Would You Please Shut Up About Ludonarrative Dissonance?

If I hear it one more time I will go feral. Yes, I get it. It’s a big word. It makes you sound very sophisticated. It’s the kind of word you can flex towards an outsider and see them nod in approval because they are too afraid to tell you they have no idea what you are talking about.
Maybe you, dear reader, have no clue what it means yourself. Maybe you think: “Hey, what’s this all about? I thought we were talking about video games. I thought gamers’ language was hard to grasp because it is simplified too much, like saying BLJ, Fuzzyjump, DoT or MTD. Not because we started using Latin”. Or maybe I am just projecting an opinion on you, who’s to say?

Let’s go a bit cliché and get definitional. Because you see, Ludonarrative Dissonance is kind of a made-up term. Yes, I know, words are always made-up, that’s kind of their point, but this one is different. If there is Ludonarrative Dissonance, you would assume that there is also something called Ludonarrative.
“Ludonarrative” would be a compound of “Ludo-” as in “Ludology”, the study of games, and “Narrative”, which is self explanatory. So Ludonarrative should describe the way gameplay contributes to telling a narrative.
But there is no such word. The word “Ludonarrative” only ever comes up in combination with “Dissonance”. And that is very strange. It does not mean that it’s a meaningless term. But it is a bit of an indication of how it is actually used. As a buzzword. Plain and simple.

The term has a very specific origin. A blog-post from 2007 by Clint Hocking (The creative director of Far Cry 2, so this really is no nobody). This blog-post titled “Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock”, which is nowadays only accessible with the WayBackMachine, is a very interesting read. Judging from this post alone, I can really respect his opinions and would love to have a conversation with him someday. Though I will say, there is a bit of a hint of pretentiousness in his choice of words that sometimes borders arrogance and elitism. But I can forgive him, it was 2007.
It is a critique of Bioshock, and the emphasis really is on “Critique” because he makes an effort to differentiate between “Review” and “Critique”. To him a review is something for the broader public. To inform them if something is made for them. A “Critique” on the other hand is for nerds. For the hardcore audience, for developers, for enthusiasts. It’s about discussing the inner workings on a design-level. It is not meant for the general public, they should not care about it.
I don’t want too derail too much into talking about Bioshock, so here is the quick breakdown: There are these “Little Sisters” which are these genetically mutated little girls that walk through the place to scavenge corpses for a specific in-universe ressource. You as the player often get confronted with the choice to either save these girls, or to kill them to aquire more of this ressource yourself. It is a moral choice with 2 options. The actual narrative of the game however has no room for choice, despite, according to Clint, adhering to the same philosophical framework as the Little-Sister-choice. So that’s what’s dissonant. The decisions you make ingame set up 2 possible characterizations for the player, but in the narrative only one of these characterizations gets a chance to align with the plot.
And then he says this, and I really just wanted to include this somewhere because what the ****???: “So take this criticism for what it is worth. It is the complaint of a semi-literate, half-blind Neanderthal, trying to comprehend the sandblasted hieroglyphic poetry of a one-armed Egyptian mason.”

Okay. You do you Clint. So what do we make of it? First and foremost, this original definition of Ludonarrative Dissonance is very different to what it’s modern buzzword-counterpart is used for. His usage of the term is in relation to a moral decision that is tied to gameplay. This is *not* about the gameplay as a whole. He did not say: “How come Jack be so calm in his dialogues, when his gameplay is so violent”. (Yes, I had to google how the protagonist of Bioshock was named. It’s been 8 years or so since I played the game, give me a break).

Because that’s how I’ve seen people use it for years and years. It’s always “Why is Nathan Drake such a likeable guy, when you spend most of Uncharted slaughtering countless people?”, as if they’ve never seen an Indiana Jones movie and how Indiana did the same thing on camera in 1981. What you thought Uncharted invented the treasure hunting genre? I don’t buy it. And that’s the thing that is infuriating me the most. 9 out of 10 times people drop the “Ludonarrative Dissonance”-Card it is about something that is not even unique to videogames. So if it is something that’s not unique to games, why is it supposedly the “Ludonarrative”? I am sorry, if a game has a story, and the way the story is played out interactively, which is how games tend to work, this has nothing to do with ludonarrative. An interactive narrative is *not* a ludonarrative.

So do I think Ludonarrative Dissonance is a useless term? No, it describes a very specific phenomenon, one which its very own Inventor pointed out as particularily hard to grasp and deemed as unfit for reviews. So how is it then, that I most often than not see it used as some form of catch-all buzzword for statements about what is “wrong” with modern games, when in reality people are mostly just tired of linearity but want to use words that make them sound smart? And like, I really don’t make this up, open up Google Trends right now, type in “Ludonarrative Dissonance”, put the settings on “All Time” and “Global” and see the graph of constant yapping for more then 10 years. You try to tell me there is clever discourse? Well the burden of proof is on you, I think the term has been butchered beyond recognition. I also think it’s original meaning may have been an interesting train of thought in this small critique from 2007, but it never was *that* deep to begin with.

So my conclusion is this: even *if* there is still some interesting discussion to be had about what this term once represented, it would probably better of trying to choose other words to describe itself, firstly because its modern association is morphed so far beyond recognition, and secondly it really, really sounds needlessly pretentious. So please, shut up about Ludonarrative Dissonance or I might burst a vessel.