First off, no this is not a retraction of my opinion (which I was apparently the sole defender of) that Ludonarrative Dissonance is a bad thing for a game to have. Instead, this is a response to the growing antagonism towards the term itself. There is plenty of it about, most recently from a post of Corvus Elrod’s over at Semionaut’s Notebook. I wanted to write this right away after reading it, but other commitments kept me from doing so at the time. Although having just reread it I find that it doesn’t say a whole lot about the term itself, just that it’s use is unnecessary and rather ineffectual.
For those who don’t know (though if you are reading this, I give 4 to 1 odds you do) Ludonarrative Dissonance was a term coined by CLINT HOCKING, here, in reference to Bioshock and was later applied by others to Gears of War, Uncharted and others. It is where the game elements conflict the thematic elements the narrative tries to convey. It’s why the normally happy-go-lucky “normal” guy of Nathan Drake becomes a disturbing sociopath in the gameplay. It’s why the “rah-rah kill them” mentality of the Cogs is somewhat undermined by the fact they cower behind chest high walls at every opportunity despite wearing refrigerators. Not included are getting stuck on the world geometry or running in place against an invisible wall.
First I want to address the common criticism that the word is pretentious. In most cases people don’t know what the word pretentious means. A word can neither be pretentious or not by itself. Not just words, but anything. It is the intent behind something’s use that makes that something pretentious or not. And in most cases the word only comes off being pretentious because people undermine their use of the term by making it seem forced or unnecessary. They prefix it with self-deprecating crap like “excuse me for using the term, but…” or “no other way to say it than…” or “pardon me for being pretentious, but…” That crap undermines not only the term but also your argument. People prefix it so that they don’t alienate their so-called “cool” audience. Hint: They’re not reading this.
In a recent Experience Points podcast, Jorge Albor and Scott Juster just tossed the term into the discussion like it were any other word, made their point and moved on. I got what they were saying and everything kept moving. If you feel there is a stigma with such a term, it’s because you have placed the stigma there. It is a useful term. Really, it’s because to most people it sounds so outrageous that they can’t help but feel that is shouldn’t belong. That feeling is the feeling that games are some lower form of creative work, because something highbrow sounding doesn’t belong; the feeling they aren’t worthy of in-depth discussion. Because that is what Ludonarrative Dissonance is, a term for the facilitating of in-depth discussion of games.
Of course there is the fear that this is a slippery slope towards not being understood in trying to broaden critical ideas to an expanded audience. Fair enough, but that comes down to writing. Contrary to what I normally argue, people are smarter than you think. If you present a word or term and they don’t understand they can figure it out. Especially if you are making an argument where you have to explain the Ludonarrative Dissonance. Give your explanation of how the game is guilty of it, a person can figure out the terms meaning. Not to mention that the definition is in the word itself. The ludo- prefix may stump some people, but every English speaking person knows what narrative is. They can figure out the rest from the explanation. It really is not as exclusionary as people make it out to be.
Now to the more relevant point Corvus Elrod brought up in his post that it is a pointless term, using the example of how we criticize movies or TV.
“So we have a situation where the fight choreography does not uphold the fiction behind the show.
But we don’t refer to this as choreonarrative dissonance. Nor, for that matter, do we refer to the poorly written and delivered dialog as dialonarrative dissonance. Or the lackluster camera work as cinemanarrative dissonance.”No, no we don’t. Why? Because we say all of that in other ways. Yes, we call it bad film making, but at the same time that isn’t good enough. If I asked you about a movie and you said it was bad and I asked why, would I really accept bad film making as the reason? No, because that tells me just as much as saying it was bad. Of course, it was bad film making if it was a bad movie. Pointless choreography, bad writing, awful delivery, shoddy cinematography. These are reasons that can be presented, argued, and defended. I cannot argue something is bad film making, because I have no idea what you are talking about. You have to go further and explain what specifically and then why. The same is true for games. An example back and forth:
“This is a bad game.”
“Okay then what was bad?”
“It has bad game design.”
“Okay then what was bad?”See my problem. You have told me nothing and I end up repeating the question. Tell me something. Ludonarrative dissonance is a something. It is a conflict in the elements of the game. It has a definition that is at least a sentence long, so it becomes shorthand for a concept that frankly is quite common in games today. It is a perfectly valid term for telling what specifically is wrong with a game. Yes, you will have to back up and defend your claim, but that is fundamental to every argument.
The only people who have a legitimate gripe about the term are the Classicists who can’t stand seeing Greek and Latin in the same word. But it’s a bit late for that; it has taken root in the critical lexicon. (Edit: This assertion was based on an argument I had with kateri_t on twitter; I apparently misremembered the issue of that argument.)
Actually, ludonarrative dissonance is one of the few pseudo-Classical gaming terms that doesn’t irritate me (at least, not linguistically). Say what you will about its usage, it is derived from pure Latin, unlike “ludology”, and the like.
I think you can critique what’s bad about a game without covering up the flaws with a fancy word like ludonarrative dissonance. The problem with having a word like that is people throw it around to avoid having to actually talk about exactly why the design is bad. Antagonism toward that word is about uncovering the actual design issues, not ignoring them.
