It’s important to be careful about the words we create and the words we choose to use. A healthy dose of criticism over how we talk about games – and even occasionally how we define “game” itself – ensures that we’re not baking aesthetic assumptions into our discussion or inventing words to solve problems that were never there. We need to not boil conversations full of individuals down to “zinesters” and “formalists” like everyone falls into one of two buckets; we need to avoid using “gamers” when we mean the more broad “players;” we need to be critical of the motivations and intentions of anyone trying to introduce new words into the lexicon. And yes, I’m as guilty of this sort of sloganeering as anyone – which is why I’m quite supportive of attempts to get us to question the language we use.
And among criticisms of ludonarrative dissonance, I find concerns of these sort to be the most powerful. It’s a long word that’s half made-up portmanteau and half high-falutin’ academic jargon. The result is a word that’s tossed around like a password to a game criticism clubhouse; a tool of exclusion for those-in-the-know to keep undesirables out of the discussion. It’s also (as others have pointed out) potentially something of a false dichotomy – play gains much of its meaning through the same representational metaphors (characters, actions) as cut scenes do, so why do we frame the two as opposing forces? It may be better to simply call games where there are opposing themes and ideas simply internally conflicted than to make up a word that describes a thematic disconnect between two supposedly competing sides. That concept doesn’t come with a trendy new buzzword we can spout at each other, but it’s probably closer to how games really operate. After all, it’s not like a film or novel can’t be self-conflicted without gameplay to complicate things.
So I’m aware of plenty of valid criticisms of ludonarrative dissonance as a term, and it’s certainly an idea we should continue to healthily question the need for. However, there seems to be a recent trend in certain game criticism circles to not just critique the idea, but to dismiss it out of hand. In the past few months Bob Chipman, Anthony Carboni*, and Jim Sterling have all written pieces that try to dismantle the idea. And I’m trying to process my thoughts on this without being a giant hypocritical asshole. This is more difficult than you may imagine as I think that all three misunderstand the idea to one degree or another, but if I start drawing lines in the sand about how they “just don’t get it” then I become the sort of slave to vocabulary I warned about above. Still, if we’re to have any discussion about the idea at all, I think it’s worth having a concrete starting place – and I like going back to the start.
Clint Hocking – who originally coined the term – first used it in a critical piece on the original Bioshock. In it he wrote about how the story – which he claimed has a preoccupation with criticizing the Objectivist notion of individual interest above all else – felt at odds with the gameplay that celebrates a player’s exaltation to virtual god by leveling up and gaining power. Note that this is a thematic dissonance, not a literal disconnect. The story explores how a society built on self-interest and men becoming gods was inexorably doomed to fail, but the gameplay champions and rewards the players who act just that way. The game seems to have two directly opposing thematic goals, and it’s not an uncharitable position to say that it’s a deeply conflicted work. The question is whether we want to give a name to that tonal and thematic conflict – is it sufficiently different from a story that conflicts itself? Can gameplay itself present self-contradictory perspectives, and if so what does that say about this word’s value? Do we gain anything as critics, players, or developers by being able to identify when play is thematically opposed to story? Is it setting up a dangerous false dichotomy?
Unfortunately the concerns raised by these three critics seem to be attacking something else entirely – mostly a disconnect between literal gameplay and literal story, where things “don’t make sense.” In Carboni’s case, he refers to it as occurring when “the game isn’t talking to you, it’s acting like a video game,” asking if West Side Story breaking into song results in “Musonarrative dissonance.” Sterling’s example cites Booker DeWitt going through trash cans and finding money and eating food off of the ground. Chipman claims that “a player that keeps bumping into walls and jumping into bottomless pits” when they’re supposed to “be a badass” is a quintessential example of the idea.
But while each of these may be amusing, the idea that they encapsulate ludonarrative dissonance is disingenuous. No one is claiming that throwing rocks at Eli Vance’s face is ludonarrative dissonance because Gordon Freeman wouldn’t do that; that’s just subversive play. “This wacky gameplay contrivance doesn’t make sense in the context of the game’s narrative!” was never the point of the term. Health-as-an-integer, infinite stamina and pain resistance, and a ridiculous carrying capacity have long been jokes about video games when framed in the context of an actual narrative, but they’re so far removed from the ideas of a thematic and tonal conflict that they’d represent some other issue entirely. So I’m worried they’re tearing down a strawman no one ever purported and in so doing moving the debate away from useful criticism of the term and towards a push for mindless snark against a vaguely related idea.
Speaking of snark – my other concern is that these criticisms seem to stem from a place of anti-intellectualism (a long-standing force in the gaming community). The word itself is a target of ridicule – all three videos poke fun at the word’s roots and length. Again, it’s a long, complicated, unwieldy word – but the problem is that it excludes people from taking part in games criticism, not that it’s a wacky word that’s hard to say. Mise en scène is a fancy French phrase used by film critics and film makers, but no one seems to have a problem with hoity-toity language there. All three of them also frame the “ludo” part of the word in a reference to the creature from Labyrinth – I’m not sure whether they’re doing it in reference to one another or if this was just the easiest, most lazy way to poke fun at the word. But it runs deeper than just prodding the length and pronunciation of the word. Sterling refers to those who use it as “intelligencia,” and argues it’s a term used as a cudgel to criticize things people just don’t like. Chipman laments the subject as “something that every games journalist just needs to pop off and do their obligatory thesis on.” Carboni frames it as “something that we all came up with one night when we were out drunk when we decided if we could take the very nature of videogames and make it sound negative.” Ludonarrative dissonance isn’t dissected or discussed but simply derided here.
Consequently there’s a lot of discussion taking place in spheres that have more visibility than most. PAX attendees, The Escapist’s readership, and Chipman’s sizeable audience (all of whom are notably larger than most blogs who would use the word) have all been exposed to comedic teardowns of a strawman. And I’m not really sure how or whether to meaningfully combat it. To correct them on the use of the word is to presuppose the word needs to exist – and I’m not sure I’m comfortable making that call given the legitimate criticisms I’ve heard. But to let this sort of nonsense go on uncontested is to concede the phrase altogether; to not debate its worth but to consign it to a nonsense idea outright.
And I kind of don’t want to let that go. We have a word that might, if we explore it a bit, have some value yet to us. We also may decide to chuck it in favor of more general words, or some new word altogether. But I think it’s the people who care about these words that should be the ones making the decisions, not those who would sooner snark at them.
* I know that Carboni’s piece is comedic; but there’s enough punch in there to say it’s not terribly far off from his actual position.