When we talk about ludonarrative dissonance, we usually treat it as a bad thing.
For those unfamiliar, ludonarrative dissonance is when a game's story as at odds with its
narrative.
The classic example is an RPG where your heroes must avert some sort of world-ending crisis
but still find time for a fishing minigame.
On a gameplay level, this totally works—you want to experience all the game’s secondary
content before you complete its main plot–but on a narrative one, having the heroes putt
off the the climax of the story in favor of sidequests just doesn’t make sense.
Ludonarrative dissonance, then, is a game’s failing, a tacit admission that gameplay and
narrative follow different rules, something the player ultimately has to ignore to keep
the experience immersive.
It’s bad, basically.
But I’d argue that it doesn’t have to be.
In fact, tension between how a game plays and what it means can be propulsive, making
the audience follow along to see, if nothing else, how these dissonant elements will work
together.
For example, Doki Doki Literature Club is driven almost entirely by the vast space between
its cheery gameplay and the darkness of its story.
Playing (or watching Northern Lion play) is interesting, even knowing that it’s going
to subvert genre expectations, because I’m curious how its going to resolve the tension
inherent in a horror dating simulator.
Whether or not you’d argue that the game actually manages it, I’m curious to see
it try.
There's a similar tension in the metal gear solid series.
I was originally going to describe it as ludonarrative dissonance, but it's not quite that–the
exaggerated stealth/action gameplay and story of animal-themed terrorists actually work
together pretty easily.
Its more that the games' ambitious themes, full-blown treatises on Society and The Human
Condition, that don't quite fit with the sneaking and boss-fighting that make up the main gameplay
loop.
This ludothematic tension, though, is just as compelling as the ludonarrative.
Going into a metal gear game, there's a real sense of mystery as to how its critical and
literary aspirations will align with a guy who throws bees at you.
Part of this may just be that the, and I say this lovingly, genre shlock of the surface
action is a candy coating for the bitter pill of Hideo Kojima’s Big Thoughts, but the
distance between those two things is a compelling element itself.
I play the game to find out what happens in the story, to get better weapons and wackier
costumes, but also to see how this pulpy absurdity is going to end up meaning something important.
Like the jaws of a mouse trap, there is potential energy in the space between game and theme,
and within that space, the promise of the two snapping together.
Which brings us to Death Stranding, Kojima’s followup to Metal Gear.
A common complaint I've heard is that its gameplay is boring, and it's a complaint that
I've had myself.
But the reason that it's boring, I'd argue, is not because it's inherently dull but because
there is next to zero tension between it and game's themes.
Death Stranding is about the importance of connection amidst isolation.
It announces this immediately, opening with a quote from writer Kobo Abe: “The Rope,
along with The Stick, are two of mankind’s oldest tools.
The stick to keep the bad away, the rope to bring the good towards us.”
The sorta-literal push and pull of these concepts is clear in the game’s premise: you play
as Sam Porter Bridges, tasked with reconnecting a splintered America, folding cut-off outposts
and lone doomsday preppers into a single community.
We are shown both humanity’s willingness to push others away and the value of coming
together in spite of it.
A recurring image is the hand: Though capable of becoming a fist, the hand can also reach
out and bring people together.
Indeed, the image for the game’s Likes system–like social media likes, providing no increase
in power, just a reminder that NPCs and other players appreciate you–is very deliberately
a hand, thumbs up.
You are to be The Rope that draws the good together, the hand that clasps in union.
The game’s theme, repeated often and loudly enough that you’ll pick up on it by, if
nothing else, osmosis, is connection in a disconnected world.
And the gameplay is…connecting a disconnected world!
You perform deliveries and build communities among the damp volcanic wasteland of America's
corpse.
You carry all sorts of stuff–food and medicine and building supplies, sure, but also art
and mementos and human remains.
With each delivery, you increase that settlement’s connectedness to the greater “chiral network,”
the ultra-internet you’re single-handedly expanding, and with greater connectedness,
you’re allowed more resources and facilities so you can make deliveries further out and
expand the network even more.
It’s a very lonely world, especially at first, with just about all the people you’re
delivering to actively pushing others away, but your progression as a player is wholly
tied to bringing them together.
The gameplay, then, is a perfect representation of Death Stranding's themes.
