What are Ludonarrative Dissonance, Consistency and Difference?
An informative essay on the concept of Ludonarrative
“Ludonarrative Dissonance” is a term coined in 2007 and used to describe a dissonance between video games’ gameplay (“ludo”) and narrative elements. Years later, the opposing term — “Ludonarrative Consistency” — started to be used as well. As for the last, “Ludonarrative Difference” is what I like to call what lies in-between to dissonance and consistency.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
The term was coined by Clint Hocking in a blog post about BioShock.
“Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story.” — Clint Hocking
His specific analysis on the title is a bit complicated to expose without delving into the complex story and gameplay of the game. But among other things, he criticizes the game for taking away the player’s possibility to make choices in a story that revolves around the concept of free will.
The term was then widely used for the Uncharted series, in which the protagonist is supposed to be a likable rogue but gameplay-wise he goes around killing hundreds and hundreds of people.
“The most famous and easy to grasp example is the Uncharted series, in which the player controls a lovable rogue by the name of Nathan Drake, who is meant to be a laid-back, sarcastic hero. Nathan Drake also mercilessly kills upwards of a thousand people over the course of the game series, making him one of the most prolific killers in all of history, and rarely if ever comments on or feels anything about this fact.” — Logan Taylor
Although these two examples are among the most common ones for the usage of the term “Ludonarrative Dissonance”, I believe that those are relatively mild examples, and that there are other games which have significantly stronger issues in that regard.
Those that I consider to be two of the worst cases in AAA video games are The Last of Us Part II, which is incidentally made by the creators of the Uncharted series, and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
In The Last of Us Part II (“TLoU2”), the game wishes for the player to feel bad for killing people, presenting scenes of survivors looking for their dead companions (killed by the player) or even the protagonist being psychologically affected by murders she commits in the cutscenes. But at the same time, the game wants to push violence and make it as fun and engaging as possible, usually making it even preferable to stealth.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (“MGSV:TPP”) is a game that revolves around the theme of the horrors of war, with a protagonist completely numbed by his sorrow and that of those around him. A man haunted by the death of his companions, a man with no light in his eyes. Venom Snake – the protagonist – hardly speaks, and his eyes alone tell of his pain, of what war has taken away from him. Yet, as in The Last of Us Part II, the game wishes to be as fun and engaging as possible gameplay-wise, pushing the player to find more and more creative ways to kill their enemies even when it is not necessary.
But there are also other manifesations of Ludonarrative Dissonance: in his article, Logan Taylor mentions the issue of the pacing and timing of main and side quests in games such as God of War (2018), Control and Fallout 4. The problem he highlights is that it makes no sense for the characters to go on side quests given the stakes of the main story; sometimes the side content kills the momentum of the main story with its timing, while some other times there is a ticking bomb situation which should require the protagonist to fully focus on the main events.
I felt this issue the most with two games in particular, for two different reasons. The first one is Dragon Age: Inquisition, in which there is no reason whatsoever for the protagonist – leader of a big organization which has an army – to personally go on fully mundane side quests or to gather plants and minerals by hand when there is a world-threatening danger. While the second one, which is definitely the worst in that regard among all the video games I’ve played, is Cyberpunk 2077.
In Cyberpunk 2077, the protagonist – V – has only a couple of weeks left to live, and advancing in the main quest their health will visibly worsen. The ticking bomb, the pressure, is far too powerful to justify in any way having V wander around aimlessly and doing random side quests. Every main quest will make the player feel the pressure and V’s death to be more and more imminent, yet the game will continue to give out side quests and unlock new side content.
Ludonarrative Consistency
“I want a reason to explore. I want an NPC saying, «We’ll keep the portal stable, go and make sure you’re powerful enough to face [insert last boss here]. We only have one shot at this.» I want to feel like a hero, not an errand boy. And I sure as hell don’t want to put the book down 50 pages from the end.” — Logan Taylor
Ludonarrative Consistency – also known as “Ludonarrative Harmony”, which sounds more poetic but less accurate to me – is about aligning gameplay and narrative. When a video game has a strong Ludonarrative Consistency, then it is possible to infer story elements by the gameplay and vice versa.
Half-Life has been one of the first and main video games to try to enforce a Ludonarrative Consistency, for instance by motivating the famous “pre-boss rooms” — the areas immediately before a boss in which there is tons of ammunition and healing items.
But one of the games that excelled in Ludonarrative Consistency and that – with its spiritual successor – brought back to life and to the masses the discussions on Ludonarrative, is Demons’ Souls. In said game, every gameplay mechanic is consistent with the story and the worldbuilding, from the respawning at death to the character’s strengthening through level up.
Additionally, as for Ludonarrative Dissonance, Ludonarrative Consistency is also about rhythm. The Persona series in particular is extremely consistent in that regard, although not without drawbacks.
In Persona, the game progresses through a calendar, with each action taking up time. Every main mission has to be completed within a certain date, therefore motivating free time and how to manage it with different types of side-content. Being able to balance them in order to prepare for the next side mission is a core component of the game, but the drawback is that the total time of the game is finite, easily not allowing the player to complete everything and making them feel pressure as deadlines – especially that of the end of the game – get closer.
Other titles – opposing what discussed with TLoU2 and MGSV:TPP – focus on having their theme and story fully channeled in the gameplay mechanics. It’s not about aligning them so that they make sense and they are just consistent, but to make them synergize with each other – and it’s for this kind of games that I find myself agreeing with the term “Ludonarrative Harmony”.
