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Ludonarrative Dissonance & Game Vocabulary Criticism
It’s important to be careful about the words we create and the words we choose to use. A healthy dose of criticism over how we talk about games - and even occasionally how we define “game” itself - ensures that we’re not baking aesthetic assumptions into our discussion or inventing words to solve problems that were never there. We need to not boil conversations full of individuals down to “zinesters” and “formalists” like everyone falls into one of two buckets; we need to avoid using “gamers” when we mean the more broad “players;” we need to be critical of the motivations and intentions of anyone trying to introduce new words into the lexicon. And yes, I’m as guilty of this sort of sloganeering as anyone - which is why I’m quite supportive of attempts to get us to question the language we use.
And among criticisms of ludonarrative dissonance, I find concerns of these sort to be the most powerful. It’s a long word that’s half made-up portmanteau and half high-falutin’ academic jargon. The result is a word that’s tossed around like a password to a game criticism clubhouse; a tool of exclusion for those-in-the-know to keep undesirables out of the discussion. It’s also (as others have pointed out) potentially something of a false dichotomy - play gains much of its meaning through the same representational metaphors (characters, actions) as cut scenes do, so why do we frame the two as opposing forces? It may be better to simply call games where there are opposing themes and ideas simply internally conflicted than to make up a word that describes a thematic disconnect between two supposedly competing sides. That concept doesn’t come with a trendy new buzzword we can spout at each other, but it’s probably closer to how games really operate. After all, it’s not like a film or novel can’t be self-conflicted without gameplay to complicate things.
So I’m aware of plenty of valid criticisms of ludonarrative dissonance as a term, and it’s certainly an idea we should continue to healthily question the need for. However, there seems to be a recent trend in certain game criticism circles to not just critique the idea, but to dismiss it out of hand. In the past few months Bob Chipman, Anthony Carboni*, and Jim Sterling have all written pieces that try to dismantle the idea. And I’m trying to process my thoughts on this without being a giant hypocritical asshole. This is more difficult than you may imagine as I think that all three misunderstand the idea to one degree or another, but if I start drawing lines in the sand about how they “just don’t get it” then I become the sort of slave to vocabulary I warned about above. Still, if we’re to have any discussion about the idea at all, I think it’s worth having a concrete starting place - and I like going back to the start.
Clint Hocking - who originally coined the term - first used it in a critical piece on the original Bioshock. In it he wrote about how the story - which he claimed has a preoccupation with criticizing the Objectivist notion of individual interest above all else - felt at odds with the gameplay that celebrates a player’s exaltation to virtual god by leveling up and gaining power. Note that this is a thematic dissonance, not a literal disconnect. The story explores how a society built on self-interest and men becoming gods was inexorably doomed to fail, but the gameplay champions and rewards the players who act just that way. The game seems to have two directly opposing thematic goals, and it’s not an uncharitable position to say that it’s a deeply conflicted work. The question is whether we want to give a name to that tonal and thematic conflict - is it sufficiently different from a story that conflicts itself? Can gameplay itself present self-contradictory perspectives, and if so what does that say about this word’s value? Do we gain anything as critics, players, or developers by being able to identify when play is thematically opposed to story? Is it setting up a dangerous false dichotomy?
Unfortunately the concerns raised by these three critics seem to be attacking something else entirely - mostly a disconnect between literal gameplay and literal story, where things “don’t make sense.” In Carboni’s case, he refers to it as occurring when “the game isn’t talking to you, it’s acting like a video game,” asking if West Side Story breaking into song results in “Musonarrative dissonance.” Sterling’s example cites Booker DeWitt going through trash cans and finding money and eating food off of the ground. Chipman claims that “a player that keeps bumping into walls and jumping into bottomless pits” when they’re supposed to “be a badass” is a quintessential example of the idea.
But while each of these may be amusing, the idea that they encapsulate ludonarrative dissonance is disingenuous. No one is claiming that throwing rocks at Eli Vance’s face is ludonarrative dissonance because Gordon Freeman wouldn’t do that; that’s just subversive play. “This wacky gameplay contrivance doesn’t make sense in the context of the game’s narrative!” was never the point of the term. Health-as-an-integer, infinite stamina and pain resistance, and a ridiculous carrying capacity have long been jokes about video games when framed in the context of an actual narrative, but they’re so far removed from the ideas of a thematic and tonal conflict that they’d represent some other issue entirely. So I’m worried they’re tearing down a strawman no one ever purported and in so doing moving the debate away from useful criticism of the term and towards a push for mindless snark against a vaguely related idea.
Speaking of snark - my other concern is that these criticisms seem to stem from a place of anti-intellectualism (a long-standing force in the gaming community). The word itself is a target of ridicule - all three videos poke fun at the word’s roots and length. Again, it’s a long, complicated, unwieldy word - but the problem is that it excludes people from taking part in games criticism, not that it’s a wacky word that’s hard to say. Mise en scène is a fancy French phrase used by film critics and film makers, but no one seems to have a problem with hoity-toity language there. All three of them also frame the “ludo” part of the word in a reference to the creature from Labyrinth - I’m not sure whether they’re doing it in reference to one another or if this was just the easiest, most lazy way to poke fun at the word. But it runs deeper than just prodding the length and pronunciation of the word. Sterling refers to those who use it as “intelligencia,” and argues it’s a term used as a cudgel to criticize things people just don’t like. Chipman laments the subject as “something that every games journalist just needs to pop off and do their obligatory thesis on.” Carboni frames it as “something that we all came up with one night when we were out drunk when we decided if we could take the very nature of videogames and make it sound negative.” Ludonarrative dissonance isn’t dissected or discussed but simply derided here.
