Ludonarrative Dissonance: Is it real? And if so is it bad?

This article was posted a few days and it brought up what I though was a poor attempt at dismissing a useful term. That ludonarrative dissonance didn't bother [some] people in Bioshock Infinite therefore it never bothers anyone therefore it doesn't exist. I perfer to think it does, but it's not a bad thing. Thoughts?

Funnily enough, I heard this term for the very first time a few minutes ago. Real? Yes. Bad? Definitely depends on the game.

My personal thought is the writer here insults my intelligence, because yes, some of us actually do notice that shit and werent looking for our rocket launcher ammo because the rocket launcher was a fancy but impractical piece of crap anyhow.

I think it can exist, but is not always bad. The gameplay of Bastion is a fun, fast-paced top-down action game. The story is about the bleak tale of the few survivors dealing with being alone, but with plenty of hope.

I've always felt the vigors could be made to work within the narrative of Bioshock Infinite if they just tweaked who was using them. Instead of being superpower drinks, make them a drug that alters your DNA on a fundamental level and is murderously addictive (so exactly what ADAM was), but have that take its natural place in the narrative of WAS Pish purity and white supremacy, and have it follow the historical parralel - the white man spreads crack among the black man to keep him poor and keep him down. The drink is an addictive substance used by Fink to warp his workers into what he needs, while keeping them docile and willing to do whatever it takes to keep working for him. They simply never conceived that the powers could be used offensively, until Daisy Fitzroy led open rebellion. The initial first enemies that you meet are the Motorized Patriot and the Handyman, with Comstocks people only using the stuff when they get well and truly desperate, and must sacrifice everything they believe in (racial purity is the most important thing you can have), in order to survive against you and Fitzroy.

It's not impossible to voice your reaction politely. Seriously, that level of hostility is ridiculous.

On the main topic, it's so common that it doesn't bother me too much, but I love it when developers make an effort to avoid it. Better yet, when the gameplay reinforces the story instead of merely existing alongside it (Ex: No More Heroes or Spec Ops The Line).

edited 14th Sep '13 11:53:57 PM by RTaco

...arent like, 90% of awkward zombie comics about basically this?

i mean, if ludonarrative dissonance is basically when you notice details contrary to what the narrative wants and it takes you outta the moment to go "wait, what?", then yeah, thats obviously a thing, and awkward zombie makes the fact that it exists wonderful imo.

not quite sure it needed such a fanshypantz name tho.

It's another example of the academic tendency to coin a term for every possible reaction that every single person may experience in any given situation.

Sounds familiar.

edited 15th Sep '13 12:44:00 AM by RTaco

We call it Gameplay and Story Segregation

We do it in plain and/or colloquial English. Far superior to those Ivory Tower boys and girls.

The thing is, internal consistency is one of the very, very, very few set-in-stone rules for telling a good story. If your story has too many contradictory elements in it, it doesn't matter how good you were at using those elements individually...it's not going to be a good story, it's going to be a mess. All Gameplay and Story Segregation is, when you break it down, is a series of "accepted" cases of not bothering with internal consistency.

This isn't a major problem now, but as video games age as a medium, there become fewer and fewer reasons why you shouldn't have to bother with those internal consistency issues. It becomes less of a "we do this in order to balance gameplay and/or the story" and more of a Grandfather Clause approach to design, simply because it worked before, so why not do it again?

Case in point with the Awkward Zombie thing, this is a pretty striking example.

...No? The basic issues of 'realism isn't fun', 'you can't control the players', and 'the writers aren't in direct control' are as present as they've ever been

edited 15th Sep '13 6:01:01 PM by Hylarn

Where's the comic?

Click on the word "this". It's a link.

Exhibit A: Grand Theft Auto San Andreas

Exhibit B: Devil May Cry (3 or 4)

Exhibit C: God Of War (any title after the first)

Exhibit D: Gameplay and Story Segregation

It is one thing to argue tolerance, it is another to argue non existence. But we can go more in depth with the samples raised if the names alone to not made the situation clear.

