Download the thesis here: http://issuu.com/christianevanerali/docs/christian.erali_ludonarrativediss/0

Dissonance in Games

The culmination of two long years of work, my final project for the Fine Arts in Emergent Media Masters Program at Champlain College is concerning a topic I feel is important for the continued growth of the gaming industry.  Over the past several years, I have played several games that are quite good and just as many that seem to completely disregard some of the key advantages of video games, basic storytelling, and even gameplay leading to disjointed and disruptive experiences.  More often than not, these instances are chalked up as being another example of ludonarrative dissonance, when the gameplay and narrative of a interactive piece fail to harmonize effectively, a term popularized by Clint Hocking's article Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock.  However, it seems some in the industry are content to just chalk these moments up as dissonant and then move on.  The gaming industry should be looking at these dissonant moments as signal flares, opportunities to explore, learn, refine game craft.  

This is essentially what I argue and discuss throughout my thesis, discovering and building essentially a taxonomy of dissonance revolving around the overarching threat of ludonarrative dissonance as well as four underlying sources of dissonance: consequence of structure, consequence of design, consequence of failure, and consequence of person. 

Ludonarrative Dissonance:

One of the major problems that plagues the industry today is the occasional to rampant disassociation between gameplay and narrative.  Gameplay will be off doing one thing, while narrative will be off in another corner and rarely do the two meet to try meld together to make an overall better game.  Having read his article extensively before starting my thesis, I decided it best to let Clint Hocking's words on the original Bioshock be the outstanding example of dissonance.  His thoughts on the conflicting ideas portrayed in the narrative, that every man has the right to choose their own path and insure their own happiness as part of the ideals of objectivism, and how the linear nature of the story prevents the player from having choice and even forcing the player to work with Atlas really helped to outline the parameters of what I was intending to discuss.

As a counterpoint, I decided to offer one of my favorite games as an example of excellent use of gameplay and narrative working together, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.  Created by the team at Eidos Montreal, and lead by Jean Francois Dugas and Mary Demarle, Human Revolution is an excellent example of dynamic choices, customizable experiences, and strong narrative.  This is not saying Human Revolution is not without its flaws, but it is a great example of knowing how to work gameplay and narrative together.  Ultimately, the origin of Human Revolution's success in this matter comes from the way the development team and narrative team were structured.  To borrow Mary Demarle's words from her GDC talk of 2011:

"What we discovered was there were times when story changed in order to accommodate gameplay. So there would be times when, 'ya know what we've just explored we need combat at this point, we need some action. How can we change it? And so the story team would have to say, 'Alright, we're gonna have to make some adjustments. How bout we do this? Or how bout we do that? We can work with that.' Sometimes the gameplay shifted in order to accommodate the story. 'This is a very important scene and it has to happen so how do we make it happen?” 

It was this ability to communicate and work with the two sides of narrative and gameplay, ebbing and flowing when needed, that lead to Human Revolution's robust and excellent experience.

After defining the overarching ideas behind Ludonarrative Dissonance, I next discuss four underlying problems that exist in the industry that help to generate dissonance.

Consequence of Structure:

In many games one of the primary ways of conveying contextual information concerning gameplay or narrative is through cutscenes or game segments where story is metered out and the player is left without control.  This can often lead to a situation where players shift between two states during play the first being active and aware during gameplay sections and the second being uninterested and distant whenever cutscenes start to play.  If players are continually shifting between these two modes, then there is the very real potential for players to lose interest in a game as the player is continually roadblocked by the game that seems more interested in playing itself.

Some developers have decided to work around this through the use of Quick-Time-Events (QTEs).  And while these buttons presses in action heavy games might help to hold the player's attention, they really only serve to put an arbitrary barrier between the player and the rest of the game.  One game that exhibits this problem rather strongly is Tomb Raider (2013), the recent rebooting of the Lara Croft character.  In the game there are a number of scenes where Lara is put in a precarious situation of life or death.  The player is given the opportunity to push a button and if they fail to push it in time, Lara is impaled, crushed, etc and the player is set back a few seconds to try again.  If the player presses the button in time Lara dives out of the way of whatever oncoming danger, supposedly using her quick wits and survival instincts.  To quote Terrance Lee, author of "Designing Game Narrative" , "That is a huge disconnect between the two! How dissonant is that?" The in game character jumping out of the way just in time thanks to, potentially, one button press just leaves the player wishing they had been allowed to dodge the danger instead of the game doing it for them.