Consequently there’s a lot of discussion taking place in spheres that have more visibility than most. PAX attendees, The Escapist’s readership, and Chipman’s sizeable audience (all of whom are notably larger than most blogs who would use the word) have all been exposed to comedic teardowns of a strawman. And I’m not really sure how or whether to meaningfully combat it. To correct them on the use of the word is to presuppose the word needs to exist - and I’m not sure I’m comfortable making that call given the legitimate criticisms I’ve heard. But to let this sort of nonsense go on uncontested is to concede the phrase altogether; to not debate its worth but to consign it to a nonsense idea outright.
And I kind of don’t want to let that go. We have a word that might, if we explore it a bit, have some value yet to us. We also may decide to chuck it in favor of more general words, or some new word altogether. But I think it’s the people who care about these words that should be the ones making the decisions, not those who would sooner snark at them.
* I know that Carboni’s piece is comedic; but there’s enough punch in there to say it’s not terribly far off from his actual position.
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64 Comments
honthro
September 16, 2013 at 9:54 PM
Amazing stuff. As someone with a penchant for good vocabulary I really appreciate your blog and videos. You manage to put into proper words exactly what I’ve had on my mind. Please don’t stop reviewing (if anything, do it more often!) and don’t change the format.
Austin Green
September 16, 2013 at 10:52 PM
I do have to say that, unlike Bob and Anthony, Jim’s recent piece on ludonarrative dissonance does not dismiss it out of hand, and in fact defends its validity while trying to clarify its real meaning to people who appropriate the term without grasping what the concept really means. His throwaway joke about “ludonarrative dissonance” and trash-eating in Bioshock Infinite was a way to illustrate that he does not believe that game suffers from any straightforward or obvious dissonance, of which I am sure he could be convinced otherwise given insightful argumentation. I believe, from my knowledge of his past works, his use of the word “intelligentsia” was a way of mocking those who seek to dismiss this concept on the grounds that it is too elitist or hoity-toity, or what have you. I definitely agree that Moviebob has little to no understanding of what ludonarrative dissonance really means, and I don’t really have anything to say about Carboni, but I believe you have either misunderstood or misrepresented Jim’s central message, which, after listening to and carefully considering it, I believe to ultimately be aligned with yours.
Some Dude
September 17, 2013 at 12:57 AM
I guess this reply is technically off topic, but the term “ludonarrative dissonance” is awful. Awful, awful, awful, awful, awful. Part of the reason is the affix “ludo-.” Why must game critics resort to Latin roots to give their field a false sense of sophistication and maturity? It’s absolutely reeks of insecurity on the parts of game critics. Apparently, some of those people call this field “ludology.” So, what’s next? Ludologists instead of game critics, ludonauts instead of gamers, ludometry instead of game balance, ludomancers instead of game developers, ludomorphization instead of gamification. It’s easy to pick on how stupid the term sounds, but that’s because the term indeed is that stupid sounding. And don’t get me started on the use of “dissonance” without “consonance.” And I think the term is not even particularly accurate in what’s it’s trying to describe, but I’m digressing.
Here’s an alternative: how about calling this phenomenon “game/story mismatch” instead? No more stupid sounding words, which means people are less likely to dismiss the term outright by virtue of its stupid-sounding terms. “Game” and “story” are words as simple as you get; no more baggage inherited from faux-academic words. The best part, however, is that you have terms to describe more types of mismatch: game/music mismatch, character/plot mismatch, world/plot mismatch, etc.
Your RPG trope of the shopkeeper selling a world-saving weapon for 1,000,000 gold instead of giving the protagonist the weapon for free can be an example of a game/story mismatch. A charcter suddenly acting out of character for the sake of the plot can be an example of a character/plot mismatch. Of course, some mismatches are more worthy of discussion and criticism than others. Just throwing ideas; I’m pretty meh on “mismatch.”
You are right. Words dictate how discussion will occur. Because of the carelessness of the person who first thought up the term, now the relevant dialogue is based on how stupid the term sounds rather than the legitimacy of the idea. It’s a shame, but I honestly feel like the best thing for game critics to do is to stop using the term. The sooner people stop using the term, the sooner people will stop tearing a strawman version of the term. Most game critics I’ve read and seen don’t particularly like the term, so it’s not like most people would actually miss it if it were to just disappear one day. People clinge to the term because there’s no alternative. I think game critics should think of a term that either doesn’t come with the baggage of “ludonarrative dissonance” or stop trying to generalize a phenomenon that should really be considered on a game-by-game basis.
G.M.
