What's funny is when that errant signal video was used as an example, like I immediately brought to mind dozens of movies that have this problem. I mean its often mentioned in basic film criticism in lots of movies.
@@Oddant1 Most of it could honestly be taken as an argument for the opposite of what he was trying to say. Yes, games should be criticised as a whole with a cohesive message or framing and not just as several distinct parts that all need to work in isolation; that's why it's useful to criticise when gameplay and narrative don't work together.
A common example of ludonarrative dissonance I see is the story having a beat about the protagonist not liking killing people. Then the cutscene ends and you continue your slaughter of 20% of the local population.
I actually had to stop playing a game I was seriously invested in because of this very reason. The narrative was all about how anti-war the protagonist and his friends were and how they were the peace bringers who never fought. The motivation of the protagonist was literally to bring about world peace….. but that group of people you just engaged in “not-war” with? yeah just don’t care about them at all. We’ll write them as comedic characters and have the protagonist uncharacteristically not show an ounce of care about the visible pain that his actions has inflicted on them
It's the reason why I stopped playing Grand Theft Auto. I played the older games to death, up until Vice City. The story was fun and over the top and also not really all that important, so I just drove around causing havoc a lot of the time. With GTA 4 it felt like it got a bit more serious and leaned more into the satirical aspects. I haven't played the main game much, but I bought Episodes from Liberty City (the standalone version of the two DLC stories). The Ballad of Gay Tony was similar to the older games. It was a bit weird that Tony, a scared and wimpy man in the cutscenes, was running alongside you during some missions, shooting people in the face, but overall it was fun an crazy. The Lost and Damned was trying to be this serious drama. At the beginning your old boss gets out of prison and shoots a member of the rival biker gang in the street, so the protagonist ist worried it might cause a gang war. And what do you do in the first mission? Go and kill twenty more of the rival gang members of course! When GTA 5 came out I watched a Let's Play of the start of Franklin's story. He is framed as this nice guy who seems to only be involved in crime because he grew up in a rough neighborhood and hung out with the wrong people. But what do you do in the first mission? Drive around killing dozens of people! What a nice and relatable guy! On they other hand both Saints Row 3 and 4 are some of my favorite games, in part because the senseless violence actually fits the story the games try to tell.
Like in Uncharted 4 you kill hundreds of guys to reach a treasure but in a cutscene the main character can’t kill anyone in “cold blood” because “that’s not their style” Love the Uncharted games but I always point that out 😂
Assassin's Creed 2: He spares Rodrigo Borgia's life because "bla bla bla vengeance bad" but has a side-quest where he gets paid to kill someone for a broken heart or cheating lover story. And he has obviously no shame to kill random guards.
I've been impressed with the term since I first heard it. It's imminently illustrative of its meaning, and for its relative complexity as a concept and high syllable-count, surprisingly easy to parse and transmit. • "Imagine a game about destiny and predetermination, but they gave it a branching narrative and 8 wildly different endings." That's Ludonarritive dissonance. • "Imagine a survival horror game, but the gameplay is a fast-paced and responsive shooter." That's Ludonarritive dissonance. • "Imagine Fallout 3." That's Ludonarritive dissonance. Unfortunately for Ludonarritive Dissonance as an incredibly _specific_ descriptor of a limited phenomenon in the incredibly narrow field of Games Media Criticism, the term caught on like wildfire for no reason. • The newest COD game had one fewer Map than the previous COD game. That's "Ludonarritive Dissonance." • The game was rushed out of development and many players ran into gamebreaking bugs. That's "Ludonarritive dissonance." • You play as a girl. That's "Ludonarritive dissonance." For all it's specificity, the term was misused by many to mean "thing I don't like," but with an implicit "also I'm very smart. So you have to take me seriously, and my subjective dislike is indicative of an objective failure on the part of this game." Basically the "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" with a side of... pantomime. Frustrated gamers who KNEW they were frustrated, but lacked the ability to articulate into words or even conceptualize their feelings to themselves. They latched onto any words they could find that could help give their frustration shape. Even if all the words were wrong. Words are only really useful when there's a shared consensus and expectation for their meaning. I definitely think there's a ready niche for the term Ludonarritive dissonance, but for us to get there, somebody badly needs to teach the Reddit Bros... basically ALL of the other words until they stop using this one exclusivity. _(edit: rearranged a few lines for readability.)_
About those games you mentioned: - The destiny one could be an interesting way to show how one can change their own destiny, that it is indeed possible, by having multiple endings. But I guess your point was about a game that specifically says you cannot change your destiny. Oh shit, that gives me another idea. What if you had that, but then those branching paths and 8 endings all lead to some kind of epilogue that's exactly the same in each ending, thus proving the point about destiny. It's interesting how you can twist that eh?
The survival horror thing reminds me of Dying Light. Play that game at night time and you will see a fast paced/responsive survival horror game that works perfectly. Those volatile zombies are one of the scariest things ever.
I suppose my point with these examples, is that ludonarrative dissonance is not a clear line between two things. It's very blurry, as perhaps all art is. So lets not throw away opportunities before we try things out eh?
That's why the criticism video that the vid creator said was good made no sense. His comparison between the Hobbit as a book and the Hobbit as a movie completely missed the point, which is that if you make a game that has a narrative (for example, opposing objectivism), but then force the players into a particular ending that matches what you belive is right vs wrong, you've just contradicted the narrative of your game. He could have at least used an accurate example by referencing critics using the term "plot hole" or something, and then making the point that plot holes should be disregarded because we should accept the limitations of fiction. But of course, if he did that, his point would be revealed as rather stupid.
This immediately made me think of possibly the same issue but because of opposite reasons. I am a producer of a small theater festival, and so many plays I get are basically movie scripts that the authors don't know simply aren't plays. There is a reasoning for having a story be a play vs. a movie, but so many aspiring playwrights think that plays are just movies that happen to take place live and on a stage. All the language of theater is discarded for cinema language, and the story doesn't fit. In that way, I often wonder if there's a lot of dissonance because "story" and "game play" don't necessarily happen in developers' minds in the same ways. I've seen a lot of games where all the story is in cut scenes, and then the game play happens, and then you get to where the story happens again. Or in large worlds where you have a lot of autonomy, but that autonomy is really put in a story that is 100% linear and all the diversions are just small blips on that narrative. Also, Transformers is going to prove move valuable to movie criticism than any other franchise ever, at this point.
That's so true! Between this, Tony Zhou, and what Lindsay Ellis is doing right now, the Transformers turns out to be a perfect example for applying criticism. I think it's because they are technically, competently made, but still fail at everything. Also being commercially successful auteur filmmaking that nobody seems to actually really like. It's all so fascinating.
+xingcat I've yet to watch any Transformers films but Lindsay Ellis' series on it is fascinating! Learning from mistakes is almost more informative and... boy does it have a lot.
I really love your comment but to give a small retort an interesting thing that I often hear about particular video game titles is that they are, "Too on rails." Take the Uncharted series as an example, in game a character is standing on a wooden pole hundreds of feet in the air carefully making his way to a jumping section where he is going to jump from that pole and onto a small ledge on a cliff side. The player at this time cannot actually fall off the pole or miss the jump no matter how much they try the character seemingly loses balance but instantly corrects himself. This goes on for about 5 minutes with a verbal narrative overlapping gameplay, The particular youtuber who I saw playing this portion passed this entire section with his eyes closed as his character was seemingly in torturous danger from beginning to end of this experience.
This is interesting, because when devs/publishers talk about "cinematic" games, my gut reaction is: "Yeah, I like movies. When watching a good movie, I feel like I'm in the action." But then it just means to go to a cutscene, which makes me feel the opposite: Like the movie would end and someone would tell me in plain words what happened. My "cinematic" feeling doesn't hinges on locked into a camera, it's about the feeling that I can do things I only saw in movies.
It's a little meta but you can actually use ludo-narrative dissonance as an artistic tool. Very minor Witcher 3 spoiler to follow. After your character rescues your adoptive daughter, you have a chance to have a snowball fight with her and the game uses the combat system almost like a special boss fight. The contrast of using such a serious mechanical system for such a frivolous story element was hilarious and really assisted in conveying the mood they wanted.
If they wanted it wouldn't that mean it's part of the narrative? I imagine that depends on how you define "narrative" so it's probably subjective but I was thinking about this.
@@ecrivonlunyx It's still dissonance, though. It's a contrast between what the story is telling you (fun snowball fight) vs. what the game is telling you (serious boss battle). The game "To the Moon" did something similar: overall the game is a very simple point-and-click that doesn't involve any combat, but there's a scene near the beginning where one of the characters pretends to fight a squirrel to entertain some kids, and suddenly the game mechanics turn into like a classic Final Fantasy-style battle, which is really effective as a little comedic gag. Other media can use dissonance in similar ways. This is kind of a random example, but think about how the movie "Airplane" frames a lot of scenes like a serious action/drama, even though what's actually happening on screen is totally absurd. So the tone & style of the movie is communicating "this is serious," but the dialogue & plot is humorous, and the dissonance is used purposefully to help highlight the absurdity. (Contrast that to say, a Three Stooges skit or a Looney Tunes short, where the tone & style are also communicating that you're watching comedy.)
@@Dachusblot I think it's a really valid and important point that, having the ability to *identify* ludonarrative dissonance as a thing that can happen or that can be done, a developer can *choose* to make use of it in an artistic way, or *choose* to avoid dissonance and make a more conventionally coherent product. Dissonance of any sort is not inherently 'bad', but it does exist; when it is done accidentally, it can lead to unintentional hilarity at the best of times, or unintentional offensive badness at the worst of times. It's like saying 'never mix patterns' in fashion - you *can* mix patterns, but you really have to know what you're doing or else it isn't going to work like you think it will or want it to. Knowing that mixing patterns is a thing that exists, and knowing the pitfalls of doing it poorly, improves one's ability to make a coherent outfit, whether or not one chooses to embrace or subvert common wisdom.
@@HeavyMetalMouse I was going to say something, but you said it all better. . . "Why use my own words, when someone else's words do what I want mine to do, better than they ever could?"
@@ecrivonlunyx as Dachusblot said it is still dissonant. I have an analogy though. Sometimes in music we use dissonant chords instead of harmonic ones, it isn't "wrong music" it's just different.
Dan, I watched this video in 2018 and it made me decide to buy my first gaming console, because you made games criticism sounds so interesting and I wanted to be able to form my own opinions! In pandemic times, gaming is one of the things getting me through this insanity!
I actually agree that dissonance is a super important critical tool, but ironically I've never been convinced that Bioshock is actually a particularly strong example of ludonarrative dissonance. The player's inability to engage with the mechanics of the game outside of a very limited scope that basically amounts to "go to X, kill Y, listen to Atlas" in seeming opposition to Randian "will of man" is in fact part of the narrative text as revealed in the infamous "twist". Atlas is ultimately *incapable* of achieving his goals without literally exploiting and controlling other beings to do violence on his behalf, and this is what I think BioShock is ultimately actually "about", he is very blatantly and literally a hypocrite Clint's original piece says that the narrative framework of "help Atlas and you will progress" is "is not in line with the values underlying Randian rational self-interest", which I think is an accurate criticism *if BioShock were actually a game about placing you in a Randian framework to see how you would react*. I don't think it is Clint seems to take the idea that BioShock's grand narrative is ultimately a mocking "fuck you" to the player as a bad thing, and as a personal insult, but I'll be frank: I think its thematically coherent and I think its fucking great
It's also not a great example because the choice about the Little Sisters was a late addition to the game thanks to a mandate from 2K that there had to be a binary moral choice system somewhere because that's what was hot in 2007. The Rescue/Harvest decision wasn't thought up when they were crafting the rest of the narrative, so it makes sense that it might be a bit out of place with it.
ThornheartCat That's external to the text though. Something poorly presented for legitimate logistical reasons is still poorly presented, the reason it happened doesn't change the end product.
Exactly. And his post got a lot of mechanics and context of the game either wrong or backwards. And his claim that the twist was a "deus ex machina" made me question if he knew what that term actually means lol
I actually thought the "Rescue/Harvest" mechanic fit with the theme fairly well. You can either act selfishly for short term gain, or you can act altruistically and reap long term benefits through participation in a community vis-à-vis the little sisters' care packages.
Even before the twits, the PC is framed as an outsider of this Randian world, its failing was semmingly due to the failure of exploitative people to bring people to exploit. This framing shatters during the twist where you are overtly used by the otherwise powerless Ryan to make him die in his own terms.But, I think it can be possible to interpret the PC as a Randian hero, if you are generous to AR. PC start as a slave and the second part of the game is about breaking the chain of his conditioning and confront his master. At the end, PC became no man's slave.
It is useful. It helps pinpoint where things don't click. For example Elder Scrolls 4 v ES 3. The game play in both encourages exploration and dilly dallying: but 4's plot says "this thing is urgent! Do this now" which then makes it feel odd when, after inevitably losing track of the main plot one advances it; the very urgent mission lost its urgency because it became obvious that the world would stand still for one. In ES 3 the main plot invites one to take one's time, explore the land, goof around and gain status LND helps one express that conflict in a more efficient fashion, and discuss how the dissonance arrises... And eventually use it to deepen the meaning of the piece Like in music: there can be dissonance between lyrics and tone, either intentional or accidental; or in acting: a dissonance between the actions done by and the reactions portrayed by the characters.
It is a good exemple. Another one: in GTA games, for me at least, there is a gameplay/story dissonance when the mission makes you slaughter 50ish bad guys, while the characters subsequently make it looks like it was a small gunfight, or even disregard the carnage at all. But maybe it fits with the offset tone of the franchise? (I don't know if it's clear, english is my second language)
I wonder if that "end of the world can wait while I raise some racing fish" type scenario feels more egregious in modern games that are typically sandbox and/or have active day/night cycles. It's harder to ignore the fact that you've spent days on unrelated stuff when you can literally see the days passing and watch NPCs carry on with their lives, regardless.
Guillermo Garcia Viesca a good example in music : Mad world by tears for fears. The original version has an overly joyful synthpop rythme while the lyrics are depressing
The first Dragon Age game had a pretty good way of deceptively handling this. The main quest is "super urgent, things keep getting worse, you need to act now!!!" but, of course, in gameplay terms, you can dick around and do as many side missions as possible, no harm done. Want to walk from one end of the kingdom and back five times? You do you, the darkspawn are just going to chill. But the game lends the impression that things are actually bad with its map screen -- there's a simmering black miasma spreading out from the bottom of the map to indicate how far the Blight has progressed, and it gets a little bit bigger everytime you complete a major quest. The first town you visit is also destroyed following the first major quest you clear -- this is the only area that will get locked out that way, but you don't KNOW that to begin with. It gives you the impression that the bad guy's aren't just sitting back and twiddling their thumbs. I mean, in actuality, they ARE just doing shit all until you complete the next questline or whatever, but it's surprisingly effective for first time players, at least.
That Errant Signal clip legitimately made me pull a lot of strange faces. The concept of ludonarrative dissonance is to describe how individually-consistent parts can make an inconsistent whole. How can it be non-holistic to describe the whole?
The point Dan made was immediately what I thought, like yes there are absolutely movies I'd describe as having a great story but the cinematography is bad and so the whole movie is impacted. I mean that's how I describe a lot of older stuff, the first Gundam is from 1979 and was made really cheaply so the animation and cinematography is impacted and even though it tells a really good story it can be really hard to get through for that reason. Like it happens all the time that a movie might on the surface have a specific story but the camera doesn't tell that story, a lot of the time this is bad but it is also occasionally used as a tool since you can use it to inform the audience that they can't read this movie literally.
tbh the more of Errant Signal I see, the more I think he's kind of just a clown. Shit like that is such an *obvious* point that I don't really understand how you can reach the conclusion he does unless you either completely miss the point or you're just being a contrarian. Like... yeah, games should be evaluated as wholes with both the story and the mechanics being a part of that. Okay. Ludonarrative dissonance is something that can cause that whole to not make sense.
@@mikewaters2126 It feels like he doesn't really think his suggestion through. Tbh, when I first read about that awful "ludology vs. narratology"-debate, I got the same feeling. At least Errant Signal was fairly calm about it, when I read Aarseth's texts, I wondered who provoked him into writing such an unconvincing polemic.
I think the distinction between gameplay and cutscene (if that's how we're defining narrative/story) is far more distinct than cinematography and "story" within a game than a movie. I think his point about cinematographic dissonance (wow that's a mouthful) is a fair one, because the cinematography *is* the story, moreso than a cutscene *is* the story in a video game. I mean, video games don't even need cutscenes to have stories. It's sort of like if a movie suddenly cut to a page in a book for you to read, the difference there would be jarring. But that's how it feels when we play games. My point being that I think Errant Signal was not really wrong when he said that we don't separate the cinematography from the "story", because they are so closely tied together. And likewise, gameplay *is* story, therefore, perhaps the same is true there, we cannot separate the game from the "story"
Dissonance is super useful for any media that encompasses multiple sensory inputs! The idea is actually super common in musical theater criticism and movie musical criticism - the example that comes first to my mind is why the Les Mis film didn't work particularly well: The cinematography was gorgeous and realistic, while the aspect of the fact that it's a musical makes it necessarily a heightened version of reality (as stage productions tend to be, with a rotating stage, extremely intense performances, and lavish scenery). The dissonance between the cinematography and the music/lyrics/script makes the film far less effective at its message.
NPC: Hero! The Princess is in trouble! You have to go the cathedral immediately to save her from the evil wizard! MECHANICS: Yeah no actually this is just a scripted event that triggers as soon as you enter the cathedral and the time you spend goofing off before you hit that point doesn't really matter. PLAYER: I know this already and despite the NPC's well-written desperate pleading I feel no need to actually rush anywhere or do anything. My immersion is broken more or less completely, and therefore this otherwise well-written part of the story is now made weaker for no reason other than the fact that the gameplay doesn't support it at all. Ludonarrative dissonance is a real thing and it can be jarring at times. Mechanics aren't just 'the game that you're playing', and they aren't necessarily separate from the story. In fact they can be and often are a core part of the narrative. If the game mechanics don't align with the narrative, then the narrative is weakened. I don't see how this is even a point of debate. Comparing it to movies is a little silly when you consider that the mechanics of the gameplay can serve and be served by the narrative.
Thus you'll prefer for the game to be more linear if the event of the hero going to the cathedral takes place instead of it being open World and the hero doing what he pleases? And what would make good examples of ludonarrative harmony?
@@Arlesmon I'm not the OP but will take a swing at this. How about if you take more than X amount of time to do the rescue the princess dies? That way you can keep the open world and still maintain the suspension of disbelief. Or even better is to just not put in that kind of quests since they are dissonance (see what I did there :) with the mechanics of the world. God of War 1-3. Kratos is a hateful, hyper-violent asshole who uses everyone for either sex or murder. That comes across strongly in both the gameplay and story. In gameplay you rip apart civilians for health, in story you kill people who are trying to give you the stuff you kill them for.
I love this example, and Bioshock is full of these moments. "Quick, you need to catch up to the NPC" NPC proceeds to wait around the corner while I meticulously loot every box in the room.
The best example of Ludonararative harmony I can think of is Darkest Dungeon, spoilers-ish follow. A game who’s mechanics combine painful RNG that you cannot prevent party member deaths, plus the long term negative effects of adventuring, steer you towards a strategy of ensuring a continuous flow of heroes that you send to their death and despair in a calculated manner, as you follow your in your ancestors footsteps of blood soaked obsession with the secrets under the family manor.
Pathologic is great with this. You certainly CAN dick around and do whatever you want whenever you want, but the story will still happen whether you're there to participate or not. If you want to beat the game, you have to treat quests with timely respect.
I actually wrote my bachelors thesis on Ludonarrative Harmony (eg the opposite of Ludonarrative Dissonance), so I might be biased but I absolutely think it's a useful concept for discussing and designing games. It is *remarkable* how much more intuitive a game mechanic is to a player when it fits into and reinforces the textual narrative of the game.
Loved this so much. Errant Signal's video is definitely great, but I do think the issue with Ludonarrative Dissonance is not that it is a bad framework, but just one that is very easily misunderstood and misapplied.
Faber Neifer This is becoming more and more common when using analytical techniques in most mediums now. We're blurring lines and 'evolving' the use but not many people refer back to the historical use (regardless of how 'new' the technique is).
UltimateDrDoom I sometimes get the impression that people will rely on their own interpretation of something, such as ludonarrative dissonance, and not bother doing the research to make sure they are understanding it correctly. It basically becomes a "hot take" for these purposes. And then that person's not-quite-right interpretation gets filtered down to others who don't bother making sure they have it right. Perhaps this is because so many assume they don't have time to double check, or just won't bother. But it is an issue, and I too see this sort of thing with all sorts of analytical techniques.
Shawn Wesley Oh sure. This video is a good example. Deconstructionism is also one. It's infuriating. I'm all for language and grammar evolving. I just think we need a frame of reference. Acknowledge the historical use or definition at least then move into its evolution. Otherwise we get the problems you described.
Indeed, Errant Signal’s argument is that we should view things holistically, as a whole text. And sometimes, one can’t do that without talking about how X doesn’t fit with Y, at a holistic level, even though both work individually.
