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For now I'm
going to end this series on game design and drama with a look at the
most hated idea in games criticism.
I have a confession to make to those are mostly unfamiliar with my twitter. I do not hate the term Ludonarrative Dissonance. I know, shocking. Criminal, even. But if having useful terminology is wrong, then I don't wanna be right.
I have a confession to make to those are mostly unfamiliar with my twitter. I do not hate the term Ludonarrative Dissonance. I know, shocking. Criminal, even. But if having useful terminology is wrong, then I don't wanna be right.
The term
has been falling out of favor in game critic circles since . . . well
honestly I'm not sure anyone has openly embraced it since maybe 2009,
and the term was invented in 2007, so I'm not sure any majority of
critics has ever liked it. As well, now that some brilliant
writer has decided to tell us that Mad Mad: Fury Road, one
of the most expertly crafted action films of the past 25 years
suffers from “filmic dissonance” instead of displaying that he
knows Fucking Anything about movies or cinematic language, my uphill
battle to save the term from the jaws of death just became a climb up
a smooth cement wall while cynics shit in my gorgeous hair.
Nevertheless,
I am resolute. As I have said more or less since I started writing
criticism two years ago, ludonarrative dissonance is a useful term
that helps describe something that absolutely, definitely, without
question exists.
However it
should also be noted that, like any other technique, which is what it
definitely is, ludonarrative dissonance is not inherently a problem.
Games like Metal Gear Solid,
Spec Ops: The Line and
even to some degree Final Fantasy VII
have been gladly invoking the dissonance between their narrative
themes and what their systems encourage. The problem isn't
ludonarrative dissonance, it's that the games that have been invoking
it are using it poorly.
It's
also a problem because, as critics keep trying to move away from the
term, LND keeps happening in games in a problematic way. See for
example the recently released Only If,
which the critic Chris Franklin describes thusly:
The
game is very much about a college student in his early-20's getting
abducted by an older man for a vague, yet menacing purpose, then
critiquing both of them. But it's also about this absurdism
experiment. And the two never really reconcile.
To be
clear, the story described in the first half of the sentence takes
place entirely as radio communication between the two men, whereas
the absurdism is entirely a result of the game's interfacial aspects:
it's mechanic set and level design. And as Franklin goes on to
describe, the game is presenting absurd mechanics in the context of a
still very non-absurd universe. There is a clear conflict between
what the developer of Only If
wanted to be as a set of interactions and as a story. That it is
suffering from misapplied Ludonarrative Dissonance could not be any
more clear.
Powerful
things have been done with ludonarrative dissonance in games, and in
general dissonance as a tool in media. For game developers to be able
to consciously grab hold of it and use it to it's full potential, we
need to be able to study dissonance and practice it, and for that to
happen, we must continually acknowledge that it is there.
A good step
forward into the study of dissonance then would be to acknowledge the
other kinds of dissonance that exist in media. In fact, the biggest
problem with “ludonarrative dissonance” as a term is mostly that
people have overused the term by applying it to games that do not
exhibit ludonarrative dissonance, a good example being the dissonance
that legitimately exists between Nathan Drake's presented likability
in the Uncharted games and
the fact that he murders hundreds if not thousands of people, often
while spitting ruthless aggression that dehumanizes them. This is not
LND, that is, this is not a contradiction between what interfacing
with the game subtextually encourages and what the game's narrative
subtextually is about, in fact, though I've no experience with
Uncharted 2, I've
heard people explain interpretations of the game in casual settings
that show a fair amount of thematic consistency.
Others have
used this to demonstrate the supposed uselessness of the term, here I
will formally retort that it only demonstrates the specificity
of Ludonarrative Dissonance as a term, which only shows us that more
terms like LND should exist, not less, given the utter lack of terms
we as game critics commonly wield to describe narrative topics in
games . . . outside of LND.