Nowhere in that post do I suggest we leave off at saying something is “bad design” without exploring specifically why. In fact, my entire blog, which incidentally has been called Semionaut’s Notebook since the beginning of the year, is about exploring how meaning is communicated via gameplay.
In fact, you’ve not only completely avoided responding to the very legitimate reasons I lay out in the post for disliking the term LD, but you’ve conflated its etymological origins with ludology, which as Kate points out is the actual word that’s got mingled Latin/Greek roots.
@kateri Sorry, I just remember an argument we had on twitter on the root bases of the term. I was basing it off that. Now curious what we were arguing about.
@Travis I think that problem lies more with those people unable to argue a point rather than anything to do with the term itself. It isn’t a shortcut around talking about design, it is a descriptor to facilitate talking about it. If people use it as an easy route to not say anything, I feel the onus is on them, not the word. I’ll admit that Ludonarrative dissonance is akin to surface level critique more than in depth analysis, but without identifying the problem one cannot fix it.
@Corvus I don’t think I’ve missed your point. I think I just fundamentally disagree with it. You say that game and story have gone hand and hand with each other since the beginning, I agree, but we now have a phenomenon where the ideas of a work are now being contradicted by the supporting mechanics. A game presents to us themes or a creative thesis, if you will, but the supporting evidence isn’t. It works towards a different goal. A term is needed to highlight this issue.
You say at the end of your post, minus the postscript, “So the reality is this; if we intend our games to provide a narrative experience and our game design conflicts with that experience, then we should simply call it what it is–bad game design.” I can’t help but see a flaw in that statement. We can’t just call it bad game design, we have to highlight where and why. Ludonarrative dissonance is a term to facilitate that discussion.
You do fine work at SN (I hadn’t updated the name in my RSS feed) towards looking at mechanics and meaning, but you don’t often look at specifics titles in your posts and that is what ludonarrative dissonance is geared towards. It is a specific critique on specific games.
“People prefix it so that they don’t alienate their so-called “cool” audience. Hint: They’re not reading this.”
Haha, awesome.
Also, I’d argue that “lackluster camera work” isn’t cinemanarrative dissonance if it isn’t specifically undermining the narrative somehow or going in a different direction than the narrative. This I believe is harder to spot or somehow turn into a straight dissonance as easily as it is with ludonarrative dissonance and video games.
What special word do you use when your supporting evidence doesn’t match your thesis in an paper? I can’t remember, but I think it may apply here.
So you’re picking one statement out of an entire post and arguing against that as if it were my entire point? That’ rather like me posting an essay on why your rebuttal has no merit because you think ludonarrative dissonance is of mixed Greek and Latin origin.
Which, come to think of it, since people who think that are the only ones who have a “legitimate gripe” against the term, I’d be pretty within my rights to do.
@Corvus I would agree, except the line is your concluding sentence. (I assume your referring to the quote in my response.) It is the point of your post. It is the pay off to your use of Riverworld and it’s final battle to discuss your feeling of how it is ridiculous to use such made up terms to discuss the specifics. Yes call it bad game design, but there is so much more to bad game design than simply conflicted meaning between narrative concerns and ludic ones. I have reread your post before writing here again and cannot come to any other conclusion about the post.
@Travis An “F”
I certainly can’t speak to Corvus’s intentions in writing his critique of the term. I would like to offer my reading of what he wrote, as it seems different than yours, Eric, and I find that interesting.
When I read Corvus’s post, the main point seems clear: he writes,
“When we use the term ludonarrative dissonance to describe gameplay that does not support that plot and theme of the narrative, we are saying that gameplay is fundamentally other than storytelling. That gameplay and story are somehow haphazardly stapled together in an uncomfortable union.
Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Thus it is problematic that this is not directly addressed in your post or comments.
I think you come close to engaging with the argument when you write, “Ludonarrative dissonance is a something. It is a conflict in the elements of the game,” because of your use of the plural: “elements.”
For me, the entire point of Corvus’s post is that there is no plural; that there is no difference between story and gameplay; that to describe them as separate is to fundamentally misunderstand what a game is and how it works.
I think that that is the basic point with which one must either agree or disagree. My guess is that you disagree, but it’s problematic that I have to guess. =D
I’ve tried arguing over at Corvus’ site and I’m doing it again here. Eric has a point. In fact, a few. LD is a meaningful term because it encapsulates a concept of misaligned messages in different systems that make up a game, and makes it possible to refer to this concept with a single term.
If I understand Corvus correctly, one point of criticism to the whole concept is that it is wrong to even think of a game as competing systems, instead focussing solely on gameplay as mode of transporting meaning. And all of a sudden this feels like deja vú, the old Ludology vs. Narratology thing all over again.
More to the point. If we are to assume that a game consists of different systems, some of which make up the gameplay and others focus more on portraying a series of events parallel to or additionally to the gameplay, then the term has it’s legitimate use. And to me it seems that (I even made a point out of that in my Magister Thesis) normally, gamers are good at identifying which parts of the game convey the story and which parts are there to interact with.