Geek circles really do like to turn on a dime. I remember when a bunch of comic fans decided it was "shallow" and uninteresting to criticize Bruce Wayne's role as both a businessman who produces military hardware often sold to police departments and a member of the oversight board for Arkham Asylum. Anyway ludonarrative dissonance is a great way to talk about games. Fight me.
I'm so glad that between this and Lindsey Ellis, Michaela Baines (EXASPERATED SIGH) is finally getting her due. I think Michael Bay might be trying to work out some issues with that character.
i had this experience when I started playing Stardew Valley a few weeks ago for a bit of fun and relaxation. I enjoyed the game's (albeit heavy-handed) message of anti-corporatism and machinations, but as you progress, you realise that the endgame is pretty much becoming a giant ever more efficient factory farm cycling cows, hens and cranberries. Monsanto, come get me.
My gripe about Stardew Valley is that so much of the game is grinding a dungeon with underdeveloped and uninteresting combat mechanics that really are out of place on a Harvest Moon clone... As productive as super-human as your farming abilities become, they are never industrialized. You have to personally do most if not all of the work, you are just really good at it. I don't think being hardworking, even if epically so, is against the game's themes. On the contrary.
@@EwMatias I think you just chose to spend too much time in the dungeon. The game is totally playable and you can get almost everything without ever setting foot in the dungeon. Sure, it's the easiest and intended way to get ore, but you can get all the ore you need in PLENTY of other ways.
So right away, the first example I thought of for a game that avoids ludonarrative dissonance better than most is Undertale. The way you interact with the in-game mechanics directly affects the plot, and the way the plot unfolds in turn dictates the gameplay options available to you. And while it _is_ possible to do things that don't quite gel with whatever narrative you're following, the game does a good job of putting those 'out-of-character' choices off to the side.
Another one i might add is ffv with the Galuf death scene. And i don't know if nier autómata works as well. But i don't know many examples of ludonarrative harmony
You made an excellent point and transformers was a better example than I'd have thought. I think with games the director still doesn't have the oversight you get in films to really develop a cohesive experience, especially with AAA titles. I like discussing the dissonance just because the more awareness it's given the better handled it will be.
It might be that I'm misunderstanding the term but... Isn't the reason you have to help Atlas sort of, uh, part of the plot of Bioshock? There's no choice because you never had one. The lack of choice from a game play standpoint is a really key part of the character's story. I might be getting confused because the paragraph was... far too meaty for me to process with audio-visual (reading and listening, even to the same thing, is hard??) but I don't remember feeling dissonance with that aspect of the story at all. And then after that you don't have choice because in order to leave you have limited options (uh, well, you have one option really). What DID feel dissonant about Bioshock, though, was the PLASMIDS. They were super fun parts of the gameplay, as was Adam upgrades, but you're doing all of this while surrounded by splicers who got addicted to what is for you a mechanic that doesn't effect your character at all. You can have every single plasmid available and switch them out as you like and it's no big deal. Honestly it would have been interesting to see how a plot might have handled THAT aspect of gameplay coming back to bite you in the arse OR at least having effects on you physically or audibly - but that could have muddied or sacrificed the plot we did get which was pretty solid soooo yeah.
Hans But...it DOES effect Jack, the player character, throughout the game. If you choose to harvest too many of the Little Sisters, and get way too much Adam, you become addicted to it. When the Little Sister gives you the Key to Rapture in the bad ending, you instead grab the Little Sister, attempting to take Adam from it. You’re addicted. If you play the game the good way, without harvesting Little Sisters, you’re essentially using the Adam as intended. As little tools, and personal superpowers, purely for practical use.
@@batnacks The specific part of the game addressed in the video is when you're helping Atlas and opposing Ryan. The paragraph seems to imply that there's a dissonance between gameplay and narrative in that you cannot choose to oppose Atlas in the early game through gameplay decisions the same way you can choose not to harvest the Little Sisters, but the whole point is that you narratively COULDN'T choose. Hence my confusion. It'd make more sense to say that about the latter half of the game? It may be a lack of clarity about real-time player experience vs the holistic narrative (since you only find out hours into the game that Jack had no control, and through him the player) in the critique.
Ludonarrative dissonance is a really valuable tool to promote even basic criticism of a game, because the concept is easy to understand, and most anyone who's gamed has experienced it. I think being an avenue for discussion gives it a lot of value.
Uhhh... Sorry, but I can't believe anyone wold ever say a movie can't be "cinematically dissonant". If the movie very clearly wants a character to appear pathetic but keep framing them strongly in shots, that's cinematically dissonant. It betrays, from the video maker, a kind of tilted way they absorb media
Games also have the inherent addition of randomness through player action. I'm sure the cinematography of movies would often be at odds with the narrative if the filmmakers let the audience control the camera. Not as to say that games should force players actions, only that it's that much for harder game developers to create the desired effect.
Like when the NPCs are having a serious discussion about the fate of the world and the player has the camera focused on the hottest female NPC's tits. Yeah. But it's not like that's the developers fault - the player has no one to blame but themselves. Hell, if the story is cliche'd and boring and the player doesn't want to take it seriously anyway, giving the player that freedom could improve their experience. I don't even think that type of "dissonance" should be avoided unless it's unintentional (the player misses an important object not because they were intentionally dicking around but because they didn't know they were supposed to be "looking" in that direction).
There's plenty of times where that dissonance becomes absolutely hilarious. As a kid, I would spend 100s of hours in Zoo Tycoon releasing dinosaurs on my unsuspecting guests. "You hate my park and are trying to leave? FEED THIS MAN TO THE TREX!" If the game tried to force the player to play along nicely with the "You're a zoo owner who's trying their best to create a safe, successful zoo with happy and healthy animals" narrative or if they'd changed the narrative I would have had MUCH less fun with it. (One easy step would be to make it impossible to pick up and put guests into exhibits as there's really no good reason for them to be in there).
I honestly never understood why Ludonarrative Dissonance became a sort of snarl word, and I never understood that part of Campster's video, I always watched that part and though "but, yeah, you could do that". I think your Transformers example is exactly the kind of situation I would use "cinemanarrative dissonance". To me it describes a moment or moments in a body of work that undermine or clash with another aspect in the body of work. Like, we have the concept of cognitive dissonance, when a person tries to reconcile two conflicting ideas/opinions, and a common criticism of any 3rd year amateur film student's work would be "This character's action doesn't make sense from what you built up earlier" or something to do with flaws in the setup of the story. Quiet's "super serious justification" for her outfit in MGS5 is completely dissonant with how the game ogles her ass the whole time, and plenty of stories have conflicting tones that clash with each other. Not to mention the dozens of open world games that pester you about the urgency of the fate of the world while you're off collecting daffodils to complete a quest. So, to me, it always described/was a useful shorthand for a fairly obvious and common enough occurrence in many stories/mediums that I never really got the resistance towards it.
I don't know if this was already mentioned, but I want to provide one example of Ludonarrative dissonance that was built purposefully in a mainstream game. In the expansion "Amonkhet" of the Trading Card Game "Magic the Gathering", the protagonists of the story, the Gatewatch, went to one of the main villain's bases. While they expected people to be in need of liberation, people there actually didn't felt oppressed and the world actually looked like a small paradise... until they started to see more under the hood. As this is a card game in which it is impossible to tell a sequential story just through gameplay, they designed the game to provide the same feeling. In words of the game's Head Designer, Mark Rosewater: >
Late comment, but I kind of love that about Amonkhet. A world set up to look perfect, represented by mechanics that drain the power of creatures (-1/-1 counters) and involve the selective discarding of pieces that one finds useless (cycling). It's kind of masterful, honestly.
This was actually the example i was thinking of. The removal spells especially are very jarring, when the name says something very different from art and mechanics. _Compulsory Rest_ shows someone forcibly dragged away against his will and being sacrificed for life gain, _Compelling Argument_ is a mill spell (thematically, the withering away of someone's mind) when it supposedly conveys enlightenment, the cream of the crop's _Final Reward_ is being ritually sacrificed, _Deem Worthy_ is the process by which that happens, and everything about _Dissenter's Deliverance_ makes me *extremely* uncomfy (especially the way that flavor text works with the rest), to name one from each color. But from specific cards like these to the mechanics, so much of this set Just Feels Wrong in a way that really works.
That's clever and also has a pretty direct parallel with film, where we're all familiar with the scene of what looks like a happy and nice place but it's shot and scored in such a way as to tell us that something isn't right.
I didn't play this game, but from your description, I don't think this is a ludonarrative dissonance at all. This is just subversion of expectations, and in fact, both the gameplay and narrative are in harmony, since the subversion works as inteded. That subversion IS the narrative (unless it actually fails and the game is bad, I wouldn't know). There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in the comments, about what the ludonarrative dissonance is, despite people watching the 7 minute video explaining it. It's not about gameplay being "different" from the basic story, or the gameplay being ironic. The narrative isn't just the story, but also it's themes and the overarching idea. All of these elements have to support the theme, the idea, for it to be in harmony.
I never considered creatures placing -1/-1 counters on themselves but still being a reasonable statline is actually a pretty brilliant way to show being able to tolerate oppression and not realizing because you can still get by.
You're clear enough at explaining these concepts that as soon as you mentioned "cinemanarrative dissonance" I was just like, "RENT. THE RENT VIDEO. YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT THAT THING IN RENT." Which speaks well to both the Rent video and this one!
I've always found those complaining about the term "Ludonarrative Dissonance" to be... Well, not understanding the point of what is being said, in many a case. If video games as a medium are to progress, they must be criticized on all levels, including how the gameplay and story interact with one another. A side mission in Mirror's Edge: Catalyst comes to mind that... Completely broke my desire to keep playing the game, despite having no strong dislike or like of the gameplay in of itself. I fail to remember the details, but you (as Faith, the protagonist) have to deliver a package to someone within a time limit. As you do, you hear a conversation talking about how the package you're carrying contains drugs that the person you're delivering for will hide in a family's meal to get them addicted so he can use that addiction to manipulate them for his own gains. The character, Faith, hears it too, yet she still hands the package over. She's framed as a moral, rebellious figure, yet this mission complete destroys the image she's built up as having. I straight up haven't picked up the game since, because the destruction of this image left a bad taste in my mouth. I wouldn't mind if Faith was framed as a bad person who didn't care if these people got hurt, but she wasn't.
Was the player given the choice to hand it over, or was reaching the drop-off point and initiating the hand-over cutscene or whatever the only way to finish the mission? Did the player have the option of going a different way and avoiding the drop-off point? If the answer is "No", then you're probably right. It DOES make the gameplay be at odds with the character, since it's all up to Faith - not the player - to make the moral choice, and she chooses in a way contrary to her portrayal as a moral person.
That wouldn't be ludonarrative dissonance, that's poor writing, Faith's choice contrasts with Faith's character. You could take away 100% of the gameplay and the problem would still be there.
I think it all comes down to believability and therefore immersion. Valid examples of ludonarrative dissonance withdraw you from an experience, whereas void accusations of it, like those thrown at the uncharted series for simply having lots of killing but also a light hearted tone, are just that,
That was a brilliant way of putting, the Transformers example was spot on. My gut feeling to Campster's argument was "yeah, but that's REALLY not the case when you talk about traditional computer Role-playing Games like, say, Baldur's Gate or Fallout 2". Because it's very easy to make arguments like this when you're talking about simple games. Like Assassin's Creed. Or Far Cry. But it all falls apart when you start talking about the real good stuff. But of course you put the argument in a brilliant way. Yes, we should talk about games as a whole, but first we need to make games as a whole. Oh, and by the way, the ludenarrative dissonance in Baldur's Gate (and generally a lot of D&D campaigns) is seriously real. In that case directly because the game was designed as a strategy war game before it was turned into an RPG, but there are other reasons and factors as well.
This is a great video! I agree that we need a term like ludonarrative dissonance to describe what happens in a lot of games nowadays. Couple of things I wanted to contribute are some reasons why I think this happens: 1) The discussion of games through the lens of genre in everything from development to marketing and retailing - Meaning both developers and customers often end up thinking of a game in view of its mechanical functions alone 2) The way games are developed, especially AAA titles is in a very compartmentalized manner that splits responsibilities up into Programming, Art, Design etc which kind of pre-emptively kills any attempts at making a theme become harmonious across all aspects of your game when SO many people need to be brought onto the same page. Indie titles, in my opinion, have a lot more success at achieving that tight knit between form and function that really makes a game sing, simply cause there's fewer people working on it so the creative vision stands less chance of getting diluted.
Fallout 4. Like, just... if there needed to be a textbook example of why ludonarrative dissonance is an important concept, Fallout 4 has surely provided that example. Fallout 4's core gameplay loop is well executed, iterating on the sort of play found in Borderlands & Diablo II - encounter procedurally generated bosses dynamically while exploring the world, kill them to grab cool loot. There's also a brilliant touch of Minecraft added to give purpose to the BethSoft junk scrounging beyond 'sell this to your nearest vendor', which makes dungeon delving feel rewarding on it's own merit. Parallel to that, Fallout 4 pursues an incredibly daring premise, and one that is not often explored in games. The writing quality is not the greatest by any stretch, but I was easily able to buy-in to the premise & know many players who were likewise willing to indulge the offer of immersion. The core gameplay loop & daring premise simply do not work together. The moment you leave the introductory Vault segment, these elements come into immediate conflict with each other, despite their independent competency, and ruin your experience with the game unless / until you decide to run with one element and forego the other. If you choose the immersive route, it is all but necessary to just enable cheats & bypass the progression treadmill so you can take on the sense of urgency demanded by the premise, rushing off immediately to Diamond City in search of Shaun. If you choose the gameplay route, you have to ignore the premise entirely & invent a different motivation for your character so you can run around collecting junk, building settlements and farming boss monsters. Either of these play experiences is enjoyable, but mixed together they are absolutely atrocious & Fallout 4 is much weaker as a title for not having committed to one or the other. If ludonarrative dissonance had been on the developers' radar, this problem could have been avoided & the game would've almost certainly been better.
True. I chose to immediately forget Shaun existed as soon as I left the Vault. Any references to him were completely ignored. When I got to the "twist", I was like, "WHO? Oh... oh yeah...".
I enjoyed _Fallout 4,_ but I played the game as though my character were a power-hungry psychopath whose only interest in getting their kid back was to regain ownership of a personal possession, which made lack of urgency immersive. If you've ever sided with the Institute, you'll know how well the game accommodates that type of PC.
Not only is ludonarrative dissonance a useful concept, but I can also come up with an example of a game actually using it deliberately. Spec Ops: The Line. The repetitive, generic, traditional shootery action only serves to enhance the cognitive dissonance that the protagonist, and by extent the player, is feeling. The monotonous, mindless fun of war games used to highlight the absurdity of treating war as a game.
I'd say that Spec Ops is unintentionally undermined by this dissonance. The game criticises the player directly for doing things that you have no choice but to do. I think the game would have been much, much stronger if you'd had the option, right at the start, to do exactly what your character was supposed to do and then leave, which would end the game. Because that would mean that getting involved in the game's story and doing all the horrible shit that the game calls you out for actually was your fault. You were given the option to complete your original mission and leave. Either you ignored it or you took it, decided it was boring and went back to fuck up Dubai because it was more exciting. Either way, you really did choose to do this. You weren't funnelled into this position by a narrative that refused to let you do anything else so it could criticise you for taking the only option available.
@@Talisguy But the game isn't criticizing the player, it's criticizing the military itself. Spec Ops came out when FPS were spending an absurd amount of time kissing up to the US army. Sure, many of them intended to show the horrors of war, but few were willing to criticize the US's terrible foreign policies. The main character can't leave, not because the game wants you to feel bad for enjoying the violence, but because that's how soldiers are expected to behave. That's how I think it's suppose to feel. Obviously it'll play differently for different people.
@@ritavermilyea5848 The game does criticize the US' interventionist foreign policy and its military, but it also breaks the fourth wall several times to call you, *the player,* an asshole. You are directly criticized for the white phosphorus attack when one of the lead's subordinates points at the camera (pointing at the lead, but we don't see him because he's not in frame) and yells "he turned us into fucking killers!" The game's loading screens eventually devolve into asking you, the player, if you even remember why you're killing people anymore, if you know why you originally came to Dubai, if you know how many people you've murdered. And this would all be so much more effective if this wasn't the only path available to the player. Undertale does the exact same thing, but it rings a lot truer in Undertale because you really need to go out of your way to become a genocidal monster in Undertale and the game gives you plenty of opportunities to not be an asshole. So when that game calls you a bastard, it's totally deserved, because you aren't railroaded into it and can't possibly have gotten onto this path by accident.
@@Talisguy I'd argue that, while what you say is true, the fourth wall breaks work as a tool to truly portray the protagonist's emotional and mental journey by involving the player in that experience. As in, everything that's said in the fourth wall breaks ("do you remember why you're here?") also apply to Walker, because a truly realistic game about a war would not be the heroic narrative commonplace in war FPS games, but involve the crushing trauma and guilt brought by the experience woven throughout the gameplay itself.
I love the discussion and the problem. It is true and most people have known about it even if it didn't have a name. I think one of the best examples of ludonarrative dissonance is how link in TLoZ or other rpg protagonists fail to comunicate agency by enjoying cheerful minigames while the world is supposedly ending. People always pointed out that it made no sense how maybe a loved one was kidnapped and yet the game incentivized doing side quest and leisure activities. BOTW did it far better by pushing the idea that there is no reason to rush, the world already ended, so it is better to take your time and grow stronger for the final battle and made sure most systems worked to make you stronger.
It's an incredibly useful tool, and the reverse (Ludo-narrative Resonance, I suppose) is as well for explaining how a game can be better than the sum of it's parts (Nier: Automata comes to mind). The problem, however, is that many games critics loved to throw the term around as a justification for disliking tonal or mechanical elements in games even when the term shouldn't have applied, causing it to lose all weight and meaning for a great deal of people. It is still an important tool for looking at a game through a critical lens, but the game critic "industry" has some very bad habits as it is (score inflation, cumulative scoring based on components rather than a whole piece, etc) so I'm not shocked at how quickly they've abandoned a critical tool that necessitates nuance in it's use.
I dunno... I really kind of feel like Nier: Automata has its own share of game vs Narrative hiccups (not the least of which was ensuring that in order to experience the full story one had to spend the MOST time with the character who had the least interesting and developed game mechanics #hackingsucksbutistousefullnottouse) I mean it allows you to not kill SOME things in its anti-war message but doesn't really allow you to kill nothing and then still sort of beats you over the head with the old 'you're perpetuating violence' theme. It's a great game mind you, I just don't think its necessarily a paragon of game play to narrative resonance.
@@lenajohnson6179 I don't perceive Automata as anti-war, personally. It feels more to me (ymmv!) like an exploration of humanity through the lens of sentient (in a bunch of degrees of sapience) combat bots, and to that purpose the gameplay in general served fine - not great, but it wasn't a Max Payne 3 situation. What sets Nier apart as dang excellent at this are a few specific examples: the scripted sequence that leads to the split of routes C and D, some of the text sequences, and ending E (phrased as vaguely as possible). That last one in particular is an incredible, amazing example of this exact thing.
The opposite of dissonance, (as in musical dissonance) is consonance. You could think of the two terms as describing how much "resonance" two or more things have with each other.
I love long form video essays, but I also appreciate these short sort of definitional videos or ones that just make a single point, that have mostly fallen out of favor.
God help me I'm commenting on TH-cam. The issue I think Ludonarrative Dissonance shows up isn't so much that the term itself is bad, but rather the overuse of the term in a short window of time highlighted the way review culture hadn't gotten its shoes on yet. There was a clear desire for some people to be academically engaged with games, and how games are made and things like theme and tone, but there simply isn't the culture and atmosphere of that kind of talk in a greater space. So you'd see a single concept bubble up in something some reviewer liked, then get repeated, then swirl around for a while until it became clear people on the periphery, removed from the original critical reading, were using it (which also plays into how review culture gets parroted by consumers). Basically LND is a fine critical lens _even though_ I say this as someone who thinks it also _kinda doesn't exist_ (because I view play as a paratextual da da da read my thesis etc etc). LND was more of a symptom than anything else: It's a perfectly valid critical tool that was being massively overused by a creative culture starved for the space and time to explore critical tools.
You think ludonarrative dissonance doesn't even exist? I'd be curious to hear more about this. I can imagine someone saying they don't think it's a *problem*, or that it's not wide-spread, and disagreeing with specific *instances* of it existing. I'd disagree with them, but I can understand it. But denying the existence even in theory of LND is an off thought it me. Would you care to elaborate?