Consequence of Design:

How many games do we know of that have had a great idea or a potentially great finish ruined by something else built into the game?  This is where consequence of the design comes in, where dissonance is created through a collision between different design decisions.  One game that exhibits this is Skyrim with the clash between the threat of Alduin, the game's open world construction, and the player as the chosen one.  In Skyrim, the player takes on the role of the Dragonborn, a prophesied hero, who must defeat the great dragon Alduin before he destroys the world. Now, if Skyrim had a linear, non-open world structure this could be a rather dangerous and harrowing adventure. And while that might still come through somewhat, the fact that Skyrim is an open world, meaning the player is free to do as they wish when they wish, there is potential to have a situation where Alduin stands at the top of a mountain and has been doing so for many, many in game days saying he will destroy the world, and the player is off fishing. The story's gravitas is completely lost because the player does not have to engage the story. In fact, the player can down right ignore the main story and explore any number of hundreds of side quests. 

The thing is, this could all be nodded at and understood as, “Well, that's the problem with making open world games,” and yet in the previous game, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the player was given relatively the same situation and yet was not as dissonant. The reason being, the player was the chosen one and instead was an adept individual.  There was a weight of responsibility given to the player through asking them to both retrieve and eventually protect the future king but the player was one of many people trying to protect the future king. In Oblivion, the player is just another individual who is good at his/her job and if they decide not to pursue something immediately, they are just busy with another task such as a job for the fighters guild. As the chosen one, the player is the only one who can stop this threat and doing anything else becomes irresponsible as the world moves ever closer to doomsday. Perhaps structuring open-world stories more around the adept individual might help to make those kind of stories more understandable and might even lead to some unique quest design ideas. 

Consequence of Failure:

Consequence of failure can arguably seen as a sort of catch all as I have basically come to define it as when either a game's gameplay, narrative, or both fail to combine together in any sort of meaningful or logical sense.  One game I feel suffers this consequence quite strongly is Tomb Raider (2013).  Throughout the game, there are several instances where the gameplay and story do not match up leading to a disjointed experience.  This can range from the narrative wanting to tell a growing up story, one where Lara obtains the skills and experience to become the Tomb Raider, but the gameplay shows no real need for that as Lara is pretty much excellent at everything.  There is the discrepancy between the large amount of cultists on the island combined with the villain's methods of making his men more hostile (throwing them in a cave until they descend into cannibalism) which leads to a pretty ludicrous amount of ships necessary to crash on the island.  There are other examples that I list in the formal paper, but ultimate consequence by failure can just be summarized as the gameplay wanting to do one thing, the narrative trying to do another, and neither of them working to compromise.

Consequence of Person:

The last source of dissonance I identify in my paper is arguably the one designers will have the hardest time actually addressing. Dissonance due to a consequence of person is what occurs when a game is built around the assumption that players will play a specific way, or are designed with a specific conclusion in mind. This can occur not just because a narrative's branch was not satisfactory, but it can also occur when a player does something the designers were not expecting.  A great example of this comes from Sleeping Dogs where the player takes on the role of Wei Shen, an undercover cop who is trying to undermine the criminal organization the Sun on Yee.  Later in the game Wei Shen must rush to save his friend who has been buried alive by a rival leader of the Sun on Yee. After rescuing the character, a cutscene plays where the Shen's friend is traumatized from the experience and begins stating how he intends to quit the gang then says he is heading home to sleep. Wei Shen, an individual who has fought time and again to keep his friend out of prison, having just killed several of the rival's men and no doubt alerted the rival to the friend's survival, decides to let his friend go.

Now, I had been playing Shen as straight as the game would let me, excusing the occasional accidental death, and I had performed a number of side police cases in order to try and improve my standing as a police officer. This meant that my Wei Shen was meant to be a relatively savvy or at least intelligent officer, so when Shen said, “Okay, I'll catch up with you later,” I shouted out loud, “Welp, he's a dead man.” And sure enough, in the next cutscene Shen finds his friend hanging from a pipe with obvious signs of torture all over his corpse.

Now, I am not saying that the team should have implemented a choice system just for this scene, but when the choice taken by the in game character is without argument a bad idea, they cease to be the player's character. When the narrative forces upon the player a decision that defies common sense, the game's narrative is severely broken and destroys a player's sense of agency. Why should they do all this work if all the important decisions are made for and often against them? This will undoubtedly lead to many players quitting the game out of frustration because all of their hard work had been negated. The Wei Shen I played in game was a cop and having done many cases to help the police of Hong Kong with certain problems, Shen obviously would have had the foresight and intelligence to see that letting his friend go would only lead to death, especially when the friend could potentially prevent Shen's rival from becoming head of the Sun on Yee. If I had been able to make a choice here, I would have prevented my friend's death instead I have to watch as someone else makes a bad choice for me, meaning my agency I have in the world drops even more.

After this I take a few brief pages to discuss some of my other thesis work such as the simple Skyrim quest I created and my thoughts on choice in video games.  If you are interested in reading the thesis, you can find it below.  

Download the thesis here: http://issuu.com/christianevanerali/docs/christian.erali_ludonarrativediss/0