Hey everyone! Thanks a lot for watching! A Disclaimer about the ending bit: I wanted to tease an upcoming video on NieR: Automata rather than assert a criticism about it. I say in my outro to not judge me until you hear my argument for it and that goes for the game too! Don't judge it--at least until you hear my argument for it! I also need to say that video's going to take me a while to make since I have to replay it for footage as well as do a ton of research to make sure I DO have an ironclad argument about it. God of War is still probably on deck for the next video. Until then, thanks again for watching and the thoughtful discussion and I'll see you guys next time! P.S. If it's any consolation for those annoyed with my implied assertion, you can check the comments and see people are planning on finishing the game now. If nothing else, I think we both can agree we want more people doing that!
To me the issue for Nier: Automata is that it feels like two different stories without a thematic thread. The A/B runs seem to have a vague "what measure is a human?" thread running through them which seemed purely narrative, while C/D/E had a more solid "repeating actions without understanding the context will only repeat the failures" theme, and that seemed to mesh far better with both the narrative exploration of the machines and the machine-YoRHa war, but also the whole multiple playthroughs element and just the repetitive nature of character action games; not to mention how Ending E highlights that theme by turning it on its head. I'm curious to see what your argument is mainly to see what I missed as far as the A/B runs' contribution to theme ludically.
SolePorpoise well I mean if you wanted to tease instead of assert criticism about it you have a funny way of showing it. FR m what you teased it seems like the whole video will be asserting one particular criticism about it. Do I don't know why you're sorry for asserting that criticism here all of a sudden. If you're gonna say that this thing everyone loves actually has a huge problem and joke about the response you're gonna get then just own it. Don't all of the sudden say your sorry of asserting it when that was your goal in the first place.
It is so great to see more of these “video-Essay” channels show this amount of sophistication. This is what we need for the medium and it shows there’s a bright future ahead for content creators like this and more games that want to go beyond
I think the first Dark Souls has a very strong ludonarrative harmony/consonance, as giving up on the game, surrendering to your despair, completes the described and witnessed process of hollowing.
Dark Souls 2's final boss Nashandra brings that concept to the forefront. She knows that the only way to truly defeat an undead is to make them go hollow, so in her fight her main priority is to inflict you with curse and hope you give up.
shostakovich343 I agree, because as is argued in the video, the consonance is in the themes of the story and gameplay. Becoming the flame and bringing about the new age of light requires you to go through and to persevere, and the gameplay reinforces this constantly by having you hollow out upon death, and you being able to overcome this hollowing by pushing forward and finding the humanity that is along the path. You are physically, gameplay-wise, at odds with the world, and thematically you are supposed to be a speck of nothing that is facing the greatest challenge ever. The ending is great as well, as it once again shows the choice of giving up on the world you are presented (the dark lord ending) or continuing on the cycle of victory and defeat (linking the flame)
BB or bloodborne does this even better to extreme levels and pretty subtle too. At the start you are infused with blood which allows the beast inside you to start manisfesting more. The health regen mechanic will allow to gain health back on enemies when they are alive but also once theyve died and they are falling to the ground, it makes the player learn to brutalize and overkill enemies like a beast would do. Just like what the 2nd boss gascione is seen doing in his opening cutscene. Bloodborne is like the height of their souls series, def play it if you havent.
BB and DS1 might as well have been designed around the concept of making Ludonarrative Harmony. Shit, most people who play BB are accidentally larping as a hunter, just mindlessly killing, doing what they're told until they can awake from the dream, no idea whats actually going on and not thinking about it beyond "time to kill some beasts." And then the way that brutality and swiftness of movement plays into both gameplay and the thematic elements is just outstanding. "You're sure to be in a fine haze about now, but don't think too hard about all of this. Just go out and kill a few beasts. It's for your own good. You know, it's just what hunters do! You'll get used to it..." Meanwhile anyone who has delved too far into BB lore has gone completely mad.
While I understand the struggle against semantic dilution, it is inevitable. Words expand in meaning as they get used and its impossible to get the genie back in the box.
I don't agree with Hawking's complaint about Bioshock's twist at all. I think Bioshock is in perfect ludonarrative harmony, because the plot twist is not that Would you kindly... makes you WANT to do something, it simply makes you do it. If we accept that the theme of Bioshock is about power and freedom, then I think it's an absolutely acceptable plot twist that in the end you have no freedom over your life, because you are always a subject to society and you will always do what is expected of you, even if you don't want to do it (I mean Rapture is basically a symbol for the failure to develop a perfect society, so it's only natural that it would turn out the high and mighty still control everything). And I don't think it contradicts the gameplay at all. By what you said, I deduce that Hawking's problem was that he didn't want to help Atlas at all, so the game telling him that he only did it because he was mind controlled really felt insulting to his intelligence. But it wasn't. Okay, Hawking didn't want to help Atlas. Did he help Atlas? Yes, he did. Why did he do it? Because the game told him to, and he did exactly what the game wanted him to do, despite his own feelings. How familiar! It's just what we do everyday in our society. If he thought the incoherence was unacceptable, he could have stopped playing. I stopped playing Dragon Age: Origins after becoming a Grey Warden, because I realized that I don't want to be a part of an order with such cruel rules, and I thought that a role-playing game should give me the opportunity to refuse. So I thought that the gameplay and the narrative did not complement each other, so I decided not to engage in it. But Hawking didn't. He didn't, because regardless of his opposition to helping Atlas, he was used to games giving him objectives he has to complete regardless of his beliefs. Just like we are used to society's formulas and expectations, he was used to what an FPS game wants him to do, and he did it. So I don't believe that the plot twist doesn't work because it ignores Hawking's beliefs, I think it works exactly because Hawking himself ignored his own beliefs and did what the game told him to do anyway. You could argue that in this case the choices you get with Little Sisters are obsolete, but I think the two are very different. The only thing you HAVE to do in Bioshock is always what Atlas ''asks you to kindly do''. You don't have to kill enemies to progress, you don't have to attack Big Daddies and you can ignore the Little Sisters. The only time you do something not for Atlas is when you kill and photograph the people for that crazy artist. But you only do that because he gives you no choice, that is a selfish act to save yourself, and the game gives you the chance to kill him in the end, if you hated him controlling you. Anyway, the Little Sisters are your choice entirely, and I think they represent the small everyday choices you face, choices which are not dependent on society. Atlas never ''asks you kindly'' to harvest Little Sisters, it's something he doesn't care about. It's something that has an effect only on your life. The Little Sisters represent the small everyday situations in which you can decide to give in to your selfishness or be selfless. And I think this is strengthened even more by the fact that it's the Little Sisters who save you after the plot twist. Basically it represents that at the end of the day, no matter what powerful people throw at you, you are ultimately defined by the small acts YOU CHOOSE TO DO. Anyway, that's my two cents.
I don't think it's fair for a game to judge you on a meta level like that. When we stop playing a game, we (or I at least) accept that the game is essentially put on hold. Not playing for a while doesn't affect the game, so to stop playing it entirely shouldn't be considered part of the story or theme. Criticising the character for following the game's plot can work, but criticising the player does not. So in theory, this happening in bioshock should be fine. Of course, when the player is completely immersed, this criticism of the character will either feel like a criticism of the player or it will remove the immersion. This is why the dissonance Hawking talks about exists. The game makes the player part of the game world and then reminds them that they're not.
So this entire argument is nonsense. But I actually want to focus on a little part near the end where you said Atlas doesn't care whether you harvest the little sisters or not. Here's the problem with that fact. It's out of character. Atlas NEEDS you to survive Rapture. Why in the fucking world would he allow you to ignore more power when your survival is paramount to his success? Realistically, he wouldn't. But in practice he did because without that choice you can make with the little sisters, you don't have the illusion of control when playing. It's the illusion of control that gives the twist its power. That is THE fundamental issue with the twist though. It's completely inorganic because Atlas had to be written out of character to make a game mechanic have narrative importance. So yes, Bioshock absolutely has ludonarrative dissonance. But that wasn't Clint Hocking's original critique. He didn't really have much of a problem with Bioshock containing ludonarrative dissonance. He had a problem with the game criticizing the player for suspending their disbelief when faced with ludonarrative dissonance. There's a distinction there that many critics and gamers alike completely miss.
Like what @@goukeban6197?… Mature writing? Maturity of people? Mature theme? _Mature writing?_ pick your bullet because they’re all overused _in different levels of severity_
It's always refreshing to see a video from you! I was not expecting this to be a prelude to a NieR: Automata criticism, but I can see why you chose to make an entire video about what you plan to criticize. As a huge fan of NieR: Automata (and all of Yoko Taro's works) I can say that I will definitely be more receptive to what you have to say about the game.
My problem here is simple : to me hocking could very well be wrong. He felt betrayed and blamed it on the game, but that scene in bioshock could be seen as an exemple of ludonarrative harmony. You could argue that the game isn't about objectivism, but about the failure of objectivism, and the illusion of freedom. Letting you feel like you have a choice in the matter and then telling you it was all a lie from the get go fits right with the themes. With this in mind, his criticism falls apart : he chose a theme for himself, and couldn't handle the fact that it wasn't what the game wanted of him. Could the game have done that better ? Yes, a lot in fact (not really a huge fan), but did it got confused with its own themes ? Arguably no. I think the problem with the "historical" use of the term is that, if story and gameplay contradict each other, how can you be sure what the theme is even supposed to be ? What if that contradiction IS the theme (like it might be in bioshock, or more recently spec ops) ? It's not that easy to tell the difference between a game that contradict itself on purpose, and one that just screwed up, and so trying to pin down the themes is very difficult to do. I'm not writting this as if I just came up with the idea that "the game designer is dead", but to add a point to the use of the term that the one you described : you can FEEL a dissonance, but without a clear statement of authorial intent, you can't be sure that there IS a dissonance and not just a poor implementation of a theme of contradiction. Thus what matter is less whether or not story and gameplay contradict each other theme-wise, but whether or not there is a clear goal to that contradiction (making that goal the real theme). That's why I would argue that a broader definition of the term is a far more useful tool of criticism : there is dissonance when there is a perceived contradiction between story and gameplay. Such disonnance can sometimes be harvested to deliver a message, successfully or not, or just be a pure accident, but its existence is far less debatable than the presence of one that is based on the perceived themes of the work.
I feel like you are absolutely right, as I was watching the video I was trying to formulate a position much like yours. At a certain point, I had to pause it to see if any one in the comments voiced it, and you hit the mark. It seems the author might have stumbled into a term that transcends his intentions.
Could an example of your last paragraph be the first mission in Deus Ex: Human Revolution? You can stay in the Sariff building all you want, hacking offices, stealing things, or just exploring. But if you take too long to board the helicopter, the hostages are dead by the time you get there. The game does not let you know, but the contrast in a serious lack of pressure (you get soft reminders to board the helicopter, but no other consequence), and serious results communicate to the player how freedom and responsibility are inescapable.
I'd say that the most important factor in making ludonarrative dissonance an element of the story, is to have it clearly defined within the story. If you're expressing an idea in your work, and it's too subtle for people to pick up on, then the text has changed to match the audience's experience. I think ludonarrative is a wonderful term, but I think clear definitions are necessary. I think we can broaden the term by strictly using our own language. For example, I think the video failed to define ludonarrative in it's colloquial usuage. Ludonarrative isn't about themes, it's about suspension of disbelief. Ludonarrative is about how much the player's gameplay and headcanon connect with the story. The video is still discussing "ludonarrative", but is discussing a much more restrictive subset of the term. A subset solely focused on theme.
@@jafabian37 I agree with the comment too, and I think a better example would be in Monster Hunter World. Just preface before I explain what I mean, I really love the game and have played it for over 300 hours. Basically much of the plot revolves a series of environmental dangers present in the "new world", which in part forces the player character to hunting specific Elder Dragons that are causing said dangers. During the course of the game, you will encounter one of the characters talking about the ecosystem and how different biomes (Specifically Coral Highlands and Rotten Veil) need each other to subsist the organisms living in them. That all well and good, now there are two problems that connect with this theme: - Elder dragons are to be hunted because they dramatically alter the ecosystem and are a danger to villages, so it's reasonable why the Elder dragons need to be killed. The game also tasks you with killing a monster called Nergigante, a monster that feeds on other Elder Dragons. This is where the dissonance can be found, because in Iceborne it is said that Nergigante neutralizes Elder dragons to prevent them from devastating the environment, which you'd think is a good thing, but the game will force you to fight and kill the monster multiple times. If the characters moving the story wanted to protect the environment, and subsequently their village, why kill Nergigante? I suppose an argument can be made that the characters simply didn't know until the end of Iceborne... - Another dissonant issue involves actually hunting normal monsters. Basically there are two groups of monsters (Though not clearly stated in the game), terrestrial and invasive. Self explanatory, you will be tasked with killing every type of monster throughout the game. Hunting Invasive species is reasonable enough, but it's strange how the game will also task you with slaughtering the apex predators of the new world. Do the characters not realize that doing so will negatively impact the ecosystem, or are we to believe that they held similar materialist attitudes to colonizers that existed not even 100 years ego (And arguably even today)? Like I said before, I love the game, and I also find it really interesting how this idea isn't explored much aside from one article that was complaining about the ethics of killing the monsters, which was also lambasted by fans.
I was looking through the comments just to see if anyone else said this yet. In Bioshock you walk into the story of someone else's objectivism failing them and an entire society, so the fact that the game hits you with the illusion of choice message at the end is actually spot on. Ludonarrative harmony
One thing I think about a lot is just how easy it actually is to design ludonarrative harmony. You basically just have to think about it. Like in Brothers, the thing with the controller isn't a complex thing in any way, but it is SO so effective.
Couldn't agree more! That's why I hope we, not only learn how to properly execute it, but have game devs actually using this term behind the scenes (not as a trophy to mock it like Uncharted 4 did lol) to actually make sure the artistic integrity is preserved. If this video is a manifesto of anything, it's that!
So... Hocking says he never wanted to help Atlas and felt like he was being forced to do it because game mechanics must happen, and then he learned that Jack was forced to help Atlas because plot must happen... and he called that "dissonance?" I'm not sure that word means what he thinks it means.
Why is Hocking's definition of ludo-narrative dissonance the one true definition? Terms change meaning over time, language evolves. If anything, Hocking should have chosen a more specific term if he only ever wanted it applied to a very specific situation. The term literally, in terms of its root words, means game-story conflict, so you can hardly blame people who use it to refer to game-story conflicts.