The “cinemanarrative dissonance” part made me think of current-day WH40k. The fluff describes the setting as something like “the cruelest and bloodiest regime imaginable” but the official artwork is often composed in a manner that resembles military propaganda, with Space Marines being framed as badass heroes. Compare that to older artwork, where the Marines were these terrifying, monstrous, inhuman abominations that really did seem like they came from the “cruelest and bloodiest regime.” GW keeps saying the setting is satire and that we shouldn’t admire the Imperium, while at the same time framing the Imperium as badass.
the modern novels and video games don’t help either. I often think of how wrong Space Marine got the setting, not visually, but narratively, by portraying the space marines as badass war heroes that are noble and always do the right thing no matter what, with heroic music set to these characters horrifically slaughtering orks. The game as text is essentially equivalent to that trashy nazi propaganda film featured in Inglorious Basterds, only it’s unironic and isn’t trying to frame itself in a critical way. Considering media like that game act as the entry point for a lot of modern fans of the setting, it’s no wonder the 40k fandom has a neo-nazi problem today, with Games Workshop constantly needing to come out and say “Hey, this setting is making fun of nazis. We will not accept your business” in spite of their own fiction saying otherwise.
I find it more likely that you're falling into the common mental trap of the past was always better. You're only remembering the good stuff from back then. There were probably just as many, if not more, films with dissonance.
I think a good complement to Chris' video is his blog post on ludonarrative dissonance from earlier in his career (I'd post a link but then TH-cam would probably flag this comment as spam). I think his larger argument is twofold: first, that there's not much value to having a jargon term like "ludonarrative dissonance" when you could probably just say "dissonant," and jargon is often alienating to people who might otherwise find the discussion valuable. But, more broadly, he's making a larger point about the inability to talk about tensions between narrative and gameplay in gaming discourse because it exists in the larger context of people who claim video games are inherently bad at telling stories. So, yes, "ludonarrative dissonance" would be a useful term, but only in a very different games culture than the one we have.
Great. All my favorite critics critiquing each other. As a game designer I remember reading the original blog post and it giving me a term for something I had a vague intuition for. Having a word for it has helped me make better games and given me a tool for communicating with my teams. Keep up the good work everyone.
'Dissonant' is incredibly imprecise though. What's dissonant? The music? Some sections of gameplay with other sections of gameplay? 'Ludonarrative dissonance' is a phrase that falls on the right side of the jargon/technical term divide because it has a precise meaning that isn't really approximated by any simpler phrase. I'm not sure that the larger context means there should be an 'inability' to talk about these tensions. Those who claim video games are inherently bad at telling stories have got plenty of ammunition, and if anything, identifying more precisely what the problem is enables us to conceive of how to address it. For example, Valve made Half-Life 2 and Portal. One is rife with ludonarrative dissonance because the player is never given any reason to properly inhabit the character of Gordon Freeman - you are essentially on a murderous rollercoaster ride full of toys and spectacle, while Freeman presumably cares about what the other characters are telling him. The player gets bored of being talked to because the information is, for the most part, ludologically irrelevant, and also tonally at odds with the levity of most of the gun fights. In both Portal games, however, the player's aims are brilliantly synthesised with that of the character they are playing. You both want to test the limits of your environment, to find out if the 'rules' can be broken, and you want to complete the challenges you've been set in order to master game mechanics that might come in useful later. The terminology here points us in the right direction in terms of what we can expect to succeed and fail. Any game that tries to marry a serious and sombre story to mechanics which encourage splatterous murder is going to look a bit ridiculous.
Hehe, as Chris points out in the blog post linked upthread, Half-Life 2 is not a ludonarratively dissonant game. Which kind of gets at the problem: simply having the term "ludonarrative dissonance" isn't very useful without wider context of what the term means and how it applies in a given instance. And, if you're providing that context, why do we need a special word for it? It makes dissonance between gameplay and narrative seem like something inherent to games. I take Dan-O's point that, since it's a thing a lot of games do, it is worth studying as a trend, but I almost never see people actually use the word for that purpose.
I don't agree with Chris's reasoning though - ludonarrative dissonance absolutely does encapsulate instances of the player acting illogically within the narrative. There's no reason why the term has to be especially narrow, and in the case of Half-Life 2 it can't be attributed simply to 'subversive play' because the game mechanics outside of the cut scenes consistently steer you toward movement, exploration and interaction. It's not exactly like driving offroad in a racing game - far from it. I must be missing something because I don't really understand why you're asking 'why do need a special word for it?' Why do we need a term for the uncanny valley, which is also something that explains why the vast majority of 3D computer games are disturbing and even frightening for some people? We use the term because it becomes a short-hand once we have established what the issue is and some of the ways if manifests itself. I honestly think most gamers are too 'native' to see just how widescale both of the above mentioned issues are. It isn't inherent, but neither is it some sort of localised, occasional stumbling block. Ludonarrative dissonance and the uncanny valley are, I would say, still the main obstacles to a wider acceptance of games as something more than toys - those who aren't already invested in them will tend to find it immediately ridiculous and jarring when a sombre or thoughtful narrative tone is intercut with monkey business.
I'd just add that I don't think monkey business and subversive gameplay is *uninteresting*, or something that shouldn't be allowed. Quite the opposite. But it's a niche area of fascination to people who are really into games and games culture, and in the broader debate about the place of games as meaningful tools for understanding ourselves, properly synthesised narrative-interactivity is an important aim - and it's not some distant utopia either. Games can achieve it, as long as they place appropriate limitations on/guidance for player expressivity.
I love the original Nier (2010) so much for using this technique. It relies on multiple playthroughs to feed more contextual information, which stacks with the dissonance felt in the previous run. Likewise the endings get darker as more and more implications about the player's actions are revealed. It doesn't really give you a choice to not play the script but it does a good job of showing the contrast between the character's perspective and the greater good.
Reason 21346 to praise Undertale: its narrative not only directly depends on the gameplay, but meshes with it so well that players feel like their decisions actually matter in the world of the game. The only time I can think of where the gameplay and story are dissonant is when there's so many easer eggs to find, but the story insists that you never replay it.
Undertale's excellent merging of mechanics, gameplay, music and level/UI design is its crowning achievement. If it wasn't so perfect at that, it'd just be a generic rpg, instead of such a heartwarming gem. (Artwork was a little sloppy for the first couple areas.)
From a metamodern approach, it's not even taken as odd or bizarre to hold two dissonant ideas. One can be genuine and ironic or hold two ideas that are in conflict (note: not ideas that are mutually exclusive). So keeping this in mind, one could even use the conflicting gameplay style and apparent narrative specifically to say something. I don't think we'll ever have anything like that without the critical tool of ludonarrative dissonance and people using it to specifically point at this phenomenon. The fact is I would *love* a game doing something like that. Actual awareness of the dissonance and usage of it can only come from ~being aware of it~. So I think it's incredibly useful.
Peter Coffin it's not a video game but as Mark Rosewater explained, they tried to do just this with Amonkhet, the next-to-last Magic The Gathering CCG expansion.
I wonder if The Stanley Parable would be a good example of that? Initially it presents its gameplay as being entirely secondary to a predefined narrative, then the player realises they can subvert the narrative by going "off piste", and in the end they are forced to recognise that this was the aim from the start and that even their deliberate subversions of the narrative were part of the narrative.
suddenllybah I probably can't do better than quote Rosewater himself: "The world has a sense of dissonance. That is, the conscious messages on the surface don't seem to match the unconscious messages from below. Things look fine, but don't feel fine. We talked about how the film Stepford Wives and the book A Wrinkle in Time both have sequences where the protagonist sees that what is on the surface looks like an ideal place but feels a sense of discomfort as they can tell that their eyes and their guts aren't in sync. This led us to work with the creative team to purposefully create a mechanical-creative dissonance. The mechanics would convey a darker, more sinister feel (such as the use of -1/-1 counters) but the creative would take a happier, more upbeat tone. That way what you saw on the cards and what you felt from the gameplay wouldn't line up. Like the Gatewatch, the players would get a sense that something isn't quite right ..." magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/amonkhet-down-business-part-3-2017-04-17
GuruJ Ah, yeah, because those types of counters were used in Shadowmoor and new phyrexia, and graveyard as resource is generally more of a darker theme (I. E. Innistrad blocks)
I love this, because it helps me think about why the Sims 4 doesn't work for me as a game without some powerful mods. In a lot of the messaging and marketing, the main sell of the game is that you can "tell your own story." However, it is actually quite difficult to tell any story. For personality, your average sim has an aspiration, like wanting to be a master chef or an amazing bodybuilder. The aspiration gives them one trait, and then you can pick three more. Now, only having four traits and an aspiration to form the basis of a personality is its own problem. The real problem is that in gameplay, it doesn't really matter. There are no consequences for the player if you ignore your sim's aspiration. Functionally, they have no idea that it's there or that it exists. You can also change the aspiration whenever you want, and it doesn't matter. They don't react to any of it. You can reach a milestone in their aspiration and nothing happens. What the gameplay essentially reveals is that your sim has no internal motivation. Stories are driven by the motivations of the characters, right? How the hell am I supposed to develop a story or enjoy the experience when the game gives me nothing to go off of? What's funny is that to stay entertained, people created challenges to add some fun into the game. And the devs responded to that by releasing scenarios. I mean, they see how people are playing, but aren't looking at why they play this way. It's not as big of a problem for PC gamers who can add mods and cc. There are modders reverse engineering powerful tools and mods all the time. But it is annoying that I have to add and manage mods to make the game worth playing.
I agree that, in order to understand, describe, and recommend a game, separating the game into its separate components is extremely helpful. The main disadvantage to this approach is introducing the idea that these components don't interact - which was what the Errant Signal video seemed to be pointing to in his example, but I also know appears to be the common philosophy of games in the public - but I've found that many gamers actively seek out games that excel in one area or another. Some go in for story, others go in for gameplay. These two populations rarely overlap. There are also many other aspects, such as graphics, music, writing, characters, etc. (For example, a game with great music will draw me in, and I've stomached questionable gameplay if the translation sprite art is especially nice). The ideal game would have all of these components work towards a cohesive whole - ie, there is no dissonance. (I do believe that a game that works towards a cohesive whole with parts that are merely "good" has more heart than a game that is dissonant with parts that are all excellent.) However, it's rare to have the perfect product, so there often exists dissonance, where the game components pull in two different directions, or unbalanced quality, where a game does one thing much better than other. I do think it's an important concept for people who enjoy games to understand - not just those who play games, but also those who are interested in looking at them as a form of media or art. I've been playing with ideas on how to review, communicate, and write about games for a while, so this video was a nice watch for me. Thanks for the video!
“They’re just games!” Is actually a really good audience to include in this discussion: dark and complex art isn’t the only art that’s needed in the world. There is a strong use for fun stories that provide nothing more than a sense of personal empowerment. Being fun in structure AND narrative is a success at bringing story and mechanics together, and I’m tired of arguments that suggest a game is badly written just because it isn’t designed to be a dark or confronting narrative. A person struggling with personal demons can be helped a TON by having accessible games about personal growth and empowerment that don’t inject triggering content. Games are an interactive experience as much as they are a narrative one, and providing a well thought out, lighthearted, empowering interactive experience is actually extremely useful in contributing to society as a whole.
Just for you to consider: even if games are intended to have deep and complex meanings... or just simplistic ones... doesn't at all mean that that is what the participant in it will take from it. Something that could be dark and confronting for you could be full-on narrative joy for me. Confusion and irritation are also valid interpretations of stuff. This is the case with any complex multimedia work. I think the art is getting as many people to come out of the experience thinking the same way.
@@nachtschimmen I actually enjoy games with complex darker narratives, I just mean that it's still deeply valid for things like Kirby to exist without any deep meaning, because games are also an interactive experience, and it isn't a failure in art if the game is just 'fun', because there's a use for 'fun', too.
@@abbey5899 Oh absolutely! Enjoying something is a valid response, and it is almost invariably the intended one. Joy is the most wonderful emotion by the way and I try to get it as often as possible. What I was trying to say is that with complex multimedia art like games can lead to deeply multi-facetted interpretations and that unintended ones are also possible and valid; ones that the artist may have not intended.... But what I was really doing was responding to your interesting comment with a challenge. I'm glad you responded. Simple things like that... cause joy! It's the best!!!
...I also got to thinkin'.... Now if any art is about the existential act of experiencing of joy, surely it must be video games, in particular the platformer? 'Cos whatever the darker intended meanings may be, what is it that draws us back to them? The joy of us controlling something that flashes and whirls and jumps on things. It really has little meaning apart from that! What are the most successful games in this genre? Probably the ones that make you remember the moment of bouncing off a mushroom or clopping a star into smithereens. The thing that stays with me is the sound it makes when I imagine that I'm doing something. I mean, this is a bad example, but you don't play Super Mario 'cos you think it's important to save princesses... You do it because of the joy of jumping and bouncing of mushrooms! I now get your point more than I did before.
@@nachtschimmen Yeah, exactly! A lot of 'games as art' art criticism is still rooted in film/book criticism, so it focuses very tightly on narrative. (and the other end of the spectrum is games criticism that refuses to look at it from an artistic view at all and only engages with the mechanics of the game) I think going forward it would be really nice for 'gameplay' and 'art' criticism to have more direct interactions when dealing with games. Stuff like the Ludonarrative concept, but also investigation of the idea in general of what 'play' or 'challenge' means in the art world, because those are also very big human emotions.
To me the ultimate example is Pokemon. In every game, spin-off, anime, and movie the bond between Pokemon and humans is at the core. Only villains use and abuse Pokemon as tools and weapons, caring only about a Pokemon's strength and attributes. The hero bonds with their team regardless of typing or inherent abilities. Real life Pokemon battles are just as competitive as they are portrayed in the game world, and in real life the trainer's personal attachment to the Pokemon or even the species of Pokemon on their team has no bearing on success. There are official tournaments with a lot of money at stake, so Pokemon are selectively bred for perfect battle traits. Hundreds of rejects are cast aside as worthless. At the top competitive level only a small handful of the nearly 1000 species of Pokemon are used, because they are objectively superior.
someone who nails the combination of the two is Edmund McMillen with games like The Binding of Isaac. the tough gameplay highlights the tough mental struggle of the titular character, as well as the repeating runs reflect his continual struggle within his own mind. This cohesion was probably easier to create because McMillen is a game designer and writer for his games.
Godblessit, Dan, you make such great videos. Comparing gameplay to cinematography in terms of storytelling is spot-on. Everything from framing to performance to dialogue is part of telling the story and unity (or intentional dissonance) is important to making a proper whole. I hear things like this brought up a lot in regards to David Fincher. Though I generally like or love just about everything he has done, there can be a disconnect between his color palette and what the story could perhaps be saying otherwise. Things of that nature. But it's all conduits of how we experience a story. The framing of shots in Miller's Crossing affects our understanding and experience of the story just as much as the gameplay in Saints Row IV, the vocal performances in Jimmy Neutron, and the acting in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The discussion of ludonarrative dissonance is one that deserves to be had, even if it is a sort of catch-of-the-day kind of term. Something like Wolfenstein: The New Order is completely aligned in its elements, whereas I have had some trouble with Uncharted when Nathan Drake will kill thirty people and go back to quipping. Something about it feels off to me. Not that others can't enjoy it but still. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this copy of War & Peace I have written above. Keep making great content. I have watched your Suicide Squad video an untold number of times.
This is a really interesting subject to talk about with Dark Souls, as everything from the environments to the exposition delivery to the mechanics of navigating/surviving the world itself are in some way an extension of the the theme and tone of the piece(s) as a whole.
Ludonarrative dissonance is part of a holistic view of media. It's literally discussing how parts of the whole work against each other to weaken the art as a whole.
So great to see this term taken seriously. Really believe there's a lot to be discussed evaluated in this direction. When I was doing my grad project back in 2011 I ha hopes to discuss something like this but also looking at the art direction, eventually we'll get there.
I had such an experience with Mass Effect 1. Within the cut scenes and character interactions it is clear that you as a spectre are supposed to be a guardian of intergalactic peace and there are moral questions raised about all kinds of topics. Among them are the topics of genocide and whether or not a culture of AI can be regarded people. Acknowledging, that this is just a game these topics were discussed in a rather nuanced and meaningful way. Yet, you were rewarded with XP and currency for every kill you made - and the reward became bigger with every kill. So in the end, the story tried to ask questions and discuss them nuancedly, but the mechanics sent the message 'Kill everyone, loot everything'. I find that message in a lot of RPG mechanics and I'm not sure, that this is the message, studios want to send. However, I'm aware, that it is much harder to design mechanics with a different message.
This topic interests me greatly. I have battled this for a while in table top RPG's in that I need to find the right system to fit my setting and story. For example, I wouldn't use Pathfinder to recreat a horror movie like The Thing. Thank you for covering this!
I love your vids, and i freaking adore Errant Signal, but you're right. And I thought the same thing when he mentioned "cinema-narrative dissonance" as NOT being a thing. I thought "...well, it COULD be, and would be valid, and doesn't take away from the validity of ludo-narrative dissonance". Great example with transformers. A comment on Errant signals own thread discussed how cinema-narrative dissonance would be something like using action-jumpcuts in a romantic comedy; but because cinema is a much older medium than gaming, those kinds of obvious flaws have since been worked out.
Definitely a good tool to have in your toolbox. It's not always super relevant because games can sometime stand without much need of story at all (like an aesthetically pleasing but ultimately meaningless music video... or porn) or the narrative and gameplay can be sufficiently separated. But for many narrative driven games it is definitely a useful tool.
One of the uncharted games has an achievement called ludonarrative dissonance - it triggers after you've killed a large number of enemies, and effectively lampshades the fact that the games and characters completely gloss over the murder spree and the psychological toll it would entail. I think there is value to seperating the story and the mechanics of a game, because a shit narrative with solid mechanics can still be fun to play, but a good story mired by bad mechanics is hard to bear. Then there's cases where otherwise solid mechanics are retracted in order to force a bad story; namely when a game forces you to choose between two outcomes, despite there logically being more than two outcomes, and the story calls you an ass for being forced into a dichotomy you didn't want, which is an incredibly jarring dissonance that really breaks immersion.
Great observation ! I was gonna say The last of us (part too as well) is on the list. It's kinda mirrored with the uncharted games if you're mind is open to the idea. As well as Watch dogs 2, you see a bunch of hippies, making jokes and whatnot, but just 30 minutes ago, the characters committed mass spree murder. Although you can have a pacifist run, the game still relies on the killing aspect. But i have noticed more games on the side of naughty dog suffers from this, especially ones under neil druckmann.
I once had an opportunity to ask a respected webcomic creator the question: "what's more important; the art, or the writing?" Her answer was: "The art needs to do what the writing needs it to do, and the writing needs to do what the art needs it to do." Same for gameplay and game premise. Fighting game "stories" are often about martial arts competition, because the player is competing with the computer or another player. RPG's are often a process of the player learning the strategies of the battle system/mechanics, as characters are levelling up and learning new abilities. Growth! Tetris is about smashing buttons in order to smash tetrominos into the densest a packing possible. Just my 2c.
Love this video. it's giving a name to something that I see all too often in my field of study, architecture. My classmates and admittedly myself sometimes often present a design stating it does one thing but in practice either doesn't do that thing, or in the much worse case, has an opposite effect.
The reason we don't have something similar for cinematography though is because we don't often see films where the cinematography works so incredibly in the opposite direction to the story and themes of the film, while we do see this in games frequently. Transformers is a good example of this in films, but that whole series is generally regarded as pretty low brow and trashy in general. In games, we see this in the cream of the crop of major studio output. Games like Uncharted and Grand Theft Auto suffer enormously from it, despite being some of the highest rated games being made.
I just want to point out, that you should watch Apocalypse now trough this lens. This is a generally beloved movie by critic, but that in my own opinion fail to live up to it's anti war discourse with an esthetisation of war that actually make war look pretty cool, but doesn't question the reason that brought this violence to play. More simply this movie criticize the way the war was fought, but not the the reason it was fought for. Hence it's an anti war movie that fail to make war look horrible. It just say's that professional soldiers and not conscript should have fought this war. This can also be explained by the fact that Vietnamese have exactly 0 lines in the movie, but that a french land owner has 30 minutes of presence on screen. An anti-war movie that doesn't give a voice to the main victim of that war seem a pretty big failure to me. hence a cinematographic disonance could work to talk about some movies, even some highly regarded one.
Bruno Sauvagnat This is considered to be a problem with war movies in general. It's really hard to portray meaningful criticisms of war on film because no matter how ugly you make it, no matter how you theme it, it just can't help but be visually compelling and dramatic. The ones that try hard to come close without doing so, like Jarhead, are often considered boring and unsatisfying. In Apocalypse Now specifically, it was adapted from Heart of Darkness, which is a pretty terrible and racist book, so it can't help but have those other problems a bit as well. Finally, I don't think there's ever been a serious reckoning of what an atrocity the Vietnam war was for the American public at large, certainly not in the 70s, not outside of leftist or academic circles. So it's also hard to blame it for sucking on the details of Vietnam when basically _no_ American movie has ever done the insanity of that war justice outside of some gross spectacle of how bad it was for American soldiers. With those caveats in mind, I still think it's an excellent film in its own right, even if it's not a very effective anti war film and generally terrible about getting the details on Vietnam right.
"...with an esthetisation of war that actually make war look pretty cool..." This is a problem with a lot of anti-war movies. Another example is American History X, which is an anti-White Supremacist movie, but a lot of White Supremacists latched onto it, because it makes them look cool.