As
a category containing Ludonarrative Dissonance, I would suggest the
adoption of simply “dissonance” to describe, well, dissonance in
games and media between their various elements, as a general term to
be used when LND isn't exactly correct, and then also propose the
freeform creation of multiple other terms with what we could call the
“[prefix]-dissonance” form as their commonality becomes
codifiable. I'd suggest that, like I've been doing with the “ludo”
prefix, that the use of the “[prefix]-dissonance” form can be
done with more improvisational spirit than has been done in the past.
Our terminology is not sacred.
Perhaps
a game does not use or missaply ludonarrative dissonance, but it can
have, for example, audio-interactive dissonance, a dissonance between
what kind of sound a game uses to set an atmosphere and what kind of
sounds a game makes in response to player input, and what the player
avatar is actually doing in the gamespace, like a dating sim with a
Silent Hill soundtrack. Or maybe it has visual-thematic
dissonance, a disconnect between the art style employed and the
narrative and political implications thereof, and the weight or lack
thereof within the game's considered concepts, such as exists and
is strategically employed in games like Final Fantasy IX.
I
would also suggest the existence of “tonal dissonance,” one of
these kinds of dissonances which exists in all media and is
especially prevalent in commercial videogames, that is yet without
codified terminology.
While
I'm loathe to give an utterly specific definition, I think a workable
one would be just that: a contradiction between how media presents
something and what is quote-unquote “true” about it. Or, if you
prefer, a disconnect between the positive or negative light something
is shone in, and the positive and negative qualities of what it
actually has. Wrestling fans should be especially familiar with how
this kind of thing works. John Cena does an AA on Seth Rollins at
Night of Champions, not during a match, outside of the ring, right
before Rollins has to wrestle again, indulging his own ego. In the
feud, he is presented as the good guy.
This
is, to me, exactly what is happening in Uncharted 2.
The contradiction is specifically in how the game presents Nathan
Drake as a person, showing him as a jokey archaeologist in cutscenes
and as a coldhearted murdered during shooting segments. It feels
particularly dissonant as well because at no point does the game make
a genuine effort to reconcile the two people that Nathan Drake is
presented as.
Improperly
applied tonal dissonance was also a huge issue in Bioshock:
Infinite, a game that was
alternatively a quiet, very silly ramble on how maybe everyone
is racist and then a game about how fun it is to murder people, with
nary a connecting line drawn between the two. The superfluous nature
of combat in Infinite
meant that the combat also is unobligated to link itself to the
game's narrative tone, such that we get yet another strong example of
the harsh divide between ludus and narrative that Hocking first
codified when discussing the original Bioshock,
a game that, ironically enough, has almost zero tonal dissonance at
all. However, I would argue that, as a game whose narrative is
ostensibly about asserting Booker DeWitt's place as a white
patriarch, that combat wherein he asserts his masculinity and
dominance, particularly over people of color is not at all dissonant
with that core thematic concept. There is tonal disconnect all over
the game, but there is not any ludonarrative
dissonance specifically.
Tonal
dissonance is of course, not new, nor is it distinct to videogames.
It's also a technique that is easy to misuse moreso than it is a
“problem” of any sort. It's one of the fundamental techniques of
black comedy, and a common tool used by David Lynch, particularly in
mashing the awkward and uncomfortable against the heartbreaking and
tragic. A lot of videogames have used tonal dissonance in a carefully
applied sense to point out the messed up values inherent in how games
present violence, a notable exampled being Suda51's No More
Heroes where dead enemies spurt
blood and coins in seemingly equal measure. Kojima's Metal
Gear Solid titles have
consistently used sudden interruptions of surreal humor partially as
a method of asserting the artificiality of their gamespaces.
In
the pleas to end “ludonarrative dissonance” as a term used in
games criticism, it seems as though what's being implied is that it
does not exist. I, of course, go about as far in the opposite
direction as conceivably possible, and assert that, in videogames, as
across media, there exists a vast, wide variety of dissonances. As
with Ludonarrative Dissonance then, the course of action is to know
when a game or a piece of media is exploiting that dissonance in a
purposeful way, or whether the contradictions cause the artifice to
collapse.
From
Olympia, WA: Play Is Labor. I'm Austin C. Howe.
