DAN: -Hey, kids! It's everybody's favorite
whipping boy of the critical term!
It's ludonarrative dissonance.
Off the top here, this is ultimately going to be
a defense of ludonarrative dissonance
as a critical concept,
as a tool for descriptive criticism.
But first, a bit of backstory.
"Ludonarrative dissonance" as a term
was coined by Clint Hocking
in a 2007 blogpost titled
"Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock:
The problem of what the game is about."
In the post, Clint argues that there is a disconnect
between the story told by
the game's mechanical interactions
and the story told by the game's narrative interaction,
that while the game appears to thematically criticize
Randian Objectivism as a foundational philosophy
and works this criticism into the game's interactions,
the same doesn't hold true for the game's fiction.
Quote, "Yet in the game's fiction on the other hand,
I do not have that freedom to choose
between helping Atlas or not.
Under the ludic contract,
if I accept to adopt an Objectivist approach,
I can harvest Little Sisters.
If I reject that approach, I can rescue them.
Under the story, if I reject an Objectivist approach,
I can help Atlas and oppose Ryan,
and if I choose to adopt an Objectivist approach –
well too bad… I can stop playing the game,
but that's about it."
This idea of pointing out when a game's mechanics
are being dissonant with the game's fiction
enjoyed a brief period where it was all the rage,
the hot, new thing to point to in games,
and subsequent to that, it also saw a pushback
and reevaluation of its value as a concept.
On his series "Errant Signal,"
Chris Franklin, AKA Campster,
described it this way in his 2015 video,
"The Debate That Never Took Place."
CHRIS: -Like, story and play both exist
in service to the overall work,
not as two forces in conflict with one another.
So... why do we frame them that way?
It'd be like going to the movies,
and then, afterwards, talking with friends
about how the film worked as a story,
and then talking about how the film worked
as an example of cinematography,
but never at the same time.
You'd never do that,
and definitely not in a way that would posit a film
as "cinemanarratively dissonant."
DAN: -Now, I love that video,
and I love that clip in particular
for a couple reasons.
First, that video as a whole makes a great point
about the need for games criticism
to accept games as a whole text,
that we should evaluate games
not as a collection of systems on one side
and a collection of fiction on the other,
but as a coherent whole
that either works or doesn't.
In particular, Chris is concerned
with this approach to games criticism,
especially the forms of games criticism
that exist in reviews,
that very much compartmentalize the two faces
of the game in a way that will lead to discussing games
as "Great gameplay, but the story sucks!"
or "Great story! Shame about the gameplay!"
And on this front, I should say yes!
I agree. We should, as a baseline,
treat games as a whole text.
If the story is bad and doesn't set up coherent themes
or if it is ugly, dehumanizing, and insulting,
then that should count as a mark against the game,
no matter how fun it is to bend bullets.
However, in calling for that sort of holistic approach,
critics have inadvertently tossed
the baby out with the bathwater,
which brings me to the second thing
that I loved about that previous clip.
Chris has, in setting up a counterexample,
accidentally created a great mechanism for criticism,
because there absolutely are films that
I would describe as "cinemanarratively dissonant."
"Transformers," for one.
By the text of the script
for the two films that she is in,
the character of Mikaela Banes is smart, funny,
talented, driven, hard-working, quick-thinking,
courageous, and mature.
She is an active agent in the plot,
she comes up with plans,
and her personal arc meshes with the rest of the film.
The simple fact that she is a mechanic
gives her more thematic connection
to the Transformers than anything going on with Sam.
However, the camera treats Mikaela as a piece of meat.
People perceive her as being superfluous eye candy,
as nagging, as irrational,
because that is how she is consistently framed.
The cinematography is not, strictly speaking, bad.
It is, in its own sphere, competent and well-executed.
Mikaela's writing simultaneously is not bad,
but they are not in agreement with each other.
There is cinemanarrative dissonance there.
The story told by the camera does not agree
with the one being told by the script.
I actually think that right there
is a great conceptual tool for critics to use
to describe why something that is
technically proficient on the whole isn't working,
and within games criticism,
I think the idea of ludonarrative dissonance
is a valuable tool that complements
a holistic approach to games criticism
rather than detracts from it
because it makes it easier to describe
when the story is telling one message
and the mechanics are telling another.
Now, taken as a whole,
this kind of dissonance is less common in film.
Film as a medium is more mature,
the language is more established,
and the production methods have generally worked out
most of the kinks in terms of getting everyone involved
on the same page in terms of theme and tone.
That's not so much the case in games.
Even asking about the themes of gameplay,
the story told by mechanical interactions,
is still a really new idea.
Most filmmakers today have learned
the grammar of film by virtue of growing up
watching films made by filmmakers
who grew up watching films made by filmmakers,
who's tinkered around asking themselves questions
about theme and story and structure and tone.
With video games, we are right now still
in that first wave of creators and critics and readers
who are asking questions like
"What story is the gameplay telling?,"
and because games are often made
in compartmentalized ways
with the writers over here and the designers over there,
it is simply more common for
the two disciplines to tell different stories.
Clint's example still stands.
It's not that the fiction of Bioshock is bad
or that the gameplay is awful,
but simply that the two aren't
in agreement with each other.
To me, the idea of ludonarrative dissonance
gives us a way to acknowledge when both teams
have done their jobs well in isolation,
but have, perhaps, failed to support each other,
or whoever has led the project has failed to keep
everyone pointed towards the same thematic/tonal goal
So what do you think?
Let me know in the comments
if you think the idea of dissonance is
a valuable critical tool for descriptive criticism,
or are they just, like, games, man?