Years later here, but I think Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent modern example of this. The story's telling you that this world is grindingly oppressive and that you're poor and scrappy, but in gameplay you're a rampaging murder machine with a high-end car collection and five apartments. This has a lot of consequences for how the player interprets plot elements that make sense in the writing, but feel out of place with the actual power and wealth the player has. So, yeah, super useful framework for discussing games.
Loved this! However I'm always a bit confused when we take Bioshock as a game where we have much agency. I mean the "Would-you kindly" thing always expressed to me that whatever choices we have have never been completely open, so I can see why you have no option that allows for the Objectivist approach. Am I wrong?
No, you're not. That was the main commentary of the game. Clint Hocking was so focused on the objectivist framing of the story that he missed the meta-commentary that was directed at the player.
Guillaume Lachapelle No, you’re absolutely right. Clint Hocking completely missed the fucking point of the entire franchise’s narrative on a gameplay and story level.
Great video, examples, and editing! Subscribed :-D As a side-note, regarding Bioshock, I think it can be argued that if there is Ludonarrative dissonance, that it may well have been executed on purpose. In my experience of the game, I found myself realizing that -- like in life -- it was my choice whether to move ahead or put the controller down and do something else. Oft times, the crux of a situation is that you realize that you want to keep playing a scenario to see what happens; and that is tantalizing. It can keep us from ejecting ourselves from a situation in which we, perhaps, only absently realize we can stop at any time. It reminds me of the Milgram experiment and the dissonance between authority (game-play), obedience, and personal conscience (narrative). The game lets us feel the seeming inexorability of our role and the smaller yet meaningful choices we make within it. Full disclosure, Bioshock is among my top five favorite games of all time along with the Elder Scrolls Morrowind -- so I might be biased, hahaha!
The 'cinemanarrative-dissonance' of 'Transformers' is pretty much the ONLY worthwhile aspect of that movie (as 'drama') and yet, as pretty much advertised on the tin, just another failure to throw on the heap that accompanies Bay's enterprise.
I think another thing this generation of game creators are just now figuring out is what other ways can you tell a story through gameplay. To oversimplify here Theres have been, from about the 80s till maybe a few years ago, only a few types of gameplay that could tell a story. Puzzle solving games like Tetris or point and click adventure games, God Games and city builders which tell the story of one place on a macro level, and good old fashion violence. Most Video games use some kind of violent interaction to tell what ever story through mechanics they have. So, a look at what Going Gault will look like through violent interactions. The effects of Racism in a cyberpunk future through violent interaction. A religious pilgrimage through a strange land 1000 years into the future, mainly through violent interactions. Game creators are just now questioning "How can you mechanically tell a story through other means than violence of solving some kind of puzzle"
An example that comes to mind being Manhunt 2. A game where the narrative progresses away from violence, questioning it's merit. Meanwhile the gameplay keeps the same level throughout from start to finish. Completely contradicting the story/message the game is trying to tell.
VejyMonsta That's not just it. There are tons of other things that are fun and exciting otherwise we would still gladiator fights and bear-baiting instead of modern sports/entertainers. But violence is easy to model on a computer all you need is "if polygon1 hits polygon2 then delete polygon2" and you've got the basic framework for a violence-based videogame. And violence-based videogames are easy to expand on - just reshape those polygons into whatever you want - swords, humans, animals, monsters, etc.. and you've got infinite variations of your game, add some obstacles that won't disappear when another polygon hits it and you've added almost infinite variety of maps, with tons of potential strategies. But designing diplomacy based game-play is much harder because there are far far more possible outcomes than violence (i.e. kill or be killed). PS I'm really hoping more strategy-based games try to tell stories with their gameplay because IMO the more complex interactions that are more commonly included in such games offers many more interesting approaches than standard violent FPS/RPG games. But I guess the small market means there isn't much chance of it happening.
I think Hotline Miami does this incredibly well. Despite its focus on violence, it's really the art and music that sets the tone of each episode. For example, in the beginning levels, the Hydrogen track plays. This track is very bouncy and rhythmatic, and associates well with the casual but clumsy mass murder you perform. When you reach the police station, the track Knock Knock plays. This track is very precise on the surface, but feels almost animalistic at times, reflecting the skill you now possess but the rage and anguish that Jacket is feeling at this time.
I've heard the term before but didn't know what it was so I clicked on the video to get a definition with no intention of watching all of it. I then realized the video had ended and I thoroughly enjoyed all of it. Dang that was some great content to watch. Keep up the good work.
Fire Emblem. See, in many of its pre-Awakening installments, out of HP meant the character themselves are dead for most cases. For the most part, you're fighting nameless goons, but there will be times when you can't recruit a sympathetic character from the other side, leaving you no choice be to end his or her life. And when you CAN recruit them, it needed be in the middle of battle, not beaten down to 0 HP first. When a character does survive, it is heavily lampshaded and usually meant that the character is out of commission, dead or not. My point is that the series had been, in the past, consistent between its gameplay and its story, thus enhancing the overall themes (war, casualties, innocent victims, friend against friend) and making its world believable. The same can NOT be said for Fates. Awakening has committed its own sins, but Fates was worse in nearly every respect. Whichever side you choose in game, it gives the absolutely irresponsible and naive notion that your army is somehow fighting, but not killing anyone. This in and of itself is bad enough, AND it eliminates any stakes the story has. And when a character is killed in a god damn cutscene, it just becomes laughable. There are times when you have to talk to someone mid battle to recruit them, but are dead when you take them out, leaving you wonder why you didn't just put the safety on your sword/lightningspell/arrows this time when it would have truly helped. It wants to tell this cliched anime story via a high stakes tactical system, and fails in either direction.
Responding to a two year old comment haha. I feel like the games sort of lost that consistent feel between gameplay and story after the SNES games. And the stories took a more “anime” feel. The gba games I still love playing because the gameplay is really well done. But as soon as you think about it a little it feels very silly. By the time Fates came around I was fully skipping the story after a couple chapters.
This is the phenomenon I find with the last of us 2: a few people I have seen try to argue that the game is trying to setup the characters as their own entities, separate from the whims of the player, to which my response is that if that was the intention they were aiming for, they failed because fundamentally the mechanics force you to interact with the game in a certain way, which the narrative then criticises.
I mean, I kinda see what ND was trying to do. I would disagree with your evaluation because games like Bioshock and Spec Ops the Line have succeeded in having it's mechanics force you to do something the game then criticizes you for. It can be done. So I can see where ND was at least trying to do in that regard. The thing that separates The Last of Us Part 2 from the games I mentioned though is that Bioshock and Spec Ops had seamless parallels between the gameplay and the story, TLOU2 kinda shoves a previous games mechanics that meant to tell a completely different story with a completely different tone into one that did not best suit the revenge story ND was trying to tell. At least that's my take.
One of the most frustrating things in art criticism, especially with mediums like games that have a less developed critical sphere, is when people take a critique as an attack. Pointing out this dissonance isn't about saying nobody should play Bioshock or whatever. It's about taking it seriously as a piece of art and pointing out ways that it falls short of what it could be, both so that new things can improve on it, and so that people can have a better appreciation for the craft. Criticism is a vital part of enriching a medium, but too often it gets boiled down to product reviews.
there's definitely a case to be made for the "just gaaaames man," a la games such as rocket league, player unknown, etc. I think the cinematic equivalent would be like music videos or documentaries (?) where the mechanics of the camerawork are genre defining (mockumentary?). great video man I'm high as fuck this was a mental treat.
I think a great source of this topic would be the Yakuza franchise. The series has marketed itself on it being a very serious crime drama with emotional beats and quite a lot of the cutscenes paint it as much, but there is such a huge tone difference between the storylines and the gameplay. You play as a member of a yakuza family being involved in a lot of dramatic moments, but also you are a break dancing combat artist that plays at arcades, day dreams while singing karaoke and fights bears (has happened more often than you’d think) in your spare time. It’s interesting because quite often these two parts of the game, the serious crime-drama and the fun oddball stories, actually are pretty good in completely different ways. As a result the series is liked both by people who like serious crime-dramas and people who want a kind of goofy comedies (which of course becomes funnier when sandwiched next to the serious parts of the games). These two parts come in conflict though since if you were trying to enjoy the game exclusively for one part, you’d need to actively go through the other part. You can’t only have your serious crime-drama because it’s mandatory to play some of the sillier mini-games and side quests, but you can’t exclusively have an oddball comedy because you have to still play through the serious main story to unlock stuff. These aspects actively fight each other to determine the tone of the game, but a lot of the fanbase overall isn’t bothered by this because these parts are done somewhat well. It’s seen as and accepted as extra content, but fundamentally it feels like they limit the impact that they could potentially have. You don’t have a potentially fantastic crime-drama or a potentially fantastic comedic game, you have a great comedic game inside of a crime-drama.
Fully agree that its valuable especially because it helps to highlight the flaws in games that have good gameplay and good story that don't sync up as you say. It also gives un granular detail to help explain how some games fail compared to others which ultimately provides a constructive feedback for developers.
My favorite cases of this is, when in some RPGs you arrive at a town thats plagued by famine and is overall poor as hell but hey, there is a vendor, here, have my thousands of years long worth of food and provisions and pay me in pure gold town still having food shortage? i mean i still could give you all of this food i found literally 100m away from here Somehow that´s almost never an option in a game
Best example of ludonarrative dissonance- in Injustice: Gods Among Us, The *good* superman blows up at least five cars thrown at him, drivers inside. Considering the story comes down to Good Superman and Bad Superman, getting Good Superman so wrong is really telling.
I think the IDEA that bioshocks randian ideas are in conflict with the central narrative is something that just cannot be overcome in the medium. Your supposed to play it, the idea that the narrative should instil in me the desire to stop is almost impossible. Stanley Parable and Spec Ops: The Line both berate the player for not just quitting the game since its all so clearly futile, but its only futile for the player character. I, the player, am free to sit back from the consequences and just restart the game. Player character and player conflict is an interesting idea to explore. I've been on a bit of a 3d platforming kick and it makes me wonder what the THEME of platforming would be. In 3d Space, platforming gives you a sense of freedom to go anywhere, but not necessarily DO anything. Its sort of the distillation of "Why did you climb the mountain? because it was there".
Plutoburns That's basically the reason that I can't get into Undertale as a tragedy you can prevent by being nice. Sure the game has only one save, and but it's all a fiction anyway.
Definitely consider the dissonance to be a useful point of critique, in just about any medium but especially visual ones and double especially ones with a team of creators behind them. Similar arguments can even be applied to, say, art illustrations created by just one person: the context is communicated well enough, the rendering is good, but the subjects lack expression rendering the intended "message" impactless. Your point about dissonance in cinema is spot on as well. Video games in particular are a medium frequently driven by executive mandates, follow-the-leader type trends, and scrambling to make the best use of the newest tech, resulting in, like you described, dev teams where the writers and concept artists are doing one thing, and the programmers and game designers are tasked with something different altogether, and the mandates of that second grouping can seriously hinder the ability of the first group to communicate what they intend.
Film and video game comparisons seem super common, from a production perspective. How similar exactly do you think this formative time period of the video game industry is to the formative period of the film industry? Is there a more-or-less specific point that the VG industry is at right now, relative to the film industry? And at what point did the film industry come into it's "mature" state, and how? P.s., This sounds like something that there's a lot of good literature on. Any recommendations? EDIT: That is, lit. on the timeline of film industry evolution in terms of craft.
Well, I'd say that comparing the two mediums in terms of each of their formative years...well that might be seriously interesting, but I'm not sure how productive it would be. Cuz here's the thing, video games are HEAVILY influenced by cinema, and mostly modern cinema at that. I feel like at this point video games are obviously in the adolescent phase of its growth (if I had to guess). In the beginning video games were more or less doing their own thing. Now video games seem to be in the process of learning from their predecessors, adopting their habits and styles (in this case the predecessor is film) But now we are BEGINNING to see video games truly---kinda---sorta---beginning to get into their own. I would check you the game "Everything" to see what I mean. Anyway, but if you're a Lit or films theory person I'd get on that.
It's an interesting question, but a challenging one, because not only are video games growing up in a world where cinema already exists and influences them, but cinema also matured in a completely different technological context. For decades movies were just another thing you went to see at the theatre, along with vaudeville, music, and plays. The first full-time cinema didn't open until movies had already been "a thing" for almost thirty years. The point being that cinema's earliest growing pains were in a context where they just slotted in right between everything else that fit into that space. Video games prior to mobile games, however, were (and largely continue to be) something wholly apart from other spaces. All that said, I think you can make some rough, and instructive, comparisons between the two, especially with regard to the evolution of the literature surrounding them (I'm lightly working on this for a future video), but to my knowledge no one has really done that yet, and it's a lot of work.
When I saw Wonder Woman(a well made super hero movie in my opinion), the term cimena-narratively dissonant from Errant Signal's video came to mind. The film's story pushes the narrative(mostly) of no one good side of WWI existing, but the framing, scoring, and directing ended up glorifying the killing of the "evil" people.
The best example of this is def open world games with tons of urgency in the plot. You end up wandering for hours as the world is supposedly weeks away from ending.
One of the first games I remember playing that made me aware of LND years before the term was coined was the game "Dead to Rights" (2002) for Xbox. In the game you play as a supposedly honorable and heroic cop, but one of the core mechanics to the game was you could grab bad guys and use them as a human shield for extra hit points while temporarily sacrificing mobility, and when you were "done" with them (Assuming they haven't already succumbed to multiple bullet wounds), you shoot them in the head execution style. That's the hero of your story. It's not even something you learn as the story progresses, and your character is forced to take extreme measures in order to take down the bad guys. You learn it in the tutorial level where he's still supposed to be a straight laced cop.
Really enjoyed this video. Glad I discovered your channel. So I work in live theatre as a sound designer and play a ton of video games. I liked your point about how this dissonance occurs when the designers and writers aren't on the same page. You attribute this to the people in charge and I couldn't agree more. In theatre all aspects of the production should exist to serve the story you are trying to tell. The director (if they know what they are doing) works to lead the performers and the production team to achieve this goal of telling a fully cohesive story. Every choice must be informed and thematically appropriate to do this well. Everyone involved must be on the same page in order to convey the directors vision for the show. This isn't normally the case for a team making a video game. There are typically a lot more people involved as well and that can make things difficult in that regard. That being said, I don't believe all games have a need for such consonance in their design. I don't think we should expect a game to be ludonarratively consonant and I don't think we should be upset if isn't. Not all games care about story. A game doesn't require a story anyway. Plenty of great games lack a narrative.
To me, “ludonarrative dissonance” never meant that you have to look at mechanics as one segregated system and stories as another, and never the twain shall meet. It was a special case, but a crucially important one, of a very common problem in all of media: when one part undermines or fails to support another. If your cinematography undercuts your storytelling (like, say, how Suicide Squad's fast peppy montages and style of editing are jarringly at odds with everything the already-disjointed script is trying to do), then that would indeed be “cinematonarrative dissonance”. Yes, you review a car in its totality, but you then break down criticisms into specifics. The same applies to any piece of art or media: you analyze what the whole work is trying to do and then break it down into specifics. Folding Ideas' example of Mikaela in Transformers is great. Of course, it gets even more complicated. Most works are trying to do multiple things. Most works of art throughout civilized history, for example, had at least two functions: their artistic function(s), and also making money. Today, the same film or video game may need to juggle engaging three to seven different audiences, building a brand more broadly, contributing to some kind of social dialog or criticism (even if only to gain a surface veneer of substance and respectability), and making money. In that respect, each part of the piece of media has to be related to each objective. So when it comes to Mikaela in Transformers, I saw the character's depth and found that so much more attractive than the way she was depicted, to the point of disliking her (because I felt she was going to be set up as a hot object) until I saw the “hidden” depths (which in retrospect aren't “hidden”: it's just that Sam is super shallow and doesn't see what is incredibly obvious about this other person until he's hit with a proverbial wrench about it). And that's in practice where “ludonarrative dissonance” comes from in most cases: within limited times, trying to serve audiences of different aspirations and level of skill and engagement with the material, something slips or breaks. Finally, it's wonderful that this video is a dialog between two very interesting and informed people (Folding Ideas and Campster) that is respectful and interesting. If only that were the default.
I completely agree with you. A work should be analyzed as a whole, *and* in its specific components. There are many movies where the "effects are bad, but that acting is good" (not dissonant). Pointing this out is important, because some people watch movies for different reasons, and they might overlook bad effects for good acting. Or they might not care about the acting, but hate when the effects look fake. The same should definitely apply to video games, _especially_ when the narrative and the mechanics don't agree.
This is great! This made me think of my PhD dissertation/book which develops a holistic way of understanding semiosis in music: as episteme, text, sign & tool - complex interactive networks of meaning. I understand ludo from the context of the Huizinga's well-known work of cultural anthropology called "Homo Ludens" that suggests that man is not one who knows... but one who plays! In other words, we learn to know through playing and interacting with the world. This was what got my attention... But In this context it just means "game narrative", right - and the dissonance means when it refers to conflicting narratives in games that don't line up with expectations like in the games you mentioned? But if it does just mean "game narrative" and it doesn't refer to the act of playing - also an important part of the significative process where the game gets you to interact and you learn from actually doing - why don't they just call it "game narrative"? Please inform me if I've got it wrong.
My favorite example of cinemanarrative dissonance is Star Wars, specifically between the original trilogy and the prequels. Narratively in the original, Darth Vader is the imposing puppet of the empire, a powerful man meant to be the face of an even more powerful regime, but deep down was just a man deceived. Anakin Skywalker turning into Darth Vader was an act of empire subsuming decent men to become their weapons, and we see this with his unmasking at the end of Episode 6; he is not a real bastion of power, he is a broken shell of a man who absolutely should never have ended up here. Contrast this with the prequels, where Anakin is constantly framed and understood to be a man who is uniquely special by everyone around him. The plot of what happened to Anakin - a person being commodified by a corrupt system - is both narratively and cinematically upended to be about a man who is special in his own right and THEN being converted to be evil because of that innate specialness he apparently has. The prequels present Anakin as a special person, and in this regard they are cinemanarratively cohesive *with themselves* but dissonant with the source material. This results in the message of Episode 6 changing from "the son who was the fallout of the father's sins redeeming him, if only in death" to "the special Skywalker gene got us into this mess and now it's gonna get us out."
I like watching your clips, they make me feel smart. As to your question, I had never thought about it until now. It seems like a valid argument to make and another level when evaluating A game. But to be fair when my 10 year old asked me why I was running over people in GTA V. Telling her it was part of mission just didn't seem to fit, but telling her it was fun was a concept she seemed ok with. Whenever I told her a reason for a game mechanic vs a feeling it required a better explanation. Is more important that the game have a valid purpose plot and story, or how it makes us feel when we play it.
Errant Signal: no one on their right mind uses the concept Cinemanarrative Dissonance
Dan: Let's use Cinemanarrative Dissonance
What's funny is when that errant signal video was used as an example, like I immediately brought to mind dozens of movies that have this problem. I mean its often mentioned in basic film criticism in lots of movies.
Watching Zack Snyder's DC movies often felt like an exhibition of this.
"Kinonarrative dissonance" is just sitting there waiting to be the accepted term for this concept.
Because Errant Signal's argument was frankly dreadful
@@Oddant1 Most of it could honestly be taken as an argument for the opposite of what he was trying to say. Yes, games should be criticised as a whole with a cohesive message or framing and not just as several distinct parts that all need to work in isolation; that's why it's useful to criticise when gameplay and narrative don't work together.
A common example of ludonarrative dissonance I see is the story having a beat about the protagonist not liking killing people. Then the cutscene ends and you continue your slaughter of 20% of the local population.
So...Fire Emblem?
"War is bad! Also, did you see that sick headshot I just pulled off? HELL YEAH!"
I actually had to stop playing a game I was seriously invested in because of this very reason. The narrative was all about how anti-war the protagonist and his friends were and how they were the peace bringers who never fought. The motivation of the protagonist was literally to bring about world peace….. but that group of people you just engaged in “not-war” with? yeah just don’t care about them at all. We’ll write them as comedic characters and have the protagonist uncharacteristically not show an ounce of care about the visible pain that his actions has inflicted on them
It's the reason why I stopped playing Grand Theft Auto. I played the older games to death, up until Vice City. The story was fun and over the top and also not really all that important, so I just drove around causing havoc a lot of the time. With GTA 4 it felt like it got a bit more serious and leaned more into the satirical aspects. I haven't played the main game much, but I bought Episodes from Liberty City (the standalone version of the two DLC stories). The Ballad of Gay Tony was similar to the older games. It was a bit weird that Tony, a scared and wimpy man in the cutscenes, was running alongside you during some missions, shooting people in the face, but overall it was fun an crazy.
The Lost and Damned was trying to be this serious drama. At the beginning your old boss gets out of prison and shoots a member of the rival biker gang in the street, so the protagonist ist worried it might cause a gang war. And what do you do in the first mission? Go and kill twenty more of the rival gang members of course! When GTA 5 came out I watched a Let's Play of the start of Franklin's story. He is framed as this nice guy who seems to only be involved in crime because he grew up in a rough neighborhood and hung out with the wrong people. But what do you do in the first mission? Drive around killing dozens of people! What a nice and relatable guy!
On they other hand both Saints Row 3 and 4 are some of my favorite games, in part because the senseless violence actually fits the story the games try to tell.