I’m confused as to why academics have to turn a blind eye towards this truth. Developers have different stages in which the story is written and incorporated into the game. Review publications tend to differentiate between story and gameplay in their scores, and players can point out discrepancies between what the game tells them they can and cannot do and what the game shows the character do during cutscenes. And that would be an example for ludonarrative dissonance.
Yes and in my post I specifically discuss WHY the choreography in Riverworld is “bad choreography.” Why would I do that is “call it bad game design” is my entire approach?
In fact, the inference in my post is that “ludonarrative dissonance” is no more descriptive or meaningful–and in fact is actually far more inaccurate and misleading–than the phrase “bad game design.”
I clearly don’t believe the conversation should end with either statement.
“It’s why the “rah-rah kill them” mentality of the Cogs is somewhat undermined by the fact they cower behind chest high walls at every opportunity despite wearing refrigerators.”
That strikes me as ludonarrative resonance; undermining the tough-guy images the characters present is Gears of War’s central narrative theme. The game is chock full of moments illustrating how deep-down these characters are actually scared, vulnerable, and desperate. An “ooh-rah kill them” attitude is a highly adaptive reaction to this kind of situation, no matter how silly it might seem to us civilians.
I think the term may have too many syllables. But I can’t think of a better, more concise way of describing the problem it describes, so I won’t complain. I happen to think that 90% of cinematics cause this problem simply by denying agency to the player and by bifurcating the motives of the player and the avatar.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoshForeman/20100729/5668/Why_I_Hate_Stories_in_Video_Games.php
All A are B, therefore all B are A.
All cats are mammals, therefore all mammals are cats.
All ludonarrative dissonance is bad game design, therefore all bad game design is ludonarrative dissonance.
I was bored recently, so I borrowed my brother’s uni textbook to read. This seems almost straight out of it. It was one of the first few fallacies listed, if not the first.
Just because a cat is a mammal, and some people get confused by the term “cat”, doesn’t mean we should refer to them as “that mammal stole my sandwich”, because without giving the context, that could mean “that tiger stole my sandwich”.
You shouldn’t just say it’s bad because it’s bad game design, you should say it’s bad because of [insert TYPE of bad game design here]. Circular definitions are invalid (as was mentioned above).
Corvus:
“Yes and in my post I specifically discuss WHY the choreography in Riverworld is “bad choreography.” Why would I do that is “call it bad game design” is my entire approach?
In fact, the inference in my post is that “ludonarrative dissonance” is no more descriptive or meaningful–and in fact is actually far more inaccurate and misleading–than the phrase “bad game design.”
I clearly don’t believe the conversation should end with either statement.”
—
This is a really retarded statement.
Ludonarrative dissonance is just a term, like ‘cognitive dissonance’ or ‘moral hypocrisy’ or ‘malignant introspection’. It’s the kind of word that I can see a lot of people using just because it sounds big and fancy, but really it’s just a block of code compacted into a single method call.
If someone is pro-life, and preaches Christianity, yet is a selfish, angry person who takes his frustrations out on others, supports a political party that decimates the poor population and supports the death penalty, I would call him a hypocrite and accuse him of cognitive dissonance. A long-winded statement, sure, but I think it proves a specific point.
Ludonarrative dissonance is a specific thing, like cognitive dissonance. If someone holds conflicting ideas, I don’t simply say that they are a ‘bad thinker’ and end it at that. And I wouldn’t call someone else pretentious because they said, ‘cognitive dissonance’. It’s just stupid.
The other point of your argument, that gameplay and story (or narrative) are inseparable, are in essence the same thing, is also wrong. In music, for example, the act of listening to a piece, imposing your own thoughts and opinions on it, and interpreting it based on the current state of your mind is a wildly different concept than composing the music and recording it.
You may think that this has nothing to do with games, but I disagree, because I think that games can be a deep form of art, just like music. I think that, to believe that gameplay and delivery are the same thing is implying that you think games are simpler than they really are. And while this might be true of a lot of games, there are certainly some that outshine that definition.
This whole argument, though, is a product of modern culture. In defining a meta-property like the “narration through play”, people are actually -creating- this as an aspect to appreciate the medium. When you say that it is a phantom, or a straw man, you are destroying it and narrowing your own view of the medium.
One of the first things I ever ran into studying philosophy, is the kind of person that would make this argument. The deeper you go in philosophy and philology, there is always a point of view on the same level that says, ‘but really, this is all nonsense, because it does not truly exist.’.
I believe, though, that this idea that it does not exist is just a superimposing of one’s own desire to berate the subject, to say to the world that anyone who tries to expand the horizons of something is wasting their time, because there is no horizon, there is nothing left to plumb, and they are above the highest line of discovery.
It may sound strange, but I take personal offense to the kind of thinker that Corvus is. I’m not trying to sound dickish or anything, but it reminds me of way too many philosophical arguments, and since a game’s narrative, in any form, is essentially literature, I believe that it is grounded in philosophy.
In a weird way, it reminds me of C.G. Jung. But I won’t go into that.
Great read.