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I am unofficially "fixing up" a video game through modding. The game's Big Reveal is that the game world is actually a simulation, that the characters and population are all AIs, and that the vill...
#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/25029 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
I am unofficially "fixing up" a video game through modding. The game's Big Reveal is that the game world is actually a simulation, that the characters and population are all AIs, and that the villain is the programmer who created them all. Here is my problem: because the player is _playing a game_, which is then revealed to be... a game, this Big Reveal might be taken as a fourth-wall breaking gimmick. That it might be seen as meta-humor, going "Oh, this was a computer game all along, _of course_." But that's not what I'm aiming for. There's a clear, coherent plot. As long as the player takes the Big Reveal seriously, he'll understand the Big Reveal - not as a joke, but as something the game has been building up to. **How do I keep that from happening?** How do I cue the player to take the Big Reveal seriously, and not just dismiss it as a gimmick?