Like in Uncharted 4 you kill hundreds of guys to reach a treasure but in a cutscene the main character can’t kill anyone in “cold blood” because “that’s not their style”
Love the Uncharted games but I always point that out 😂
Assassin's Creed 2: He spares Rodrigo Borgia's life because "bla bla bla vengeance bad" but has a side-quest where he gets paid to kill someone for a broken heart or cheating lover story. And he has obviously no shame to kill random guards.
I totally forgot that Megan Fox was a mechanic in the Transformers franchise...
I totally forgot Megan Fox existed lol
I'm sure they thought people would see her as such a good mechanic they would forget she was hot and over compensated.
@@corbinforrester4883 So they haven't met women then?
Plot mechanic
Thats cause everyone was looking for the camshaft.
I've been impressed with the term since I first heard it. It's imminently illustrative of its meaning, and for its relative complexity as a concept and high syllable-count, surprisingly easy to parse and transmit.
• "Imagine a game about destiny and predetermination, but they gave it a branching narrative and 8 wildly different endings." That's Ludonarritive dissonance.
• "Imagine a survival horror game, but the gameplay is a fast-paced and responsive shooter." That's Ludonarritive dissonance.
• "Imagine Fallout 3." That's Ludonarritive dissonance.
Unfortunately for Ludonarritive Dissonance as an incredibly _specific_ descriptor of a limited phenomenon in the incredibly narrow field of Games Media Criticism, the term caught on like wildfire for no reason.
• The newest COD game had one fewer Map than the previous COD game. That's "Ludonarritive Dissonance."
• The game was rushed out of development and many players ran into gamebreaking bugs. That's "Ludonarritive dissonance."
• You play as a girl. That's "Ludonarritive dissonance."
For all it's specificity, the term was misused by many to mean "thing I don't like," but with an implicit "also I'm very smart. So you have to take me seriously, and my subjective dislike is indicative of an objective failure on the part of this game."
Basically the "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" with a side of... pantomime.
Frustrated gamers who KNEW they were frustrated, but lacked the ability to articulate into words or even conceptualize their feelings to themselves. They latched onto any words they could find that could help give their frustration shape. Even if all the words were wrong.
Words are only really useful when there's a shared consensus and expectation for their meaning. I definitely think there's a ready niche for the term Ludonarritive dissonance, but for us to get there, somebody badly needs to teach the Reddit Bros... basically ALL of the other words until they stop using this one exclusivity.
_(edit: rearranged a few lines for readability.)_
>”Imagine Fallout 3” That’s Ludonarrative Dissonance
Is this Hbomberguy’s alt?
About those games you mentioned:
- The destiny one could be an interesting way to show how one can change their own destiny, that it is indeed possible, by having multiple endings. But I guess your point was about a game that specifically says you cannot change your destiny. Oh shit, that gives me another idea. What if you had that, but then those branching paths and 8 endings all lead to some kind of epilogue that's exactly the same in each ending, thus proving the point about destiny. It's interesting how you can twist that eh?
The survival horror thing reminds me of Dying Light. Play that game at night time and you will see a fast paced/responsive survival horror game that works perfectly. Those volatile zombies are one of the scariest things ever.
I suppose my point with these examples, is that ludonarrative dissonance is not a clear line between two things. It's very blurry, as perhaps all art is. So lets not throw away opportunities before we try things out eh?
That's why the criticism video that the vid creator said was good made no sense. His comparison between the Hobbit as a book and the Hobbit as a movie completely missed the point, which is that if you make a game that has a narrative (for example, opposing objectivism), but then force the players into a particular ending that matches what you belive is right vs wrong, you've just contradicted the narrative of your game.
He could have at least used an accurate example by referencing critics using the term "plot hole" or something, and then making the point that plot holes should be disregarded because we should accept the limitations of fiction. But of course, if he did that, his point would be revealed as rather stupid.
This immediately made me think of possibly the same issue but because of opposite reasons. I am a producer of a small theater festival, and so many plays I get are basically movie scripts that the authors don't know simply aren't plays. There is a reasoning for having a story be a play vs. a movie, but so many aspiring playwrights think that plays are just movies that happen to take place live and on a stage. All the language of theater is discarded for cinema language, and the story doesn't fit.
In that way, I often wonder if there's a lot of dissonance because "story" and "game play" don't necessarily happen in developers' minds in the same ways. I've seen a lot of games where all the story is in cut scenes, and then the game play happens, and then you get to where the story happens again. Or in large worlds where you have a lot of autonomy, but that autonomy is really put in a story that is 100% linear and all the diversions are just small blips on that narrative.
Also, Transformers is going to prove move valuable to movie criticism than any other franchise ever, at this point.
That's so true!
Between this, Tony Zhou, and what Lindsay Ellis is doing right now, the Transformers turns out to be a perfect example for applying criticism.
I think it's because they are technically, competently made, but still fail at everything.
Also being commercially successful auteur filmmaking that nobody seems to actually really like.
It's all so fascinating.
+xingcat I've yet to watch any Transformers films but Lindsay Ellis' series on it is fascinating! Learning from mistakes is almost more informative and... boy does it have a lot.
I really love your comment but to give a small retort an interesting thing that I often hear about particular video game titles is that they are, "Too on rails." Take the Uncharted series as an example, in game a character is standing on a wooden pole hundreds of feet in the air carefully making his way to a jumping section where he is going to jump from that pole and onto a small ledge on a cliff side. The player at this time cannot actually fall off the pole or miss the jump no matter how much they try the character seemingly loses balance but instantly corrects himself. This goes on for about 5 minutes with a verbal narrative overlapping gameplay, The particular youtuber who I saw playing this portion passed this entire section with his eyes closed as his character was seemingly in torturous danger from beginning to end of this experience.
Oh? You've seen Lindsay Ellis' "The Whole Plate" too have you? Hmmmmm. XD
(FYI, if you haven't I highly suggest you do.)
This is interesting, because when devs/publishers talk about "cinematic" games, my gut reaction is: "Yeah, I like movies. When watching a good movie, I feel like I'm in the action." But then it just means to go to a cutscene, which makes me feel the opposite: Like the movie would end and someone would tell me in plain words what happened. My "cinematic" feeling doesn't hinges on locked into a camera, it's about the feeling that I can do things I only saw in movies.
It's a little meta but you can actually use ludo-narrative dissonance as an artistic tool. Very minor Witcher 3 spoiler to follow. After your character rescues your adoptive daughter, you have a chance to have a snowball fight with her and the game uses the combat system almost like a special boss fight. The contrast of using such a serious mechanical system for such a frivolous story element was hilarious and really assisted in conveying the mood they wanted.
If they wanted it wouldn't that mean it's part of the narrative? I imagine that depends on how you define "narrative" so it's probably subjective but I was thinking about this.
@@ecrivonlunyx It's still dissonance, though. It's a contrast between what the story is telling you (fun snowball fight) vs. what the game is telling you (serious boss battle). The game "To the Moon" did something similar: overall the game is a very simple point-and-click that doesn't involve any combat, but there's a scene near the beginning where one of the characters pretends to fight a squirrel to entertain some kids, and suddenly the game mechanics turn into like a classic Final Fantasy-style battle, which is really effective as a little comedic gag.
Other media can use dissonance in similar ways. This is kind of a random example, but think about how the movie "Airplane" frames a lot of scenes like a serious action/drama, even though what's actually happening on screen is totally absurd. So the tone & style of the movie is communicating "this is serious," but the dialogue & plot is humorous, and the dissonance is used purposefully to help highlight the absurdity. (Contrast that to say, a Three Stooges skit or a Looney Tunes short, where the tone & style are also communicating that you're watching comedy.)
@@Dachusblot I think it's a really valid and important point that, having the ability to *identify* ludonarrative dissonance as a thing that can happen or that can be done, a developer can *choose* to make use of it in an artistic way, or *choose* to avoid dissonance and make a more conventionally coherent product. Dissonance of any sort is not inherently 'bad', but it does exist; when it is done accidentally, it can lead to unintentional hilarity at the best of times, or unintentional offensive badness at the worst of times.
It's like saying 'never mix patterns' in fashion - you *can* mix patterns, but you really have to know what you're doing or else it isn't going to work like you think it will or want it to. Knowing that mixing patterns is a thing that exists, and knowing the pitfalls of doing it poorly, improves one's ability to make a coherent outfit, whether or not one chooses to embrace or subvert common wisdom.
@@HeavyMetalMouse
I was going to say something, but you said it all better. . .
"Why use my own words, when someone else's words do what I want mine to do, better than they ever could?"
@@ecrivonlunyx as Dachusblot said it is still dissonant. I have an analogy though. Sometimes in music we use dissonant chords instead of harmonic ones, it isn't "wrong music" it's just different.
Dan, I watched this video in 2018 and it made me decide to buy my first gaming console, because you made games criticism sounds so interesting and I wanted to be able to form my own opinions! In pandemic times, gaming is one of the things getting me through this insanity!
I actually agree that dissonance is a super important critical tool, but ironically I've never been convinced that Bioshock is actually a particularly strong example of ludonarrative dissonance.
The player's inability to engage with the mechanics of the game outside of a very limited scope that basically amounts to "go to X, kill Y, listen to Atlas" in seeming opposition to Randian "will of man" is in fact part of the narrative text as revealed in the infamous "twist".
Atlas is ultimately *incapable* of achieving his goals without literally exploiting and controlling other beings to do violence on his behalf, and this is what I think BioShock is ultimately actually "about", he is very blatantly and literally a hypocrite
Clint's original piece says that the narrative framework of "help Atlas and you will progress" is "is not in line with the values underlying Randian rational self-interest", which I think is an accurate criticism *if BioShock were actually a game about placing you in a Randian framework to see how you would react*. I don't think it is
Clint seems to take the idea that BioShock's grand narrative is ultimately a mocking "fuck you" to the player as a bad thing, and as a personal insult, but I'll be frank: I think its thematically coherent and I think its fucking great
It's also not a great example because the choice about the Little Sisters was a late addition to the game thanks to a mandate from 2K that there had to be a binary moral choice system somewhere because that's what was hot in 2007. The Rescue/Harvest decision wasn't thought up when they were crafting the rest of the narrative, so it makes sense that it might be a bit out of place with it.
ThornheartCat That's external to the text though. Something poorly presented for legitimate logistical reasons is still poorly presented, the reason it happened doesn't change the end product.
Exactly. And his post got a lot of mechanics and context of the game either wrong or backwards. And his claim that the twist was a "deus ex machina" made me question if he knew what that term actually means lol
I actually thought the "Rescue/Harvest" mechanic fit with the theme fairly well. You can either act selfishly for short term gain, or you can act altruistically and reap long term benefits through participation in a community vis-à-vis the little sisters' care packages.
Even before the twits, the PC is framed as an outsider of this Randian world, its failing was semmingly due to the failure of exploitative people to bring people to exploit. This framing shatters during the twist where you are overtly used by the otherwise powerless Ryan to make him die in his own terms.But, I think it can be possible to interpret the PC as a Randian hero, if you are generous to AR. PC start as a slave and the second part of the game is about breaking the chain of his conditioning and confront his master. At the end, PC became no man's slave.
It is useful. It helps pinpoint where things don't click. For example Elder Scrolls 4 v ES 3. The game play in both encourages exploration and dilly dallying: but 4's plot says "this thing is urgent! Do this now" which then makes it feel odd when, after inevitably losing track of the main plot one advances it; the very urgent mission lost its urgency because it became obvious that the world would stand still for one. In ES 3 the main plot invites one to take one's time, explore the land, goof around and gain status
LND helps one express that conflict in a more efficient fashion, and discuss how the dissonance arrises... And eventually use it to deepen the meaning of the piece
Like in music: there can be dissonance between lyrics and tone, either intentional or accidental; or in acting: a dissonance between the actions done by and the reactions portrayed by the characters.
It is a good exemple. Another one: in GTA games, for me at least, there is a gameplay/story dissonance when the mission makes you slaughter 50ish bad guys, while the characters subsequently make it looks like it was a small gunfight, or even disregard the carnage at all. But maybe it fits with the offset tone of the franchise? (I don't know if it's clear, english is my second language)
I wonder if that "end of the world can wait while I raise some racing fish" type scenario feels more egregious in modern games that are typically sandbox and/or have active day/night cycles. It's harder to ignore the fact that you've spent days on unrelated stuff when you can literally see the days passing and watch NPCs carry on with their lives, regardless.
Guillermo Garcia Viesca a good example in music : Mad world by tears for fears. The original version has an overly joyful synthpop rythme while the lyrics are depressing
Fallout 4- My baby! I want my baby back! Well... maybe I'll grow some corn first.
The first Dragon Age game had a pretty good way of deceptively handling this. The main quest is "super urgent, things keep getting worse, you need to act now!!!" but, of course, in gameplay terms, you can dick around and do as many side missions as possible, no harm done. Want to walk from one end of the kingdom and back five times? You do you, the darkspawn are just going to chill. But the game lends the impression that things are actually bad with its map screen -- there's a simmering black miasma spreading out from the bottom of the map to indicate how far the Blight has progressed, and it gets a little bit bigger everytime you complete a major quest. The first town you visit is also destroyed following the first major quest you clear -- this is the only area that will get locked out that way, but you don't KNOW that to begin with. It gives you the impression that the bad guy's aren't just sitting back and twiddling their thumbs. I mean, in actuality, they ARE just doing shit all until you complete the next questline or whatever, but it's surprisingly effective for first time players, at least.
That Errant Signal clip legitimately made me pull a lot of strange faces. The concept of ludonarrative dissonance is to describe how individually-consistent parts can make an inconsistent whole. How can it be non-holistic to describe the whole?
The point Dan made was immediately what I thought, like yes there are absolutely movies I'd describe as having a great story but the cinematography is bad and so the whole movie is impacted. I mean that's how I describe a lot of older stuff, the first Gundam is from 1979 and was made really cheaply so the animation and cinematography is impacted and even though it tells a really good story it can be really hard to get through for that reason. Like it happens all the time that a movie might on the surface have a specific story but the camera doesn't tell that story, a lot of the time this is bad but it is also occasionally used as a tool since you can use it to inform the audience that they can't read this movie literally.
tbh the more of Errant Signal I see, the more I think he's kind of just a clown. Shit like that is such an *obvious* point that I don't really understand how you can reach the conclusion he does unless you either completely miss the point or you're just being a contrarian. Like... yeah, games should be evaluated as wholes with both the story and the mechanics being a part of that. Okay. Ludonarrative dissonance is something that can cause that whole to not make sense.
@@mikewaters2126 It feels like he doesn't really think his suggestion through. Tbh, when I first read about that awful "ludology vs. narratology"-debate, I got the same feeling. At least Errant Signal was fairly calm about it, when I read Aarseth's texts, I wondered who provoked him into writing such an unconvincing polemic.
Man all y'all dumb motherfuckers failed Literature class
I think the distinction between gameplay and cutscene (if that's how we're defining narrative/story) is far more distinct than cinematography and "story" within a game than a movie. I think his point about cinematographic dissonance (wow that's a mouthful) is a fair one, because the cinematography *is* the story, moreso than a cutscene *is* the story in a video game. I mean, video games don't even need cutscenes to have stories. It's sort of like if a movie suddenly cut to a page in a book for you to read, the difference there would be jarring. But that's how it feels when we play games. My point being that I think Errant Signal was not really wrong when he said that we don't separate the cinematography from the "story", because they are so closely tied together. And likewise, gameplay *is* story, therefore, perhaps the same is true there, we cannot separate the game from the "story"
Dissonance is super useful for any media that encompasses multiple sensory inputs! The idea is actually super common in musical theater criticism and movie musical criticism - the example that comes first to my mind is why the Les Mis film didn't work particularly well: The cinematography was gorgeous and realistic, while the aspect of the fact that it's a musical makes it necessarily a heightened version of reality (as stage productions tend to be, with a rotating stage, extremely intense performances, and lavish scenery). The dissonance between the cinematography and the music/lyrics/script makes the film far less effective at its message.
NPC: Hero! The Princess is in trouble! You have to go the cathedral immediately to save her from the evil wizard!
MECHANICS: Yeah no actually this is just a scripted event that triggers as soon as you enter the cathedral and the time you spend goofing off before you hit that point doesn't really matter.
PLAYER: I know this already and despite the NPC's well-written desperate pleading I feel no need to actually rush anywhere or do anything. My immersion is broken more or less completely, and therefore this otherwise well-written part of the story is now made weaker for no reason other than the fact that the gameplay doesn't support it at all.
Ludonarrative dissonance is a real thing and it can be jarring at times. Mechanics aren't just 'the game that you're playing', and they aren't necessarily separate from the story. In fact they can be and often are a core part of the narrative. If the game mechanics don't align with the narrative, then the narrative is weakened. I don't see how this is even a point of debate. Comparing it to movies is a little silly when you consider that the mechanics of the gameplay can serve and be served by the narrative.
Thus you'll prefer for the game to be more linear if the event of the hero going to the cathedral takes place instead of it being open World and the hero doing what he pleases?
And what would make good examples of ludonarrative harmony?
@@Arlesmon I'm not the OP but will take a swing at this. How about if you take more than X amount of time to do the rescue the princess dies? That way you can keep the open world and still maintain the suspension of disbelief. Or even better is to just not put in that kind of quests since they are dissonance (see what I did there :) with the mechanics of the world.
God of War 1-3. Kratos is a hateful, hyper-violent asshole who uses everyone for either sex or murder. That comes across strongly in both the gameplay and story. In gameplay you rip apart civilians for health, in story you kill people who are trying to give you the stuff you kill them for.
I love this example, and Bioshock is full of these moments. "Quick, you need to catch up to the NPC"
NPC proceeds to wait around the corner while I meticulously loot every box in the room.
The best example of Ludonararative harmony I can think of is Darkest Dungeon, spoilers-ish follow.
A game who’s mechanics combine painful RNG that you cannot prevent party member deaths, plus the long term negative effects of adventuring, steer you towards a strategy of ensuring a continuous flow of heroes that you send to their death and despair in a calculated manner, as you follow your in your ancestors footsteps of blood soaked obsession with the secrets under the family manor.
Pathologic is great with this. You certainly CAN dick around and do whatever you want whenever you want, but the story will still happen whether you're there to participate or not. If you want to beat the game, you have to treat quests with timely respect.
I actually wrote my bachelors thesis on Ludonarrative Harmony (eg the opposite of Ludonarrative Dissonance), so I might be biased but I absolutely think it's a useful concept for discussing and designing games. It is *remarkable* how much more intuitive a game mechanic is to a player when it fits into and reinforces the textual narrative of the game.
Ludonarrative harmony is just Undertale
Campster: Noone takes the narrative and cinematography as seperate things
Me: literally does this every time
Loved this so much. Errant Signal's video is definitely great, but I do think the issue with Ludonarrative Dissonance is not that it is a bad framework, but just one that is very easily misunderstood and misapplied.
Faber Neifer This is becoming more and more common when using analytical techniques in most mediums now. We're blurring lines and 'evolving' the use but not many people refer back to the historical use (regardless of how 'new' the technique is).
UltimateDrDoom
I sometimes get the impression that people will rely on their own interpretation of something, such as ludonarrative dissonance, and not bother doing the research to make sure they are understanding it correctly. It basically becomes a "hot take" for these purposes. And then that person's not-quite-right interpretation gets filtered down to others who don't bother making sure they have it right. Perhaps this is because so many assume they don't have time to double check, or just won't bother. But it is an issue, and I too see this sort of thing with all sorts of analytical techniques.
Shawn Wesley Oh sure. This video is a good example. Deconstructionism is also one. It's infuriating. I'm all for language and grammar evolving. I just think we need a frame of reference. Acknowledge the historical use or definition at least then move into its evolution.
Otherwise we get the problems you described.
Indeed, Errant Signal’s argument is that we should view things holistically, as a whole text. And sometimes, one can’t do that without talking about how X doesn’t fit with Y, at a holistic level, even though both work individually.
I also love cinemanarrative dissonance. That was such a great point.
Geek circles really do like to turn on a dime. I remember when a bunch of comic fans decided it was "shallow" and uninteresting to criticize Bruce Wayne's role as both a businessman who produces military hardware often sold to police departments and a member of the oversight board for Arkham Asylum.
Anyway ludonarrative dissonance is a great way to talk about games. Fight me.
I'm so glad that between this and Lindsey Ellis, Michaela Baines (EXASPERATED SIGH) is finally getting her due. I think Michael Bay might be trying to work out some issues with that character.
wait.....Michael Bay, /Michael/a /Bai/nes
how did I never realize this?
I remember having to look this term up when I won the trophy in Uncharted 4 for killing over 1000 enemies.
i had this experience when I started playing Stardew Valley a few weeks ago for a bit of fun and relaxation. I enjoyed the game's (albeit heavy-handed) message of anti-corporatism and machinations, but as you progress, you realise that the endgame is pretty much becoming a giant ever more efficient factory farm cycling cows, hens and cranberries. Monsanto, come get me.
My gripe about Stardew Valley is that so much of the game is grinding a dungeon with underdeveloped and uninteresting combat mechanics that really are out of place on a Harvest Moon clone...