September 17, 2013 at 1:38 AM
The l-word has become a good indicator of lazy criticism masquerading as more. Not that the conventional, consumer-oriented isn’t overdone either, but it serves its purpose.
Criticizing the use of lnd is hardly anti-intellectual. Yes, games have a hard time balancing themes, mechanics, and story. But pointing that out just isn’t interesting any more.
krellen
September 17, 2013 at 2:05 AM
You have no idea how badly I want to be a ludonaut now.
A great deal of English has roots in Latin (and Greek makes up a fair portion as well), and deriding the use of Latin roots is just the exact sort of anti-intellectualism Chris was suggesting.
Khalil Zoule
September 17, 2013 at 2:17 AM
On the issue of Hocking’s Bioshock critique, can you or anyone else make a case for why the perceived ‘dissonance’ is even applicable? The classical critique of objectivism was not that one person couldn’t Make It but that the process does not occur in a vacuum; individualism in an environment inevitably leads to possessive individualism, that being, ones individual agency conflicts and reduces the full agency and potential of others.
Ryan, Fontaine and finally Jack all ascend to supreme control over their environment at profound and explicit costs to others. That one could arguably create arguably ‘positive’ ends in such a system is irrelevant to the foundational flaw that the unrestrained expansion of one individual will invariably trample upon another, let alone concerted combinations, conspiracies and vast corporate entities. To argue that the game ‘rewards’ or exalts you mechanically is irrelevant to the purpose of the critique of objectivism, was Andrew Ryan not rewarded repeatedly in thousands of discrete ways for his intellect and charisma and manipulation to achieve the level of power and wealth that created Rapture itself?
How many lonely, desperate and deranged people did the player brutally kill to achieve their objective which when ultimately revealed to have been entirely in someone else’s self-interest takes possessive individualism to quite literal levels.
I must contend your objection is therefore a profound misreading.
Primogenitor
September 17, 2013 at 2:34 AM
I think this phenomena is just another facet of the video game community being more fractured that unified - and that’s a good thing.
Some people don’t want to have an conversations about flaws of their favourites, as stereotyped by the “frat boy”. Some people do want to have those conversations, as stereotyped by the “intellectual”. That;’s fine; different strokes for different folks.
And in most fractured communities, there will be people gaining popularity with one group by being negative about the other, perhaps without realizing or intending it. It is the internet after all!
So in the end, those that are interested in concepts such as ludonarrative dissonance will keep using it and those that aren’t won’t. The words that are used are not as important as what you say with them.
Your Name
September 17, 2013 at 4:44 AM
It’s funny, when I saw Jim Sterling video on this topic, my mind went right to you and I also sensed he was missing the point to an extent.
Nothing I’d say would really be different than what you have already, so I’ll just say that Jim Sterling almost seems like a guy who’s on a major contrarian streak, but doesn’t realize how much of a contrarian he is. He makes good points on occasional, but their foundations are usually made on half truths and half baked opinions. So take his word with a tablespoon of salt.
I wouldn’t know about about how the other two journalist you’ve mentioned handled the topic so I’ll leave it at that,
Tim
September 17, 2013 at 6:40 AM
Hmm…. Here is why I think the term is still useful:
“Internally conflicted”, as proposed by Chris, would ignore that the conflict is specifically between what the player does or can do, and what the story is about. This aspect is unique to videogames, and therefore worthy of some attention in my opinion.
“Game/story mismatch” (mentioned by “Some Dude”) is not necessarily about tone or values. The “game” part of a videogame is usually a slight abstraction of the games scenario, where regenerating health and such “unrealistic” details are added to keep the gameplay from becoming too hard/easy or boring. Those may border on ludonarrative dissonance (e.g. when killing hundreds of mooks in Tomb Raider or Uncharted where there would only be a few if it were a movie), but in most cases they are just accepted breaks from the games reality that do not contradict it’s core themes.
Nigholith
September 17, 2013 at 9:01 AM
Television borrows from the French—Télévision, a portmanteau of the French “Far” and “Seeing”—which is further abbreviated today to TV in common conversation. The term “Movie” is entirely made up, derived from “Moving picture”.
Why is it every other field can invent words now used in the common vernacular to describe something better, and videogames can’t?
Whenever we’ve come across something that totally lacks description in our current vocabulary, or requires better description, we adapt our vocabulary to describe it; like “Movie”, “TV”, or “Dinosaur”. The idea of boiling-down complex and distinct facets of games to terms like “game/story mismatch” seems as absurd to me as replacing the term “Dinosaur” with “very big lizards”. It’s an inadequate and unwieldy description.
And yes, the term “Videogame” is an increasingly poor description that needs replacement. A Game normally signifies something explicitly for the purposes of entertainment; so can we classify games that are purposefully not entertaining—a la Cart Life—a game? That would seem as absurd as calling Tzu’s The Art of War a “Game”. Even the term “Video” seems to lack in the context of what videogames do.
Why can the film industry invert words where we can not? What special classification makes videogames inferior in that regard?
