A question concerning the "fourth wall"!

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I know what the fourth wall is, my question is what are walls one through three all about?
 
The three dimensions of space is what I always assumed.
 
It's a reference back to theatre productions, if I'm remembering right.

Walls one to three are the different sides of the stage; the left side, right side, and the wall behind you etc. The fourth wall, meanwhile, is a more metaphorical one. It's the wall that seperates actor from audience. It's the seperation between the fiction on stage and reality.

Therefore, breaking this fourth wall is to directly interact with the audience by going past it.
 
Ooooh! Makes sense!
 
I didn't realize one could understand the term "breaking the fourth wall" without understanding the theatre background. Can someone who didn't know that before explain it to me?
 
I don't know nothing about theatre, but I know fiction! Any time you have a character talking to the reader/viewer that was breaking the fourth wall, going into the "real world" sorta going hand and hand with being genre savvy. It was comedy tropes as far as I knew.
 
Breaking the fourth wall is kind of synonymous now with 'directly interacting with the audience', I guess.
 
Comedy tropes, huh? I guess that makes sense. I just first heard about it from theatre, so I am surprised people just accepted it without wondering where the phrase came from with it being in fiction.
 
It is a theater-based term.

When I was in highschool- you either learned the art of subtly breaking the forth wall, or you didn't- hell sometimes just looking in the audience's direction can be breaking it if you do it right.

When used in RPs, it's where the characters seem to have an awareness- from what I've seen- that they're merely creations of a mind.

In books, they talk to the reader a bit.

IT IS based on the three walls of the stage. The forth being intangible. It can involve breaking character some times if you break the forth wall.