This is not a good reading of Bioshock because it ignores the results of the other choice available to the player. If you save the Little Sisters, yes, you get less Adam in the very short term but in the long term the Little Sisters give you a bunch of stuff that more than makes up for the "lost" Adam. This is in perfect harmony with the message of the game which is "objectivism is bad and will destroy the world." The Little Sister's thankfulness is an argument for collaboration in a setting that has been decimated by selfishness. Bioshock is not about, as Hocking suggests, whether or not objectivism is a good idea. The game is firmly taking the position, from the outset, that objectivism is harmful and destructive.
It also misrepresents Objectivism since nothing in Objectivism says that you can't help others, but that it's not a moral imperative to help others at the expense of yourself. If you help others because you WANT to (instead of FORCED to), especially if you'll gain from it (as you do in the game), then you are still adhering to Objectivism. Part of the commentary of the Bioshock isn't that "Objectivism is Bad", but that extreme Utopian ideologies are Bad. Rapture isn't what happens when you follow Objectivism, but what happens when you deviate from Objectivism even a little when that's your proclaimed goal (Objectivism being basically impossible in practice).
Yeah, I was pretty disappointed that no one bothered to address how full of shit Hocking was. The game was never about attempting to sell the player on the enjoyment of extreme anarchic individualism. The example that "you could choose to kill the little sisters for an ultimately smaller but more immediate gain" is a condemnation of high time preference greed. So the notion that it was going against its own themes is retarded.
Isn't this literally the opposite, since if you take a true objectivist position, knowing that you will get more for saving sisters, you would actually save sisters, thus discounting the actual sacrifices that true empathy entails? Bc of this to take a truly objectivist position you would actually be required to save sisters since it is the objective and logical selfishly best option.
Chiara Simeon-S. The character and player don't know that though. The choice, as it's framed in the narrative, is between selfishness and selflessness. The point the game is making by rewarding you for making the selfless choice is that we all are better off when we collaborate.
Firstly: Player intention/knowledge is not necessarily important here for that. Randian self-interest doesn't really care about what the subjective perspective is, so much as the objective and rational reality. My argument is thus: you can agree with Randian self-interest and save little sisters and be correct within the ludic application of the game. Meaning that this choice, as well as all other gameplay choices in the game, are still ultimately an enforcement of rational self-interest. In your first post you yourself say "If you save the Little Sisters, yes, you get less Adam in the very short term but in the long term the Little Sisters give you a bunch of stuff that more than makes up for the "lost" Adam." This means (Randian) players that are harvesting Adam are actually just MISTAKEN in their determination that harvesting sisters is the best option if they are basing it on their own self interest. They have made a mistake in judgement. However the gameplay still enforces that good=self advancement. The value of saving little sisters lies in the fact that it advances you better than harvesting them, not in any intrinsic value they hold as agents. Also, I just read the original essay linked in the description and I would definitely suggest giving it a read, and I have to say: SolePorpoise completely misread it. I don't know if he's reading a different version or something, but the decision involving the little sisters actually has very little to do with his argument of dissonance. There's no mention of a choice to "trigger" anything either. His argument is that the main gameplay mechanic, collecting better gear and adam etc., encourages and incentivizes selfish personal improvement. Mastery of the game is to most efficient and expedient self improvement. In otherwords: Randian objectivism. The decision with the sisters (as I mentioned above) is either way made valuable only insofar as it advances self interest BECAUSE the gameplay necessitates that self-improvement is the only means of advancement, thus the arbiter of value. Which (unintentionally, I'm sure) advances the very idea that the game attempts to subvert. Anyways sorry this is really long. I just feel like this video slightly misunderstands the core argument of Hocking's essay, which leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation.
But being made to feel like a fool for thinking I had control is precisely why I liked the twist in Bioshock...lol...l think the whole point of BioShock was to demonstrate that video gaming is a medium of ludonarrative dissonance because the story often makes you think you have freedom of choice when really you must do what the game tells you. Presenting that dissonance in the story itself was kind of the point...?
The narritive in Bioshock doesn't contradict the theme. You only think that if you really want to game to be about Objectivisim being correct. The bait and switch of power through individualism is exactly in line with the theme. Objectivisim reels you in with the idea of self empowerment but slowly you get coopted into the tasks of those with more power and leverage. The theme is about how Objectivisim tricks you into thinking you are the hero when you are the pawn.
I remember reading the original article and thinking that the intent behind the article was "I felt tricked by the game's narrative and it pulled the rug out from under me, I don't like that" and I see that a lot. Some people hate being tricked and mark that down as a fault of the narrative--the game telling you one thing but meaning another happens ALL THE TIME. This is why whenever Ludonarrative Dissonance comes up I ask about The Stanley Parable. In that game, the theme of the game is to have your expectations about the theme of the game be completely violated. If someone believes Ludonarrative Dissonance only applies against first part (it's the theme of the game), then there's no contradiction, the game is not dissonant because it is fulfilling its own theme. But if someone believe Ludonarrative Dissonance applies to the second part (one's expectations of the game's themes are violated) then there is a problem because that would suggest that The Stanley Parable fails at its theme when it clearly succeeds. And I think the original essay falls more in line with the second part than the first regardless of whether or not "by gameplay" is appended to that. It has a preconceived idea of what the theme is from the beginning and then hated that the assumption didn't pan out. I'm sorry, but . . . that can happen with art, regardless of what piece of art and who is doing the viewing, and it's not really a fault of his definitions being taken out of context. It is exactly what he meant. I don't think anyone can really say "This game here doesn't actually have themes so it doesn't apply" because that's to ascribe meaninglessness to art, which is basically a contradiction in terms. If you have found a theme in a piece of art, regardless of whether it's intentional or not, regardless of whether it's good or not, it's there, and the only proof you need is textual support. So, if the original article found a theme of embracing objectivism in Bioshock that's not strictly supported by the text, and subsequently complains that it wasn't supported by the text . . . then no wonder this term flew apart at the seams.
rickpgriffin I just dont see how it can be seen as pro objectivisim at any point. Like, who sees the big golden statue of Ryan and the horrific aftermath of his society and think "I bet that guy had it all figured out." The game paints ryan and his ideas as bad from the start. The twist later is just reenforcement.
Travis Bewley I think his main point is not that he thought the game was endorsing objectivism, but because the game allowed you to act in an objectivist way and the narrative then made that choice meaningless, that is where the dissonance lies. If the main theme of the narrative was that all your choices are meaningless, then that would be a different story.
Jacob Shepard i dont see how he cpuld have though this game would ever reward acting like an objectivist or adopting its mindset. It's like an alt-right person going to see Inglorious Bastards and then being disappointed that all the Nazis die.
The dissonance is between the theme of the game and the theme of daily life. Game: acting selfishly doesn't save you from the inevitable Capitalist society we all indulge: Look out for number 1
1:14 SolePorpoise: "Anyway, while I'm going to be talking about ludonarrative dissonance..." Nathan Drake: "Oh, I am so over this shit." The best match cut. Bar none.
My criticism of Clint stems from him clearly not understanding Ayn Rand. I hate Ayn Rand but saying that an objectivist playthrough is one which empowers the character fails to understand the themes and characters of Bioshock and also fails to understand the philosophy of Ayn Rand. In other words, Clint failed to feel what the game wanted him to because he had a flawed, incorrect perception of the source material. It's actually relatively clear throughout that the protagonist of Bioshock does not represent either a condemnation or idealization of Ayn Rand. Rand would neither harvest nor save the little sisters. Their problems are their own problems and not of her concern. The one who represents the entirety of the idea is Andrew Ryan, not the protagonist. As horrible as objectivists are, they do state that you are not to directly harm other individuals and we see the strongest condemnation of this aspect of objectivism in how Andrew Ryan fails to maintain a world where the objectivist is capable of thriving without applying force and harm against people who intentionally undermine the system. The problem with the term is that even when you use it in the correct context, it more often means you failed to understand the game and instead felt it has to conform to your preconceptions. That the criticism is based on the biases and projections of the audience and not of the content itself.
She would if she could have known that would happen. It's not clear from the start that they would help you for helping them, and the game's text implies you wouldn't get any mechanical rewards for helping. So yes if she read a guide, no with just the game.
The problem with Hocking's dissertation is not his definition of what could be a problem in a game, it is that he ignored the holistic themes of Bioshock to focus on one thematic element the game almost instantly discredits. Interested to see how you support your take on the ludonarrative of Nier, as myself and many others praise that aspect in particular.
To say "ludonarrative dissonance" is an abused term is "objectively bad" because this guy saw a criticism of game that he didn't agree with and all of a sudden a term becomes "Most Abused"... seriously... when is the last you were in a videogame convo and someone said, "yeah but how about that ludonarritve disso..." Thats because no on says it
Something can absolutely be 'objectively bad', as long as everyone involved has defined their terms. I consider an objective flaw to be something that damages a thing's ability to serve its purpose. A car with no engine is an objectively bad car. A game with broken controls is an objectively bad game. A movie with a nonsensical script is an objectively bad movie. So on and so forth.
This my friend was absolutely wonderful. An important term in dire need of reorientation. The English literary critic in me applauds your advocacy for the integrity and precision of a concise definition. Maximum respect Sole. We're all better off after this one.
For all the thought and effort put into this video, all it really reinforces for me is how worthless 'themes' are as a critical standard to try and measure games against. The theme of Bioshock was actually the *failure* of objectivism. Boom, now there's no dissonance because the twist reinforced the theme.
I thought the argument against Uncharted and Tomb Raider was that they soak up bullets like a sponge during gameplay then they get shot once in a cutscene and act like it's a huge problem. They want us to engage in the "power fantasy" yet still feel vulnerable... Dissonant ideas.
I had to stop watching about 10 minutes in, I'm floored by how smart you are to have put together such a good critique. You get so much substance from just a few small snippets of gameplay, and are completely selling me on all of it. Love this stuff!
I'm honestly wracking my head for instances during Nier:Automata where the theme of the game was at odds with the way the game was played, or even the themes being at odds with themselves, and I really just don't see it. I think the most you could come up with would be nit-picking, centered mainly around the problem that the medium chosen to express the story just happened to be a video game. I think the video will be contrarian at best, and click-baity at worst, but either way I'm looking forward to seeing you get blown the fuck out by the internet at large; you're braver than I am.
I'm left asking the same thing. The only thing I can think of is if you consider "the meaninglessness of an endless war" to be Nier's fundamental theme. Then I can see it being dissonant with its great hack and slash gameplay and the progression you get out of said gameplay (levels, and chips and money). Obviously, "an endless war in a meaningless world" is just a setting for the game's true themes of existencialism and the development of all the characters around it.
Hold on, I'm a bit confused. Was I expected to buy into Andrew Ryan's philosophy from the get-go? Because I didn't and the game's narrative and gameplay seemed to mesh just fine for me. How valuable is a criticism of a game that only has validity from a specific perspective?
So, the game is promising to be about power and personal freedom. It seems to offer the player a choice: sacrifice societal morality for the sake of personal power, or visa versa. But there isn't really a choice in the story, so there's a clash. If you go with the societal morality, and help the friendly man on the radio and harvest the Little Sisters, then there IS no problem. But if you don't, and you harvest the Little Sisters, then the man on the radio is forced upon you anyway. This is a distraction, and annoying, but worth it for the discussion around the Little Sisters. Except it isn't - because the game then mocks you for thinking you had a choice anyway. Basically, the twist only works with the gameplay if you wanted to be moral. If you wanted to ignore Atlas, and go for personal power, then the thematic promise made by the gameplay of the harvesting is thrown into direct conflict with the themes of the story. I think that's it. Like the man says, it's highly specific and only applies rarely.
where does this thematic promise come from? i felt railroaded from the get go. you can either A rescue or B kill little girls on your way out of the obstacle course, and in the end it doesn't matter, just like everything else doesn't matter, cause you're playing a pre-determined video game like a rat in a maze. I try to meet the game halfway and decide to forget this, and if the game is compelling, it can work for a little while. but the real reason i progressed in bioshock was there's nothing else to do, or just for completion's sake. and i think that this is bioshock's actual thematic promise, when it points out your conditioning. as a gamer you're so used to this you don't even think about it, so its extra frustrating when you try to zig by choosing option B and get the revelation, so this twist that guy says is the source of all ludo narrative disonance is the strongest part of the game. there's no dissonance, A and B lead to the same place. it may even be stronger with path B cause you as both player and character, resent the atlas-helping objectives, but do them anyway.
and that conditioning, and feeling like a rat in a maze being herded along, were real things. I could say they are as successful an example as brothers' empty side of the controller feeling.
See this is what I was wondering, given I have not played Bioshock. Sure the Objectivism Path stuff might be part of the narrative but are they specifically for the player's personal arc? Maybe the little sisters stuff could have been set up more elegantly. But what about the obvious theme of self-determination being stripped away from the player? I, personally, do not see mocking the player for buying into one form of the narrative and then pulling the rug out from under them as dissonance. That's good narrative design to me! Mess with audience expectations, that's all part of what art is about! Does it have anything to do with objectivism as presented by the story? I don't know! But if objectivism is seen on par with rugged individualism which you, the player, do not have, that seems to dovetail regardless of what you do or don't do to the little sisters. But again, I haven't played Bioshock so I have no idea how the details of the story connect together. I just know that there's a lot of talk about how the Little Sisters mechanic doesn't work with the narrative and I've never seen a complete breakdown of how.
Not to mention that the twist, in the case of you following the objectivist path, actually serves as an explanation for why you are being railroaded in the first place
I think that Hawkins want of not wanting to follow the plot and was forced to do what the game want enforce the phrase. He doesn't WANT to do it, but he HAS to follow what atlas said. It really showed how little freedom you actually had.
Yeah, I think the ship has sailed here, and for good reason: Hocking’s essay was based on a bizarre misunderstanding of what Bioshock was trying to do thematically in the first instance, and there’s no real reason to be tied down to his narrow usage of the term. Critics used it more broadly because the looser sense is more useful: Because it’s common to find cases in which a game’s immersion breaks because the mechanics are at odds with the story or characterization, not just the Big Themes. These things bleed into each other in messy ways anyway. Consider the end of Uncharted 4: There the idea that human relationships are more important than the obsessive pursuit of treasure IS ultimately part of the thematic content. There’s even a key scene where Nathan essentially allows himself & Sam to be captured rather than letting Sam kill Nadine. And I don’t think it ruins the game, which is ultimately a big fun romp, but it rings false at the end of a series of murder sprees (including killing auction security guards who, like the museum employees, are doing their legitimate jobs). It’s useful to have a term to describe that kind of disconnect, whether or not it’s exactly how the coiner of the phrase initially used it.