Abnaxis
September 17, 2013 at 9:59 AM
Reading Some Dude’s criticism above got me thinking: the whole idea behind “ludonarrative dissonance” as a concept is that it looks at the message as the sum of gameplay themes and story themes, and compares it to the parts. It picks apart the pieces of the game and looks at how they fit together. “Game/story mismatch” really doesn’t properly express the same idea because while themes are often expressed through a separate “story” in cutscene-action-cutscene type games, that’s not always how themes are expressed.
Further, dissonance really isn’t something unique to gameplay. Specifically, it got me thinking of that one infamous scene from A Clockwork Orange-you know the one if you’ve seen the movie-where the tone of a song being sung is in deliberate contrast with the scene playing out. This in turn got me looking at the TvTropes page for a Clockwork Orange…
You know what the term they use for that scene is? (WARNING: Tropes) Soundtrack Dissonance, which, incidentally, is a sub-trope of Mood Dissonance.
I think “dissonance” is a good part of the term “ludonarrative dissonance.” The idea is, some piece of the art is deliberately or inadvertently in conflict with the theme. “Ludonarrative” does seem a bit presumptuous-“Gameplay Dissonance” would work well enough for communicating the idea to my mind-but “dissonance” bring to mind off-key chords played on a piano, the ones that make you instinctively cringe from their ugliness when you hear them.
The real problem, I see, however, is this almost-universal attitude that less dissonance=better. Dissonant chords have their place in music, and the scene from A Clockwork Orange is famous largely because of the Soundtrack Dissonance.
I would argue that there are games that have used ludonarrative dissonance to great effect as well. Portal 1/2 is like a cast study on the use of dissonance to create emotional impact, both in the level design and in the character design of GlaDOS. Spec Op: The Line is another example where the creators specifically wanted to make a game the criticized its players for playing it-and incidentally, was criticized because anything that tells you to do a thing while calling that thing evil is bad (not that there’s nothing to criticize in the game, just that particular criticism annoyed me).
Playing through the Noise | ndgold
September 17, 2013 at 11:04 AM
[…] content of said game. That term is ludonarrative dissonance. Chris Franklin of Errant Signal describes the primary argument for discarding […]
Dylan Goldblatt
September 17, 2013 at 11:05 AM
With my blog response, I humbly submit “noise” as an alternative to “ludonarrative dissonance.” http://www.ndgold.com/playing-through-the-noise/
Zukhramm
September 17, 2013 at 2:34 PM
So because it’s already been said, we should just let games get away with it and never explain why we don’t like a game?
Zukhramm
September 17, 2013 at 2:36 PM
Are we seeing the damage of MovieBob’s video here or what? I keep seeing people saying “games have always had LND, Super Mario Bros. had extra lives!”. Abstraction and unrealistic mechanics are not ludonarrative dissonance.
Narratorway
September 17, 2013 at 4:23 PM
“No one is claiming that throwing rocks at Eli Vance’s face is ludonarrative dissonance because Gordon Freeman wouldn’t do that; that’s just subversive play.”
And that isn’t being dismissive? I mentioned this before elsewhere but regardless of whether you, Bob, Sterling or another else gives importance to these concepts they still exist. Yeah narrative or thematic issues have more allure, but subversive engagement is still an actual thing that has to be accounted for…Especially if it’s beginning to be conflated with the new hotness of *insert ‘hilarious’ mispronunciation here*.
We are just now beginning to include game design theory into direct critiques on the quality of games. I have seen at least three gametrailer reviews of triple-a titles that made specific references to LND. This is not just an issue of academia anymore. This is an indication of a direct impact on how games are perceived by consumers, which means these issues will now have a direct impact on how games are made for consumers. We can’t just discount talking about subversive play any more than we can LND just because it’s been around longer, lest you risk developers making the same mistakes as Bob, Sterling and the like.
somini
September 17, 2013 at 4:57 PM
If you are trying to simplify things, at least check out existing terms instead of creating yet another “standard”.
TVTropes calls it Gameplay/Story Segregation.
I find it hilarious that the article critics anti-intellectualism, and behold, here we have a great example. Knowing Latin words is now being “insecure”?
Atlas
September 17, 2013 at 5:19 PM
Just to make things more complicated, how about meta-ludonarrative dissonance: when a character’s motivations are different than the player’s. It’s not as damaging as thematic inconsistencies so it rarely affects the quality of a game, Still, it’s interesting to notice how often games are built to be as fun as possible for the player while their character is in the middle of some horrible conflict, but still try to make the player sympathetic to their character.
http://gamedesignreviews.com/scrapbook/meta-ludonarrative-dissonance/
Some Dude
September 17, 2013 at 5:54 PM
So, I don’t know how to reply to any of the individual posters, so here’s my response to all of them:
@krellen: I mostly find the invention of new roots unnecessary when we already have existing words to describe this phenomenon. It’s not like I have an inherent problem with using Latin/Greek roots ie my use of the word “phenomenon,” which came from Latin, and which the Latin word itself came from Greek and my use of the abbreviation ie.
@Nigholith: There’s a difference between English’s borrowing of television from French and a bunch of people making up words by duct-taping a bunch of Latin/Greek roots in order to sound more “academic” when suitable words already exists. As for the French conceiving the word “television,” but that’s the thing. Television, the device or thing, didn’t exist and once it did, obviously it rests on people to conceive of a new word for this new invention. But we already have a word for videogames: videogames.
