The Most Abused Term in Videogame Criticism

I think it's time to address the elephant in the room and talk about language and art criticism so obviously I think video games are an invaluable art form and that's why I'm spending my time right now as a critic to try and articulate what makes them successful and unsuccessful in achieving their goal in an attempt to contribute to making the art form better but I worry there's a real problem in video game criticism where precision of language isn't nearly as important as it should be this is a major problem as critics languages all we have and we use these tools to make games a more robust medium I've noticed critics myself included I'm sincerely regretful to say have been inventing redundant terms using the flat-out wrong term or what we're going to talk about here using a term by proximity rather than for what it was initially intended by far the most common of which I've noticed is the term flute or narrative dissonance no need to check your calendars yes it's 2018 why make a video on this topic then because I have a youtube channel about video games come on try to keep up anyway well I'm going to be talking about ludonarrative dissonance the point of this video is actually in the service of my axe to grind this is really an examination of the erosion of our language in game criticism because while I notice it most commonly in this term it's not the only term that suffers from misuse so this video is going to offer an in-depth examination of the concept and I think by the end of it you'll find that lunar narrative dissonance isn't nearly as fun jablow term as many critics seem to make it out to be and I want to address what I see as an extremely specialized term for our medium is now diluted so much that it no longer resembles its original form and it's even possible to find the very critics who are eroding the terms usefulness are now advocating for it retirement now I realize this is actually a criticism of federal critics so I'll be careful to not distort the positions of anyone else or vilify anyone under no circumstances will I betray that goal it just needs to be said that the people advocating for the terms retirement are following the same logic murderers go by when they want to bury the body whoops [Music] all right nobody intentionally wanted to kill this term and nobody wanted to hide the evidence and before I get too far ahead of myself I think it's worth starting where the term dip Clint hockey's criticism of Bioshock let's first engage with what Hawking actually argued because over the years and I think this is a major part of the problem the giant game of telephone has taken place between the critics countless summations and summations of those summations of the original argument and it's all worked to degrade the integrity of what he actually said it's to the point that I think those that didn't read it for themselves will be surprised that it's not nearly as simple or as easily applicable as it's made out to be to understand this argument fully we need to understand that Bioshock as a whole is ultimately about Randy and objectivism and the dystopian promise of a society built on the values of hyper selfishness and rational self-interest talking argued the gameplay and narrative were offering two of what he called contracts the gameplay was offering it contract to reinforce the point as a whole the game was making it was an examination of the relationship between power and freedom and there's a point that's crucial to this argument that I think many of her look were even mischaracterize he explicitly states he had been playing the game such that he had been buying into the themes a bad objectivism and he wanted to quote feel what it meant to buy into the philosophy of rational self-interest he says this is something that was guaranteed to him through the ludecke contract of the little sisters a situation where players could gain more power instantly through harvesting the adopted children or players could make the choice to save them but had no certainty they would be rewarded for it Hawking argues that the fact that he could harvest the little sisters for Adam was a gameplay mechanic that was harmonic with the narrative because he could increase his own power by having the freedom to act as selfishly as he liked well I'm going to get into this much more in depth later it's important to note what he's arguing here is that he could experience the game's themes through the gameplay but for now let's move on to the narrative contract hucking argues this is where the game gets into trouble because even though he wanted to explore the freedom of the Objectivist philosophy to gain more power as the game seemed to be setting up he was required to do the opposite of what objectivism dictates he was required to helped atlas the only hope I'll ever see my wife and child again this was a goal he felt he shouldn't be interested in after all he was philosophically aligned with Ryan in his ludecke actions when it came to the little sisters yet he was being forced to do the opposite and help someone now in regards to this point Hawking himself admits this is quote disturbing but also quote far from the end of the world that he is forced to do something out of character he goes on to concede minigames impose a narrative on the player where it crosses the line however is the story's twist this is of course the famous moment where Jack the main character reveals himself and the player to be a slave to the phrase would you kindly something the player has been hearing as a preface to each of atlases instructions would you kindly powerful phrase familiar friends we head to Ryan's office and kill this it's a fourth wall breaking twist that explains why the player was so eager to follow Atlas's instructions and help him in the first place that is assuming they were in fact eager to help him for Hawking he was not and so this was outright insulting he explains players can concede that the presumptuous narrative is a weakness of the