It's established quite explicitly that those guards are literally mafia enforcers. Whether or not you consider that a sufficient moral justification for killing them I think it's safe to say they are fair game, at least to the same degree as Nadine's mercenaries.
@@Betrix5060 But, WTF is "fair game". Like, if I kill a thousand "fair game" soldiers, should I expect to be "hunky dory"? The human being doesn't work like that. Killing a person is "killing yourself". Empathy forces us to identify with other people, and if we kill another person and justify it, then we start to "murder" our ability to empathize with others outside of our ideology. Drake, must be really quick to *detest* and *violently hate* anyone who does anything he considers immoral, because he's killed more people then 9/11; And he's done it in person! God help his friends and family if they cross him!
Raven Godwin “fair game” is killing people who would kill you if given the chance, and are people with little to no remorse at that fact. Am I supposed to care about someone who would kill me over a piece of treasure? We know the villains in the uncharted series shoot first so to speak, therefore it is okay for Nate to fight back.
I think the analysis of Objectivism being against helping people is a serious misinterpretation of Objectivism. When Objectivism says that its against "altruism", it's NOT talking about "helping others", but August Comte's definition which states that it's a moral imperative to "live for others at the expense of the self". You can absolutely help others and still be an Objectivist, if that's what you feel like doing, as long as it's not considered a moral necessity and you aren't being forced to do it, but because you WANT TO. You can ESPECIALLY help others and be an Objectivist if you will in turn gain from it (as you do in the game). This is my problem with the original use of "ludonarrative dissonance", mainly that it's original use seems to misunderstand Objectivism to begin with.
trying to think really hard where in nier automata the conversation between gameplay and narrative is compromised but i can't think of anything. Maybe ending E which hints at somewhat of a happy ending but it's pretty ambiguous and i wouldn't say it's at odds with what the gameplay has established. Combad, multiple playthrough structure, shift in perspective. I don't see how the narrative is at odds with these elements at all.
Themes are there even if people want to pretend they are not, what you are seeing in the Uncharted games is something even more dramatic than normal dissonance, it's a 'ludonarrative disconnect'.
Speaking of abused terms in this industry, I've found the words "nostalgia goggles" to often be a poor way for people to attempt to discredit someone's argument towards a remake/reboot or a sequel. It's easy to just sling it around without really looking into what the person is critiquing and i think that's bad. Now don't get me wrong, nostalgia goggles do exist, but it's got more to do with when a person is unreasonable and has no real arguments towards why the older games are better and won't accept any critique towards their beloved games
The feeling I get from ludonarrative dissonance is more "Okay, well fuck you too, Devs, you minimizing pricks, are you for real right now?" and less "I dunno, I don't feel very immersed in the character's actions when I want to be."
When you find a channel that does in depth game analyses better than anything you have seen thus far, and he teases an analysis on one of your favorite games but seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. . . .
Sorry man! I'm still here. Just taking way longer because of some life changes that kinda came from nowhere. Planning on being resurrected soon with a massive video that's upcoming (albeit not with the video on Automata I teased so sorry for that!)
When the creator of a channel you really like that you thought had disappeared into the ether, replies to your comment saying he shall return with a bang. . .
I bought Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons like way back but I never played it...just from this small segment where you explain its impact through the controls and it being one of the few games that follows Ludonarrative harmony...almost made me tear up...now I have to play it.
yo man glad to see you are back, i think you offer a unique, well argued perspective on video games as literature that i want to see more of. keep it up
I must admit that I was in all likely hood one of those people that may have unintentionally misused Ludonarrative Dissonance. There is a danger to IMO being intelligent enough to identify problems but not intelligent and well-versed enough to accurately identify and describe the problem. Both of which has affected me up until now. The game of telephone does not help the spread of a specialized term as well. An excellent video that has clarified the origins and exact problem Ludonarrative Dissonance was meant to describe. As someone who is very skeptical of games as a narratively cohesive art form, it is refreshing to see a game like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons be ludonarratively holistic. Thank you for clarifying the term for me and others. I still find it to be useful as well, especially with the confusion cleared up.
My big disagreement with that critique of Bioshock is that helping Atlas *is* helping yourself. He's your way out of Rapture. What's the alternative? Join the reclusive Ryan whose army of splicers has been trying to kill you since you set foot in the city? The ludonarrative dissonance is only present if you take the most shallow view of "selfishness": you must *only* help yourself, and must *not* help anyone else. So the central complaint of the critique dissolves under the fact that helping Atlas can be either selfish or selfless, depending on your internal motivations (get home, or help a helpless stranger). In general, I think the critique was written by someone looking for something to complain about, using the most obtuse language available to them.
Greatest way to make someone return to your channel/subscribe, never seen someone cliff hanger a video that is the exact same topic as the video you're watching at the moment in a time of peak viewer investment in the topic at hand, bloody amazing. Other than that and my definite subscription to this channel for the oncoming Nier Automata video, this video was seriously amazing and amongst the multitude of video essays and critics of all forms of entertainment, something about your video stood out and I really felt like I learnt something from it as well as felt fully invested throughout the whole thing, amazing work man, keep it up!
Honestly I hate the term. It comes off as pretensious to me because it always feels like the person is saying to the writer "hey I know how this character whould act" you know the one they made. And as for the Drake being a psychopath thing. Drake is fighting pirate's and terrorists and mercenary yeah there human but there also trying to kill him and he's been doing it for year's at this of course he'd be numb to it's a daily part of his profession. I'm not saying it can't or doesn't exist but the most popular examples of it are terrible.
Exactly! I agree. It's so unfair to have people kinda agreeing with what Lazarevich says by the end of Uncharted 2. Like, he was playing mind games with Nate, trying to equate the deaths that Nate caused (terrorists and war criminals) to the deaths that Lazarebitch caused (innocent pacific civilians). They (had) it coming at them! I guess there might be space for the use of this term "ludonarrative dissonance", but it's really misused when it comes to Uncharted, at least the first 3 games of the franchise. (Edit: Lazarebitch was misspelled!) (Edit 2: They had it coming at them)
I merrily await your crucifixion haha. But seriously, can't wait for your next piece. This has very quickly become one of my favorite channels and I'm champing at the bit for more. Thanks for everything and hope to see you back soon.
wish i found this channel sooner, just binge watched half of your videos and they are all great! Hopefully we can get some more quality content from you in the future.
Thank you very much for making this! It's important to me that this is talked about a lot because I really do think it's complicated and needs a lot of thought and argument. Really we are sort of writing the rules of engagement for a new language and a new medium. Clint said "With the 'language of games' being as limited as it is, understanding what I am 'reading' is hard, and trying to articulate it back to people in a useful way is a full order of magnitude harder". I agree with most of what you are saying, and in my opinion probably it comes down mostly just to how critics decide to use the term. Even if Uncharted has little to say in the ways Bioshock does, the information it presents you in its dialogue is still narrative! It's probably not a great use of ludonarrative dissonance to talk about Drake killing so many people, but there is certainly something valid buried in there. Uncharted is genuinely split down the middle in its sections of cutscene, puzzle solving, climbing, and then in its shooting sections. Certainly these games are light and easy to consume, and there seems to have been no intent to create something deeply thought provoking, but if it's hard to buy into Drake as a believable character then maybe ludonarrative dissonance can be appropriate criticism. I don't think the original essay that framed and invented the phrase necessarily gets to write the rules for how we engage with it thirteen years later, and if there are new ways to utilize this idea we should try them and argue over them!
Drake is not Chaotic Good. Just because you don't kill someone while stealing something doesn't make you Good. He's more like Lawful Neutral, following his code of honor while doing what's in his self interest.
Never thought the dude who made Splinter Cell Chaos Theory would coin the term. But I am glad someone pointed out that Brothers probably has the best use of story a story being told through its mechanics. SOMA, ICO and Shadow of the Colossus would be other examples.
This is probably one of the best videos actually talking about this topic. The uncharted thing has always irritated me. So it's nice to see it properly explained and used with more fitting subjects. Something I thought was interesting was when you commented about how if a game was going to try to replicate a PTSD experience from an action game characters acts of violence would end up creating that dissonance. I think that actually mirrors a lot of the arguments over how effective the narrative is in last of us 2. I know that game most likely isn't your cup of tea but I think it would be super interesting to see you revisit this topic through the lens of that game and how it creates dissonance both intentionally and unintentionally
SolePorpoise I don't know where you went but if you ever come back, I think you'd like the game Kingdom. It's beautiful visually and has fantastic gameplay as well as a beautiful sountrack. The game seems to explore ideas of greed and wealth and it does this purely through gameplay. You may find it an interesting topic for a future video.
Interesting analysis. Honestly, I have been memeing on this term since the day I heard it, but I have also been interested in how gameplay and narrative rub up against eachother in negative ways (whether that be thematically or otherwise) as well. What I am trying to say is that I am a piece of shit memer who memes on stuff he is actually interested in. Fuck me, right? I have lots of thoughts on this, but I feel like they are hard to get across in a single comment, so I am gonna do my best here to keep it concise. Hocking should have called it Ludonarrative Thematic Dissonance if he only wanted it to be applied to the dissonance between the themes of both gameplay and narrative. So, I would argue that this is not an example of the erosion of our language because he even admits in the piece that he doesn't fully know what he is talking about. It was kind of untreaded territory at the time, and while his view was focused on theme, I don't know that he would explicitly say that contradictions in gameplay and narrative could not also fall under the umbrella term. I have not really looked into his thought on how he views the topic now, but due to this article not being all that explicit in what the term can entail, I do think it is natural and healthy for it to grow in the way it has. With that said, I would still agree with your view that the term is overused and abused. The fact of the matter is that there will always be some issue between gameplay and narrative, but unless it negatively impacts the way you play a game, there is really no point in talking about.
Your video is eye opening and you got me thinking, especially when combining both narrative and gameplay which isn't typically compared together in critique, the terminology was a little heavy, however relevant to the subject. Personally I'd argue in Bioshock the game has an alternate ending and the idea of jack being a sleeper agent who responds to the trigger is what leaves the gameplay feeling like there's a lack of choice. 2K themselves told Ken Lavine to incorporate an alternate ending as well as other mechanics which probably left to this slight contradiction from the original vision. But the beauty of art as well as media is how we can all interpret things differently, your video got me thinking as a negotiated reader, and I look forward to how you approach Nier.
Extremely correct about Brothers, the swimming moment is such an amazing moment, such a powerful ludonarrative consonance I have never experience something like that in any other game before
Interesting... You base the entire premise of your video around explaining the nuance behind a term that is often misused and immediately people revert back to its misuse in the comment section. That said, I would say that even the "misuse" of the term (ie. that ludonarrative dissonance is simply about a tonal disconnect in gameplay/narrative) can actually be a valid criticism... for example, in Final Fantasy XI, the game encourages you to butcher countless individuals of monster races to grind up for power/treasure and totally ignore them for any other purpose, but the story (in the Chains of Promathia expansion, specifically) goes out of it's way to make a point of demonstrating that they are sentient beings with their own will and desires made by the same gods as the "good races" and deserve a degree of equality and respect... and then sends you back to butchering them haphazardly for the lootz. There still may not be an intentional "theme" posited by the gameplay, but that doesn't mean that the disconnect isn't present.
my thoughts exactly. Maybe another term should be invented to talk about those broader disconnects of implications of gameplay (usually the moral implications of violence) and tone of story. Maybe by categorizing the overly broad "misused" term. Like thematic ludo-narrative dissonance as replacement for the original term, and character ludo-narrative dissonance for stuff like the number of people Drake kills (which is actually just a result of the length of a gameplay experience vs a movie experience rather than mechanics per-se: the tonal disconnect exists in the action genre in general, it's just all the more jarring the more people die- in the end its a fun action story with a fun action gameplay). and plot ludonarrative dissonance whenever a plot point contradicts the rules of the world as established by the gameplay (when a character dies for real but could have been resurrected in any gameplay section)
Hmm, I think the bigger point, at least as far as it's original Bioshock definition is concerned, is the word "dissonance". A dissonance implies a clash of unsuitable or contradictory elements... for many examples, it is less of a dissonance of opposing messages and more of an incongruity or a disconnect. After all, with characters committing acts of violence when anti-violence is an apparent message of the game, that is still a thematic mismatch... but mostly because the "acts of violence" element of the gameplay doesn't intentionally have a theme built into it or actively presented to the audience... one half of the equation wasn't considered when making the other half. So, perhaps, instead we could add in two terms for this... for a situation where the gameplay and narrative aren't necessarily sending directly opposing message, but simply don't work well together, it could be considered "Ludonarrative incongruity" (Like in my FFXI example). Meanwhile, if they do function logically together, but they aren't "harmonious" and complementary like in the "Brothers" example, they could simply be seen as "Ludonarratively compatible" (Like in Dynasty warriors... it doesn't necessarily make sense why certain people are inexplicable super heroes, but the historical setting with famous characters and context of warfare do at least logically function with the violent and over-the-top gameplay). That way, we have a four setting sliding scale for gameplay/narrative theme conversation... on one end, dissonance implies drastically opposing messages from the gameplay/narrative... Then incongruity works for a looser and uncomplimentary mismatch... then Compatible if they function logically together... and on the far opposite end from dissonance, Harmony if they work together to build something great than the sum of their parts. By the way, this could apply to any comparison of separate elements from games/movies/etc.... after all, ideally, all elements of a work should be working together. You could have musical/narrative dissonance, cinematographical/editing dissonance, Plot/Character dissonance, etc.
Maxime Teppe -- totally agree. I just said this elsewhere, but from an etymological perspective I don't get why the term should be reserved to Hocking's very specific sort of thematic dissonance. Hocking may have been the first to use the term, but it's not like he really "invented" it -- he just pieced it together, and based on those pieces, "ludonarrative dissonance" can and should be used to describe any dissonance between gameplay and narrative. So in the interest of having better language to talk about games, let's let "ludonarrative dissonance" expand to cover everything its roots would reasonably imply, and use more specific terms for more specific phenomena.
in the specific examples of the video, the term isn't even devoid of meaning because it's used too widely, it's even the opposite: used narrowly for the issue of violence in videogames. Now my reason for not calling it ludo-narrative dissonance would be that this tonal issue is there in non-interactive action related media, amplified by the length and repetitivity of the AAA game format. Saying there is no dissonance because the themes of play or story aren't developped or deep enough is kinda arbitrary. They can be shallow and tenuous as hell and still be there nonetheless.
