Am I Ludonarrative dissonance?

 No, Brother. We are Ludonarrative- and dissonant!

Never teach a big word to a community of pseudo-intellectuals, you'll just be feeding fuel to their narcissism-engine. Just like with any term or concept, the very second that the term starts to float around the snotty-nosed of the industry it melts into the vernacular of the common tongue, thrown about with as much pretentious gusto as a Latin major loves to regurgitate pithy witticism in a dead tongue. The very term of 'Ludonarrative dissonance' itself is a 2007 coined phrase that just squeezes down a lengthy concept that every one who plays games is already decently familiar with; but of course with simplifications eventually comes the dissolution of the original meaning, tainting the original purpose. Suddenly if you want to critique anything that slightly relates to the idea, you're throwing the shiny word about like a club, killing any potential dialogue with a rambunctious play at intellectual superiority.

So in terms of a laymen, like myself; what the heck is Ludonarrative dissonance? Well it's fairly simple if you break it down. Ludus, Latin for 'Play'- Hideo Kojima traced the same etymology on his 'Ludens' mascot for Kojima Productions. Narrative- relation to the story. And 'Dissonance'; indicating a conflict which prevents the two sides from meeting. 'Ludonarrative dissonance' thus refers to inconsistencies between the gameplay and storytelling of a video game which creates an environment where one aspect doesn't quite compliment or shake hands with the other. The example which is always used is a game wherein you play a snappy wise-cracking happy-go-lucky hero man, like 'Uncharted', only to end up driven to acts of mass murder and gunfights throughout the gameplay which should, if we're being real here, probably have some sort of psychological effect on the witty man. Or at the very least prelude to some sort of latent psychopathy that the game has yet to explore. Hence the dissonance.

It is a common 'problem', if you choose to perceive it as such, but in practise the very ideal of ludonarrative dissonance only drives a wedge into total story immersion in truly egregious circumstances. The cast of Grand Theft Auto V, for example, may be largely level-headed and non-psychotic before the player gets ahold of them; (or rather, 2/3 of them are non-psychotic) but the game itself doesn't force players to act like crazy people, those are choices made by the player in their own free time. This could still be seen as an example of ludonarrative dissonance, of course, but in a more minor fashion and only on a very surface level if you choose not to really examine the characters you play as. Because in general Rockstar are actually very proficient at writing their characters smothered in so many flaws and hypocritical moral compunctions that there's very few of them you can picture accidentally running over a whole side walk and not managing to twist the incident in their heads into not making them the worst person in the world through tortured perspectives. I think John Marston from Red Dead Redemption 1 is perhaps the only character lacking in the hypocritical shield that protects him from potential 'dissonance', because his whole story is designed to be his redemption journey from the thug he was into a reformed avenging angel literally killing his past to make up for it. Yet still the player could go nuts and murder a whole covenant of nuns. (Not that I ever did that. My dad on the otherhand...)

Most of the examples that I do see bought up as poster-children for this concept quite often rub me the wrong way too. The new Tomb Raider games are apparently a beacon for 'Ludonarrative Dissonance' accusations, despite the fact that these games are specifically written to address this side of the storytelling. Lara is put up against hardships that we follow her with throughout the first act, from being shipwrecked on an island, pulling jagged rocks out of her stomach and being forced to kill a deer for sustenance leading up to the first moment she has to actually kill someone in a desperate struggle for self defence. The game does as good of a job as it can, without sacrificing momentum of the plot, to portray the 'hardening' of Lara to justify the intense combat she is thrown up against later, and the writers even touch on the psychological scars of that entire game in the prelude to the next one, which is more than most any other game out there even thinks to do. But perhaps that's just not enough for some critics who waggle their fingers at the fact that Lara doesn't burst down into vomitus tears after every combat encounter, as she tries to weigh up the value of her own life against that of the murderous pirate rapists that she's killing. (Maybe that would be their ideal 'Ludonarrative synch up' game!)

Doing the best to balance the wants of the game and the wants of the narrative is how one deftly combats both sides of this ludonarrative issue; and yes, perhaps the equation does not always line up in a perfectly neat bow where we see a perfect psychological breakdown, medically vetted, detailing how Lara enters the mental state of being ready to kill her way to survival. But the groundwork is laid there, Crystal Dynamics did provide a narrative of the 'hardening' of Lara to justify the lives she takes, and it's a bit galling for one of the only games that really tries to be narratively aware get dragged down and disparaged as the poster child for wanton narrative dissonance. It's as if the attempt itself is what makes them a target of questionable dissemination from the types of people who only kinda get what the concept means and is looking for a example case they don't have to think too hard about. It's screwed up.

Another curiosity I saw, rather recently in fact, was the conflation of video-game scaled narrative accomplishment as itself a dinner bell for the 'ludonarrative dissonance' sharks. Specifically I saw the argument that Cal Kestis, protagonist of 'Jedi: Fallen Order', is a posterboy for this sort of dissonant story writing because of the fact that Cal refers to himself as a 'good guy Jedi' despite killing hundreds of Stormtroopers throughout the course of the game. Now, this one I really had to scratch my head at, because as far as I'm aware within the wider lore of every Star Wars film and comic I've ever read, it's never been considered morally dubious or questionable to kill a Stormtrooper. The fascistic military tyrants placing their boot on the throat of the Galaxy? No, they've happily and handily been slain by ordinary people, rebel outfits and Jedi Knights (do try and remember that Jedi serve as actual 'Knights' in the galaxy, not pacifistic 'Air Bender' monks) all the time without the question of if someone is still a 'good person' on the otherend.

Which means the only distinction between how the movies and books depict actions and how the game depicts them, is the scaling of just how many Stormtroopers Cal slays through the natural act of scaling that video games, as a much longer form of entertainment, are beholden to commit to. Cal has probably on-screen murdered more Stormtroopers than any other character in the films or TV aside from, perhaps, Luke Skywalker when he blew up the Death Star. So does that scale in itself invite in questions of moral cracking, enough to summon accusations of 'ludonarrative dissonance'? This speaks again to my prevailing theme of the disintegrating meaning of the term as it's passed from pseudointellectuals making bad examples to causal luddites extrapolating upon misnomers. As the commonly held general belief is that killing is wrong, the umbrella application of that general standard confers wrongdoing into all forms of fiction, regardless of context, twisting all killing into an equal unjustifiable 'murders'. Thus, through the inevitable scale of accomplishment in near all video games, this perspective should turn every video game protagonist into a mass murderer. Thus any game where you don't play as a mass murderer is ludonarratively dissonant, right?

I hope you can start to see the fallacy in this way of characterising what was original coined as a pithy summation of wanting narrative trends in evaluation of Bioshock, one of the most narratively confronting games that had existed in gaming up to that point. Bioshock, a game which went out of it's way to ask you, the player, why is it that you do the things you do. It's fitting then, that a opinion on the game should coin a term about the examination between gameplay and context, but sad that the meaning and relevance of that discussion would become watered down and meaningless over the years. Consider this my application in the 'stop using Ludonarrative Dissonance freely without understanding it's meaning' defence fund. And maybe, if you have a point that only sounds firm if you phrase it with big compound words that sound impressive on their own, maybe your point isn't so firm as you think. Maybe you should analyse the context a little harder- lest you start falling victim to Fabulanarrative Dissonance!