The best examples are the action games which have their theme and story revolving around violence and adrenaline – such as the Helldivers and DOOM series – and the games that are the complete opposite – such as This War of Mine, Pathologic 2 and Papers, Please.
In DOOM and Helldivers, the game is crafted around having the protagonist being a violent and destructive force that will annihilate “evil” creatures. The story and the gameplay are perfectly in line, enhancing each other – although it could actually be said in those cases that the story simply provides a context that highly motivates the violence of the gameplay mechanics.
As for the other mentioned titles, they are the cases in which I believe Ludonarrative Harmony to be at its most interesting: being able to convey suffering and pain through gameplay while keeping it engaging is an extremely tall task. TLoU2 and MGSV:TPP failed in that task and decided to keep the player engaged with fun gameplay, even when the story was not being “fun” at all.
In This War of Mine, the game introduces the psychological wellbeing of characters as a bar to keep in check and to keep as high as possible. Failing to do so will bring the characters to stop accepting order and eventually to let themselves die, if not directly committing suicide on their own. Players will therefore have to make the characters avoid stressful and harming situations as much as possible, keeping the engagement high through this management and risk-avoiding approach.
In Pathologic 2, the gameplay serves the purpose of pressuring the player and making them feel each choice as heavy as possible. The story revolves around the protagonist being a doctor in a city affected by a plague, with scarce resources and a killer on the loose. Therefore, the player has to decide whom to treat, how and when to gather and use resources, and be aware of their environment – all with the clock constantly moving. Traversing the city is a slow act, so even planning where to go is key. The game is hardly suitable for everyone, but being heavy and slow is its whole point: it wishes to make the player feel anxious even while walking through the environment. In Pathologic 2 the choices are made not only explicitly, but only implicitly just by existing and moving around, and their consequences cannot be avoided. It’s a slow run against time.
While in Papers, Please, the game has very little gameplay, and what is present is similar in concept to Pathologic 2, although opposite to it at the same time. The player is tasked with controlling the papers of people who want to enter the borders of a highly dictatorship country. The amount of papers parsed will determine the daily pay of the protagonist – and therefore whether they will be able to provide for their family – but every mistake will be met with a reduction of the earnings. The game forces the player to be as fast as possible while making as few mistakes as possible on a short time at each day-session, all while dealing with moral and political choices: throughout the game, multiple members of a revolutionary group will try to enter the country, as well as there will be people bribing you to make you refuse the entrance of people in need who would have the right to access. Make too many revolutionaries enter with forged papers and you will be discovered and killed before your actions will end up having a good impact on the country, or both you and your family will get sick or starve to death because you haven’t been able to gain enough money. On the other hand, you could accept bribes for the safety of your family, fully aware of the suffering that those acts will bring to other people. Or you could decide to do both things: working with the revolutionaries and accepting bribes that will not hinder their operations to make up for the loss of money. But all these decisions will have to be taken on a ticking clock, generating anxiety and stress on the player, but also engagement.
Abandon or Keep Differences
We can define any element which is not Dissonant or Consistent as “Ludonarrative Difference”. For instance, Super Mario having multiple lives is not meant to literally mean that he is almost immortal story-wise, just as checkpoint systems in most video games do not imply the protagonist having some sort of power to rewind time. These elements which are not consistent in terms of Ludonarrative but that are not dissonant either, are just “Differences”.
As mentioned, Dark Souls – although a bit less consistent than Demon’s Souls – is the one that re-lit the topic of Ludonarrative Dissonance, and sadly in the worst way possible. Where some games took inspiration and tried to increase their consistency, others simply continued as usual just trying not to be dissonant, and getting critiqued for it.
Dark Souls brought the idea to many players that Ludonarrative Differences are a bad thing, and every game should strive to have full – or almost – Ludonarrative Consistency. Although aiming for consistency is fascinating from a point of view of game design, it is also a gargantuan limitation and it can sometimes impede accessibility.
For instance, either time would continuously pass (and therefore there should be a day-night cycle) or there should be a reason for which time does not pass. Multiple open world games feature a day-night cycle, but at the same time they – most of the time – ignore the passage of time. To be fully consistent would mean to acknowledge it and therefore to either give a time limitation to the game – as per the Persona games – or allow the characters to grow older as the in-game months or years pass while the protagonist is just going around doing side quests.
Another example could be that of the realism of wounds and how to heal them, or even the turn based system: in a game that is 100% Ludonarrative Consistent, it would imply that enemies and protagonists alike literally wait for their turn to act.
There are many more instances, and most players who complain about Ludonarrative Differences don’t realise them; they just want Consistency in certain specific aspects in which they like it, such as the respawn of the protagonist after being defeated.
Therefore, although Ludonarrative Consistency is fascinating to try to achieve and in certain aspects if done correctly can even significantly enhance the game thanks to its harmony, Ludonarrative Differences have been there since the beginning of video games and they are here to stay. As long as they don’t become Ludonarrative Dissonances, they can bring a lot of value to a game and allow the developers and designers to build interesting and engaging worlds and mechanics much more freely.
Addendum: Beyond Video Games
In his video called “Ludonarraitve Dissonance”, Folding Ideas talks about the concept of — as the name says — Ludonarrative Dissonance, but brings it to a different field: cinematography. Given the fact that the video is only 7 minutes long and very well-done, I do not wish to summarize it, and I added it here at the end to suggest you to watch it if you’re interested in seeing this topic brought to the world of cinema and movies.