I'm super late to the party, and maybe I'm still missing something, but I think what you described as a "misuse" of the term is in fact the defenition of the term. When the gameplay and the themes are contradictory. The violence in Uncharted is not a ludonarrative dissonance because there's no theme of passivisism in the narrative for the violence to contradict. Your FFXI example IS a ludonarrative disonance, because the narrative encourages the player to view the monsters as people, not mindless beasts, then sends you out to slaughter them like mindless beasts.
The story of Brothers makes me cry every time. I'm real close with my brother, can't imagine losing him. But that's neither here nor there. I hadn't realized the real meaning of Ludonarrative dissonance. It was honestly something I hadn't really read into before. So thank you for the lesson, SolePorpoise.
So you're telling me a medium where the reader/player can influence the story and see it from different perspectives, there's a possibility that it can come into conflict with the main narrative? CRAZY!!!11! Why is all of this even a thing?
Here's the thing; I don't think that the term is misused. I think the real issue is that while the term was created for a very specific issue the term was "needed" for an much wider and maybe more vague issue. The ludo-narrative dissonance is triggered in an Uncharted game the moment the player accepts the main character as a lovable individual. Sure originally the term was created for games that actively go out of their way to enforce a theme through gameplay and the dissonance was triggered when the theme and gameplay actually came into contrast but that does not mean that for many players the dissonance is triggered even if the game does not actively seek to link the gameplay and the theme. The reality is that games naturally make this connection if they have a narrative. All narratives have themes and all themes carry messages and meanings. The fact that the developer never intended for the mechanics to actively support the themes does not mean that the dissonance does not exist. The amount of terms that get created but then get used for very different if tangentially related things is staggering; it's the nature of language itself. Neologisms become widely used when they serve a need that most people have rather than what they were intentionally created for. An active example is the word Meme which was created for a related but ultimately different reason to what it has become. Simply put, we needed a word for memes more than we needed the strict and narrow definition of meme. Ludo narrative dissonance is the same and you can even argue that in the end the term still includes both the original meaning and the "new" more general one because ultimately it expresses the feeling of being forced to do something the player simply does not feel is right with the theme and the narrative. Uncharted might be shallow but, as shallow as it is, it's still got a theme and a narrative and the gameplay does nothing to enforce them. Criticisms about the dissonance are still valid if critics remember that this dissonance depends entirely on the player's desires. If the player wants the game to be consistent in its theme and gameplay then the dissonance will be present, if not then it won't. Ludo narrative dissonance criticisms applied to Uncharted games simply means that some players seek something different out of a game; it does nothing to describe the game's quality, only that the player seeks something that the game cannot offer. The real problem with the term and its use in game critiques is that it is framed as something inherently undesirable and a sign of poor design or poor writing. It is no such thing; just as it was intended it is something that is only triggered when the player and the developer make a sort of "deal" about what to expect from the game. If the player expects consistency in themes and narrative then shooting a bunch of people for seemingly no reason is an example of ludo narrative dissonance; the issue is that it is not inherently a problem, it is only a problem if you want it to be. To conclude, the ludo narrative dissonance of Bioshock can be completely ignored if the player isn't seeking the consistency in themes and mechanics. If the player does not care then the dissonance does not exist, it is not inherent to the game but only comes out through interaction with the player and only if the player themself seeks it out. If the player seeks consistency in Uncharted then the dissonance will be just as valid as Bioshock's
I might argue with Hocking over the application of the term to _Bioshock_ (I also might lose that argument, though that's a separate matter), but it is nonetheless a phenomenally valuable tool for games criticism, and one that has been consistently abused. It's good to see a video with some proper application and discussion of it. Looking forward to the Nier video.
Great video, really looking forward to the Nier Automata video as I think Ending E and being able to buy trophies in-game are (just some of its) examples of ludonarrative harmony. That is, if you consider its theme to be creating your own meaning from something that is not inherently meaningful (rather than the theme relating to cycles). Curious to hear what you'll have to say in the video!
Great discussion and nice to hear a dissection of how twisted this term has become. Ironically, as someone who will defend the (appropriate) use of the term, I actually disagree with Hocking's original argument about the Bioshock twist. I think its presence actually greatly reduces potential LND resulting from taking the themes and its gameplay ties seriously, compared to if it wasn't there. An important thing to note about Bioshock is that I don't see it as a blanket statement against all acts of self-interest, but more specifically, against following pure Randian self-interest even at the expense of others or of some greater cause. With this in mind, if we look at the main gameplay elements, the dolls are one between self-gain at far greater cost to the dolls, or freeing them at a potential risk to yourself. Engaging with the game's themes, it makes sense that this choice would be the one to affect the story outcome, and that it's a choice in the first place since it's made independently of Altas's influence. The game similarly takes steps to minimize LND with other non-Atlas-controlled, survival-driven decisions like upgrades (not at a cost to others besides doll harvesting), hacking (of now-useless devices in a failed city), and gunplay (by clearly portraying both citizens and, eventually, Big Daddy's as doomed, mindless, and likely suffering so that survival/freeing the dolls can be more comfortably viewed as greater/justified causes under anti-Randianism, grim as things may be). The major element mostly likely to contradict this/raise questions is obeying Atlas, so it's brilliant and essential IMO that this is the one revealed to be due to outside control, drawing a parallel between Atlas/game progression demands as a way to both reinforce greater thematic engagement from the player, and simultaneously justify the game's structure up to that point for those who do so. To me, this wasn't a slap in the face; it was a moment of awe at the narrative consideration for interactivity. This could have potentially fallen apart after the player is freed from this influence, which I suspect is why the player's goal in the final act is more clearly framed as a net altruistic good - to prevent this goal of the now "free-willed" players from contradicting the message, which *would* cause true LND. tl;dr: Bioshock is a really interesting game, and I think it's more ludonarratively harmonious than Hocking claims.
Well, it makes sense that NieR is your favorite game if you wanna be hurt. After all, the whole point of NieR is hurting the player over and over and over in progressively worse ways.
Let the language evolve. Hocking's being the first to combine those roots doesn't give him or anyone else the right to take the combination off the linguistic market... and it'd be a waste to do so. We need a term to describe dissonance between gameplay and narrative in general, and from an etymological perspective, "ludonarrative dissonance" is exactly that. My suggestion: let's generally call dissonance between narrative and gameplay "ludonarrative dissonance," and if you feel the need to make the distinction, call Hocking's issue with Bioshock a specific instance of "thematic ludonarrative dissonance."
Great video as always. I learned a lot this time. I know a lot about games and I was stumped as to what your title could be refering to. Can't wait for your next video, also props on creating a unique video in a sea of copy-paste Vidya based TH-cam channels! You're awesome.
I'm pretty sure bioshock (like MGS2) was consciously delivering ludonarative dissonance, i don't get why people criticize it for something it clearly intended to pull off.
Worthless Winner yeah, it kind of strikes me as “the game made me feel bad for being a murderous power-hungry lunatic.” as if that wasn’t the whole point
GTA IV is always accused of having ludonarrative disonance like if the game forced the player to randomly kill or run over people. I play as I think the main character would act and the disonance is gone.
I'm surprised you missed out on the most common occurrence of ludonarrative dissonance. That is difficulty, If I'm about to face a literal godly entity and all the cutscenes and narrative points towards it as a near insurmountable challenge, then, the fight should reflect that and make me FEEL through the gameplay the truthfulness of how hard the challenge is. But when it turns out to be a piece of cake, It creates a contradiction between the narrative provided by the cutscenes, dialogue etc. and the narrative provided by the gameplay itself. You could argue it's not strictly ludonarrative dissonance because we don't have the equivalent instance of harvesting the little daughter. But i'd say the difficulty options are that instance, each difficulty option changes the narrative provided by the gameplay interaction in the form of showing how weak/strong you and your enemies are, But the narrative provided by the dialogue doesn't change one bit. Additionally, in 90% of cases, the "normal" difficulty still suffers from the same contradiction. The BEST example of how NOT to do that is soulsborne games. TL;DR games with easy mode are the most common instance of ludonarrative dissonance
Very early on in Nier:Automata there is a section where a character very clearly makes a direct connection between the combat the player pursues and the feeling of “love” the characters experience when engaging in said combat. This idea re-emerges when it becomes clear that the target of the central character’s “affection” is also someone he loses his sanity while happily killing hundreds of copies of her. The theme here is the conflation of extreme enjoyment with extreme violence and I think that is one of many examples of what you’d call “Ludonarrative harmony”. So with that as my understanding, I am VERY INTERESTED in seeing if you can adequately convince my of alleged dissonance between automata’s story and gameplay. Very interested indeed.
So, as an example, is this ludo-narrative dissonance? In AC4, you spend the game having fun being a pirate, then at the end it tries to make you feel bad for all your pirate-ing. But, to me, it rang hollow because the pirating was just too fun.
I don't know anymore. When I made that commitment, I had way less going on in my life. And things went from 0-100 quick. I won't anticipate you waiting another year but I certainly didn't expect the God of War Video to take me nearly 2 when starting it so god only knows.
I feel like having an umbrella term like player-narrative dissonance would solve this issue. With a term like that we could talk about things that create dissonance between a player and a story without mangling the original meaning of ludonarrative dissonance.
The problem I have with the twist in bioshock is up until that point the game set up that your character wouldn't do shit until you said would you kindly. But Andrew Ryan puts it at the end of the sentence rather than the start, so your characters is doing it by choice rather than due to the trigger phrase.
In Bioshock I always saw it as an illusion of choice. When given the options to save or harvest, you still get a bit of boost on the save option, just not as much if you harvest. However, morally I aligned with saving the kids as they are one of the few children in games i didn't want to punt into a volcano. I figured if i harvest even if id get more short term i could still get something long term as an incentive from Tenenbaum. So either way i would gain more power, one short term or one long term.But in the end all your choices up to right before the end wasn't your own. So even if you saved or harvested you never had the power. If anything the one in power i saw at the end was Tenenbaum (probably butchering her name). She was the one who had all the little sisters, the little sisters that had been shown to harvest themselves Adam. Tenenbaum is the one that frees you from WYK and she then sets you on a warpath towards Fontain. The only thing i found annoying was the ending for the "harvest" route in which you set the splicers free upon the world. At no point was it shown that you cared about releasing a pain in the rear that is splicer upon anything. If anything it would have made more sense for an ending in which Jack(you) usurps the position Ryan had and take over Rapture yourself. As this would follow that path of obtaining power in the short term over the long term of harnessing the sisters to either lead a happy life (good ending) or world domination. And even in this choice, at no point is it shown that Tenenbaum can't use WYK herself. Either through a different method or set to a different phrase. So in the end the Freedom was never there and the only choices you truly had is whether you get to live by being Mr. B to the Little Sisters which is then rewarded by leaving and having a family, or dying following Fontains plan towards UNLIMITED POWER!!!!
Did he miss the fact that the ending of the games and morality of what your character chooses to do with said power changes depending on whether you harvested or saved the sisters? The game genuinely provides him with both sides of the story he claims to be seeking... Side with Atlas you end up killing Ryan out of a sense of morality and justice, Side with Ryan and you end up using Atlas as a means to an end which reuslts in you being under direct control of all the ADAM in the city, both choices that play into either side of the morality coin, I feel like this has been glossed over HEAVILY.
Maybe I'm just dense but I don't see how Atlas' mind control undermines the idea of objectivity. As he says, the game forces a narrative on you despite what philosophy you choose to follow. When it's revealed that Atlas has been controlling you, it simply gives a reasoning for why that narrative has been forced on you up to that point. Regardless of whether you buy into objectivity or not, you WILL help Atlas because no matter what you believe, he has control over you. It's not a clash of the narrative forcing you to be selfless and help Atlas while encouraging you to be selfish for more power. It's a clash of free will. "A man chooses, a slave obeys." You can choose to be selfless or self-serving, but you have to struggle to truly choose your own path, breaking free of the man who's been controlling you. I don't see where the issue is... Am I just missing the point?
Hey everyone! Thanks a lot for watching!
A Disclaimer about the ending bit: I wanted to tease an upcoming video on NieR: Automata rather than assert a criticism about it. I say in my outro to not judge me until you hear my argument for it and that goes for the game too! Don't judge it--at least until you hear my argument for it! I also need to say that video's going to take me a while to make since I have to replay it for footage as well as do a ton of research to make sure I DO have an ironclad argument about it. God of War is still probably on deck for the next video. Until then, thanks again for watching and the thoughtful discussion and I'll see you guys next time!
P.S. If it's any consolation for those annoyed with my implied assertion, you can check the comments and see people are planning on finishing the game now. If nothing else, I think we both can agree we want more people doing that!
To me the issue for Nier: Automata is that it feels like two different stories without a thematic thread. The A/B runs seem to have a vague "what measure is a human?" thread running through them which seemed purely narrative, while C/D/E had a more solid "repeating actions without understanding the context will only repeat the failures" theme, and that seemed to mesh far better with both the narrative exploration of the machines and the machine-YoRHa war, but also the whole multiple playthroughs element and just the repetitive nature of character action games; not to mention how Ending E highlights that theme by turning it on its head.
I'm curious to see what your argument is mainly to see what I missed as far as the A/B runs' contribution to theme ludically.
SolePorpoise well I mean if you wanted to tease instead of assert criticism about it you have a funny way of showing it. FR m what you teased it seems like the whole video will be asserting one particular criticism about it. Do I don't know why you're sorry for asserting that criticism here all of a sudden. If you're gonna say that this thing everyone loves actually has a huge problem and joke about the response you're gonna get then just own it. Don't all of the sudden say your sorry of asserting it when that was your goal in the first place.
SolePorpoise also i hope it's more iornclade then the Bioshock one cause it's pretty obvious that the game is telling you the ideology is bad
So... Is the video coming? It's been a while.
@@lowellcamp3267 We can hope? Hope all is well with Porpoise
It is so great to see more of these “video-Essay” channels show this amount of sophistication. This is what we need for the medium and it shows there’s a bright future ahead for content creators like this and more games that want to go beyond
PatchFact For sure. Hope channels like this one win over foolish creators like Clearprincegaming and DownwardThrust.
So is Ludonarrative dissonance the Dark Souls of videogames criticism?
Petition to change the name to "Ludonarrative Dark Souls" because the story and gameplay are in conflict, just like the many battles in Dark Souls.
How so? the whole story, however little tangible amount of it, is literally about killing those enemies.
Google "the dark souls of. ."
I was speaking to mariokarter13
Whoosh
I think the first Dark Souls has a very strong ludonarrative harmony/consonance, as giving up on the game, surrendering to your despair, completes the described and witnessed process of hollowing.
Dark Souls is one of the best examples of ludonarrative harmony that exist.
