ABSTRACT
Despite the wide range of genres and methods of approaching and bringing out metareferentiality in games, breaking the immersion often results in the feeling of discomfort and the fourth-wall breaking is often used as means of startling, mocking, or attacking the player. The chapter first goes over the frameworks of uncomfortable and abusive game design (Wilson and Sicart, 2010; Jørgensen, 2019), as an example of which it discusses the figure of an unreliable narrator-as-villain in Narrator is a Dick. Further, the chapter discusses masocore games, that is unfairly difficult, frustrating games as an example of games about games designed according to the poetics of restraint.