“Whenever we’ve come across something that totally lacks description in our current vocabulary, or requires better description, we adapt our vocabulary to describe it; like “Movie”, “TV”, or “Dinosaur”. The idea of boiling-down complex and distinct facets of games to terms like “game/story mismatch” seems as absurd to me as replacing the term “Dinosaur” with “very big lizards”. It’s an inadequate and unwieldy description.”
How is “game/story mismatch” possibly a more inadequate and unwieldly description than “ludonarrative dissonance?” Both terms communicate the same amount of information: there are two elements, game and story, and those elements are not moving towards the same goal. My term also doesn’t sound as pretentious and is easier to say to boot (5 syllables vs 8 syllables), so I see that as a plus.
“And yes, the term “Videogame” is an increasingly poor description that needs replacement. A Game normally signifies something explicitly for the purposes of entertainment; so can we classify games that are purposefully not entertaining—a la Cart Life—a game? That would seem as absurd as calling Tzu’s The Art of War a “Game”. Even the term “Video” seems to lack in the context of what videogames do.”
I would argue that combat simulations people use in the military are better examples as they don’t exist for entertainment’s sake, but I can see your point. My post above was more about questioning the motives towards using the term rather than the merits of the term itself (although I think the term is actually not that great either). I’m arguing that “ludonarrative dissonance” was conceived because those game critics wanted to fit in with other members of academia. It’s some kind of inferiority complex I guess.
@somini: Not knowing Latin words, but using them so haphazardly like those game critics. It’s the equivalent of a 7th grader overusing the thesaurus in order to sound smart. Sorry, no one is impressed that you can crank out sentences like “I consumed a bombastic meal of Herculean proportions.” No need to be condescending when knowing Latin and Greek roots is hardly a necessary or sufficient condition of being an “intellectual.”
A. Hieronymus Bosch
September 17, 2013 at 7:49 PM
Nomenclature evolves, vernacular catches up.
Arguing that anyone who attempts to take part in the evolution of nomenclature is (paraphrasing) ‘trying to sound smart’ is making a fallacious argument.
The idea of a scientific journalist attacking the term ‘cosmological constant’ for being ‘intelligencia’ is absurd, and absurd is all that I’ve seen from gaming journalists on this issue.
I’ve never understood why people shy away from such use of language.
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And in response to no one in particular….
The strength of nomenclature is its specificity.
Ludonarrative dissonance is not a bad term. Its use indicates that something has both ludic and narrative qualities, and that they are not in harmony with each other.
A game without a narrative cannot have ludonarrative dissonance and a narrative without a game cannot have ludonarrative dissonance. E.g., Superhexagon can neither suffer nor benefit from ludonarrative dissonance.
Ludonarrative dissonance is not a term that implies quality. Dissonance is not necessarily a bad thing. And I think this is the major point of failure with detractors of the term. They refuse to give it the time of day because they assume it’s automatically unfair criticism for reasons that they fill in as they go along.
Film makers in particular make use of visual dissonance to evoke emotions. They do this using strange camera angles; combining motion and alteration of the angle of view (Dolly Zoom); lighting effects, and other techniques. E.g., Evil Dead, Pitch Black, Vertigo, etc.
Syal
September 18, 2013 at 12:01 AM
“Television, the device or thing, didn’t exist and once it did, obviously it rests on people to conceive of a new word for this new invention.”
And that word was “Home Picture Radio”,
“Why must game critics resort to Latin roots to give their field a false sense of sophistication and maturity?”
If you say the sense is false it’s up to you to provide an example of what true sophistication and maturity would look like. In my opinion, one of the major steps to a field being taken seriously is when it starts making up words for situations that don’t usually occur outside of it.
“I think game critics should think of a term that doesn’t come with the baggage of ludonarrative dissonance”
There’s literally no term anyone can come up with that a hundred people won’t instantly misuse. Considering that’s the only real baggage of Ludonarrative Dissonance I say we keep it.
krellen
September 18, 2013 at 1:04 AM
Bosch makes a good point. Isn’t the entire POINT of Spec Ops: The Line the dissonance between the expected play of such games and the horrid reality of war? Dissonance isn’t automatically bad - it’s jarring, but sometimes that’s the whole idea.
Magdain
September 18, 2013 at 3:03 AM
I think a big problem is that the phrase ludonarrative dissonance is so ubiquitous, but the idea of ludonarrative on its own is almost never used. The obvious way to parse this (and its use in Clint Hocking’s original piece) and “dissonance between ludo[logy] and narrative”, but I think its just as valid, and perhaps more useful, to parse it as a single word: THE ludonarrative. This big mesh where many parts meet and there’s no clear distinction, but its a broad framing term for experience through play. And there can be tonal or moral dissonance WITHIN it, just as their can be tonal dissonance in cinema, or books, or music.