Dark Souls 2's final boss Nashandra brings that concept to the forefront. She knows that the only way to truly defeat an undead is to make them go hollow, so in her fight her main priority is to inflict you with curse and hope you give up.
shostakovich343 I agree, because as is argued in the video, the consonance is in the themes of the story and gameplay. Becoming the flame and bringing about the new age of light requires you to go through and to persevere, and the gameplay reinforces this constantly by having you hollow out upon death, and you being able to overcome this hollowing by pushing forward and finding the humanity that is along the path. You are physically, gameplay-wise, at odds with the world, and thematically you are supposed to be a speck of nothing that is facing the greatest challenge ever.
The ending is great as well, as it once again shows the choice of giving up on the world you are presented (the dark lord ending) or continuing on the cycle of victory and defeat (linking the flame)
BB or bloodborne does this even better to extreme levels and pretty subtle too. At the start you are infused with blood which allows the beast inside you to start manisfesting more. The health regen mechanic will allow to gain health back on enemies when they are alive but also once theyve died and they are falling to the ground, it makes the player learn to brutalize and overkill enemies like a beast would do. Just like what the 2nd boss gascione is seen doing in his opening cutscene. Bloodborne is like the height of their souls series, def play it if you havent.
BB and DS1 might as well have been designed around the concept of making Ludonarrative Harmony. Shit, most people who play BB are accidentally larping as a hunter, just mindlessly killing, doing what they're told until they can awake from the dream, no idea whats actually going on and not thinking about it beyond "time to kill some beasts." And then the way that brutality and swiftness of movement plays into both gameplay and the thematic elements is just outstanding.
"You're sure to be in a fine haze about now, but don't think too hard about all of this. Just go out and kill a few beasts. It's for your own good. You know, it's just what hunters do! You'll get used to it..."
Meanwhile anyone who has delved too far into BB lore has gone completely mad.
While I understand the struggle against semantic dilution, it is inevitable. Words expand in meaning as they get used and its impossible to get the genie back in the box.
I don't agree with Hawking's complaint about Bioshock's twist at all. I think Bioshock is in perfect ludonarrative harmony, because the plot twist is not that Would you kindly... makes you WANT to do something, it simply makes you do it. If we accept that the theme of Bioshock is about power and freedom, then I think it's an absolutely acceptable plot twist that in the end you have no freedom over your life, because you are always a subject to society and you will always do what is expected of you, even if you don't want to do it (I mean Rapture is basically a symbol for the failure to develop a perfect society, so it's only natural that it would turn out the high and mighty still control everything). And I don't think it contradicts the gameplay at all. By what you said, I deduce that Hawking's problem was that he didn't want to help Atlas at all, so the game telling him that he only did it because he was mind controlled really felt insulting to his intelligence. But it wasn't. Okay, Hawking didn't want to help Atlas. Did he help Atlas? Yes, he did. Why did he do it? Because the game told him to, and he did exactly what the game wanted him to do, despite his own feelings. How familiar! It's just what we do everyday in our society. If he thought the incoherence was unacceptable, he could have stopped playing. I stopped playing Dragon Age: Origins after becoming a Grey Warden, because I realized that I don't want to be a part of an order with such cruel rules, and I thought that a role-playing game should give me the opportunity to refuse. So I thought that the gameplay and the narrative did not complement each other, so I decided not to engage in it. But Hawking didn't. He didn't, because regardless of his opposition to helping Atlas, he was used to games giving him objectives he has to complete regardless of his beliefs. Just like we are used to society's formulas and expectations, he was used to what an FPS game wants him to do, and he did it. So I don't believe that the plot twist doesn't work because it ignores Hawking's beliefs, I think it works exactly because Hawking himself ignored his own beliefs and did what the game told him to do anyway. You could argue that in this case the choices you get with Little Sisters are obsolete, but I think the two are very different. The only thing you HAVE to do in Bioshock is always what Atlas ''asks you to kindly do''. You don't have to kill enemies to progress, you don't have to attack Big Daddies and you can ignore the Little Sisters. The only time you do something not for Atlas is when you kill and photograph the people for that crazy artist. But you only do that because he gives you no choice, that is a selfish act to save yourself, and the game gives you the chance to kill him in the end, if you hated him controlling you. Anyway, the Little Sisters are your choice entirely, and I think they represent the small everyday choices you face, choices which are not dependent on society. Atlas never ''asks you kindly'' to harvest Little Sisters, it's something he doesn't care about. It's something that has an effect only on your life. The Little Sisters represent the small everyday situations in which you can decide to give in to your selfishness or be selfless. And I think this is strengthened even more by the fact that it's the Little Sisters who save you after the plot twist. Basically it represents that at the end of the day, no matter what powerful people throw at you, you are ultimately defined by the small acts YOU CHOOSE TO DO. Anyway, that's my two cents.
This is exactly what I always thought about Bioshock and why I never had a problem with it's twist.
I don't think it's fair for a game to judge you on a meta level like that. When we stop playing a game, we (or I at least) accept that the game is essentially put on hold. Not playing for a while doesn't affect the game, so to stop playing it entirely shouldn't be considered part of the story or theme. Criticising the character for following the game's plot can work, but criticising the player does not. So in theory, this happening in bioshock should be fine. Of course, when the player is completely immersed, this criticism of the character will either feel like a criticism of the player or it will remove the immersion. This is why the dissonance Hawking talks about exists. The game makes the player part of the game world and then reminds them that they're not.
So this entire argument is nonsense. But I actually want to focus on a little part near the end where you said Atlas doesn't care whether you harvest the little sisters or not. Here's the problem with that fact. It's out of character. Atlas NEEDS you to survive Rapture. Why in the fucking world would he allow you to ignore more power when your survival is paramount to his success? Realistically, he wouldn't. But in practice he did because without that choice you can make with the little sisters, you don't have the illusion of control when playing. It's the illusion of control that gives the twist its power. That is THE fundamental issue with the twist though. It's completely inorganic because Atlas had to be written out of character to make a game mechanic have narrative importance.
So yes, Bioshock absolutely has ludonarrative dissonance. But that wasn't Clint Hocking's original critique. He didn't really have much of a problem with Bioshock containing ludonarrative dissonance. He had a problem with the game criticizing the player for suspending their disbelief when faced with ludonarrative dissonance. There's a distinction there that many critics and gamers alike completely miss.
I have... literally never heard the term ludonarrative dissonance
yeah same and he says its the most abused term
There is a trophy in Uncharted 4 called Ludonarrative Dissonance because so many journalists have accused the series of having it.
I watch Mark Brown and Writing on Games. I’ve heard it around.
Never heard of it either.
"Nobody has"
I mean... If you google it there's a bunch of videos and articles explaining it. There's literally 27100 results for the search.
The fact that I was able to guess it would be “Ludonarratuve Dissonance” before I even clicked on the video is telling
Two years later, I think that term would be "Mature"
Like what @@goukeban6197?… Mature writing? Maturity of people? Mature theme? _Mature writing?_ pick your bullet because they’re all overused _in different levels of severity_
@@goukeban6197I'd count both to be honest.
It's always refreshing to see a video from you! I was not expecting this to be a prelude to a NieR: Automata criticism, but I can see why you chose to make an entire video about what you plan to criticize. As a huge fan of NieR: Automata (and all of Yoko Taro's works) I can say that I will definitely be more receptive to what you have to say about the game.
My problem here is simple : to me hocking could very well be wrong. He felt betrayed and blamed it on the game, but that scene in bioshock could be seen as an exemple of ludonarrative harmony. You could argue that the game isn't about objectivism, but about the failure of objectivism, and the illusion of freedom. Letting you feel like you have a choice in the matter and then telling you it was all a lie from the get go fits right with the themes. With this in mind, his criticism falls apart : he chose a theme for himself, and couldn't handle the fact that it wasn't what the game wanted of him. Could the game have done that better ? Yes, a lot in fact (not really a huge fan), but did it got confused with its own themes ? Arguably no.
I think the problem with the "historical" use of the term is that, if story and gameplay contradict each other, how can you be sure what the theme is even supposed to be ? What if that contradiction IS the theme (like it might be in bioshock, or more recently spec ops) ? It's not that easy to tell the difference between a game that contradict itself on purpose, and one that just screwed up, and so trying to pin down the themes is very difficult to do.
I'm not writting this as if I just came up with the idea that "the game designer is dead", but to add a point to the use of the term that the one you described : you can FEEL a dissonance, but without a clear statement of authorial intent, you can't be sure that there IS a dissonance and not just a poor implementation of a theme of contradiction. Thus what matter is less whether or not story and gameplay contradict each other theme-wise, but whether or not there is a clear goal to that contradiction (making that goal the real theme).
That's why I would argue that a broader definition of the term is a far more useful tool of criticism : there is dissonance when there is a perceived contradiction between story and gameplay. Such disonnance can sometimes be harvested to deliver a message, successfully or not, or just be a pure accident, but its existence is far less debatable than the presence of one that is based on the perceived themes of the work.
I feel like you are absolutely right, as I was watching the video I was trying to formulate a position much like yours. At a certain point, I had to pause it to see if any one in the comments voiced it, and you hit the mark. It seems the author might have stumbled into a term that transcends his intentions.
Could an example of your last paragraph be the first mission in Deus Ex: Human Revolution? You can stay in the Sariff building all you want, hacking offices, stealing things, or just exploring. But if you take too long to board the helicopter, the hostages are dead by the time you get there. The game does not let you know, but the contrast in a serious lack of pressure (you get soft reminders to board the helicopter, but no other consequence), and serious results communicate to the player how freedom and responsibility are inescapable.
I'd say that the most important factor in making ludonarrative dissonance an element of the story, is to have it clearly defined within the story. If you're expressing an idea in your work, and it's too subtle for people to pick up on, then the text has changed to match the audience's experience.
I think ludonarrative is a wonderful term, but I think clear definitions are necessary. I think we can broaden the term by strictly using our own language. For example, I think the video failed to define ludonarrative in it's colloquial usuage.
Ludonarrative isn't about themes, it's about suspension of disbelief. Ludonarrative is about how much the player's gameplay and headcanon connect with the story. The video is still discussing "ludonarrative", but is discussing a much more restrictive subset of the term. A subset solely focused on theme.
@@jafabian37 I agree with the comment too, and I think a better example would be in Monster Hunter World. Just preface before I explain what I mean, I really love the game and have played it for over 300 hours.
Basically much of the plot revolves a series of environmental dangers present in the "new world", which in part forces the player character to hunting specific Elder Dragons that are causing said dangers. During the course of the game, you will encounter one of the characters talking about the ecosystem and how different biomes (Specifically Coral Highlands and Rotten Veil) need each other to subsist the organisms living in them.
That all well and good, now there are two problems that connect with this theme:
- Elder dragons are to be hunted because they dramatically alter the ecosystem and are a danger to villages, so it's reasonable why the Elder dragons need to be killed. The game also tasks you with killing a monster called Nergigante, a monster that feeds on other Elder Dragons. This is where the dissonance can be found, because in Iceborne it is said that Nergigante neutralizes Elder dragons to prevent them from devastating the environment, which you'd think is a good thing, but the game will force you to fight and kill the monster multiple times. If the characters moving the story wanted to protect the environment, and subsequently their village, why kill Nergigante? I suppose an argument can be made that the characters simply didn't know until the end of Iceborne...
- Another dissonant issue involves actually hunting normal monsters. Basically there are two groups of monsters (Though not clearly stated in the game), terrestrial and invasive. Self explanatory, you will be tasked with killing every type of monster throughout the game. Hunting Invasive species is reasonable enough, but it's strange how the game will also task you with slaughtering the apex predators of the new world. Do the characters not realize that doing so will negatively impact the ecosystem, or are we to believe that they held similar materialist attitudes to colonizers that existed not even 100 years ego (And arguably even today)?
Like I said before, I love the game, and I also find it really interesting how this idea isn't explored much aside from one article that was complaining about the ethics of killing the monsters, which was also lambasted by fans.
I was looking through the comments just to see if anyone else said this yet. In Bioshock you walk into the story of someone else's objectivism failing them and an entire society, so the fact that the game hits you with the illusion of choice message at the end is actually spot on. Ludonarrative harmony
One thing I think about a lot is just how easy it actually is to design ludonarrative harmony. You basically just have to think about it. Like in Brothers, the thing with the controller isn't a complex thing in any way, but it is SO so effective.
Couldn't agree more! That's why I hope we, not only learn how to properly execute it, but have game devs actually using this term behind the scenes (not as a trophy to mock it like Uncharted 4 did lol) to actually make sure the artistic integrity is preserved. If this video is a manifesto of anything, it's that!
So... Hocking says he never wanted to help Atlas and felt like he was being forced to do it because game mechanics must happen, and then he learned that Jack was forced to help Atlas because plot must happen... and he called that "dissonance?" I'm not sure that word means what he thinks it means.
Why is Hocking's definition of ludo-narrative dissonance the one true definition? Terms change meaning over time, language evolves. If anything, Hocking should have chosen a more specific term if he only ever wanted it applied to a very specific situation. The term literally, in terms of its root words, means game-story conflict, so you can hardly blame people who use it to refer to game-story conflicts.
This is not a good reading of Bioshock because it ignores the results of the other choice available to the player. If you save the Little Sisters, yes, you get less Adam in the very short term but in the long term the Little Sisters give you a bunch of stuff that more than makes up for the "lost" Adam. This is in perfect harmony with the message of the game which is "objectivism is bad and will destroy the world." The Little Sister's thankfulness is an argument for collaboration in a setting that has been decimated by selfishness. Bioshock is not about, as Hocking suggests, whether or not objectivism is a good idea. The game is firmly taking the position, from the outset, that objectivism is harmful and destructive.
It also misrepresents Objectivism since nothing in Objectivism says that you can't help others, but that it's not a moral imperative to help others at the expense of yourself. If you help others because you WANT to (instead of FORCED to), especially if you'll gain from it (as you do in the game), then you are still adhering to Objectivism. Part of the commentary of the Bioshock isn't that "Objectivism is Bad", but that extreme Utopian ideologies are Bad. Rapture isn't what happens when you follow Objectivism, but what happens when you deviate from Objectivism even a little when that's your proclaimed goal (Objectivism being basically impossible in practice).
Yeah, I was pretty disappointed that no one bothered to address how full of shit Hocking was. The game was never about attempting to sell the player on the enjoyment of extreme anarchic individualism. The example that "you could choose to kill the little sisters for an ultimately smaller but more immediate gain" is a condemnation of high time preference greed. So the notion that it was going against its own themes is retarded.