As productive as super-human as your farming abilities become, they are never industrialized. You have to personally do most if not all of the work, you are just really good at it. I don't think being hardworking, even if epically so, is against the game's themes. On the contrary.
@@EwMatias I think you just chose to spend too much time in the dungeon. The game is totally playable and you can get almost everything without ever setting foot in the dungeon. Sure, it's the easiest and intended way to get ore, but you can get all the ore you need in PLENTY of other ways.
Your comment currently has likes equal to the secret of life, the universe and everything.
My issue with Stardew is that the ticking clock on screen causes me anxiety which is the entirely wrong emotion to have with Stardew..
Cookie Clicker is a better critique about capitalism and corporation
So right away, the first example I thought of for a game that avoids ludonarrative dissonance better than most is Undertale. The way you interact with the in-game mechanics directly affects the plot, and the way the plot unfolds in turn dictates the gameplay options available to you. And while it _is_ possible to do things that don't quite gel with whatever narrative you're following, the game does a good job of putting those 'out-of-character' choices off to the side.
Another one i might add is ffv with the Galuf death scene.
And i don't know if nier autómata works as well. But i don't know many examples of ludonarrative harmony
@@Arlesmon I feel papers please fits that description quite well.
I liked because of your profile. Also also because I agree, but also because of your profile
You made an excellent point and transformers was a better example than I'd have thought. I think with games the director still doesn't have the oversight you get in films to really develop a cohesive experience, especially with AAA titles. I like discussing the dissonance just because the more awareness it's given the better handled it will be.
Go watch Folding's video on Rent
It might be that I'm misunderstanding the term but...
Isn't the reason you have to help Atlas sort of, uh, part of the plot of Bioshock? There's no choice because you never had one. The lack of choice from a game play standpoint is a really key part of the character's story.
I might be getting confused because the paragraph was... far too meaty for me to process with audio-visual (reading and listening, even to the same thing, is hard??) but I don't remember feeling dissonance with that aspect of the story at all. And then after that you don't have choice because in order to leave you have limited options (uh, well, you have one option really).
What DID feel dissonant about Bioshock, though, was the PLASMIDS. They were super fun parts of the gameplay, as was Adam upgrades, but you're doing all of this while surrounded by splicers who got addicted to what is for you a mechanic that doesn't effect your character at all. You can have every single plasmid available and switch them out as you like and it's no big deal. Honestly it would have been interesting to see how a plot might have handled THAT aspect of gameplay coming back to bite you in the arse OR at least having effects on you physically or audibly - but that could have muddied or sacrificed the plot we did get which was pretty solid soooo yeah.
Hans But...it DOES effect Jack, the player character, throughout the game.
If you choose to harvest too many of the Little Sisters, and get way too much Adam, you become addicted to it. When the Little Sister gives you the Key to Rapture in the bad ending, you instead grab the Little Sister, attempting to take Adam from it. You’re addicted.
If you play the game the good way, without harvesting Little Sisters, you’re essentially using the Adam as intended. As little tools, and personal superpowers, purely for practical use.
@@theoneandonlymichaelmccormick I did not know this! That's fascinating.
Yeah I'm wondering it the guy ever finished the game
I think by the point you're fighting Atlas your free will has been supposedly restored as he previously ordered you to die yet here you still are
@@batnacks The specific part of the game addressed in the video is when you're helping Atlas and opposing Ryan. The paragraph seems to imply that there's a dissonance between gameplay and narrative in that you cannot choose to oppose Atlas in the early game through gameplay decisions the same way you can choose not to harvest the Little Sisters, but the whole point is that you narratively COULDN'T choose. Hence my confusion. It'd make more sense to say that about the latter half of the game? It may be a lack of clarity about real-time player experience vs the holistic narrative (since you only find out hours into the game that Jack had no control, and through him the player) in the critique.
Ludonarrative dissonance is a really valuable tool to promote even basic criticism of a game, because the concept is easy to understand, and most anyone who's gamed has experienced it. I think being an avenue for discussion gives it a lot of value.
Uhhh... Sorry, but I can't believe anyone wold ever say a movie can't be "cinematically dissonant". If the movie very clearly wants a character to appear pathetic but keep framing them strongly in shots, that's cinematically dissonant. It betrays, from the video maker, a kind of tilted way they absorb media
Games also have the inherent addition of randomness through player action. I'm sure the cinematography of movies would often be at odds with the narrative if the filmmakers let the audience control the camera. Not as to say that games should force players actions, only that it's that much for harder game developers to create the desired effect.
Like when the NPCs are having a serious discussion about the fate of the world and the player has the camera focused on the hottest female NPC's tits. Yeah. But it's not like that's the developers fault - the player has no one to blame but themselves. Hell, if the story is cliche'd and boring and the player doesn't want to take it seriously anyway, giving the player that freedom could improve their experience. I don't even think that type of "dissonance" should be avoided unless it's unintentional (the player misses an important object not because they were intentionally dicking around but because they didn't know they were supposed to be "looking" in that direction).
There's plenty of times where that dissonance becomes absolutely hilarious. As a kid, I would spend 100s of hours in Zoo Tycoon releasing dinosaurs on my unsuspecting guests. "You hate my park and are trying to leave? FEED THIS MAN TO THE TREX!" If the game tried to force the player to play along nicely with the "You're a zoo owner who's trying their best to create a safe, successful zoo with happy and healthy animals" narrative or if they'd changed the narrative I would have had MUCH less fun with it. (One easy step would be to make it impossible to pick up and put guests into exhibits as there's really no good reason for them to be in there).
I honestly never understood why Ludonarrative Dissonance became a sort of snarl word, and I never understood that part of Campster's video, I always watched that part and though "but, yeah, you could do that". I think your Transformers example is exactly the kind of situation I would use "cinemanarrative dissonance". To me it describes a moment or moments in a body of work that undermine or clash with another aspect in the body of work.
Like, we have the concept of cognitive dissonance, when a person tries to reconcile two conflicting ideas/opinions, and a common criticism of any 3rd year amateur film student's work would be "This character's action doesn't make sense from what you built up earlier" or something to do with flaws in the setup of the story. Quiet's "super serious justification" for her outfit in MGS5 is completely dissonant with how the game ogles her ass the whole time, and plenty of stories have conflicting tones that clash with each other. Not to mention the dozens of open world games that pester you about the urgency of the fate of the world while you're off collecting daffodils to complete a quest.
So, to me, it always described/was a useful shorthand for a fairly obvious and common enough occurrence in many stories/mediums that I never really got the resistance towards it.
I don't know if this was already mentioned, but I want to provide one example of Ludonarrative dissonance that was built purposefully in a mainstream game.
In the expansion "Amonkhet" of the Trading Card Game "Magic the Gathering", the protagonists of the story, the Gatewatch, went to one of the main villain's bases. While they expected people to be in need of liberation, people there actually didn't felt oppressed and the world actually looked like a small paradise... until they started to see more under the hood. As this is a card game in which it is impossible to tell a sequential story just through gameplay, they designed the game to provide the same feeling. In words of the game's Head Designer, Mark Rosewater:
>
Late comment, but I kind of love that about Amonkhet. A world set up to look perfect, represented by mechanics that drain the power of creatures (-1/-1 counters) and involve the selective discarding of pieces that one finds useless (cycling). It's kind of masterful, honestly.
This was actually the example i was thinking of. The removal spells especially are very jarring, when the name says something very different from art and mechanics. _Compulsory Rest_ shows someone forcibly dragged away against his will and being sacrificed for life gain, _Compelling Argument_ is a mill spell (thematically, the withering away of someone's mind) when it supposedly conveys enlightenment, the cream of the crop's _Final Reward_ is being ritually sacrificed, _Deem Worthy_ is the process by which that happens, and everything about _Dissenter's Deliverance_ makes me *extremely* uncomfy (especially the way that flavor text works with the rest), to name one from each color. But from specific cards like these to the mechanics, so much of this set Just Feels Wrong in a way that really works.
That's clever and also has a pretty direct parallel with film, where we're all familiar with the scene of what looks like a happy and nice place but it's shot and scored in such a way as to tell us that something isn't right.
I didn't play this game, but from your description, I don't think this is a ludonarrative dissonance at all. This is just subversion of expectations, and in fact, both the gameplay and narrative are in harmony, since the subversion works as inteded. That subversion IS the narrative (unless it actually fails and the game is bad, I wouldn't know).
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in the comments, about what the ludonarrative dissonance is, despite people watching the 7 minute video explaining it. It's not about gameplay being "different" from the basic story, or the gameplay being ironic. The narrative isn't just the story, but also it's themes and the overarching idea. All of these elements have to support the theme, the idea, for it to be in harmony.
I never considered creatures placing -1/-1 counters on themselves but still being a reasonable statline is actually a pretty brilliant way to show being able to tolerate oppression and not realizing because you can still get by.
You're clear enough at explaining these concepts that as soon as you mentioned "cinemanarrative dissonance" I was just like, "RENT. THE RENT VIDEO. YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT THAT THING IN RENT." Which speaks well to both the Rent video and this one!
I've always found those complaining about the term "Ludonarrative Dissonance" to be... Well, not understanding the point of what is being said, in many a case. If video games as a medium are to progress, they must be criticized on all levels, including how the gameplay and story interact with one another.
A side mission in Mirror's Edge: Catalyst comes to mind that... Completely broke my desire to keep playing the game, despite having no strong dislike or like of the gameplay in of itself. I fail to remember the details, but you (as Faith, the protagonist) have to deliver a package to someone within a time limit. As you do, you hear a conversation talking about how the package you're carrying contains drugs that the person you're delivering for will hide in a family's meal to get them addicted so he can use that addiction to manipulate them for his own gains. The character, Faith, hears it too, yet she still hands the package over.
She's framed as a moral, rebellious figure, yet this mission complete destroys the image she's built up as having. I straight up haven't picked up the game since, because the destruction of this image left a bad taste in my mouth. I wouldn't mind if Faith was framed as a bad person who didn't care if these people got hurt, but she wasn't.
Was the player given the choice to hand it over, or was reaching the drop-off point and initiating the hand-over cutscene or whatever the only way to finish the mission? Did the player have the option of going a different way and avoiding the drop-off point?
If the answer is "No", then you're probably right. It DOES make the gameplay be at odds with the character, since it's all up to Faith - not the player - to make the moral choice, and she chooses in a way contrary to her portrayal as a moral person.
No, there was no choice in the matter.
That wouldn't be ludonarrative dissonance, that's poor writing, Faith's choice contrasts with Faith's character. You could take away 100% of the gameplay and the problem would still be there.
Yeah, you're right. I realized it not long after a wrote it.
I think it all comes down to believability and therefore immersion. Valid examples of ludonarrative dissonance withdraw you from an experience, whereas void accusations of it, like those thrown at the uncharted series for simply having lots of killing but also a light hearted tone, are just that,
That was a brilliant way of putting, the Transformers example was spot on. My gut feeling to Campster's argument was "yeah, but that's REALLY not the case when you talk about traditional computer Role-playing Games like, say, Baldur's Gate or Fallout 2".
Because it's very easy to make arguments like this when you're talking about simple games. Like Assassin's Creed. Or Far Cry. But it all falls apart when you start talking about the real good stuff. But of course you put the argument in a brilliant way. Yes, we should talk about games as a whole, but first we need to make games as a whole.
Oh, and by the way, the ludenarrative dissonance in Baldur's Gate (and generally a lot of D&D campaigns) is seriously real. In that case directly because the game was designed as a strategy war game before it was turned into an RPG, but there are other reasons and factors as well.
This is a great video!
I agree that we need a term like ludonarrative dissonance to describe what happens in a lot of games nowadays.
Couple of things I wanted to contribute are some reasons why I think this happens:
1) The discussion of games through the lens of genre in everything from development to marketing and retailing - Meaning both developers and customers often end up thinking of a game in view of its mechanical functions alone
2) The way games are developed, especially AAA titles is in a very compartmentalized manner that splits responsibilities up into Programming, Art, Design etc which kind of pre-emptively kills any attempts at making a theme become harmonious across all aspects of your game when SO many people need to be brought onto the same page.
Indie titles, in my opinion, have a lot more success at achieving that tight knit between form and function that really makes a game sing, simply cause there's fewer people working on it so the creative vision stands less chance of getting diluted.
Fallout 4. Like, just... if there needed to be a textbook example of why ludonarrative dissonance is an important concept, Fallout 4 has surely provided that example.
Fallout 4's core gameplay loop is well executed, iterating on the sort of play found in Borderlands & Diablo II - encounter procedurally generated bosses dynamically while exploring the world, kill them to grab cool loot. There's also a brilliant touch of Minecraft added to give purpose to the BethSoft junk scrounging beyond 'sell this to your nearest vendor', which makes dungeon delving feel rewarding on it's own merit.
Parallel to that, Fallout 4 pursues an incredibly daring premise, and one that is not often explored in games. The writing quality is not the greatest by any stretch, but I was easily able to buy-in to the premise & know many players who were likewise willing to indulge the offer of immersion.
The core gameplay loop & daring premise simply do not work together. The moment you leave the introductory Vault segment, these elements come into immediate conflict with each other, despite their independent competency, and ruin your experience with the game unless / until you decide to run with one element and forego the other. If you choose the immersive route, it is all but necessary to just enable cheats & bypass the progression treadmill so you can take on the sense of urgency demanded by the premise, rushing off immediately to Diamond City in search of Shaun. If you choose the gameplay route, you have to ignore the premise entirely & invent a different motivation for your character so you can run around collecting junk, building settlements and farming boss monsters.
Either of these play experiences is enjoyable, but mixed together they are absolutely atrocious & Fallout 4 is much weaker as a title for not having committed to one or the other. If ludonarrative dissonance had been on the developers' radar, this problem could have been avoided & the game would've almost certainly been better.
True. I chose to immediately forget Shaun existed as soon as I left the Vault. Any references to him were completely ignored. When I got to the "twist", I was like, "WHO? Oh... oh yeah...".
I enjoyed _Fallout 4,_ but I played the game as though my character were a power-hungry psychopath whose only interest in getting their kid back was to regain ownership of a personal possession, which made lack of urgency immersive. If you've ever sided with the Institute, you'll know how well the game accommodates that type of PC.
Would the feeling of urgency be restored if one heard Ethan from Heavy Rain shout SHAAAAUUUUUN every few seconds?
Not only is ludonarrative dissonance a useful concept, but I can also come up with an example of a game actually using it deliberately. Spec Ops: The Line. The repetitive, generic, traditional shootery action only serves to enhance the cognitive dissonance that the protagonist, and by extent the player, is feeling. The monotonous, mindless fun of war games used to highlight the absurdity of treating war as a game.
"the game is bad on purpose teach you a lesson"
I'd say that Spec Ops is unintentionally undermined by this dissonance. The game criticises the player directly for doing things that you have no choice but to do. I think the game would have been much, much stronger if you'd had the option, right at the start, to do exactly what your character was supposed to do and then leave, which would end the game. Because that would mean that getting involved in the game's story and doing all the horrible shit that the game calls you out for actually was your fault. You were given the option to complete your original mission and leave. Either you ignored it or you took it, decided it was boring and went back to fuck up Dubai because it was more exciting. Either way, you really did choose to do this. You weren't funnelled into this position by a narrative that refused to let you do anything else so it could criticise you for taking the only option available.
@@Talisguy But the game isn't criticizing the player, it's criticizing the military itself. Spec Ops came out when FPS were spending an absurd amount of time kissing up to the US army. Sure, many of them intended to show the horrors of war, but few were willing to criticize the US's terrible foreign policies. The main character can't leave, not because the game wants you to feel bad for enjoying the violence, but because that's how soldiers are expected to behave.
That's how I think it's suppose to feel. Obviously it'll play differently for different people.
@@ritavermilyea5848 The game does criticize the US' interventionist foreign policy and its military, but it also breaks the fourth wall several times to call you, *the player,* an asshole. You are directly criticized for the white phosphorus attack when one of the lead's subordinates points at the camera (pointing at the lead, but we don't see him because he's not in frame) and yells "he turned us into fucking killers!" The game's loading screens eventually devolve into asking you, the player, if you even remember why you're killing people anymore, if you know why you originally came to Dubai, if you know how many people you've murdered. And this would all be so much more effective if this wasn't the only path available to the player.
Undertale does the exact same thing, but it rings a lot truer in Undertale because you really need to go out of your way to become a genocidal monster in Undertale and the game gives you plenty of opportunities to not be an asshole. So when that game calls you a bastard, it's totally deserved, because you aren't railroaded into it and can't possibly have gotten onto this path by accident.
@@Talisguy I'd argue that, while what you say is true, the fourth wall breaks work as a tool to truly portray the protagonist's emotional and mental journey by involving the player in that experience. As in, everything that's said in the fourth wall breaks ("do you remember why you're here?") also apply to Walker, because a truly realistic game about a war would not be the heroic narrative commonplace in war FPS games, but involve the crushing trauma and guilt brought by the experience woven throughout the gameplay itself.
I love the discussion and the problem. It is true and most people have known about it even if it didn't have a name. I think one of the best examples of ludonarrative dissonance is how link in TLoZ or other rpg protagonists fail to comunicate agency by enjoying cheerful minigames while the world is supposedly ending. People always pointed out that it made no sense how maybe a loved one was kidnapped and yet the game incentivized doing side quest and leisure activities.
BOTW did it far better by pushing the idea that there is no reason to rush, the world already ended, so it is better to take your time and grow stronger for the final battle and made sure most systems worked to make you stronger.
It's an incredibly useful tool, and the reverse (Ludo-narrative Resonance, I suppose) is as well for explaining how a game can be better than the sum of it's parts (Nier: Automata comes to mind).
The problem, however, is that many games critics loved to throw the term around as a justification for disliking tonal or mechanical elements in games even when the term shouldn't have applied, causing it to lose all weight and meaning for a great deal of people.
It is still an important tool for looking at a game through a critical lens, but the game critic "industry" has some very bad habits as it is (score inflation, cumulative scoring based on components rather than a whole piece, etc) so I'm not shocked at how quickly they've abandoned a critical tool that necessitates nuance in it's use.
I dunno... I really kind of feel like Nier: Automata has its own share of game vs Narrative hiccups (not the least of which was ensuring that in order to experience the full story one had to spend the MOST time with the character who had the least interesting and developed game mechanics #hackingsucksbutistousefullnottouse) I mean it allows you to not kill SOME things in its anti-war message but doesn't really allow you to kill nothing and then still sort of beats you over the head with the old 'you're perpetuating violence' theme. It's a great game mind you, I just don't think its necessarily a paragon of game play to narrative resonance.
@@lenajohnson6179 I don't perceive Automata as anti-war, personally. It feels more to me (ymmv!) like an exploration of humanity through the lens of sentient (in a bunch of degrees of sapience) combat bots, and to that purpose the gameplay in general served fine - not great, but it wasn't a Max Payne 3 situation.
What sets Nier apart as dang excellent at this are a few specific examples: the scripted sequence that leads to the split of routes C and D, some of the text sequences, and ending E (phrased as vaguely as possible). That last one in particular is an incredible, amazing example of this exact thing.
The opposite of dissonance, (as in musical dissonance) is consonance. You could think of the two terms as describing how much "resonance" two or more things have with each other.
I love long form video essays, but I also appreciate these short sort of definitional videos or ones that just make a single point, that have mostly fallen out of favor.
God help me I'm commenting on TH-cam.
The issue I think Ludonarrative Dissonance shows up isn't so much that the term itself is bad, but rather the overuse of the term in a short window of time highlighted the way review culture hadn't gotten its shoes on yet. There was a clear desire for some people to be academically engaged with games, and how games are made and things like theme and tone, but there simply isn't the culture and atmosphere of that kind of talk in a greater space. So you'd see a single concept bubble up in something some reviewer liked, then get repeated, then swirl around for a while until it became clear people on the periphery, removed from the original critical reading, were using it (which also plays into how review culture gets parroted by consumers).
Basically LND is a fine critical lens _even though_ I say this as someone who thinks it also _kinda doesn't exist_ (because I view play as a paratextual da da da read my thesis etc etc).
LND was more of a symptom than anything else: It's a perfectly valid critical tool that was being massively overused by a creative culture starved for the space and time to explore critical tools.
Oh and doesn't Cinemanarrative Dissonane already exist? Filmic Dissonance?
You think ludonarrative dissonance doesn't even exist? I'd be curious to hear more about this. I can imagine someone saying they don't think it's a *problem*, or that it's not wide-spread, and disagreeing with specific *instances* of it existing. I'd disagree with them, but I can understand it. But denying the existence even in theory of LND is an off thought it me. Would you care to elaborate?
Stupid TH-cam's awful markup parser buggered my formatting in that last comment… disregard the weirdly bolded format.
Jim Cullen +
The “cinemanarrative dissonance” part made me think of current-day WH40k. The fluff describes the setting as something like “the cruelest and bloodiest regime imaginable” but the official artwork is often composed in a manner that resembles military propaganda, with Space Marines being framed as badass heroes. Compare that to older artwork, where the Marines were these terrifying, monstrous, inhuman abominations that really did seem like they came from the “cruelest and bloodiest regime.” GW keeps saying the setting is satire and that we shouldn’t admire the Imperium, while at the same time framing the Imperium as badass.
the modern novels and video games don’t help either.