medium but he could not get past the game mocking him for quote suspending his disbelief by accepting this imposed narrative to enjoy the game and this seems to sum up Hawking's argument his point of contention stems from two things the first perhaps is the most important thing the game is letting him feel the themes of the story through the gameplay that seems to be his best evidence for why he had the impression this game should offer two narrative paths one of embracing power and freedom as a result of embracing objectivism and one rejecting freedom and power as a result of rejecting objectivism now this is essential to understand because what Hawking is doing here is not only demonstrating the backbone of his point he's outlining what's necessary for the application of his term what he is saying here is it is a necessary condition to allow players to engage in the themes of the narrative in a meaningful way through the gameplay in order to have a ludonarrative dissonance which is the same thing as saying without the trigger of gameplay that allowed for players to engage in the themes of the narrative in a meaningful way there cannot be a ludonarrative dissonance and we can see that play out in the example given if you take out the choice with the little sisters then all that discussion disappears and the player is no longer engaging with the themes of the story in a meaningful way any longer now they're not experiencing nearly as much of a dissonance between the narrative and gameplay because they aren't exploring the relationship between freedom and power or like the mechanics reflect through this choice it's possible to argue that we're shooting people and gaining power that way and Hawking himself brings up this point but he also concedes that putting players at odds with the characters of the world is something many single player games have to do in order to have conflict but he calls the interaction with the little sisters in BioShock going quote the extra-mile that ties the mechanical contract back to the narrative in a spectacular fashion by dressing up the mechanics of this contract and well realized content I literally experienced what it means to gain by doing what is best for me I get more Adam without consideration for others by harvesting little sister this is Hawking fueling the themes of the game through the gameplay without this players are just helping Atlas in a collapse society and that twist to Hawking presumably should now be fair game the second point of contention is what he says should be out of bounds the game was forcing the player to take part in a narrative that was contradicting the themes offered through the gameplay and then went on to make that contradiction part of the story itself in other words the game ignored what that ludecke engagement meant to the player emotionally and went on to vitiate those emotions by contradicting what they meant as ignoring those emotions were essential to pulling off the twist hugging subtitle of this article is the problem of what the game is about and I think this sums up his argument and why it matters this is a conversation about how the themes are being communicated through the gameplay because a theme very generally defined is what the story is about or maybe more precisely the main idea the story is trying to communicate to his audience the game offered him ludecke expression that allowed him to engage with the theme of the game with more freedom comes more opportunities for power and here he was feeling that but this is something that was outright contradicted by the narrative because it forced him to do something that was in contrast to what the mechanics were telling him to explore something made so much worse by the fact the game based its continued narrative on that contradiction by calling him a fool for obeying every instruction he had been given when this whole time he had been trying to ignore that fact so as is still engaged with the meaning offered through the mechanics what the gameplay was about and what the narrative was about were in his words thrown into opposition this was a criticism applied back in 2007 and something I encourage anyone interested in to read it's a much better argued piece than what I offer here so the link is in the description below it's a sophisticated argument and one I think deserves more than a few sentence summary to understand it's nuanced and now that we've broken down the argument into its elements we can understand how to apply it or how not to in other games since the terms invention you've probably heard it officially or unofficially applied to uncharted games the criticism being the player is constantly killing enemies and yet Drake presumably not a psychopath is completely unaffected by the hundreds of people he's taken from their families since the player might not want to kill anybody but Drake does so willingly and the mechanics often demand it it causes a separation between the player and character this has the player feeling a little narrative dissonance and thus pulls the player out of the narrative and the experience or at least so the argument goes and it's a common argument that seems to be widely accepted as true and quickly applied to many other games that have a casual view towards violence [Music] however something seems to be missing from this argument that existed in the original application of the term remember there's a trigger we need to see gameplay engage with the themes of the narrative in a meaningful way we need a moment like this with the little sisters where the player feels the themes of the narrative through the mechanics remember this is what Hawking thought was so special about the game at all but in Uncharted we only engage with the gameplay in three ways shooting platforming and puzzle solving but the main one is shooting so can we say we're engaging in conversation with the game's themes through this mechanic and uncharted I don't think so we don't have a narrative that has any themes of condemning violence in the