Isn't this literally the opposite, since if you take a true objectivist position, knowing that you will get more for saving sisters, you would actually save sisters, thus discounting the actual sacrifices that true empathy entails? Bc of this to take a truly objectivist position you would actually be required to save sisters since it is the objective and logical selfishly best option.
Chiara Simeon-S. The character and player don't know that though. The choice, as it's framed in the narrative, is between selfishness and selflessness. The point the game is making by rewarding you for making the selfless choice is that we all are better off when we collaborate.
Firstly: Player intention/knowledge is not necessarily important here for that. Randian self-interest doesn't really care about what the subjective perspective is, so much as the objective and rational reality. My argument is thus: you can agree with Randian self-interest and save little sisters and be correct within the ludic application of the game. Meaning that this choice, as well as all other gameplay choices in the game, are still ultimately an enforcement of rational self-interest. In your first post you yourself say "If you save the Little Sisters, yes, you get less Adam in the very short term but in the long term the Little Sisters give you a bunch of stuff that more than makes up for the "lost" Adam." This means (Randian) players that are harvesting Adam are actually just MISTAKEN in their determination that harvesting sisters is the best option if they are basing it on their own self interest. They have made a mistake in judgement. However the gameplay still enforces that good=self advancement. The value of saving little sisters lies in the fact that it advances you better than harvesting them, not in any intrinsic value they hold as agents.
Also, I just read the original essay linked in the description and I would definitely suggest giving it a read, and I have to say: SolePorpoise completely misread it. I don't know if he's reading a different version or something, but the decision involving the little sisters actually has very little to do with his argument of dissonance. There's no mention of a choice to "trigger" anything either. His argument is that the main gameplay mechanic, collecting better gear and adam etc., encourages and incentivizes selfish personal improvement. Mastery of the game is to most efficient and expedient self improvement. In otherwords: Randian objectivism. The decision with the sisters (as I mentioned above) is either way made valuable only insofar as it advances self interest BECAUSE the gameplay necessitates that self-improvement is the only means of advancement, thus the arbiter of value. Which (unintentionally, I'm sure) advances the very idea that the game attempts to subvert.
Anyways sorry this is really long. I just feel like this video slightly misunderstands the core argument of Hocking's essay, which leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation.
But being made to feel like a fool for thinking I had control is precisely why I liked the twist in Bioshock...lol...l think the whole point of BioShock was to demonstrate that video gaming is a medium of ludonarrative dissonance because the story often makes you think you have freedom of choice when really you must do what the game tells you. Presenting that dissonance in the story itself was kind of the point...?
The narritive in Bioshock doesn't contradict the theme. You only think that if you really want to game to be about Objectivisim being correct.
The bait and switch of power through individualism is exactly in line with the theme.
Objectivisim reels you in with the idea of self empowerment but slowly you get coopted into the tasks of those with more power and leverage.
The theme is about how Objectivisim tricks you into thinking you are the hero when you are the pawn.
I remember reading the original article and thinking that the intent behind the article was "I felt tricked by the game's narrative and it pulled the rug out from under me, I don't like that" and I see that a lot. Some people hate being tricked and mark that down as a fault of the narrative--the game telling you one thing but meaning another happens ALL THE TIME.
This is why whenever Ludonarrative Dissonance comes up I ask about The Stanley Parable. In that game, the theme of the game is to have your expectations about the theme of the game be completely violated. If someone believes Ludonarrative Dissonance only applies against first part (it's the theme of the game), then there's no contradiction, the game is not dissonant because it is fulfilling its own theme. But if someone believe Ludonarrative Dissonance applies to the second part (one's expectations of the game's themes are violated) then there is a problem because that would suggest that The Stanley Parable fails at its theme when it clearly succeeds.
And I think the original essay falls more in line with the second part than the first regardless of whether or not "by gameplay" is appended to that. It has a preconceived idea of what the theme is from the beginning and then hated that the assumption didn't pan out. I'm sorry, but . . . that can happen with art, regardless of what piece of art and who is doing the viewing, and it's not really a fault of his definitions being taken out of context.
It is exactly what he meant. I don't think anyone can really say "This game here doesn't actually have themes so it doesn't apply" because that's to ascribe meaninglessness to art, which is basically a contradiction in terms. If you have found a theme in a piece of art, regardless of whether it's intentional or not, regardless of whether it's good or not, it's there, and the only proof you need is textual support.
So, if the original article found a theme of embracing objectivism in Bioshock that's not strictly supported by the text, and subsequently complains that it wasn't supported by the text . . . then no wonder this term flew apart at the seams.
rickpgriffin I just dont see how it can be seen as pro objectivisim at any point.
Like, who sees the big golden statue of Ryan and the horrific aftermath of his society and think "I bet that guy had it all figured out."
The game paints ryan and his ideas as bad from the start. The twist later is just reenforcement.
Travis Bewley I think his main point is not that he thought the game was endorsing objectivism, but because the game allowed you to act in an objectivist way and the narrative then made that choice meaningless, that is where the dissonance lies. If the main theme of the narrative was that all your choices are meaningless, then that would be a different story.
Jacob Shepard i dont see how he cpuld have though this game would ever reward acting like an objectivist or adopting its mindset.
It's like an alt-right person going to see Inglorious Bastards and then being disappointed that all the Nazis die.
The dissonance is between the theme of the game and the theme of daily life. Game: acting selfishly doesn't save you from the inevitable
Capitalist society we all indulge: Look out for number 1
1:14
SolePorpoise: "Anyway, while I'm going to be talking about ludonarrative dissonance..."
Nathan Drake: "Oh, I am so over this shit."
The best match cut. Bar none.
damn, i didn't even notice, that's some good shit lol
*LANGUAGE*
My criticism of Clint stems from him clearly not understanding Ayn Rand. I hate Ayn Rand but saying that an objectivist playthrough is one which empowers the character fails to understand the themes and characters of Bioshock and also fails to understand the philosophy of Ayn Rand. In other words, Clint failed to feel what the game wanted him to because he had a flawed, incorrect perception of the source material.
It's actually relatively clear throughout that the protagonist of Bioshock does not represent either a condemnation or idealization of Ayn Rand. Rand would neither harvest nor save the little sisters. Their problems are their own problems and not of her concern. The one who represents the entirety of the idea is Andrew Ryan, not the protagonist. As horrible as objectivists are, they do state that you are not to directly harm other individuals and we see the strongest condemnation of this aspect of objectivism in how Andrew Ryan fails to maintain a world where the objectivist is capable of thriving without applying force and harm against people who intentionally undermine the system.
The problem with the term is that even when you use it in the correct context, it more often means you failed to understand the game and instead felt it has to conform to your preconceptions. That the criticism is based on the biases and projections of the audience and not of the content itself.
Yukitsu Times Actually, Rand might have saved the Little Sisters, since they help you out in the long term.
She would if she could have known that would happen. It's not clear from the start that they would help you for helping them, and the game's text implies you wouldn't get any mechanical rewards for helping. So yes if she read a guide, no with just the game.
Yukitsu Times Oh, you meant if she was playing the game instead of being the main character of it's story. My mistake.
I mean even if she were to take Jack's place, she wouldn't since there's no reason to assume helping them would give you anything.
Yukitsu Times Fair enough.
The problem with Hocking's dissertation is not his definition of what could be a problem in a game, it is that he ignored the holistic themes of Bioshock to focus on one thematic element the game almost instantly discredits.
Interested to see how you support your take on the ludonarrative of Nier, as myself and many others praise that aspect in particular.
Neir video is coming soon - 2 years later
I would argue for "objectively bad" as being the most abused term, but “Ludonarratuve Dissonance” makes a close second :D
"Objectively bad" is a contraction. People need to read more philosophy like John Searle.
@@felipetartas5434 a contraction?
fuck knows
To say "ludonarrative dissonance" is an abused term is "objectively bad" because this guy saw a criticism of game that he didn't agree with and all of a sudden a term becomes "Most Abused"... seriously... when is the last you were in a videogame convo and someone said, "yeah but how about that ludonarritve disso..." Thats because no on says it
Something can absolutely be 'objectively bad', as long as everyone involved has defined their terms. I consider an objective flaw to be something that damages a thing's ability to serve its purpose.
A car with no engine is an objectively bad car. A game with broken controls is an objectively bad game. A movie with a nonsensical script is an objectively bad movie. So on and so forth.
This my friend was absolutely wonderful. An important term in dire need of reorientation. The English literary critic in me applauds your advocacy for the integrity and precision of a concise definition.
Maximum respect Sole. We're all better off after this one.
For all the thought and effort put into this video, all it really reinforces for me is how worthless 'themes' are as a critical standard to try and measure games against. The theme of Bioshock was actually the *failure* of objectivism. Boom, now there's no dissonance because the twist reinforced the theme.
I thought the argument against Uncharted and Tomb Raider was that they soak up bullets like a sponge during gameplay then they get shot once in a cutscene and act like it's a huge problem. They want us to engage in the "power fantasy" yet still feel vulnerable... Dissonant ideas.
I had to stop watching about 10 minutes in, I'm floored by how smart you are to have put together such a good critique. You get so much substance from just a few small snippets of gameplay, and are completely selling me on all of it. Love this stuff!
I'm honestly wracking my head for instances during Nier:Automata where the theme of the game was at odds with the way the game was played, or even the themes being at odds with themselves, and I really just don't see it.
I think the most you could come up with would be nit-picking, centered mainly around the problem that the medium chosen to express the story just happened to be a video game.
I think the video will be contrarian at best, and click-baity at worst, but either way I'm looking forward to seeing you get blown the fuck out by the internet at large; you're braver than I am.
I'm left asking the same thing.
The only thing I can think of is if you consider "the meaninglessness of an endless war" to be Nier's fundamental theme.
Then I can see it being dissonant with its great hack and slash gameplay and the progression you get out of said gameplay (levels, and chips and money).
Obviously, "an endless war in a meaningless world" is just a setting for the game's true themes of existencialism and the development of all the characters around it.
Hold on, I'm a bit confused. Was I expected to buy into Andrew Ryan's philosophy from the get-go? Because I didn't and the game's narrative and gameplay seemed to mesh just fine for me. How valuable is a criticism of a game that only has validity from a specific perspective?
So, the game is promising to be about power and personal freedom. It seems to offer the player a choice: sacrifice societal morality for the sake of personal power, or visa versa. But there isn't really a choice in the story, so there's a clash.
If you go with the societal morality, and help the friendly man on the radio and harvest the Little Sisters, then there IS no problem. But if you don't, and you harvest the Little Sisters, then the man on the radio is forced upon you anyway. This is a distraction, and annoying, but worth it for the discussion around the Little Sisters. Except it isn't - because the game then mocks you for thinking you had a choice anyway.
Basically, the twist only works with the gameplay if you wanted to be moral. If you wanted to ignore Atlas, and go for personal power, then the thematic promise made by the gameplay of the harvesting is thrown into direct conflict with the themes of the story.
I think that's it. Like the man says, it's highly specific and only applies rarely.
where does this thematic promise come from? i felt railroaded from the get go. you can either A rescue or B kill little girls on your way out of the obstacle course, and in the end it doesn't matter, just like everything else doesn't matter, cause you're playing a pre-determined video game like a rat in a maze. I try to meet the game halfway and decide to forget this, and if the game is compelling, it can work for a little while. but the real reason i progressed in bioshock was there's nothing else to do, or just for completion's sake. and i think that this is bioshock's actual thematic promise, when it points out your conditioning. as a gamer you're so used to this you don't even think about it, so its extra frustrating when you try to zig by choosing option B and get the revelation, so this twist that guy says is the source of all ludo narrative disonance is the strongest part of the game. there's no dissonance, A and B lead to the same place. it may even be stronger with path B cause you as both player and character, resent the atlas-helping objectives, but do them anyway.
and that conditioning, and feeling like a rat in a maze being herded along, were real things. I could say they are as successful an example as brothers' empty side of the controller feeling.
See this is what I was wondering, given I have not played Bioshock. Sure the Objectivism Path stuff might be part of the narrative but are they specifically for the player's personal arc? Maybe the little sisters stuff could have been set up more elegantly. But what about the obvious theme of self-determination being stripped away from the player?
I, personally, do not see mocking the player for buying into one form of the narrative and then pulling the rug out from under them as dissonance. That's good narrative design to me! Mess with audience expectations, that's all part of what art is about! Does it have anything to do with objectivism as presented by the story? I don't know! But if objectivism is seen on par with rugged individualism which you, the player, do not have, that seems to dovetail regardless of what you do or don't do to the little sisters.
But again, I haven't played Bioshock so I have no idea how the details of the story connect together. I just know that there's a lot of talk about how the Little Sisters mechanic doesn't work with the narrative and I've never seen a complete breakdown of how.
Not to mention that the twist, in the case of you following the objectivist path, actually serves as an explanation for why you are being railroaded in the first place
I think that Hawkins want of not wanting to follow the plot and was forced to do what the game want enforce the phrase. He doesn't WANT to do it, but he HAS to follow what atlas said. It really showed how little freedom you actually had.
Yeah, I think the ship has sailed here, and for good reason: Hocking’s essay was based on a bizarre misunderstanding of what Bioshock was trying to do thematically in the first instance, and there’s no real reason to be tied down to his narrow usage of the term. Critics used it more broadly because the looser sense is more useful: Because it’s common to find cases in which a game’s immersion breaks because the mechanics are at odds with the story or characterization, not just the Big Themes. These things bleed into each other in messy ways anyway. Consider the end of Uncharted 4: There the idea that human relationships are more important than the obsessive pursuit of treasure IS ultimately part of the thematic content. There’s even a key scene where Nathan essentially allows himself & Sam to be captured rather than letting Sam kill Nadine. And I don’t think it ruins the game, which is ultimately a big fun romp, but it rings false at the end of a series of murder sprees (including killing auction security guards who, like the museum employees, are doing their legitimate jobs). It’s useful to have a term to describe that kind of disconnect, whether or not it’s exactly how the coiner of the phrase initially used it.
It's established quite explicitly that those guards are literally mafia enforcers. Whether or not you consider that a sufficient moral justification for killing them I think it's safe to say they are fair game, at least to the same degree as Nadine's mercenaries.
@@Betrix5060 But, WTF is "fair game". Like, if I kill a thousand "fair game" soldiers, should I expect to be "hunky dory"? The human being doesn't work like that.
Killing a person is "killing yourself". Empathy forces us to identify with other people, and if we kill another person and justify it, then we start to "murder" our ability to empathize with others outside of our ideology.
Drake, must be really quick to *detest* and *violently hate* anyone who does anything he considers immoral, because he's killed more people then 9/11; And he's done it in person!
