Ludonarrative dissonance

Now there’s a pretentious word. Makes me feel all gross and icky just to type it. But I think it’s an important piece of technobabble for talking about games and writing, so I thought I’d give you an easy to understand refresher course on the whole thing. Ready?

It’s a word used in chin-stroking conversations about video games, and horribly ostentatious blog posts. Uh, like this one. It basically describes a disharmony or imbalance between events that take place during gameplay (the ludo bit) and things that happen in the cutscenes (the narrative bit).

Take pulpy, punchy pow-pow action adventure epic Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.  Drake shrugs off a thousand bullets in combat, repairing vital organs and stemming blood loss just by crouching behind a bit of rock. But as soon as control is taken away, and it moves to cutscene, our intrepid hero is taken out of the action with a single bullet to the belly.

Or how about in The Darkness, where Jacky uses his spooky demon arm-pals to leap across rooftops and swing between balconies in the cutscenes, but once the control is back in your hands he’s as stodgy and immobile as a week old crumpet.

But those are tiny, inconsequential conflicts between mechanics and plot. That’s only scratching the surface of the term. What about games where the entire theme is defied by its mechanics?

Like Uncharted, again. During cutscenes Nathan Drake is affable and charming. Sometimes he’s mouthy and sarcastic, and sometimes he’s a flirtatious scamp. He talks his way out of problems, and goads his enemies with witty remarks and scathing comebacks.

But in the game, Drake is a coldly efficient killing machine, dropping enemies with knowingly placed headshots, barrages of AK-47 fire and fiery grenade blasts. Over the course of two PS3 games he’s racked up a higher kill count than John Rambo and Genghis Khan’s freaky love child, Khanbo, but doesn’t seem to have a slither of remorse or guilt about the whole thing.

In short: In the cutscenes, Nate is a charmer. In the game, Nate is a psychopath.

And, as much as I adore the Uncharted games, that kind of sucks. One of the franchise’s biggest draws is this everyman persona of Drake. He’s not a superhero, a trained soldier or a hardened mercenary. In fact, he’s a bit rubbish: he’s cowardly, he gets out of most situations through pure luck and only one side of his shirt is tucked in, the big scruff. So to suddenly say he’s capable of mascaraing the entire pirate and hired Russian mercenary population without so much as a scratch, sort of wrecks the whole persona that Naughty Dog has built up.

Same goes for other loveable heroes and anti-heroes that the developers try so hard to get us to emphasise with. We’re supposed to root for the regretful Niko Bellic, trying to leave his murderous past back in vaguely-middle-eastern-country. And then Grand Theft Auto IV throws us headfirst into stages where we murder hundreds of police officers, just for some money we don’t really need.

Clint Hocking, the Far Cry 2 designer who, as far as I can tell, coined the hateful term, argues that Bioshock is a particularly egregious example. When you come across the Little Sisters, the themes running beneath the game says we should put aside our greedy, selfish ways and instead be nice and empathic, regardless of the cool shit we’ll miss out on.

Except: you don’t miss out on any cool shit. You’re actually rewarded for being the hero and scolded for being evil. Play through the game both ways, and tally up how much free shit you get, and it works out better to be the happy, cheery, sympathetic hero than the grizzly, greedy, nasty bastard. It sort of shatters the illusion, and is deceitful to the game’s core themes.

It’s something that game developers need to work on, and to stop thinking of story and gameplay as two distinct elements. They need to get together, get married and bump uglies throughout the development cycle, to make sure that the things you do aren’t in direct conflict with the things you say.

One day, I’ll talk about some games that, I think, take this idea on board and make it really work. Where the story and gameplay mechanics lock together like Ikea furniture. Until then.