Magdain
September 18, 2013 at 3:04 AM
That should read, ‘The obvious way to parse this (…) is “…”‘
Abnaxis
September 18, 2013 at 7:22 AM
Moderation makes me sad. I had a big long post that talked about all this, including Spec OP: The Line, but I’m still in the queue since yesterday :\
But yeah, dissonance is used a lot in all mediums. The example I cited is the “Singing in the Rain” scene in A Clockwork Orange. TV Tropes calls that “Soundtrack Dissonance,” which is a sub-trope of “Mood Dissonance.” To me, it can be the result of improper design or of deliberate choice, kind of like how a dissonant chord can be a child banging on the piano keys or a composer trying to create tension in a symphonic piece. It’s not inherently good or bad, but the current trend in gameplay is to view it as more dissonant=unequivocally bad and I think that hurts games as an art form.
Personally, I’m more a fan of calling it “Gameplay Dissonance,” because I find “ludonarrative” to be misleading and hoity-toity. Conceptually, ludonarrative dissonance is a conflict between the gameplay and the overall theme of the game, and the narrative is not the only thing in a game that conveys theme. Even it it were, “ludonarrative” is over-complicated and redundant. I’m more a fan of following the TV Tropes naming example, and just listing out the one particular element that’s dissonant, without making up words that set up a strange dichotomy that applies to two elements that may or may not actually be the two elements that are dissonant.
False Prophet
September 18, 2013 at 1:24 PM
The word “game” is no more useful or satisfying than “ludo-“, as philosophers from Wittgenstein onward have struggled with an actual definition of “game”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game#Ludwig_Wittgenstein
@NIGHOLITH: And the French, in turn, took the term from Greek (“tele-” = “distant”) and Latin (“videre” = “to see”).
@Some Dude: Re: “Videogame”-They still refer to the movie medium as “film”, even though it’s pretty much all done digitally these days and celluloid is just about obsolete. As I noted above, there’s no all-encompassing definition for “game”, so to define games as only for entertainment isn’t accurate. There are educational games and wargames conducted by militaries, for example. The former are generally engaging, but have goals beyond entertainment. The latter are very serious affairs. Professional sports also have games, and there are the Olympic Games. To the audience, they’re primarily entertainment. But do the athletes approach them that way? Almost never.
BlooDeck
September 18, 2013 at 5:26 PM
I generally prefer Gameplay and Story Segregation from TV Tropes when discussing about anything related to this. I think it works better as a term - the gameplay and story are segregated in the phrase itself… while in Ludonarrative Dissonance they’re in the same word. Not a perfect term, gameplay is a really vague word and the whole thing is kinda unwieldy, but it works.
I do like the word ludonarrative though, it has a better ring to it than paizonarrative (not really sure how to even put the Greek into English).
Jack Mack
September 18, 2013 at 5:49 PM
“Ludologists instead of game critics, ludonauts instead of gamers, ludometry instead of game balance, ludomancers instead of game developers, ludomorphization instead of gamification.”
Those are all a million times cooler than the words we have now.
Kill Me I’m A Researcher
September 18, 2013 at 5:49 PM
We don’t take our research to the public for peer review for this very reason. And academic language is designed to lock out the ‘plebeian class’ to prevent us from drowning in useless opinion-based information.
Don’t let them force you to question yourself. Keep doing exactly what you are doing ES.
Jack Mack
September 18, 2013 at 6:16 PM
Well, you should read the original article rather than respond to my summary of it, but clint’s critique was actually on a different conflict.
In the gameplay we’re given the freedom to choose objectivism by killing the little sisters for our own power. As you say, that’s completely in line with the critique of Rand’s philosophy. In the story, though, we are forced to reject objectivism by helping atlas. It is possible to take an objectivist approach in the gameplay, but not the story.
Now, Clint actually accepts that this is only slight dissonance, and it’s not the end of the world to just have sympathy for the limitations of the medium and ignore it. What provoked him to write the article is that the mind control twist comes along and rubs your face in it.
“But when it is revealed that the rationale for why the player helps Atlas is not a ludic constraint that we graciously accept in order to enjoy the game, but rather is a narrative one that is dictated to us, what was once disturbing becomes insulting. The game openly mocks us for having willingly suspended our disbelief in order to enjoy it.”
http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html
Jack Mack
September 18, 2013 at 6:50 PM
I think you’ve misinterpreted Clint’s use of the term. Clint said that Bioshock’s gameplay was completely in line with it’s critique of objectivism. It lets you reject Rand’s philosophy by saving the little sisters, or accept it by killing them for your own personal gain. If you follow Objectivism, it shows you the terrible consequences of that philosophy.
The dissonance is that the story doesn’t accept your choice. You can follow Objectivism in the gameplay, but in order to progress in the story you’re forced to help Atlas. It’s like the disconnect in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. You can choose to be a pacifist in the gameplay, but you are forced to kill bosses in order to progress in the story.
Clint doesn’t use Ludonarrative Dissonance to suggest a thematic disconnect, or a case of mechanics not making literal sense. He uses to say that the story rejects the choices you make in gameplay.