I often think of how wrong Space Marine got the setting, not visually, but narratively, by portraying the space marines as badass war heroes that are noble and always do the right thing no matter what, with heroic music set to these characters horrifically slaughtering orks. The game as text is essentially equivalent to that trashy nazi propaganda film featured in Inglorious Basterds, only it’s unironic and isn’t trying to frame itself in a critical way.
Considering media like that game act as the entry point for a lot of modern fans of the setting, it’s no wonder the 40k fandom has a neo-nazi problem today, with Games Workshop constantly needing to come out and say “Hey, this setting is making fun of nazis. We will not accept your business” in spite of their own fiction saying otherwise.
I think that you can find more dissonance in modern cinema, showing an overall decline in communication in these gigantic factory line films.
Incorrect, even those films don't have much dissonance, if at all.
Fair enough, this isn't my wheelhouse.
I don't agree. I think there's a lot more dissonance than people think.
I find it more likely that you're falling into the common mental trap of the past was always better. You're only remembering the good stuff from back then. There were probably just as many, if not more, films with dissonance.
while you're right, he also has a point that in the past it wasn't to the scale that it is now
I think a good complement to Chris' video is his blog post on ludonarrative dissonance from earlier in his career (I'd post a link but then TH-cam would probably flag this comment as spam). I think his larger argument is twofold: first, that there's not much value to having a jargon term like "ludonarrative dissonance" when you could probably just say "dissonant," and jargon is often alienating to people who might otherwise find the discussion valuable. But, more broadly, he's making a larger point about the inability to talk about tensions between narrative and gameplay in gaming discourse because it exists in the larger context of people who claim video games are inherently bad at telling stories. So, yes, "ludonarrative dissonance" would be a useful term, but only in a very different games culture than the one we have.
Great. All my favorite critics critiquing each other. As a game designer I remember reading the original blog post and it giving me a term for something I had a vague intuition for. Having a word for it has helped me make better games and given me a tool for communicating with my teams. Keep up the good work everyone.
'Dissonant' is incredibly imprecise though. What's dissonant? The music? Some sections of gameplay with other sections of gameplay? 'Ludonarrative dissonance' is a phrase that falls on the right side of the jargon/technical term divide because it has a precise meaning that isn't really approximated by any simpler phrase.
I'm not sure that the larger context means there should be an 'inability' to talk about these tensions. Those who claim video games are inherently bad at telling stories have got plenty of ammunition, and if anything, identifying more precisely what the problem is enables us to conceive of how to address it.
For example, Valve made Half-Life 2 and Portal. One is rife with ludonarrative dissonance because the player is never given any reason to properly inhabit the character of Gordon Freeman - you are essentially on a murderous rollercoaster ride full of toys and spectacle, while Freeman presumably cares about what the other characters are telling him. The player gets bored of being talked to because the information is, for the most part, ludologically irrelevant, and also tonally at odds with the levity of most of the gun fights.
In both Portal games, however, the player's aims are brilliantly synthesised with that of the character they are playing. You both want to test the limits of your environment, to find out if the 'rules' can be broken, and you want to complete the challenges you've been set in order to master game mechanics that might come in useful later.
The terminology here points us in the right direction in terms of what we can expect to succeed and fail. Any game that tries to marry a serious and sombre story to mechanics which encourage splatterous murder is going to look a bit ridiculous.
Hehe, as Chris points out in the blog post linked upthread, Half-Life 2 is not a ludonarratively dissonant game. Which kind of gets at the problem: simply having the term "ludonarrative dissonance" isn't very useful without wider context of what the term means and how it applies in a given instance. And, if you're providing that context, why do we need a special word for it? It makes dissonance between gameplay and narrative seem like something inherent to games. I take Dan-O's point that, since it's a thing a lot of games do, it is worth studying as a trend, but I almost never see people actually use the word for that purpose.
I don't agree with Chris's reasoning though - ludonarrative dissonance absolutely does encapsulate instances of the player acting illogically within the narrative. There's no reason why the term has to be especially narrow, and in the case of Half-Life 2 it can't be attributed simply to 'subversive play' because the game mechanics outside of the cut scenes consistently steer you toward movement, exploration and interaction. It's not exactly like driving offroad in a racing game - far from it.
I must be missing something because I don't really understand why you're asking 'why do need a special word for it?' Why do we need a term for the uncanny valley, which is also something that explains why the vast majority of 3D computer games are disturbing and even frightening for some people? We use the term because it becomes a short-hand once we have established what the issue is and some of the ways if manifests itself.
I honestly think most gamers are too 'native' to see just how widescale both of the above mentioned issues are. It isn't inherent, but neither is it some sort of localised, occasional stumbling block. Ludonarrative dissonance and the uncanny valley are, I would say, still the main obstacles to a wider acceptance of games as something more than toys - those who aren't already invested in them will tend to find it immediately ridiculous and jarring when a sombre or thoughtful narrative tone is intercut with monkey business.
I'd just add that I don't think monkey business and subversive gameplay is *uninteresting*, or something that shouldn't be allowed. Quite the opposite. But it's a niche area of fascination to people who are really into games and games culture, and in the broader debate about the place of games as meaningful tools for understanding ourselves, properly synthesised narrative-interactivity is an important aim - and it's not some distant utopia either. Games can achieve it, as long as they place appropriate limitations on/guidance for player expressivity.
I love the original Nier (2010) so much for using this technique. It relies on multiple playthroughs to feed more contextual information, which stacks with the dissonance felt in the previous run. Likewise the endings get darker as more and more implications about the player's actions are revealed. It doesn't really give you a choice to not play the script but it does a good job of showing the contrast between the character's perspective and the greater good.
Reason 21346 to praise Undertale: its narrative not only directly depends on the gameplay, but meshes with it so well that players feel like their decisions actually matter in the world of the game. The only time I can think of where the gameplay and story are dissonant is when there's so many easer eggs to find, but the story insists that you never replay it.
Undertale's excellent merging of mechanics, gameplay, music and level/UI design is its crowning achievement. If it wasn't so perfect at that, it'd just be a generic rpg, instead of such a heartwarming gem. (Artwork was a little sloppy for the first couple areas.)
From a metamodern approach, it's not even taken as odd or bizarre to hold two dissonant ideas. One can be genuine and ironic or hold two ideas that are in conflict (note: not ideas that are mutually exclusive). So keeping this in mind, one could even use the conflicting gameplay style and apparent narrative specifically to say something. I don't think we'll ever have anything like that without the critical tool of ludonarrative dissonance and people using it to specifically point at this phenomenon. The fact is I would *love* a game doing something like that. Actual awareness of the dissonance and usage of it can only come from ~being aware of it~. So I think it's incredibly useful.
Peter Coffin it's not a video game but as Mark Rosewater explained, they tried to do just this with Amonkhet, the next-to-last Magic The Gathering CCG expansion.
I wonder if The Stanley Parable would be a good example of that? Initially it presents its gameplay as being entirely secondary to a predefined narrative, then the player realises they can subvert the narrative by going "off piste", and in the end they are forced to recognise that this was the aim from the start and that even their deliberate subversions of the narrative were part of the narrative.
GuruJ
Can you talk about that more? I've been playing the game, and noticing that Amonkhet has a theme of broken cycles and betrayal.
suddenllybah I probably can't do better than quote Rosewater himself:
"The world has a sense of dissonance. That is, the conscious messages on the surface don't seem to match the unconscious messages from below. Things look fine, but don't feel fine. We talked about how the film Stepford Wives and the book A Wrinkle in Time both have sequences where the protagonist sees that what is on the surface looks like an ideal place but feels a sense of discomfort as they can tell that their eyes and their guts aren't in sync.
This led us to work with the creative team to purposefully create a mechanical-creative dissonance. The mechanics would convey a darker, more sinister feel (such as the use of -1/-1 counters) but the creative would take a happier, more upbeat tone. That way what you saw on the cards and what you felt from the gameplay wouldn't line up. Like the Gatewatch, the players would get a sense that something isn't quite right ..."
magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/amonkhet-down-business-part-3-2017-04-17
GuruJ
Ah, yeah, because those types of counters were used in Shadowmoor and new phyrexia, and graveyard as resource is generally more of a darker theme (I. E. Innistrad blocks)
I love this, because it helps me think about why the Sims 4 doesn't work for me as a game without some powerful mods. In a lot of the messaging and marketing, the main sell of the game is that you can "tell your own story." However, it is actually quite difficult to tell any story. For personality, your average sim has an aspiration, like wanting to be a master chef or an amazing bodybuilder. The aspiration gives them one trait, and then you can pick three more. Now, only having four traits and an aspiration to form the basis of a personality is its own problem. The real problem is that in gameplay, it doesn't really matter.
There are no consequences for the player if you ignore your sim's aspiration. Functionally, they have no idea that it's there or that it exists. You can also change the aspiration whenever you want, and it doesn't matter. They don't react to any of it. You can reach a milestone in their aspiration and nothing happens. What the gameplay essentially reveals is that your sim has no internal motivation. Stories are driven by the motivations of the characters, right? How the hell am I supposed to develop a story or enjoy the experience when the game gives me nothing to go off of?
What's funny is that to stay entertained, people created challenges to add some fun into the game. And the devs responded to that by releasing scenarios. I mean, they see how people are playing, but aren't looking at why they play this way. It's not as big of a problem for PC gamers who can add mods and cc. There are modders reverse engineering powerful tools and mods all the time. But it is annoying that I have to add and manage mods to make the game worth playing.
I agree that, in order to understand, describe, and recommend a game, separating the game into its separate components is extremely helpful. The main disadvantage to this approach is introducing the idea that these components don't interact - which was what the Errant Signal video seemed to be pointing to in his example, but I also know appears to be the common philosophy of games in the public - but I've found that many gamers actively seek out games that excel in one area or another. Some go in for story, others go in for gameplay. These two populations rarely overlap. There are also many other aspects, such as graphics, music, writing, characters, etc. (For example, a game with great music will draw me in, and I've stomached questionable gameplay if the translation sprite art is especially nice). The ideal game would have all of these components work towards a cohesive whole - ie, there is no dissonance. (I do believe that a game that works towards a cohesive whole with parts that are merely "good" has more heart than a game that is dissonant with parts that are all excellent.) However, it's rare to have the perfect product, so there often exists dissonance, where the game components pull in two different directions, or unbalanced quality, where a game does one thing much better than other. I do think it's an important concept for people who enjoy games to understand - not just those who play games, but also those who are interested in looking at them as a form of media or art. I've been playing with ideas on how to review, communicate, and write about games for a while, so this video was a nice watch for me. Thanks for the video!
“They’re just games!” Is actually a really good audience to include in this discussion: dark and complex art isn’t the only art that’s needed in the world. There is a strong use for fun stories that provide nothing more than a sense of personal empowerment. Being fun in structure AND narrative is a success at bringing story and mechanics together, and I’m tired of arguments that suggest a game is badly written just because it isn’t designed to be a dark or confronting narrative. A person struggling with personal demons can be helped a TON by having accessible games about personal growth and empowerment that don’t inject triggering content. Games are an interactive experience as much as they are a narrative one, and providing a well thought out, lighthearted, empowering interactive experience is actually extremely useful in contributing to society as a whole.
Just for you to consider: even if games are intended to have deep and complex meanings... or just simplistic ones... doesn't at all mean that that is what the participant in it will take from it. Something that could be dark and confronting for you could be full-on narrative joy for me. Confusion and irritation are also valid interpretations of stuff. This is the case with any complex multimedia work. I think the art is getting as many people to come out of the experience thinking the same way.
@@nachtschimmen I actually enjoy games with complex darker narratives, I just mean that it's still deeply valid for things like Kirby to exist without any deep meaning, because games are also an interactive experience, and it isn't a failure in art if the game is just 'fun', because there's a use for 'fun', too.
@@abbey5899 Oh absolutely! Enjoying something is a valid response, and it is almost invariably the intended one. Joy is the most wonderful emotion by the way and I try to get it as often as possible. What I was trying to say is that with complex multimedia art like games can lead to deeply multi-facetted interpretations and that unintended ones are also possible and valid; ones that the artist may have not intended.... But what I was really doing was responding to your interesting comment with a challenge. I'm glad you responded. Simple things like that... cause joy! It's the best!!!
...I also got to thinkin'.... Now if any art is about the existential act of experiencing of joy, surely it must be video games, in particular the platformer? 'Cos whatever the darker intended meanings may be, what is it that draws us back to them? The joy of us controlling something that flashes and whirls and jumps on things. It really has little meaning apart from that! What are the most successful games in this genre? Probably the ones that make you remember the moment of bouncing off a mushroom or clopping a star into smithereens. The thing that stays with me is the sound it makes when I imagine that I'm doing something. I mean, this is a bad example, but you don't play Super Mario 'cos you think it's important to save princesses... You do it because of the joy of jumping and bouncing of mushrooms! I now get your point more than I did before.
@@nachtschimmen Yeah, exactly! A lot of 'games as art' art criticism is still rooted in film/book criticism, so it focuses very tightly on narrative. (and the other end of the spectrum is games criticism that refuses to look at it from an artistic view at all and only engages with the mechanics of the game) I think going forward it would be really nice for 'gameplay' and 'art' criticism to have more direct interactions when dealing with games. Stuff like the Ludonarrative concept, but also investigation of the idea in general of what 'play' or 'challenge' means in the art world, because those are also very big human emotions.
To me the ultimate example is Pokemon. In every game, spin-off, anime, and movie the bond between Pokemon and humans is at the core. Only villains use and abuse Pokemon as tools and weapons, caring only about a Pokemon's strength and attributes. The hero bonds with their team regardless of typing or inherent abilities.
Real life Pokemon battles are just as competitive as they are portrayed in the game world, and in real life the trainer's personal attachment to the Pokemon or even the species of Pokemon on their team has no bearing on success. There are official tournaments with a lot of money at stake, so Pokemon are selectively bred for perfect battle traits. Hundreds of rejects are cast aside as worthless. At the top competitive level only a small handful of the nearly 1000 species of Pokemon are used, because they are objectively superior.
Any ideas on how Pokèmon could possibly fix that?
someone who nails the combination of the two is Edmund McMillen with games like The Binding of Isaac. the tough gameplay highlights the tough mental struggle of the titular character, as well as the repeating runs reflect his continual struggle within his
own mind. This cohesion was probably easier to create because McMillen is a game designer and writer for his games.
Godblessit, Dan, you make such great videos. Comparing gameplay to cinematography in terms of storytelling is spot-on. Everything from framing to performance to dialogue is part of telling the story and unity (or intentional dissonance) is important to making a proper whole.
I hear things like this brought up a lot in regards to David Fincher. Though I generally like or love just about everything he has done, there can be a disconnect between his color palette and what the story could perhaps be saying otherwise. Things of that nature. But it's all conduits of how we experience a story.
The framing of shots in Miller's Crossing affects our understanding and experience of the story just as much as the gameplay in Saints Row IV, the vocal performances in Jimmy Neutron, and the acting in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The discussion of ludonarrative dissonance is one that deserves to be had, even if it is a sort of catch-of-the-day kind of term. Something like Wolfenstein: The New Order is completely aligned in its elements, whereas I have had some trouble with Uncharted when Nathan Drake will kill thirty people and go back to quipping. Something about it feels off to me. Not that others can't enjoy it but still.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this copy of War & Peace I have written above. Keep making great content. I have watched your Suicide Squad video an untold number of times.
This is a really interesting subject to talk about with Dark Souls, as everything from the environments to the exposition delivery to the mechanics of navigating/surviving the world itself are in some way an extension of the the theme and tone of the piece(s) as a whole.
Ludonarrative dissonance is part of a holistic view of media. It's literally discussing how parts of the whole work against each other to weaken the art as a whole.
So great to see this term taken seriously. Really believe there's a lot to be discussed evaluated in this direction.
When I was doing my grad project back in 2011 I ha hopes to discuss something like this but also looking at the art direction, eventually we'll get there.
I had such an experience with Mass Effect 1. Within the cut scenes and character interactions it is clear that you as a spectre are supposed to be a guardian of intergalactic peace and there are moral questions raised about all kinds of topics. Among them are the topics of genocide and whether or not a culture of AI can be regarded people. Acknowledging, that this is just a game these topics were discussed in a rather nuanced and meaningful way. Yet, you were rewarded with XP and currency for every kill you made - and the reward became bigger with every kill.
So in the end, the story tried to ask questions and discuss them nuancedly, but the mechanics sent the message 'Kill everyone, loot everything'. I find that message in a lot of RPG mechanics and I'm not sure, that this is the message, studios want to send. However, I'm aware, that it is much harder to design mechanics with a different message.
This topic interests me greatly. I have battled this for a while in table top RPG's in that I need to find the right system to fit my setting and story. For example, I wouldn't use Pathfinder to recreat a horror movie like The Thing. Thank you for covering this!
last time i was this early foldy was still the main on-camera persona
I love your vids, and i freaking adore Errant Signal, but you're right. And I thought the same thing when he mentioned "cinema-narrative dissonance" as NOT being a thing. I thought "...well, it COULD be, and would be valid, and doesn't take away from the validity of ludo-narrative dissonance". Great example with transformers. A comment on Errant signals own thread discussed how cinema-narrative dissonance would be something like using action-jumpcuts in a romantic comedy; but because cinema is a much older medium than gaming, those kinds of obvious flaws have since been worked out.
Definitely a good tool to have in your toolbox. It's not always super relevant because games can sometime stand without much need of story at all (like an aesthetically pleasing but ultimately meaningless music video... or porn) or the narrative and gameplay can be sufficiently separated. But for many narrative driven games it is definitely a useful tool.
One of the uncharted games has an achievement called ludonarrative dissonance - it triggers after you've killed a large number of enemies, and effectively lampshades the fact that the games and characters completely gloss over the murder spree and the psychological toll it would entail.
I think there is value to seperating the story and the mechanics of a game, because a shit narrative with solid mechanics can still be fun to play, but a good story mired by bad mechanics is hard to bear. Then there's cases where otherwise solid mechanics are retracted in order to force a bad story; namely when a game forces you to choose between two outcomes, despite there logically being more than two outcomes, and the story calls you an ass for being forced into a dichotomy you didn't want, which is an incredibly jarring dissonance that really breaks immersion.
Great observation ! I was gonna say The last of us (part too as well) is on the list. It's kinda mirrored with the uncharted games if you're mind is open to the idea. As well as Watch dogs 2, you see a bunch of hippies, making jokes and whatnot, but just 30 minutes ago, the characters committed mass spree murder. Although you can have a pacifist run, the game still relies on the killing aspect. But i have noticed more games on the side of naughty dog suffers from this, especially ones under neil druckmann.
I once had an opportunity to ask a respected webcomic creator the question: "what's more important; the art, or the writing?" Her answer was: "The art needs to do what the writing needs it to do, and the writing needs to do what the art needs it to do."
Same for gameplay and game premise.
Fighting game "stories" are often about martial arts competition, because the player is competing with the computer or another player.
RPG's are often a process of the player learning the strategies of the battle system/mechanics, as characters are levelling up and learning new abilities. Growth!
Tetris is about smashing buttons in order to smash tetrominos into the densest a packing possible.
Just my 2c.
Love this video. it's giving a name to something that I see all too often in my field of study, architecture. My classmates and admittedly myself sometimes often present a design stating it does one thing but in practice either doesn't do that thing, or in the much worse case, has an opposite effect.
The reason we don't have something similar for cinematography though is because we don't often see films where the cinematography works so incredibly in the opposite direction to the story and themes of the film, while we do see this in games frequently. Transformers is a good example of this in films, but that whole series is generally regarded as pretty low brow and trashy in general. In games, we see this in the cream of the crop of major studio output. Games like Uncharted and Grand Theft Auto suffer enormously from it, despite being some of the highest rated games being made.
semi true
I just want to point out, that you should watch Apocalypse now trough this lens. This is a generally beloved movie by critic, but that in my own opinion fail to live up to it's anti war discourse with an esthetisation of war that actually make war look pretty cool, but doesn't question the reason that brought this violence to play. More simply this movie criticize the way the war was fought, but not the the reason it was fought for. Hence it's an anti war movie that fail to make war look horrible. It just say's that professional soldiers and not conscript should have fought this war. This can also be explained by the fact that Vietnamese have exactly 0 lines in the movie, but that a french land owner has 30 minutes of presence on screen. An anti-war movie that doesn't give a voice to the main victim of that war seem a pretty big failure to me.
hence a cinematographic disonance could work to talk about some movies, even some highly regarded one.
Bruno Sauvagnat This is considered to be a problem with war movies in general. It's really hard to portray meaningful criticisms of war on film because no matter how ugly you make it, no matter how you theme it, it just can't help but be visually compelling and dramatic. The ones that try hard to come close without doing so, like Jarhead, are often considered boring and unsatisfying.
In Apocalypse Now specifically, it was adapted from Heart of Darkness, which is a pretty terrible and racist book, so it can't help but have those other problems a bit as well.