first place what's more is we don't have a game play that engages with those themes if they even did exist that's what you would need in order to have a little narrative dissonance as Hawking described it the gameplay and narrative working together to communicate its themes without this they're compartmentalized and there is no ludecke commentary now the gameplay is just a way to interact with the story of Uncharted that's just a game that's simply at pulp action stories set in modern times and so that's what you get that's really all there is to it I'm of the opinion and I might be wrong on this that Uncharted games don't offer anything more than what would be considered shallow in terms of themes this isn't a criticism of the game games don't need to have heavy themes I can buy that it says something about finding the real treasure in our relationships and if you really wanted to stretch it maybe even something a bit more complicated about inheriting a role from past generations and how that role connects us to our past and our future but I think it would be a very hard sell to persuade me that this game where violence is the essence of the conflict has a story that has anything negative to say about violence power blowing things up or anything else that we engage in to the mechanics now oddly enough if we did get mention of something as dramatic as the very extreme examples call for and we got themes about PTSD in the stress the character undergoes from how many people he's killed we would be closer to having a ludonarrative dissonance because now the gameplay is communicating to us how much fun there is in treating people like target practice when the narrative is about the human psyche breaking down from the very thing we're enjoying ironically this term is so confused the solutions some people are calling for is the very thing that would actually give this game a ludonarrative dissonance as hawking saw it granted this wouldn't be a very impactful dissonance since like hawking said it's pher for single-player story different games to have players in conflict with the game world so this doesn't exactly stand out like a gameplay mechanic that's poor comparable to the Little Sisters mechanic but it would have us much closer to a ludonarrative dissonance than we are now now it's fair to say the story occasionally does make mention of how much violence is permitted depending on the situation there are brief moments in the story where the narrative says Drake can't kill people and that's what we get in uncharted 2 here Drake is in the middle of robbing a museum and since he is not robbing bad guys but rather normal guys with retirement plans and text paychecks just doing their jobs its explained that there is a workaround so that he and his team don't use lethal force the work around being a tranquilizer gun but this mention of how much violence is permitted has nothing to do with the themes of the story so much as it has to do with establishing Drake to be a chaotic good character and it also allows the players to experience the events of the story that lead up to its famous and media's race opening so establishing the character isn't the same thing as establishing a theme and similarly communicating the event of the story isn't the same thing as communicating a theme again themes are the main ideas that text is trying to communicate to use these terms interchangeably is simply bad practice and it predictably leads to this kind of confusion a well-known theme is like what you get in your film about how technology both defines who we are as the species as well as the thing that very well may destroy us and an example of a plot if robots fighting each other so it's imperative we avoid conflating the term theme with the term plot or story or narrative after all once we finished this level we never hear anything again about how we didn't kill anyone at the museum so why do we do so now and that's because that's not important to the overall message the game is trying to convey as far as I can tell this is just a sequence that allows players to experience not the themes of the story but the events of the story through gameplay the harshest claim you can make about Uncharted is that it's ludecke themes and narrative themes don't complement one another but that's just because it lacks thematic emphasis and just because the gameplay and narrative don't complement each other automatically doesn't mean they actively contradict each other in other words there is no problem of what this game is about so is this term beyond redemption I hope because as we're going to see I think it's essential in diagnosing a very real problem now for the record although I respect them and not all that much a fan of Uncharted games the reason I'm defending them here has more to do with the term because I think it's an important one to preserve to better understand why it's important let's contrast it with leader narrative dissonance --is arch-enemy ludo narrative harmony I want to do this because I think this is what Hawking wanted to achieve in inventing this term after all the penultimate line in his essay is and I quote it seems to me that it will take us several years to learn from Bioshock mistakes and create a new generation of games that do manage to successfully marry their ludecke and narrative themes into a consistent and fully realized whole gameplay is after all the defining characteristic of our medium but seeing it engage with the story in a meaningful way is not something that's focused on nearly as much as it could and in my opinion should be mechanics can be designed to make us feel a certain way and if that feeling it communicates supports the themes of the narrative then we are engaging with the themes in a completely unique way that's distinct from all other art forms but this is a dual edged sword if the developers ignore the feelings conveyed by the mechanics like Hokkien suggests they do in Bioshock it can vitiated the meaning extracted from the game one of the clearest examples of