Syal
September 18, 2013 at 11:24 PM
…I’m not sure if you’re saying designers should eliminate subversive play or not. If you are, I disagree. Subversive play is caused by people not being invested in the narrative, and the way to address it is to make the narrative stronger. If you don’t fix the narrative and just take away all the subversive options, I’ll be subversive by shutting the game off.
Or maybe you’re saying if we don’t want subversive play lumped in with ludonarrative dissonance we need a separate term for subversive play. In which case I agree. “Reactive dissonance” or somesuch.
Hydralysk
September 19, 2013 at 2:42 PM
Well I have to disagree with TV Tropes on that definition because I view ludonarrative dissonance and gameplay and story segregation as two different issues. They frequently coincide but they aren’t interdependent. Gameplay and story segregation, to me, means the story doesn’t use or barely uses it’s basic mechanics to deliver it’s story.
Games like FF13 tried to give us all the story bits and interactions between characters during cutscenes, while in the gameplay all that we did was murder tons of things while moving down a linear corridor. While I’d say it definitely suffered from gameplay and story segregation (god I hate typing that), I wouldn’t say it ever felt like it suffered from ludonarrative dissonance. It was cliched and boring as all hell, but it still felt like it was hitting the same “unlikely band of heroes bands together to save a fantasy world from evil” note that FF got famous for.
allfreightoncanals
September 19, 2013 at 3:53 PM
Off topic, why do you make a distinction between “gamers” and “players”?
On topic, people always complain about the over use of jargon, but we all keep on using it. The reason is that it is useful. These critics have probably helped to spread the word rather than suppress it.
Creesem
September 21, 2013 at 7:57 PM
I’m wondering whether the examples you cite as misunderstanding the concept are really so far apart from it. Presumably instances where the game-world mechanics noticeably fail to model what the story-world should be like are liable to create a sense of dissonance between the game mechanic and the narrative - one which can, although we have mostly become numb to the common examples, grate jarringly with the content, themes or so forth of the story being told.
It occurs to me as I write that, strictly speaking, mechanical failures to model the world of the story might more closely fit what seems implied by the term ‘ludonarrative dissonance’, while what the Bioshock review describes might better be termed something like ‘ludothematic dissonance’.
Either way though, I think that the ways that mechanics can model stories can both undermine suspension of disbelief/immersion and grate with the theme and tone intended, and that these issues aren’t so very separate. Mechanics that force (or just seem to encourage) activities that do not fit the characters, setting or narrative are likely to be at once narratively and thematically dissonant - if, in the middle of a serious story about guilt and responsibility I can detour out to kick off some consequence-free violence, say. Even if they are only the former, that is still a thing we might want to talk about.
One final thought: having read nothing but this and the Bioshock review on the subject of ludonarrative dissonance (a friend used it, I googled it, these came up) I would have to say that I wouldn’t recommend leaning too heavily on that as a basis for thinking about how to understand the term, as I found the use of the concept there rather confusing, and I don’t think the author keeps any distinction between the ‘game’ and ‘narrative’ elements very straight.
BenD
September 24, 2013 at 1:59 PM
Or, for that matter, because something’s hard, people who strive to do it should get a free pass when they fail and throw the result out for the paying public to consume anyway?
BenD
September 24, 2013 at 2:03 PM
This, a hundred times this. Remember that we need a game academia, and that academia by nature must exist in that ivory tower if it’s to accomplish anything. Journalists and pundits are not academics; their opinions may be interesting, but need not invalidate academic work just because they disagree.
BenD
September 24, 2013 at 2:07 PM
I suspect there are multiple reasons. The most compelling is probably that ‘gamers’ is a term used by a certain subgroup of players to identify themselves apart from the rest. Within the subgroup the term is used to imply superiority or belonging - a sort of in-club designation - while outside of it the term may be used in a derogatory sense.
In the industry, if you’re making a game for gamers, you’re making something with a presupposed notion about your audience and probably concerning yourself with cloning whatever it is that the subgroup seems to be buying lately; marketing may be your primary budget expenditure. If you make a game for players, you’re trying to make a game that can be played well and the playing of which serves its purpose (perhaps to be fun, to be diverting, to be terrifying, to send a message).
Disc
September 24, 2013 at 3:54 PM
@Krellen
Problem with deliberately using it in games is you really have to have a good idea what you’re doing. Otherwise you’re just going to piss people off. Specs Ops: The Line just felt like they just want to mess with your head at every turn, which made me resent both the plot and the gameplay. I suppose it can have value if it makes people think more about what’s happening in the game, but with the overall lack of subtlety, I just found the whole experience extremely distasteful rather than genuinely thought provoking. There’s nothing really that clever about what they do and it becomes quickly transparent. It’s hard to feel involved or even immersed in making what’s typically supposed to be a conflicting moral choice, when you can basically feel the writer(s) breathing down your neck and demanding you to make a choice. Halfway through the game, I felt like I should be shooting at whoever wrote this crap instead and wished I could somehow break off from the annoying plot.
Narratorway
September 25, 2013 at 3:25 AM
@Syal I’m saying that if the gaming community keeps referring to subversive play as LND, game designers may respond by attempting to do just that - eliminated it. This would be a VERY BAD THING, so being dismissive as Campster was - by prefacing the term subversive play with ‘that’s just…’ - is equally as dangerous if not more so as misapplying the wrong terms to the wrong concepts.