Finally, I don't think there's ever been a serious reckoning of what an atrocity the Vietnam war was for the American public at large, certainly not in the 70s, not outside of leftist or academic circles. So it's also hard to blame it for sucking on the details of Vietnam when basically _no_ American movie has ever done the insanity of that war justice outside of some gross spectacle of how bad it was for American soldiers.
With those caveats in mind, I still think it's an excellent film in its own right, even if it's not a very effective anti war film and generally terrible about getting the details on Vietnam right.
"...with an esthetisation of war that actually make war look pretty cool..."
This is a problem with a lot of anti-war movies.
Another example is American History X, which is an anti-White Supremacist movie, but a lot of White Supremacists latched onto it, because it makes them look cool.
heart of darkness isnt that bad
Years later here, but I think Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent modern example of this. The story's telling you that this world is grindingly oppressive and that you're poor and scrappy, but in gameplay you're a rampaging murder machine with a high-end car collection and five apartments. This has a lot of consequences for how the player interprets plot elements that make sense in the writing, but feel out of place with the actual power and wealth the player has.
So, yeah, super useful framework for discussing games.
Why not talk about rent when discussing cinema narrative dissonance?
Because we're trying to forget Rent. So please.
I think it crosses the line into being fascinating because of bad it is.
He can't just analyze Rent for everything.
He's gotta look at the whole plate. The WHOLE plate.
Rei the Offbeat Otaku You seen the nastolgia chick series?
OMG The Rent video is entirely about Cinemanarrative dissonance!
absolutely loving this high-volume pace you've been keeping lately. bite-sized but as interesting, informative, and high-quality as ever
Loved this! However I'm always a bit confused when we take Bioshock as a game where we have much agency. I mean the "Would-you kindly" thing always expressed to me that whatever choices we have have never been completely open, so I can see why you have no option that allows for the Objectivist approach. Am I wrong?
No, you're not. That was the main commentary of the game. Clint Hocking was so focused on the objectivist framing of the story that he missed the meta-commentary that was directed at the player.
Guillaume Lachapelle No, you’re absolutely right. Clint Hocking completely missed the fucking point of the entire franchise’s narrative on a gameplay and story level.
Great video, examples, and editing! Subscribed :-D As a side-note, regarding Bioshock, I think it can be argued that if there is Ludonarrative dissonance, that it may well have been executed on purpose. In my experience of the game, I found myself realizing that -- like in life -- it was my choice whether to move ahead or put the controller down and do something else. Oft times, the crux of a situation is that you realize that you want to keep playing a scenario to see what happens; and that is tantalizing. It can keep us from ejecting ourselves from a situation in which we, perhaps, only absently realize we can stop at any time. It reminds me of the Milgram experiment and the dissonance between authority (game-play), obedience, and personal conscience (narrative). The game lets us feel the seeming inexorability of our role and the smaller yet meaningful choices we make within it. Full disclosure, Bioshock is among my top five favorite games of all time along with the Elder Scrolls Morrowind -- so I might be biased, hahaha!
This can be traced back to atleast the early days of the NES.
They tell you that Mario is a plumber, but fool doesn't so much as use even a plunger.
My favorite example of ludonarrative harmony is the ending of Brothers: A Tale of 2 Sons.
Dayo te amamos.
The 'cinemanarrative-dissonance' of 'Transformers' is pretty much the ONLY worthwhile aspect of that movie (as 'drama') and yet, as pretty much advertised on the tin, just another failure to throw on the heap that accompanies Bay's enterprise.
I think another thing this generation of game creators are just now figuring out is what other ways can you tell a story through gameplay. To oversimplify here Theres have been, from about the 80s till maybe a few years ago, only a few types of gameplay that could tell a story. Puzzle solving games like Tetris or point and click adventure games, God Games and city builders which tell the story of one place on a macro level, and good old fashion violence.
Most Video games use some kind of violent interaction to tell what ever story through mechanics they have. So, a look at what Going Gault will look like through violent interactions. The effects of Racism in a cyberpunk future through violent interaction. A religious pilgrimage through a strange land 1000 years into the future, mainly through violent interactions.
Game creators are just now questioning "How can you mechanically tell a story through other means than violence of solving some kind of puzzle"
An example that comes to mind being Manhunt 2. A game where the narrative progresses away from violence, questioning it's merit. Meanwhile the gameplay keeps the same level throughout from start to finish. Completely contradicting the story/message the game is trying to tell.
Charlotte McEachern Violence is fun and it's exciting. It's always going to be the main source of conflict and difficulty in videogames.
You described everything Rockstar have ever made; god they're awful for this.
VejyMonsta That's not just it. There are tons of other things that are fun and exciting otherwise we would still gladiator fights and bear-baiting instead of modern sports/entertainers. But violence is easy to model on a computer all you need is "if polygon1 hits polygon2 then delete polygon2" and you've got the basic framework for a violence-based videogame. And violence-based videogames are easy to expand on - just reshape those polygons into whatever you want - swords, humans, animals, monsters, etc.. and you've got infinite variations of your game, add some obstacles that won't disappear when another polygon hits it and you've added almost infinite variety of maps, with tons of potential strategies.
But designing diplomacy based game-play is much harder because there are far far more possible outcomes than violence (i.e. kill or be killed).
PS I'm really hoping more strategy-based games try to tell stories with their gameplay because IMO the more complex interactions that are more commonly included in such games offers many more interesting approaches than standard violent FPS/RPG games. But I guess the small market means there isn't much chance of it happening.
I think Hotline Miami does this incredibly well. Despite its focus on violence, it's really the art and music that sets the tone of each episode. For example, in the beginning levels, the Hydrogen track plays. This track is very bouncy and rhythmatic, and associates well with the casual but clumsy mass murder you perform. When you reach the police station, the track Knock Knock plays. This track is very precise on the surface, but feels almost animalistic at times, reflecting the skill you now possess but the rage and anguish that Jacket is feeling at this time.
I've heard the term before but didn't know what it was so I clicked on the video to get a definition with no intention of watching all of it. I then realized the video had ended and I thoroughly enjoyed all of it. Dang that was some great content to watch. Keep up the good work.
Fire Emblem.
See, in many of its pre-Awakening installments, out of HP meant the character themselves are dead for most cases. For the most part, you're fighting nameless goons, but there will be times when you can't recruit a sympathetic character from the other side, leaving you no choice be to end his or her life. And when you CAN recruit them, it needed be in the middle of battle, not beaten down to 0 HP first. When a character does survive, it is heavily lampshaded and usually meant that the character is out of commission, dead or not. My point is that the series had been, in the past, consistent between its gameplay and its story, thus enhancing the overall themes (war, casualties, innocent victims, friend against friend) and making its world believable.
The same can NOT be said for Fates. Awakening has committed its own sins, but Fates was worse in nearly every respect. Whichever side you choose in game, it gives the absolutely irresponsible and naive notion that your army is somehow fighting, but not killing anyone. This in and of itself is bad enough, AND it eliminates any stakes the story has. And when a character is killed in a god damn cutscene, it just becomes laughable. There are times when you have to talk to someone mid battle to recruit them, but are dead when you take them out, leaving you wonder why you didn't just put the safety on your sword/lightningspell/arrows this time when it would have truly helped.
It wants to tell this cliched anime story via a high stakes tactical system, and fails in either direction.
Responding to a two year old comment haha.
I feel like the games sort of lost that consistent feel between gameplay and story after the SNES games. And the stories took a more “anime” feel.
The gba games I still love playing because the gameplay is really well done. But as soon as you think about it a little it feels very silly.
By the time Fates came around I was fully skipping the story after a couple chapters.
Just stumbled upon this channel and I feel like kind of a Idea Channel esque with less of an adhd host
This is the phenomenon I find with the last of us 2: a few people I have seen try to argue that the game is trying to setup the characters as their own entities, separate from the whims of the player, to which my response is that if that was the intention they were aiming for, they failed because fundamentally the mechanics force you to interact with the game in a certain way, which the narrative then criticises.
I mean, I kinda see what ND was trying to do. I would disagree with your evaluation because games like Bioshock and Spec Ops the Line have succeeded in having it's mechanics force you to do something the game then criticizes you for. It can be done. So I can see where ND was at least trying to do in that regard. The thing that separates The Last of Us Part 2 from the games I mentioned though is that Bioshock and Spec Ops had seamless parallels between the gameplay and the story, TLOU2 kinda shoves a previous games mechanics that meant to tell a completely different story with a completely different tone into one that did not best suit the revenge story ND was trying to tell. At least that's my take.
One of the most frustrating things in art criticism, especially with mediums like games that have a less developed critical sphere, is when people take a critique as an attack. Pointing out this dissonance isn't about saying nobody should play Bioshock or whatever. It's about taking it seriously as a piece of art and pointing out ways that it falls short of what it could be, both so that new things can improve on it, and so that people can have a better appreciation for the craft. Criticism is a vital part of enriching a medium, but too often it gets boiled down to product reviews.
Beginning of the video: "Cinemanarrative Dissonance". You mean like Michaela Banes in Transformers?
Two minutes later: Called it!
there's definitely a case to be made for the "just gaaaames man," a la games such as rocket league, player unknown, etc. I think the cinematic equivalent would be like music videos or documentaries (?) where the mechanics of the camerawork are genre defining (mockumentary?). great video man I'm high as fuck this was a mental treat.
I think a great source of this topic would be the Yakuza franchise. The series has marketed itself on it being a very serious crime drama with emotional beats and quite a lot of the cutscenes paint it as much, but there is such a huge tone difference between the storylines and the gameplay. You play as a member of a yakuza family being involved in a lot of dramatic moments, but also you are a break dancing combat artist that plays at arcades, day dreams while singing karaoke and fights bears (has happened more often than you’d think) in your spare time.
It’s interesting because quite often these two parts of the game, the serious crime-drama and the fun oddball stories, actually are pretty good in completely different ways. As a result the series is liked both by people who like serious crime-dramas and people who want a kind of goofy comedies (which of course becomes funnier when sandwiched next to the serious parts of the games). These two parts come in conflict though since if you were trying to enjoy the game exclusively for one part, you’d need to actively go through the other part. You can’t only have your serious crime-drama because it’s mandatory to play some of the sillier mini-games and side quests, but you can’t exclusively have an oddball comedy because you have to still play through the serious main story to unlock stuff.
These aspects actively fight each other to determine the tone of the game, but a lot of the fanbase overall isn’t bothered by this because these parts are done somewhat well. It’s seen as and accepted as extra content, but fundamentally it feels like they limit the impact that they could potentially have. You don’t have a potentially fantastic crime-drama or a potentially fantastic comedic game, you have a great comedic game inside of a crime-drama.
Fully agree that its valuable especially because it helps to highlight the flaws in games that have good gameplay and good story that don't sync up as you say. It also gives un granular detail to help explain how some games fail compared to others which ultimately provides a constructive feedback for developers.
a dayo script fan was here
The Watchmen by Zack Snyder is cinemanarratively dissonant
Snyder is the definition of that term lmao
My favorite cases of this is, when in some RPGs you arrive at a town thats plagued by famine and is overall poor as hell
but hey, there is a vendor, here, have my thousands of years long worth of food and provisions and pay me in pure gold
town still having food shortage? i mean i still could give you all of this food i found literally 100m away from here
Somehow that´s almost never an option in a game
Best example of ludonarrative dissonance- in Injustice: Gods Among Us, The *good* superman blows up at least five cars thrown at him, drivers inside. Considering the story comes down to Good Superman and Bad Superman, getting Good Superman so wrong is really telling.
I think the IDEA that bioshocks randian ideas are in conflict with the central narrative is something that just cannot be overcome in the medium. Your supposed to play it, the idea that the narrative should instil in me the desire to stop is almost impossible. Stanley Parable and Spec Ops: The Line both berate the player for not just quitting the game since its all so clearly futile, but its only futile for the player character. I, the player, am free to sit back from the consequences and just restart the game. Player character and player conflict is an interesting idea to explore.
I've been on a bit of a 3d platforming kick and it makes me wonder what the THEME of platforming would be. In 3d Space, platforming gives you a sense of freedom to go anywhere, but not necessarily DO anything. Its sort of the distillation of "Why did you climb the mountain? because it was there".
Plutoburns
That's basically the reason that I can't get into Undertale as a tragedy you can prevent by being nice.
Sure the game has only one save, and but it's all a fiction anyway.
Definitely consider the dissonance to be a useful point of critique, in just about any medium but especially visual ones and double especially ones with a team of creators behind them. Similar arguments can even be applied to, say, art illustrations created by just one person: the context is communicated well enough, the rendering is good, but the subjects lack expression rendering the intended "message" impactless. Your point about dissonance in cinema is spot on as well.
Video games in particular are a medium frequently driven by executive mandates, follow-the-leader type trends, and scrambling to make the best use of the newest tech, resulting in, like you described, dev teams where the writers and concept artists are doing one thing, and the programmers and game designers are tasked with something different altogether, and the mandates of that second grouping can seriously hinder the ability of the first group to communicate what they intend.
Film and video game comparisons seem super common, from a production perspective. How similar exactly do you think this formative time period of the video game industry is to the formative period of the film industry? Is there a more-or-less specific point that the VG industry is at right now, relative to the film industry? And at what point did the film industry come into it's "mature" state, and how? P.s., This sounds like something that there's a lot of good literature on. Any recommendations?
EDIT: That is, lit. on the timeline of film industry evolution in terms of craft.
I... don't think that there is any good lit. comparing early film and video games. Someone needs to get on that.
I love your question, i cannot answer it but i love it.
Well, I'd say that comparing the two mediums in terms of each of their formative years...well that might be seriously interesting, but I'm not sure how productive it would be. Cuz here's the thing, video games are HEAVILY influenced by cinema, and mostly modern cinema at that. I feel like at this point video games are obviously in the adolescent phase of its growth (if I had to guess). In the beginning video games were more or less doing their own thing. Now video games seem to be in the process of learning from their predecessors, adopting their habits and styles (in this case the predecessor is film) But now we are BEGINNING to see video games truly---kinda---sorta---beginning to get into their own. I would check you the game "Everything" to see what I mean.
Anyway, but if you're a Lit or films theory person I'd get on that.
It's an interesting question, but a challenging one, because not only are video games growing up in a world where cinema already exists and influences them, but cinema also matured in a completely different technological context. For decades movies were just another thing you went to see at the theatre, along with vaudeville, music, and plays. The first full-time cinema didn't open until movies had already been "a thing" for almost thirty years. The point being that cinema's earliest growing pains were in a context where they just slotted in right between everything else that fit into that space. Video games prior to mobile games, however, were (and largely continue to be) something wholly apart from other spaces.
All that said, I think you can make some rough, and instructive, comparisons between the two, especially with regard to the evolution of the literature surrounding them (I'm lightly working on this for a future video), but to my knowledge no one has really done that yet, and it's a lot of work.
When I saw Wonder Woman(a well made super hero movie in my opinion), the term cimena-narratively dissonant from Errant Signal's video came to mind. The film's story pushes the narrative(mostly) of no one good side of WWI existing, but the framing, scoring, and directing ended up glorifying the killing of the "evil" people.
You love that automatic thumbnail TH-cam gave you don't you.
:O
It could be that or he rendered that one frame of the video as an image and used it
The best example of this is def open world games with tons of urgency in the plot. You end up wandering for hours as the world is supposedly weeks away from ending.
Ciri will be safe until you pass the point of bo return. If you care about her, never touch the island
One of the first games I remember playing that made me aware of LND years before the term was coined was the game "Dead to Rights" (2002) for Xbox. In the game you play as a supposedly honorable and heroic cop, but one of the core mechanics to the game was you could grab bad guys and use them as a human shield for extra hit points while temporarily sacrificing mobility, and when you were "done" with them (Assuming they haven't already succumbed to multiple bullet wounds), you shoot them in the head execution style. That's the hero of your story. It's not even something you learn as the story progresses, and your character is forced to take extreme measures in order to take down the bad guys. You learn it in the tutorial level where he's still supposed to be a straight laced cop.
Really enjoyed this video. Glad I discovered your channel.
So I work in live theatre as a sound designer and play a ton of video games. I liked your point about how this dissonance occurs when the designers and writers aren't on the same page. You attribute this to the people in charge and I couldn't agree more. In theatre all aspects of the production should exist to serve the story you are trying to tell. The director (if they know what they are doing) works to lead the performers and the production team to achieve this goal of telling a fully cohesive story. Every choice must be informed and thematically appropriate to do this well. Everyone involved must be on the same page in order to convey the directors vision for the show. This isn't normally the case for a team making a video game. There are typically a lot more people involved as well and that can make things difficult in that regard.
That being said, I don't believe all games have a need for such consonance in their design. I don't think we should expect a game to be ludonarratively consonant and I don't think we should be upset if isn't. Not all games care about story. A game doesn't require a story anyway. Plenty of great games lack a narrative.
To me, “ludonarrative dissonance” never meant that you have to look at mechanics as one segregated system and stories as another, and never the twain shall meet. It was a special case, but a crucially important one, of a very common problem in all of media: when one part undermines or fails to support another. If your cinematography undercuts your storytelling (like, say, how Suicide Squad's fast peppy montages and style of editing are jarringly at odds with everything the already-disjointed script is trying to do), then that would indeed be “cinematonarrative dissonance”. Yes, you review a car in its totality, but you then break down criticisms into specifics. The same applies to any piece of art or media: you analyze what the whole work is trying to do and then break it down into specifics. Folding Ideas' example of Mikaela in Transformers is great.
Of course, it gets even more complicated. Most works are trying to do multiple things. Most works of art throughout civilized history, for example, had at least two functions: their artistic function(s), and also making money. Today, the same film or video game may need to juggle engaging three to seven different audiences, building a brand more broadly, contributing to some kind of social dialog or criticism (even if only to gain a surface veneer of substance and respectability), and making money. In that respect, each part of the piece of media has to be related to each objective. So when it comes to Mikaela in Transformers, I saw the character's depth and found that so much more attractive than the way she was depicted, to the point of disliking her (because I felt she was going to be set up as a hot object) until I saw the “hidden” depths (which in retrospect aren't “hidden”: it's just that Sam is super shallow and doesn't see what is incredibly obvious about this other person until he's hit with a proverbial wrench about it).
And that's in practice where “ludonarrative dissonance” comes from in most cases: within limited times, trying to serve audiences of different aspirations and level of skill and engagement with the material, something slips or breaks.
Finally, it's wonderful that this video is a dialog between two very interesting and informed people (Folding Ideas and Campster) that is respectful and interesting. If only that were the default.
I completely agree with you. A work should be analyzed as a whole, *and* in its specific components. There are many movies where the "effects are bad, but that acting is good" (not dissonant). Pointing this out is important, because some people watch movies for different reasons, and they might overlook bad effects for good acting. Or they might not care about the acting, but hate when the effects look fake. The same should definitely apply to video games, _especially_ when the narrative and the mechanics don't agree.
Ratings are on. Is this the new norm going forward?
This is great! This made me think of my PhD dissertation/book which develops a holistic way of understanding semiosis in music: as episteme, text, sign & tool - complex interactive networks of meaning. I understand ludo from the context of the Huizinga's well-known work of cultural anthropology called "Homo Ludens" that suggests that man is not one who knows... but one who plays! In other words, we learn to know through playing and interacting with the world. This was what got my attention... But In this context it just means "game narrative", right - and the dissonance means when it refers to conflicting narratives in games that don't line up with expectations like in the games you mentioned? But if it does just mean "game narrative" and it doesn't refer to the act of playing - also an important part of the significative process where the game gets you to interact and you learn from actually doing - why don't they just call it "game narrative"? Please inform me if I've got it wrong.
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My favorite example of cinemanarrative dissonance is Star Wars, specifically between the original trilogy and the prequels. Narratively in the original, Darth Vader is the imposing puppet of the empire, a powerful man meant to be the face of an even more powerful regime, but deep down was just a man deceived. Anakin Skywalker turning into Darth Vader was an act of empire subsuming decent men to become their weapons, and we see this with his unmasking at the end of Episode 6; he is not a real bastion of power, he is a broken shell of a man who absolutely should never have ended up here.
Contrast this with the prequels, where Anakin is constantly framed and understood to be a man who is uniquely special by everyone around him. The plot of what happened to Anakin - a person being commodified by a corrupt system - is both narratively and cinematically upended to be about a man who is special in his own right and THEN being converted to be evil because of that innate specialness he apparently has. The prequels present Anakin as a special person, and in this regard they are cinemanarratively cohesive *with themselves* but dissonant with the source material. This results in the message of Episode 6 changing from "the son who was the fallout of the father's sins redeeming him, if only in death" to "the special Skywalker gene got us into this mess and now it's gonna get us out."
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I like watching your clips, they make me feel smart. As to your question, I had never thought about it until now. It seems like a valid argument to make and another level when evaluating A game. But to be fair when my 10 year old asked me why I was running over people in GTA V. Telling her it was part of mission just didn't seem to fit, but telling her it was fun was a concept she seemed ok with. Whenever I told her a reason for a game mechanic vs a feeling it required a better explanation. Is more important that the game have a valid purpose plot and story, or how it makes us feel when we play it.