volute or narrative harmony comes from the 2013 game brothers a tale of two sons in it you simultaneously play as two brothers and solve platforming challenges puzzles and defeat bosses to complete your quest of finding an antidote for your dying father's ailment and if you haven't played it's important to understand you don't take on the role of one brother at a time by switching off you have to control each brother in real time through the left and right joysticks of the gamepad respectively it's an experience that has players feeling as though each character isn't working as a single unit in fact they're competing for the players attention it's hard to wrap your mind around but with more practice comes mastery and before long players will have both characters working through obstacles less clumsily and in unison this bonding between the characters that we feel is demonstrated through gameplay it's something further demonstrated by the fact the eldest brother can do things the youngest brother cannot like swim and move object the reason he cannot swim is explained narrative Lee for he has a fear of it after losing his mother and the youngest brother can do things the eldest cannot like fit through small spaces it has us understand the relationship between the two what's being communicated here isn't what each character is like but the bond between both characters this is something beautifully solidified by the fact the ending of the game has the eldest brother nya died as a result of saving the younger brother Nighy from the last boss this results in the younger brother and thereby the player having to return home alone and because of Niyaz absence players are now only using the right joystick to make the final stretch it's something that causes the player to actually feel the loneliness that Nighy feels because they physically feel the absence of their brother on the gamepad now the gamepad is imbalanced noticeably lighter and even incomplete something made that much more haunting by the fact we are taken past the path we travel with our sibling and we are now remembering our journey together knowing that using the left joystick is of no use to us because we know nya is gone speaks to the fact that players as well as the character is missing a part of himself it's extremely powerful but not nearly as powerful as what comes next nyeeehhh will soon encounter a pool of water and is thereby forced to challenge himself to overcome this lifelong fear of swimming remember this is something we would normally have to rely on his older brother for and so players have to figure out they cannot get across this obstacle until they summoned not just the will to cross the water from knives in her strength but what he learned from his brother it's something that's communicated through the controls because the controls that allow naive assume are still the ones mapped to the elder brother on the left side of the gamepad something we once assumed to be part of our past is now something we tap into to overcome our challenge players are understanding through gameplay that even though their brother isn't physically there with us he's still a part of us and it makes us whole and this matches what's being communicated to us to the narrative because the characters will show us visually how they are influenced by the people they care about in their past through cutscenes whether it's Nighy haunted by the memory of his mother and knowing he was unable to save her or nya remembering the times he his father and remembering the importance of his quest but it's not until we feel it through gameplay that we experience feel this connection it is through the controls that we remember what it is like to be whole with the person we cared about it's a climax that offers one of the most potent emotional zenith of any game I've played and it has a lot to do with the fact that it's one of the best examples of leader narrative harmony I've experienced this is a game about the bond between two brothers now could it be successfully argued that this game suffers from a ludonarrative dissonance no it can't this game does exactly what Hawking wanted to see happen six years prior Mary it's ludecke and narrative themes into a consistent and fully realized whole now does that mean people won't make an argument that this does suffer from ludonarrative dissonance almost certainly not take your pick of any of the definitions of quarters so far whether it has to do with characters tone killing not having the control you think you should have you can find a way to come up with an example of ludonarrative dissonance not as Hawking defined it but there a version of Hawking's argument so what would it take to see in brothers a tale of two sons what we see in Bioshock what would it have to do to reach Hawking standard for where the game mocks you for quote having believed in the game's fiction at all well let's have a thought experiment to find an analog that would fit Hawking's original argument keeping in mind how Hawking outlined the use of his term we need to see two things happen in the game in order to have a ludonarrative dissonance the first thing is the most important we need the trigger for ludonarrative dissonance or harmony to take place at all and that's for the themes of the gameplay to interact with the themes of the narrative and obviously we can easily check off this one all we need now is for the narrative to trample on those themes communicate it through the gameplay in such a way that it contradicts the feelings we extract from it now that we don't have so let's say brothers wanted a happy ending instead of what we have this will call for a twist so instead of the dad needing the antidote now he needed it and he was this whole time when conscious and dreaming all the events we just experienced his brother and father are both fine and eventually they administer the Cureton ie to save him the game ends with the brothers happily playing a game of catch together with the father watching them in smiling the camera