Right now we have a medium that is currently at something of a crossroads - particularly for this generation - in that the fidelity has increased past the ability of its inputs. This is not just a visuals things either, though that certainly plays a big part. Games are now beginning to tackle - through narrative and play - concepts, ideas and themes that are more complicated than the directional pad and various buttons on a controller can adequately represent as inputs. If gaming is to evolve as an interactive form of artist expression, it is going to have to expand that communication beyond these limitations - this was somewhat hinted at in Campster’s video on violence in videogames - but until this ceiling is breached, designers are going to have to find a way to make pressing buttons meaningful to the narratives they want to tell or points they want to make and they may begin to think that reducing the chance for subversive play may be the answer to their problems. Again, this is a BAD thing that we don’t want to have happen, so my point is ignore at your peril!
J’
October 2, 2013 at 7:33 PM
Ah I see. It’s better to ask what is the sum total of the protagonists goal motivation and aspirations in relation to the story, and when game tasks break from that goal, instead of pointing at every game mechanic that doesn’t portray itself as real.
Well thats what we get in the west from our maximize ‘free engagement’ approach to VG environments. Healthy amount of narrative internal conflicts in video games across the world too, but in thinking back to JRPGs, most stuff done in those quests didn’t place the character in such an obvious morally dangerous hypocritical break. The story had domination over environmental freedom. You mostly fought countryside monsters, or attacked troops of a corrupt principality, dealt reasonably with townspeople and weren’t enabled the option of killing innocents with GTA ease.
I remember even John Woo’s ‘Hard Boiled’ back ’92 in all its double wielding Beretta infamy, during its infamous hospital shootout scene, took a moment to introduce the negative effects of conflict when Tony Leung’s character shot a cop, the camera slowed down, the music filtered into lowpass, and film acknowledged that his mental ‘fight’ over flight response completely replacing civil discretion in the midst of trying to get the drop on thugs appearing randomly around every corner. Of course it was for plots sake, but it was still done.
Maybe a cultural outlook is disingenuous to many indie games in the states UK and Europe that strongly question and acknowledge internal game progression conflicts, but I remember being able to easily rationalize why I played Resident Evil 2, Parasite Eve, to my folks in my younger years and part of the argument was what’s the deal? ( These game worlds aren’t peaceful environments. ‘I’m vanquishing destructive beasts aren’t I? it’s not like I’m ravaging innocent lives.)
Oh memories.
J’
October 2, 2013 at 7:54 PM
Sorry for the tangent, but maybe the best way to phrase this is in future game criticism is ‘Themes and Player Goals.’ in stories. What games tend to align them more, vs. ones who ignore them for the purpose of maximizing player expression. Reminds me of Penny arcade’s extra credit videos ‘East vs. West’ cultural game comparisons, but after all the ‘journey’ is supposed to be more important than ‘attainment.’
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Flying Carp
October 14, 2013 at 6:38 PM
Moreover, the dissonance feels like the result of a marketing decision rather than an artistic or thematic choice. Bioshock is about objectivism because the developer really wanted to explore the idea. Bioshock is a shooter (loose use of the term) because shooters are a medium which is known to sell.
ArekExcelsior
October 21, 2013 at 1:53 PM
The arguments you supplied against the term are frankly bad. Take the idea that “ludonarrative dissonance” implies that narrative and play are in conflict. It doesn’t.
Let’s say that I’m listening to a song. I back up and grimace. “Ugh, that guitar and that piano aren’t harmonizing. That’s really ugly and dissonant”. Someone says to me, “Oh, so guitars and pianos are diametrically opposed”? No, they’re just separate parts of the experience.
Narrative is a part of games. So is play. So are controls, strategy, tutorials, signaling of the designer to the player what they should do to get through an obstacle, systems, etc. These ideas overlap, but overlapping ideas are not by their nature useless. By that reasoning, we should abandon the idea of the square because a square is just a special case of a rectangle.
Ludonarrative dissonance is an especially useful concept in today’s gameplay settings. As you noted in The Last of Us, we’re at a point where narrative and gameplay ARE often separated. We don’t have the tools yet, technologically or creatively, to really seamlessly blend them in order to tell something like a complex story. Film spent decades learning how to seamlessly combine exposition through dialog, visual symbolism, the language of cuts and scene transitions, the emoting of actors, and dozens of other cues to all communicate the meaning of a story. They still don’t do it perfectly, and they’re in a medium where the audience is passive and there’s little risk of our message being lost in glitches and poor fidelity. Did that NPC’s strange look at me outside of a rendered cutscene show that they’re not trustworthy, or was it just a breakdown of that character’s model? All too often, games do have a gameplay theme or approach that is directly at odds with the story concept. That problem is fractal in Bioshock, even as some of the problem is intentional as a way to underline the contradictions inherent to the ideas of freedom in an Objectivist/libertarian sense. Ludonarrative dissonance is a special case of internal conflict. “Internal conflict” could be between anything in the game design: Controls and soundtrack, character models and story theme.
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