In San Andreas CJ is supposed to be a good guy doing it for his hood. In practice the only thing hinder the player from utterly destroying it is the need to take a break to eat (or whatever scrappy mechanic was particular to San Andreas)

In the Devil May Cry titles Dante becomes increasingly disinterested and invulnerable...supposedly. In the game play itself he becomes increasingly reliant on new evasive maneuvers and quicker hitting offense as the enemy's get more and more adept at eviscerating him.

The God Of War does not even have a gameplay issues...at least that is not where the start of its narrative dissonance is. The story continues to make excuses for and show Kratos sympathy despite not giving him any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Why not make this easier on everyone and just make him the villain? (Kratos being a random bastard child of Zeus instead of the god of strength is unrelated but still bugs me, demigod bastard is becoming one of the most overused plot devices in Classical fan fics)

Playing a videogame is a fundamentally different experience from reading a novel or watching a movie. No matter how much you try to make videogames like a novel or movie they will never be like one.

Some of these folks like our dear blog writer seems to forget that there's a difference between a game telling a good story or immersing you into it's world through its gameplay, and a game letting itself be dictated, and dare I say, bogged down by the story its attached itself to.

Don't look at it backwards; it's not about tailoring the gameplay to be consistent with reality or the plot, but the other way around.

A game can still be good while having ludonarrative dissonance, but there is potential for the medium that's being ignored - the same way effective use of visuals and sound didn't happen much in the early days of film.

This, so much.

I love telling the story of the first System Shock, where the developers were stumped on how to make a dialogue system work. Eventually, they threw their hands up and said "let's not do a dialogue system", which forced them to come up with a game plot that didn't use dialogue trees. Their answer was to kill almost the entire cast off in advance, and the entire plot grew out of that.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/8105-Lugoscababib-Discobiscuits

jim with his piece on this phrase's use.

IMO the player and gameplay side this equation is too much of a wildcard to completely remove and keep tabs on, and honestly, you shouldn't try to. It is annoying when it happens, and it can kill your immersion, but some games like Metal Gear sort of thrive on it.

edited 16th Sep '13 10:24:12 AM by Schitzo

I think you should try to. Messing with the player-character distinction and directly addressing the taken for granted aspects of gameplay is a great place to get emotional torque. While most games can thrive with completely separate gameplay and stories, the best games will integrate them. It's risky, sure, but we have to keep trying.

Now, as I understand it the term came into popularity with the original Bioshock, in particular the fact that the "twist" of the game mocks you, the player, for having no initiative and blindly following the instructions of the NP Cs. Not that you have a choice because every other route is blocked off through narrative contrivance. The problem occurs after the twist when the gameplay continues on exactly the same, up to and including blindly following NPC instructions. So the theme of the game is agency, except the player has no agency, and the views of the antagonist character end up affirmed. It's a bit of a mess if you think about it too much.

But the twist was freaking awesome. End the game right there and maybe something something. I think it's a very strong foundation. It attempts to integrate gameplay and narrative into one seemless whole, while forcing you to think about the implications of what you're doing in gameplay. It's telling a story that can only be told through gameplay. You, the player, are an agent in the story. It just happens to be a story with a theme of loss of control. Actually, I wonder if it would be a lot stronger without the haphazard moral choice thing they threw in...

Anyway, on a basic level ludonarrative non-dissonance just makes games funner. A horror story just isn't scary unless your character feels vulnerable, and when you do feel that it's scarier than any non-interactive medium could ever be. You are literally afraid for your life, and desperate to escape the monster. So the recent trend of horror games also being shooters where you kill thousands of generic monsters necessarily makes them less scary. Other than stuff jumping at you out of nowhere, I guess. That's a real problem, but it's only a problem because of the inverse, that this is one of gaming's narrative strengths.

edited 16th Sep '13 3:37:25 PM by Clarste

This. Ludonarrative dissonance isn't inherently a problem, but games can do so much more by acknowledging that mechanics can be meaningful.