Writer's Block Magazine

Game of Goose, by José Guadalupe Posada

The videogame is a young artform. It’s roughly 500,000 years younger than architecture; 72,936 years younger than art; and 4,061 years younger than literature. An odd road it’s been from the Kalambo River wood structure, Leang Karampuang cave painting, and Epic of Gilgamesh to Steve Russel’s Spacewar! Despite the genre’s endearingly bowlegged first steps still being a fresh memory, many critics are rightfully treating it as seriously as all its predecessors. I intend to do much the same. As every genre before it, it has been an amalgamation of previous forms, and novelties wholly its own. Painting takes its visuals from sight, but adds composition. Film borrows this arrangement, takes its storytelling from theatre, but introduces editing, and with it, a whole new way of understanding and misunderstanding time and space. Videogames are on track to bring forth even more new ideas and challenges. A personal favorite of mine is ludonarrative dissonance, something no other artform in human history has ever had to grapple with, but which oddly springs forth from the oldest issue art’s ever had to contend with.

Ludonarrative Dissonance

A term coined by Clint Hocking when writing about Bioshock, ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ has since taken on a life of its own. Essentially, it denotes when a videogame’s player-controlled section in some manner contradicts its narrative. Either thematically, narratively, logically, or otherwise. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is about a man in a midlife crisis accepting the beauty of everyday existence, the stability of true love, and fatherhood. Its core gameplay-loop is climbing and then killing dozens, hundreds, thousands of mercenaries with knives, pistols, machine-guns, sniper-rifles, or your bare hands if the need arises. In one of Borderlands 2’s most pivotal cut-scenes (where the player watches a video instead of plays) a main character is dramatically slain with a single bullet to the chest. The previous ten hours of playtime have involved being shot no less than forty-thousand times, jamming every available artery full of med-packs that heals everything from the common cold to gaping chest cavities, and the magical ability to instantly fix yourself by killing someone. All of Call of Duty’s storylines are about the evils of war. It has made shooting people in the face amongst battle-torn shacks the single most fun way to spend a Saturday in years. The messaging, story, and non-playable sections of a game are miles removed from the second to second interaction the player has with it. Ludonarrative dissonance. Some games unsuccessfully address the issue directly. The Last of Us 2 critiques the player’s brutality and shows the human cost of its gun-fire-gameplay in many gruelingly long cut-scenes. Still, the game forces you into this violence: finger-pointingly lecturing you with one hand, and shoving you towards that fully loaded AK-47 sitting besides a busload of blood-hungry cultists with the other. Interestingly, a few games have incorporated this seeming issue to their benefit. Far Cry 3’s bro-dude protagonist Brody slowly becomes detached from the ‘normal’ people who populate the cut-scenes as the player becomes more adept at having him leisurely disembowel whole villages of ‘bad’ people in the gameplay. It is a clever attempt but doesn’t commit hard enough. Brody never truly loses his hang-loose attitude or his affinity for his civilian girlfriend. He remains unbelievably human, casual, and emotive; even after being baptized in oceans of blood, viscera, and cleft collar-bones. A better example is the aforementioned Bioshock. While being a videogame about free will, it has a predetermined structure of levels and enemies the player has to move through. A seeming contradiction. This resolves itself when the free will of the protagonist proves an illusion, just as the free will of the player had been all along.

Instead of the various methods to tackle this dissonance described above – ignoring it, addressing it, or attempting to resolve it through incorporation – I want to argue something polar opposite. Ludonarrative dissonance does not need to be a problem. It doesn’t require solving. It’s a solution. More than that, it is the solution to the oldest problem art’s ever been endowed with.

Art’s Oldest Problem

From its very beginning, art has been torn betwixt two ideals: income and expression. Art starts and ends in commerce. Money is required to produce it, and sustain the ones who make it. Films need budgets, books need publishing, paintings require paint. On art’s other end, it must supply artists with the means to continue living after it is sent into the world. They need food, a room of their own, and the free time to exercise their creativity, and their art needs to supply these. On some level, all professional art must be created with value beyond the artistic in mind. The Kalambo River wood structure was built for safety and comfort, the Leang Karampuang cave painting might have been a teaching-tool, or a bargain-chip for shelter, and the Epic of Gilgamesh was written by someone who lived on its proceeds for years to come. However, that cannot be all that art is about. It must be about life, truth, beauty, society, the inexpressible, and more, and it must chase these lofty ideals with integrity and dignity, without being dragged down into the dregs of necessity and commercialism. A painting made only to be sold cannot be truly great. It has to serve a higher purpose of some kind. 

The tension between these two forces is omnipresent in art. A film that is too artistic makes no money, and the director is never allowed to make one again. A book too commercial deadens the writer’s soul, and soon he has no joy in his profession to speak of. Great art finds a balance. Michelangelo was paid handsomely for the Sistine Chapel by the church, but made it a space of awe and androgynous beauty regardless. Raymond Chandler wrote in the ever-commercial genre of the pulpy detective story, but heightened it to the level of ‘true’ literature. Tony Gillroy required three-hundred million dollars to create Star Wars television series Andor, but delivered a poignant and personal analysis of the inner machinations of fascism in spite of the studio-oversight such a sum usually produces. Still, the success stories produced in this dichotomous system do not outweigh the failures, and the conflicts this tug-of-war produces are as much a part of our understanding of art, as the art itself is.

Intentional Dissonance

What if there was a way to circumvent this conflict completely? To split an artform in two? One half meant for commerce, for sellable entertainment and the sustainment of the artist, and the other half meant solely for the artist to express the essence of their art, uninterrupted by the soul crushing frivolities of commercialism. That is what ludonarrative dissonance does. Videogames can be two forms, two genres. 

Genre and form are telegraphed as much by its form as its content. We recognize a poem as a poem because of its poetic quality, but perhaps more so by its page-layout, the presence of white space, where we find it in the bookstore, and the word ‘poetry collection’ on the it’s cover. Video games thus contain two genres: the gameplay, as indicated by the fact the protagonist and the camera respond to controller-inputs; and the cut-scenes, telegraphed by a film-like quality, a lack of player control, and a camera-angle frequently uncoupled from the player character. The first form can be dedicated wholly to highly sellable dumb fun and the latter can be a space where the game creators comment on life, truth, beauty, society, the inexpressible, and more. Uncharted’s endless cascade of violence is partly why it sold so well, and why its touching message of finding contentment later in life reached so many. Borderland’s health-pack-shooting-system is what makes it chaotic and fun, and its cutscenes, while inconsistent, were genuinely affecting. There are, of course, profound limitations to this approach. It removes the impetus of artistic expression from the gameplay and creates a cleft experience. In a sense, it is a cop-out from art’s most endless battle. However, this battle is frequently unwinnable, so why not, on occasion cop-out a little? Games, like all art, have limitations spurred on by both its inherent properties and its monetary requirements, but these also make them unique, innovative, and utterly refreshing. Ludonarrative dissonance is a feature, as much as it is a bug, and embracing it as a limitation to work with instead of around could be of great benefit. Embracing dissonance is an opportunity to love videogames more deeply in spite of its seeming flaws. Videogames can be proud of their new little quirk.

Written by Arthur Mulder