God help his friends and family if they cross him!
Raven Godwin “fair game” is killing people who would kill you if given the chance, and are people with little to no remorse at that fact. Am I supposed to care about someone who would kill me over a piece of treasure? We know the villains in the uncharted series shoot first so to speak, therefore it is okay for Nate to fight back.
I think the analysis of Objectivism being against helping people is a serious misinterpretation of Objectivism. When Objectivism says that its against "altruism", it's NOT talking about "helping others", but August Comte's definition which states that it's a moral imperative to "live for others at the expense of the self". You can absolutely help others and still be an Objectivist, if that's what you feel like doing, as long as it's not considered a moral necessity and you aren't being forced to do it, but because you WANT TO. You can ESPECIALLY help others and be an Objectivist if you will in turn gain from it (as you do in the game). This is my problem with the original use of "ludonarrative dissonance", mainly that it's original use seems to misunderstand Objectivism to begin with.
trying to think really hard where in nier automata the conversation between gameplay and narrative is compromised but i can't think of anything. Maybe ending E which hints at somewhat of a happy ending but it's pretty ambiguous and i wouldn't say it's at odds with what the gameplay has established. Combad, multiple playthrough structure, shift in perspective. I don't see how the narrative is at odds with these elements at all.
Criticizing Nier: Automata is free clicks, simple as that
"it's coming soom"
1 year and a Half ago
Themes are there even if people want to pretend they are not, what you are seeing in the Uncharted games is something even more dramatic than normal dissonance, it's a 'ludonarrative disconnect'.
Speaking of abused terms in this industry, I've found the words "nostalgia goggles" to often be a poor way for people to attempt to discredit someone's argument towards a remake/reboot or a sequel.
It's easy to just sling it around without really looking into what the person is critiquing and i think that's bad.
Now don't get me wrong, nostalgia goggles do exist, but it's got more to do with when a person is unreasonable and has no real arguments towards why the older games are better and won't accept any critique towards their beloved games
The feeling I get from ludonarrative dissonance is more "Okay, well fuck you too, Devs, you minimizing pricks, are you for real right now?" and less "I dunno, I don't feel very immersed in the character's actions when I want to be."
When you find a channel that does in depth game analyses better than anything you have seen thus far, and he teases an analysis on one of your favorite games but seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. . . .
Sorry man! I'm still here. Just taking way longer because of some life changes that kinda came from nowhere. Planning on being resurrected soon with a massive video that's upcoming (albeit not with the video on Automata I teased so sorry for that!)
When the creator of a channel you really like that you thought had disappeared into the ether, replies to your comment saying he shall return with a bang. . .
SolePorpoise awesome looking forward to it
this is exactly what high-brow video-game analysis should strive to be. excellent video
You know that feeling you get when you find a great new channel with amazing content? Just got that feeling.
I bought Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons like way back but I never played it...just from this small segment where you explain its impact through the controls and it being one of the few games that follows Ludonarrative harmony...almost made me tear up...now I have to play it.
yo man glad to see you are back, i think you offer a unique, well argued perspective on video games as literature that i want to see more of. keep it up
I must admit that I was in all likely hood one of those people that may have unintentionally misused Ludonarrative Dissonance. There is a danger to IMO being intelligent enough to identify problems but not intelligent and well-versed enough to accurately identify and describe the problem. Both of which has affected me up until now. The game of telephone does not help the spread of a specialized term as well.
An excellent video that has clarified the origins and exact problem Ludonarrative Dissonance was meant to describe. As someone who is very skeptical of games as a narratively cohesive art form, it is refreshing to see a game like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons be ludonarratively holistic.
Thank you for clarifying the term for me and others. I still find it to be useful as well, especially with the confusion cleared up.
In the museum section of U2 nathan kills some random guard by throwing him down a cliff. They even joke about his death. That moment shocked me.
Ah, I'm so happy you uploaded a video again, haha. Such interesting content! Really excited for the next video on NieR: Automata!
My big disagreement with that critique of Bioshock is that helping Atlas *is* helping yourself. He's your way out of Rapture. What's the alternative? Join the reclusive Ryan whose army of splicers has been trying to kill you since you set foot in the city?
The ludonarrative dissonance is only present if you take the most shallow view of "selfishness": you must *only* help yourself, and must *not* help anyone else.
So the central complaint of the critique dissolves under the fact that helping Atlas can be either selfish or selfless, depending on your internal motivations (get home, or help a helpless stranger).
In general, I think the critique was written by someone looking for something to complain about, using the most obtuse language available to them.
Greatest way to make someone return to your channel/subscribe, never seen someone cliff hanger a video that is the exact same topic as the video you're watching at the moment in a time of peak viewer investment in the topic at hand, bloody amazing. Other than that and my definite subscription to this channel for the oncoming Nier Automata video, this video was seriously amazing and amongst the multitude of video essays and critics of all forms of entertainment, something about your video stood out and I really felt like I learnt something from it as well as felt fully invested throughout the whole thing, amazing work man, keep it up!
Honestly I hate the term. It comes off as pretensious to me because it always feels like the person is saying to the writer "hey I know how this character whould act" you know the one they made. And as for the Drake being a psychopath thing. Drake is fighting pirate's and terrorists and mercenary yeah there human but there also trying to kill him and he's been doing it for year's at this of course he'd be numb to it's a daily part of his profession. I'm not saying it can't or doesn't exist but the most popular examples of it are terrible.
Exactly! I agree. It's so unfair to have people kinda agreeing with what Lazarevich says by the end of Uncharted 2. Like, he was playing mind games with Nate, trying to equate the deaths that Nate caused (terrorists and war criminals) to the deaths that Lazarebitch caused (innocent pacific civilians).
They (had) it coming at them!
I guess there might be space for the use of this term "ludonarrative dissonance", but it's really misused when it comes to Uncharted, at least the first 3 games of the franchise.
(Edit: Lazarebitch was misspelled!)
(Edit 2: They had it coming at them)
I merrily await your crucifixion haha. But seriously, can't wait for your next piece. This has very quickly become one of my favorite channels and I'm champing at the bit for more. Thanks for everything and hope to see you back soon.
I don't ever remember subbing to this guy...but....ok. It's a good video.
I'd be doomed without amnesia-subs. You guys are my bread and butter!
Me too
same, I don't think I've watched any of his other videos
SolePorpoise No, you're a TH-cam recommendation. Still, very interesting video.
SangoProductions213 it is a TH-cam recommendation, but it got him a new subscriber
wish i found this channel sooner, just binge watched half of your videos and they are all great! Hopefully we can get some more quality content from you in the future.
Thank you very much for making this! It's important to me that this is talked about a lot because I really do think it's complicated and needs a lot of thought and argument. Really we are sort of writing the rules of engagement for a new language and a new medium. Clint said "With the 'language of games' being as limited as it is, understanding what I am 'reading' is hard, and trying to articulate it back to people in a useful way is a full order of magnitude harder".
I agree with most of what you are saying, and in my opinion probably it comes down mostly just to how critics decide to use the term. Even if Uncharted has little to say in the ways Bioshock does, the information it presents you in its dialogue is still narrative! It's probably not a great use of ludonarrative dissonance to talk about Drake killing so many people, but there is certainly something valid buried in there. Uncharted is genuinely split down the middle in its sections of cutscene, puzzle solving, climbing, and then in its shooting sections. Certainly these games are light and easy to consume, and there seems to have been no intent to create something deeply thought provoking, but if it's hard to buy into Drake as a believable character then maybe ludonarrative dissonance can be appropriate criticism.
I don't think the original essay that framed and invented the phrase necessarily gets to write the rules for how we engage with it thirteen years later, and if there are new ways to utilize this idea we should try them and argue over them!
Most underrated channel! Great video!
Drake is not Chaotic Good. Just because you don't kill someone while stealing something doesn't make you Good.
He's more like Lawful Neutral, following his code of honor while doing what's in his self interest.
Never thought the dude who made Splinter Cell Chaos Theory would coin the term. But I am glad someone pointed out that Brothers probably has the best use of story a story being told through its mechanics. SOMA, ICO and Shadow of the Colossus would be other examples.
26:17 "That's a video that's coming soon"
. . . One Year Later
WHY SolePoroise WHY !?!?!?
Looking forward to the next gem :)
Where did you go Mr. Porpoise? Just found your virus and they are super insightful and well made
New video's coming in the next month or so!
This is probably one of the best videos actually talking about this topic. The uncharted thing has always irritated me. So it's nice to see it properly explained and used with more fitting subjects.
Something I thought was interesting was when you commented about how if a game was going to try to replicate a PTSD experience from an action game characters acts of violence would end up creating that dissonance. I think that actually mirrors a lot of the arguments over how effective the narrative is in last of us 2. I know that game most likely isn't your cup of tea but I think it would be super interesting to see you revisit this topic through the lens of that game and how it creates dissonance both intentionally and unintentionally
SolePorpoise I don't know where you went but if you ever come back, I think you'd like the game Kingdom. It's beautiful visually and has fantastic gameplay as well as a beautiful sountrack. The game seems to explore ideas of greed and wealth and it does this purely through gameplay. You may find it an interesting topic for a future video.
*Expects actual abused critical terminology, gets "LUDONARRATIVE DISSONANCE"
Interesting analysis. Honestly, I have been memeing on this term since the day I heard it, but I have also been interested in how gameplay and narrative rub up against eachother in negative ways (whether that be thematically or otherwise) as well. What I am trying to say is that I am a piece of shit memer who memes on stuff he is actually interested in. Fuck me, right?
I have lots of thoughts on this, but I feel like they are hard to get across in a single comment, so I am gonna do my best here to keep it concise. Hocking should have called it Ludonarrative Thematic Dissonance if he only wanted it to be applied to the dissonance between the themes of both gameplay and narrative. So, I would argue that this is not an example of the erosion of our language because he even admits in the piece that he doesn't fully know what he is talking about. It was kind of untreaded territory at the time, and while his view was focused on theme, I don't know that he would explicitly say that contradictions in gameplay and narrative could not also fall under the umbrella term. I have not really looked into his thought on how he views the topic now, but due to this article not being all that explicit in what the term can entail, I do think it is natural and healthy for it to grow in the way it has. With that said, I would still agree with your view that the term is overused and abused. The fact of the matter is that there will always be some issue between gameplay and narrative, but unless it negatively impacts the way you play a game, there is really no point in talking about.
Your video is eye opening and you got me thinking, especially when combining both narrative and gameplay which isn't typically compared together in critique, the terminology was a little heavy, however relevant to the subject. Personally I'd argue in Bioshock the game has an alternate ending and the idea of jack being a sleeper agent who responds to the trigger is what leaves the gameplay feeling like there's a lack of choice. 2K themselves told Ken Lavine to incorporate an alternate ending as well as other mechanics which probably left to this slight contradiction from the original vision. But the beauty of art as well as media is how we can all interpret things differently, your video got me thinking as a negotiated reader, and I look forward to how you approach Nier.
Extremely correct about Brothers, the swimming moment is such an amazing moment, such a powerful ludonarrative consonance I have never experience something like that in any other game before
damn i almost cried during the brothers section wtf?
Interesting... You base the entire premise of your video around explaining the nuance behind a term that is often misused and immediately people revert back to its misuse in the comment section.
That said, I would say that even the "misuse" of the term (ie. that ludonarrative dissonance is simply about a tonal disconnect in gameplay/narrative) can actually be a valid criticism... for example, in Final Fantasy XI, the game encourages you to butcher countless individuals of monster races to grind up for power/treasure and totally ignore them for any other purpose, but the story (in the Chains of Promathia expansion, specifically) goes out of it's way to make a point of demonstrating that they are sentient beings with their own will and desires made by the same gods as the "good races" and deserve a degree of equality and respect... and then sends you back to butchering them haphazardly for the lootz. There still may not be an intentional "theme" posited by the gameplay, but that doesn't mean that the disconnect isn't present.
my thoughts exactly.
Maybe another term should be invented to talk about those broader disconnects of implications of gameplay (usually the moral implications of violence) and tone of story. Maybe by categorizing the overly broad "misused" term. Like thematic ludo-narrative dissonance as replacement for the original term, and character ludo-narrative dissonance for stuff like the number of people Drake kills (which is actually just a result of the length of a gameplay experience vs a movie experience rather than mechanics per-se: the tonal disconnect exists in the action genre in general, it's just all the more jarring the more people die- in the end its a fun action story with a fun action gameplay). and plot ludonarrative dissonance whenever a plot point contradicts the rules of the world as established by the gameplay (when a character dies for real but could have been resurrected in any gameplay section)
Hmm, I think the bigger point, at least as far as it's original Bioshock definition is concerned, is the word "dissonance". A dissonance implies a clash of unsuitable or contradictory elements... for many examples, it is less of a dissonance of opposing messages and more of an incongruity or a disconnect. After all, with characters committing acts of violence when anti-violence is an apparent message of the game, that is still a thematic mismatch... but mostly because the "acts of violence" element of the gameplay doesn't intentionally have a theme built into it or actively presented to the audience... one half of the equation wasn't considered when making the other half. So, perhaps, instead we could add in two terms for this... for a situation where the gameplay and narrative aren't necessarily sending directly opposing message, but simply don't work well together, it could be considered "Ludonarrative incongruity" (Like in my FFXI example). Meanwhile, if they do function logically together, but they aren't "harmonious" and complementary like in the "Brothers" example, they could simply be seen as "Ludonarratively compatible" (Like in Dynasty warriors... it doesn't necessarily make sense why certain people are inexplicable super heroes, but the historical setting with famous characters and context of warfare do at least logically function with the violent and over-the-top gameplay).
That way, we have a four setting sliding scale for gameplay/narrative theme conversation... on one end, dissonance implies drastically opposing messages from the gameplay/narrative... Then incongruity works for a looser and uncomplimentary mismatch... then Compatible if they function logically together... and on the far opposite end from dissonance, Harmony if they work together to build something great than the sum of their parts. By the way, this could apply to any comparison of separate elements from games/movies/etc.... after all, ideally, all elements of a work should be working together. You could have musical/narrative dissonance, cinematographical/editing dissonance, Plot/Character dissonance, etc.
Maxime Teppe -- totally agree. I just said this elsewhere, but from an etymological perspective I don't get why the term should be reserved to Hocking's very specific sort of thematic dissonance. Hocking may have been the first to use the term, but it's not like he really "invented" it -- he just pieced it together, and based on those pieces, "ludonarrative dissonance" can and should be used to describe any dissonance between gameplay and narrative.
