Ludonarrative Dissonance Followup

A followup to a post on Ludonarrative Dissonance, where I talked about the concept and two games in particular that suffered heavily from its issues. I pointed out those two in particular because they were so heavily talked about as new paradigms for videogames as a whole, when they were really cheap trash stuck so far in the past that it was unbelivable anyone would praise them without having recieved financial compensation for doing so. However, I am considering that this is a much wider issue than I previously let on.

One thing you have to realize about the issue is that, like, a lot of games have it. An overwhelming majority of the games out there. It’s largely ignored because there’s a missing bit of game design philosophy that just wasn’t present until pretty recently, and that’s the idea that ‘gameplay’ and ‘story’ aren’t separate things.

If you think about really early games, story and gameplay really were completely separate things. On Atari/PC games the most you might get for a story is what’s written in the manual, with any sort of advanced storytelling being left entirely to 1 dimensional adventure games where you type a bunch of bullshit commands in the vague hope that something might happen. Get ye flask, get ye parapets etc.

Then story started to kind of appear in videogames starting around the time the NES was popular. It wasn’t the most common thing, and was pretty limited. Of particular note, the NES and home computers at the time had very limited memory, so Japanese games were all limited to telling their stories without using kanji, which… kind of imagine the game’s word selection was limited to whatever Simple Wikipedia uses. Everything was very simple. It wasn’t impossible to get kanji in your games, just uncommon.

Around the SNES/Genesis, the stories start getting a little more complicated, and kanjis start actually being used. Playstation shows up, buncha games come out trying to experiment with their stories. Playstation 2 shows up, even more experimentation…

Problem is, throughout all of this there STILL wasn’t really the idea that gameplay and story could even be the same thing. The story was what happened inbetween what you were doing, and the gameplay just an abstraction of how you got there. Talking about the story in a game is never really considered as what the player could’ve been doing between cutscenes, except in very rare and brief scenarios. So, the sky was the fuckin’ limit for just putting whatever dumb shit you wanted inbetween.

The world is about to end, but the protagonist is gonna go on a binger collecting a bunch of useless trinkets. Characters could be going through emotional moments just for the gameplay to keep being goofy disconnected bullshit. There’s really no such thing as a unity between the protagonist and player, the two may as well be in entirely different universes short of the occasional story enemy that needed to be fought.

This is partly why people like Ebert took a quick glance at videogames and decided that the medium as a whole could never be considered art. Whether or not it is, who gives a shit I guess, but you’ll have a game promising an emotional connection via what are essentially story precursors only for the actual story to be a series of disconnected jokes. It’d be like if Star Wars was Spaceballs after the title crawl.

There’s been more of an effort to try and work gameplay into the narrative. This is often done less by actually making the gameplay a narrative in and of itself, but rather by doing the exact opposite and taking away control from the player to try and inspire helplessness or some shit. That, or it tries to do the Half Life thing where it blurs cutscene and gameplay, but I never liked that shit.

Games, especially big budget ones, have a real difficulty separating themselves from film even well after their popularity as a medium started to eclipse them much like how film had serious issues decoupling itself from literature. Some games just seem like they want to be movies, so they have lots of cutscenes where the director can force his vision on you and do whatever he wants with the camera.

But of course, this infantalizes the medium and sets us back to square one: that gameplay and story are two separate things. It’s why I don’t like TloU, it’s why I don’t like Spec Ops. People constantly praise these as new paradigms, but they’re often little more or actually even worse than attempts to tell story on 80s hardware. They shove the story and the gameplay in two completely different compartments and fail to utilize gameplay for the story, with TloU being more cutscene than game and Spec Ops having more gameplay but being little more than a stupid series of jokes designed to make the player feel bad over something that didn’t even happen.

There is some extent that when you’re making a point about something, you have to understand that the player can subvert that point, often within your own game. Consider speedrunning, it’s not an offensive thing to do but speedrunning a game defacto makes a joke of the entire experience, often abusing glitches and turning the game’s difficulty, if any, into a fat joke.

You could spend all that time setting up a fight or scenario just for the speedrunner to say “yeah i just have to do this and he’s done wow goldsplit!”, and this isn’t a bad thing. The player is ultimately designing the story. If you can’t set up the narrative in a way that meshes with the gameplay, then it’s going to get trampled on like this.

Cutscenes can be skipped, and often are. Dialogue can be thumbed through very fast. What people care about and what will make the experience for them is the minute to minute actions that they actually take as players, regardless of how it’s abstracted. It doesn’t become any less of a game if it’s turn-based and more about strategy than direct action, but it does become less of a game when too many stupid decisions are made that take away the player’s ability to put action on the story.

Even dialogue heavy games where you’re meant to view a lot of people talking can be done in a way where the player can have input over the story. Don’t shove people into sections where too much happens without the player’s input, have the NPCs discuss and reveal useful information, make a dialogue system that rewards paying attention and being active and inquisitive. At the very fucking least don’t throw fights into cutscenes if the game is about combat, I hate that shit.

It’s still in an infantile state, but I have still seen quite a few games that tell their narrative via the gameplay, or can mesh the narrative and gameplay together in a way that doesn’t feel awkward to look back on. This isn’t an impossible task, and it’s one that should be actively pursued when it comes to narrative design in games.

Hell, you don’t even need a narrative. You can tell compelling stories simply by creating feeling from gameplay. Just look at more minimal games like Tetris and the various differences between modern versions and the old NES version. There’s a lot of similarities obviously, but things like T-spinning, hard dropping, etc. can really change the flow of how Tetris is played and that change in the flow changes people’s emotions when they play Tetris.

It’s the difference between a bullet hell shmup and classic shmup, where one can be about weaving through a complex series of attacks and the other can be very fast and direct. It’s what makes Zachtronics games stand out among other puzzlers. There is this atmosphere, this feeling, this ART you can create with gameplay alone, and it doesn’t have to be done by pulling the rug out from underneath the player, hooking their mouths open, and shoving it down their throats.

It’s not just the stupid narrative that gives these emotions. Great games inspire this sort of thing. You can leave people off much with the same strange feelings they might get looking at paintings, but so much stronger and so much more vivid because they were there, in the moment, fully engrossed in the experience. And this can’t be done if that experience keeps getting interrupted by out of place obnoxious attempts at narrative.

At the very least having these elements can make people feel less like they’re playing games for gambling-like dopamine hits.