tilts up towards the sunset over the ocean and it fades to black sure we get the happy ending and that's nice but the narrative is now thrown into opposition with the gameplays now everything you were experiencing that you thought was meaningful through the mechanics about forming a bond and that bond being so powerful it transcends death those are now meaningless that bond with your brother that grew over time because you got better at having the to work together the feeling of loneliness without him and of course the recognition that he is still a part of you when you had to cross that seemingly impossible pool of water these were the things that were being communicated through the mechanics but what's now being communicated through the narrative is contradicting those feelings this might now be a story where the main character learns about the relationships they have and how important they are to them but this can no longer be a story about an actual bond between two brothers that we actually felt was tangible and real through gameplay because it's no longer about two people now we have a problem of what the game is about because just like with Bioshock the moments where we think the gameplay was allowed to speak the loudest now become more of a gameplay gimmick you think you're controlling two different people but the bond that forming isn't actually between two different people in its most powerful moment we thought we were experiencing the bond between two brothers and how that bond transcends death because we feel it helped a character grow in a way we once thought impossible it's not the bond with his mother that he ends up tapping into to overcome this obstacle it's the very real bond with his brother that we as players felt throughout our journey and it's that bond that were reminded is still with us but now that very real feeling where we thought we understood what the mechanics were saying are now thrown aside so we can deliver a feel-good ending imagine how frustrating it would be to come across something like this where you felt there was a very real meaning not in what you were seeing but like hawking said what you are feeling but the game throw it aside simply because it saw the themes communicated through the gameplay as more of an aesthetic of the medium rather than the defining feature of its artistic potency I know to me it would be agonizing now I could tighten up this analogy a little more to make it more accurate but I chose the happy ending analogy because I want to show how easy it could be to screw something like this up if the gameplay and narrative are in conversation together they should be working towards the same message if the narrative message is prioritized over the gameplays like in Bioshock and in this hypothetical the game might just be building a story that will mock the player for having bought into it's fiction at all it's an instance like this for which the term ludonarrative dissonance was invented but it's become so diluted it hardly even has a meaning anymore and this explains why Jonathan Blow says it's not descriptive of a unique problem and we already have words for these things but based on its original definition it's a term that has a very specialized use and as we just saw it's used to describe a very real problem rather than an abstract one like you might see argued about other games I think it's important to close by pointing out I know this sounds like a long-winded manifesto on my desire to get keep but that's absolutely not my intention here I'm trying to defend a term that has an excruciatingly ly specialized purpose but a damn useful one and this extreme specialty is its greatest strength but also is greatest weakness because it's so rare to experience the very thing is trying to communicate so it gets tossed around on things that don't exactly meet the criteria however when you do experience it it's not just distracting or quote disturbing as Hawking calls it before Bioshock leaned into its contradiction it's disorienting and unag Noora below and we need a way to communicate that so I'm not advocating to destroy this term or roll our eyes at whomever is I'm asking critics to place it behind breakable glass for us to think twice if we really need this tool for the circumstances or perhaps a better term or argument with less baggage can be used and if you're wondering why I'm defending a term when I haven't even established another real-life example of it since Bioshock I can think of something pretty recent that suffers from ludonarrative dissonance that's right the 2014 movie automata with Antonio Banderas oh you thought I meant Nier automata now why would I criticize one of the most beloved games from last year that games just perfect what I meant to say was oh yeah it wasn't your automata whoops so for those of you champing at the bit to crucify me just hear me out on your automata that's a video that's coming soon make sure to subscribe and ring my bell to be notified and you can yell at me then if you liked what you saw and want to contribute to more content like it you can support me on patreon like the select group of amazing people who are the water beneath my fins a sincere thank you to all my patrons who are the greatest I'd also like to mention Elroy Amy corn air grant Vogel max Mills Ethan Honeycutt Thomas Greenberg Shane Levengood Griffin 116 rainbow hawk 1993 Jaime's forget Jan Barrens Tiber Alexios Sergio Ruben Hernandez Gallegos Percival zhurqis the brave lupus yonder boy Jack Pinet Joshua Herman David Stern Berg furious George Rita Wahlstrom and Ashley Dawkins thank you so much to all of you thanks for watching and I'll see you all next time

Channel: SolePorpoise

Views: 107,763

Keywords: Ludonarrative Dissonance, Ludonarrative, dissonance, ld, uncharted, uncharted 2, uncharted 4, themes, meaning, brothers, a tale of two sons, clint hocking, bioshock, game criticism, game critics, game design

Id: m8PAWO4Y_rY

Length: 27min 2sec (1622 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 01 2018