So in the interest of having better language to talk about games, let's let "ludonarrative dissonance" expand to cover everything its roots would reasonably imply, and use more specific terms for more specific phenomena.
in the specific examples of the video, the term isn't even devoid of meaning because it's used too widely, it's even the opposite: used narrowly for the issue of violence in videogames.
Now my reason for not calling it ludo-narrative dissonance would be that this tonal issue is there in non-interactive action related media, amplified by the length and repetitivity of the AAA game format.
Saying there is no dissonance because the themes of play or story aren't developped or deep enough is kinda arbitrary. They can be shallow and tenuous as hell and still be there nonetheless.
I'm super late to the party, and maybe I'm still missing something, but I think what you described as a "misuse" of the term is in fact the defenition of the term. When the gameplay and the themes are contradictory. The violence in Uncharted is not a ludonarrative dissonance because there's no theme of passivisism in the narrative for the violence to contradict. Your FFXI example IS a ludonarrative disonance, because the narrative encourages the player to view the monsters as people, not mindless beasts, then sends you out to slaughter them like mindless beasts.
The story of Brothers makes me cry every time. I'm real close with my brother, can't imagine losing him.
But that's neither here nor there. I hadn't realized the real meaning of Ludonarrative dissonance. It was honestly something I hadn't really read into before. So thank you for the lesson, SolePorpoise.
So you're telling me a medium where the reader/player can influence the story and see it from different perspectives, there's a possibility that it can come into conflict with the main narrative? CRAZY!!!11! Why is all of this even a thing?
Here's the thing; I don't think that the term is misused.
I think the real issue is that while the term was created for a very specific issue the term was "needed" for an much wider and maybe more vague issue. The ludo-narrative dissonance is triggered in an Uncharted game the moment the player accepts the main character as a lovable individual. Sure originally the term was created for games that actively go out of their way to enforce a theme through gameplay and the dissonance was triggered when the theme and gameplay actually came into contrast but that does not mean that for many players the dissonance is triggered even if the game does not actively seek to link the gameplay and the theme.
The reality is that games naturally make this connection if they have a narrative. All narratives have themes and all themes carry messages and meanings. The fact that the developer never intended for the mechanics to actively support the themes does not mean that the dissonance does not exist.
The amount of terms that get created but then get used for very different if tangentially related things is staggering; it's the nature of language itself. Neologisms become widely used when they serve a need that most people have rather than what they were intentionally created for. An active example is the word Meme which was created for a related but ultimately different reason to what it has become. Simply put, we needed a word for memes more than we needed the strict and narrow definition of meme.
Ludo narrative dissonance is the same and you can even argue that in the end the term still includes both the original meaning and the "new" more general one because ultimately it expresses the feeling of being forced to do something the player simply does not feel is right with the theme and the narrative.
Uncharted might be shallow but, as shallow as it is, it's still got a theme and a narrative and the gameplay does nothing to enforce them. Criticisms about the dissonance are still valid if critics remember that this dissonance depends entirely on the player's desires. If the player wants the game to be consistent in its theme and gameplay then the dissonance will be present, if not then it won't.
Ludo narrative dissonance criticisms applied to Uncharted games simply means that some players seek something different out of a game; it does nothing to describe the game's quality, only that the player seeks something that the game cannot offer.
The real problem with the term and its use in game critiques is that it is framed as something inherently undesirable and a sign of poor design or poor writing. It is no such thing; just as it was intended it is something that is only triggered when the player and the developer make a sort of "deal" about what to expect from the game. If the player expects consistency in themes and narrative then shooting a bunch of people for seemingly no reason is an example of ludo narrative dissonance; the issue is that it is not inherently a problem, it is only a problem if you want it to be.
To conclude, the ludo narrative dissonance of Bioshock can be completely ignored if the player isn't seeking the consistency in themes and mechanics. If the player does not care then the dissonance does not exist, it is not inherent to the game but only comes out through interaction with the player and only if the player themself seeks it out. If the player seeks consistency in Uncharted then the dissonance will be just as valid as Bioshock's
I think it's high time for a new video, man. We are waiting :)
the best ludonarrative harmony is seen in katamari damacy bc you use both the joysticks to move the ball just like the prince wow
I might argue with Hocking over the application of the term to _Bioshock_ (I also might lose that argument, though that's a separate matter), but it is nonetheless a phenomenally valuable tool for games criticism, and one that has been consistently abused.
It's good to see a video with some proper application and discussion of it. Looking forward to the Nier video.
Now I really wish that I had played that brothers game before watching this video.
Great video, really looking forward to the Nier Automata video as I think Ending E and being able to buy trophies in-game are (just some of its) examples of ludonarrative harmony. That is, if you consider its theme to be creating your own meaning from something that is not inherently meaningful (rather than the theme relating to cycles). Curious to hear what you'll have to say in the video!
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WOOOOOOOO!
Great discussion and nice to hear a dissection of how twisted this term has become. Ironically, as someone who will defend the (appropriate) use of the term, I actually disagree with Hocking's original argument about the Bioshock twist. I think its presence actually greatly reduces potential LND resulting from taking the themes and its gameplay ties seriously, compared to if it wasn't there.
An important thing to note about Bioshock is that I don't see it as a blanket statement against all acts of self-interest, but more specifically, against following pure Randian self-interest even at the expense of others or of some greater cause. With this in mind, if we look at the main gameplay elements, the dolls are one between self-gain at far greater cost to the dolls, or freeing them at a potential risk to yourself. Engaging with the game's themes, it makes sense that this choice would be the one to affect the story outcome, and that it's a choice in the first place since it's made independently of Altas's influence. The game similarly takes steps to minimize LND with other non-Atlas-controlled, survival-driven decisions like upgrades (not at a cost to others besides doll harvesting), hacking (of now-useless devices in a failed city), and gunplay (by clearly portraying both citizens and, eventually, Big Daddy's as doomed, mindless, and likely suffering so that survival/freeing the dolls can be more comfortably viewed as greater/justified causes under anti-Randianism, grim as things may be). The major element mostly likely to contradict this/raise questions is obeying Atlas, so it's brilliant and essential IMO that this is the one revealed to be due to outside control, drawing a parallel between Atlas/game progression demands as a way to both reinforce greater thematic engagement from the player, and simultaneously justify the game's structure up to that point for those who do so. To me, this wasn't a slap in the face; it was a moment of awe at the narrative consideration for interactivity. This could have potentially fallen apart after the player is freed from this influence, which I suspect is why the player's goal in the final act is more clearly framed as a net altruistic good - to prevent this goal of the now "free-willed" players from contradicting the message, which *would* cause true LND.
tl;dr: Bioshock is a really interesting game, and I think it's more ludonarratively harmonious than Hocking claims.
Watching this video has now become my... sole porpoise.
Sorry, I had to. I'll show myself out... once I watch the video :P
Marc Shanahan That's not a pun.
I can't wait to yell at you. NieR is my favourite game, and I want to be hurt..
Hurt me daddy.
Well, it makes sense that NieR is your favorite game if you wanna be hurt. After all, the whole point of NieR is hurting the player over and over and over in progressively worse ways.
Zanthor no. you've confused nier with drakengard.
Let's compromise and say that Yoko Taro is an emotional sadist with all of his games.
Zanthor
he's a sadist with drakengard, while nier is more nihilist.
u mom gay
Let the language evolve. Hocking's being the first to combine those roots doesn't give him or anyone else the right to take the combination off the linguistic market... and it'd be a waste to do so. We need a term to describe dissonance between gameplay and narrative in general, and from an etymological perspective, "ludonarrative dissonance" is exactly that.
My suggestion: let's generally call dissonance between narrative and gameplay "ludonarrative dissonance," and if you feel the need to make the distinction, call Hocking's issue with Bioshock a specific instance of "thematic ludonarrative dissonance."
Great video as always. I learned a lot this time. I know a lot about games and I was stumped as to what your title could be refering to. Can't wait for your next video, also props on creating a unique video in a sea of copy-paste Vidya based TH-cam channels! You're awesome.
Damn, I haven't even played Brothers and your analysis of its ending gave me a lump in my throat. Great video, well put
The only time I've heard "Ludonarrative dissonance" is when people complain about it's use.
I'm pretty sure bioshock (like MGS2) was consciously delivering ludonarative dissonance, i don't get why people criticize it for something it clearly intended to pull off.
Worthless Winner yeah, it kind of strikes me as “the game made me feel bad for being a murderous power-hungry lunatic.” as if that wasn’t the whole point
GTA IV is always accused of having ludonarrative disonance like if the game forced the player to randomly kill or run over people. I play as I think the main character would act and the disonance is gone.
Tommy Vercetti saying GTA 4 has that, is missing the point of a sandbox (and a GTA game)
I'm surprised you missed out on the most common occurrence of ludonarrative dissonance. That is difficulty, If I'm about to face a literal godly entity and all the cutscenes and narrative points towards it as a near insurmountable challenge, then, the fight should reflect that and make me FEEL through the gameplay the truthfulness of how hard the challenge is. But when it turns out to be a piece of cake, It creates a contradiction between the narrative provided by the cutscenes, dialogue etc. and the narrative provided by the gameplay itself.
You could argue it's not strictly ludonarrative dissonance because we don't have the equivalent instance of harvesting the little daughter. But i'd say the difficulty options are that instance, each difficulty option changes the narrative provided by the gameplay interaction in the form of showing how weak/strong you and your enemies are, But the narrative provided by the dialogue doesn't change one bit. Additionally, in 90% of cases, the "normal" difficulty still suffers from the same contradiction.
The BEST example of how NOT to do that is soulsborne games.
TL;DR games with easy mode are the most common instance of ludonarrative dissonance
Nier Automata video coming soon.... annnnnyyy year now.
Feels like what everyone means to say is "I'm unable to suspend my disbelief"
I didn't know a video essay could have a killer twist at the end. Oh boy.
Very early on in Nier:Automata there is a section where a character very clearly makes a direct connection between the combat the player pursues and the feeling of “love” the characters experience when engaging in said combat.
This idea re-emerges when it becomes clear that the target of the central character’s “affection” is also someone he loses his sanity while happily killing hundreds of copies of her.
The theme here is the conflation of extreme enjoyment with extreme violence and I think that is one of many examples of what you’d call
“Ludonarrative harmony”.
So with that as my understanding, I am VERY INTERESTED in seeing if you can adequately convince my of alleged dissonance between automata’s story and gameplay. Very interested indeed.
So, as an example, is this ludo-narrative dissonance?
In AC4, you spend the game having fun being a pirate, then at the end it tries to make you feel bad for all your pirate-ing. But, to me, it rang hollow because the pirating was just too fun.
I've always hated how often the term "visually stunning" is thrown around. It has no impact anymore
FEEL THE STEEL of SolePorpoise's argument as he flexes his brain MUSCLE.
When are we getting the NieR: Automata video?
I've waited a year, and I'll wait another
I don't know anymore. When I made that commitment, I had way less going on in my life. And things went from 0-100 quick. I won't anticipate you waiting another year but I certainly didn't expect the God of War Video to take me nearly 2 when starting it so god only knows.
@@SolePorpoise would love to see you post some new videos, the ones that you did are amazing! Take your time and hope everything goes well for you :)
I had just guessed the Nier fanbase had green-lighted you, looking forward to it!
I feel like having an umbrella term like player-narrative dissonance would solve this issue. With a term like that we could talk about things that create dissonance between a player and a story without mangling the original meaning of ludonarrative dissonance.
It’s wild to see the observation originally came from BioShock! I’d always heard it came in relation to Uncharted and GTA 4 especially.
Is the Nier Automata video still coming "Soon?"
The problem I have with the twist in bioshock is up until that point the game set up that your character wouldn't do shit until you said would you kindly. But Andrew Ryan puts it at the end of the sentence rather than the start, so your characters is doing it by choice rather than due to the trigger phrase.
I'm so sad... I was looking forward to a SolePorpise marathon tonight, but your last video was 2 years ago... :(
Soon...
In Bioshock I always saw it as an illusion of choice. When given the options to save or harvest, you still get a bit of boost on the save option, just not as much if you harvest. However, morally I aligned with saving the kids as they are one of the few children in games i didn't want to punt into a volcano. I figured if i harvest even if id get more short term i could still get something long term as an incentive from Tenenbaum. So either way i would gain more power, one short term or one long term.But in the end all your choices up to right before the end wasn't your own. So even if you saved or harvested you never had the power. If anything the one in power i saw at the end was Tenenbaum (probably butchering her name). She was the one who had all the little sisters, the little sisters that had been shown to harvest themselves Adam. Tenenbaum is the one that frees you from WYK and she then sets you on a warpath towards Fontain. The only thing i found annoying was the ending for the "harvest" route in which you set the splicers free upon the world. At no point was it shown that you cared about releasing a pain in the rear that is splicer upon anything. If anything it would have made more sense for an ending in which Jack(you) usurps the position Ryan had and take over Rapture yourself. As this would follow that path of obtaining power in the short term over the long term of harnessing the sisters to either lead a happy life (good ending) or world domination. And even in this choice, at no point is it shown that Tenenbaum can't use WYK herself. Either through a different method or set to a different phrase. So in the end the Freedom was never there and the only choices you truly had is whether you get to live by being Mr. B to the Little Sisters which is then rewarded by leaving and having a family, or dying following Fontains plan towards UNLIMITED POWER!!!!
"Toxic" is another, really abused term in game journalism
Did he miss the fact that the ending of the games and morality of what your character chooses to do with said power changes depending on whether you harvested or saved the sisters? The game genuinely provides him with both sides of the story he claims to be seeking... Side with Atlas you end up killing Ryan out of a sense of morality and justice, Side with Ryan and you end up using Atlas as a means to an end which reuslts in you being under direct control of all the ADAM in the city, both choices that play into either side of the morality coin, I feel like this has been glossed over HEAVILY.
Western Coerthas Highlands at 11:00 just after "Yakety-Sax".
Maybe I'm just dense but I don't see how Atlas' mind control undermines the idea of objectivity. As he says, the game forces a narrative on you despite what philosophy you choose to follow. When it's revealed that Atlas has been controlling you, it simply gives a reasoning for why that narrative has been forced on you up to that point. Regardless of whether you buy into objectivity or not, you WILL help Atlas because no matter what you believe, he has control over you. It's not a clash of the narrative forcing you to be selfless and help Atlas while encouraging you to be selfish for more power. It's a clash of free will. "A man chooses, a slave obeys." You can choose to be selfless or self-serving, but you have to struggle to truly choose your own path, breaking free of the man who's been controlling you.
I don't see where the issue is... Am I just missing the point?