A little too perfect.
Acting as a post-apocalyptic courier is so on-the-nose for the point the game is trying
to make that the result is something that feels heavy-handed.
There's plenty of narrative intrigue, and a steady drip of new items and equipment that
open up new avenues of gameplay, but because there is no ludothematic tension, there's
no mystery.
It is an 80 hour game that feels solved within 90 minutes, and in that case, the actual quality
of the gameplay is insignificant: it's boring because you already know what it means.
So when I started Death Stranding, I wasn't really hooked.
I did the deliveries, I expanded the network, I acted as a rope, as the hand reaching out,
but like the jaded Sam at the start of his obvious character arc, I didn't really buy
into this quest for connection.
Until I could build roads.
In the game’s first area, you can't build roads, and you feel it.
Everything is wild and unpaved, the slick and craggy terrain of what’s very clearly
Iceland but we're pretending is exploded America.
Even without the invisible monsters, traversing this land is tough, with Sam losing his balance
on uneven ground or getting swept away by snaking rivers.
Fairly early on, you get access to vehicles, but the jags and cliffs batter them and your
cargo both.
The going is hard, and the resistance you face trying to connect this world is visceral.
But then, after you've come to appreciate just how uncooperative this environment is,
you get the option to change it.
You can, using large quantities of earned and pilfered resources, construct a road system
that connects the lonesome settlements and isolated depots.
And the difference the roads make is *huge*: having trekked through unpaved wilderness
to deliver a man's pizza, every other second punctuated with your bike ramming into a rock,
you relish a nice, flat, easy surface, a near-effortless trip between two points that bypasses all
the rivers and mountains and struggle that you've become accustomed to.
It is an absolutely massive leap forward in the gameplay.
And, because the gameplay is so unsubtly aligned with the theme, it's a massive leap forward
in the themes as well.
Because with the roads you are, in a literal and meaningful way, connecting people.
Unlike all of your deliveries to this point, which are important but ultimately temporary
connection, the roads are a permanent (or close enough) link between hubs.
The difficulty of travel is so much less with the roads that you're happy to run supplies
from point A to point B.
This world, once atomized and shattered, is, through your efforts, one step closer to being
whole.
And this is the point that Death Stranding really started to work for me.
It had forgeone the ludothematic tensions of the Metal Gear Solid games, the innate
mystery of how gameplay and story and theme will converge, for something more direct and
far riskier: saying something so clearly and loudly that the audience comes to believe
in it.
To mean something obvious, yes, but to use every trick of the medium to make it feel
profound despite the obviousness.
It is, absolutely heavy-handed, leaden, even, almost bashing you with the meaning of the
text.
But as the game's hand motif reminds us, as easily as it can ball into a fist, a stick
to keep away the bad, a hand can clasp another and pull you into the good.
And Death Stranding, unencumbered by subtlety and driven by an almost embarrassing earnestness,
all its elements perfectly united, holds its hand out to the player and asks you to join.
Thanks for watching!
I just wanted to take this time to share some really heartfelt appreciation for the response
to the last video–it’s beyond anything I could have hoped for, and every comment
with kind words or encouragement or some other really depressing flavor text means a lot.
As this video suggests, I won’t be doing exclusively Magic content moving forward,
though I absolutely will revisit it.
I want this channel to be an outlet for whatever I’m interested in, and the goal for each
video is that it be interesting even if you’re not familiar with the entertainment I’m
referencing.
Also, to be totally transparent, while I really really like Magic and have been playing it
for more than a decade, I’m just not sure I have a full channel’s worth of interesting
things to say about it.
Moving forward, I will be doing more of these shorter video essays–they’re more accessible
and fun to make and a lot less daunting of a project–but I’ll still be putting out
longer videos as the subject matter calls for it.
The Final Fantasy 7 one is coming, but I’ve realized I need to run through the script
again.
I do also have a Patreon with, and I cannot overstate my excitement and surprise about
this, patrons: Shoutout to Pose and Erik K. for making this all possible.
I also have a Twitter account that’s the social media I use most often.
Check them out if you’re interested!
As always, let me know what you think about the video, any other examples of good ludonarrative
dissonance, and if, uh, I used too much music on this one.
Take care!