Video games that use ludonarrative dissonance to their advantage?

[ninja666]

Ludonarrative dissonance is pretty much always seen as something negative in video games, as something that ruins the experience by breaking the player's immersion and suspension of disbelief. However, I've been wondering if there are any games that use it to their advantage.

For those of you who don't know what ludonarrative dissonance is, it's the conflict between what's being presented in a narrative vs what's being presented in gameplay. For example, in cutscenes the character is portrayed as a pacifist, yet the game has you slaughter thousands upon thousands of people during the gameplay parts.

My personal example, which also motivated me to start this thread, would be Saints Row 2. You see, in the game you are presented with all those crazy missions requiring of you to constantly kill people and destroy things, and they're all presented as pure, almost innocent fun, sprinkled with some hard satire for good measure. However, pretty much every time you complete one of those "fun" missions, the consequences are, more often than not, horrible, usually with someone ending up getting tortured or mutilated, dying an unnecessarily violent death, or parts of the city getting utterly obliterated. All of that caused by a sadistic, sociopathic protagonist, who stops at nothing to deliver a message that he should not be messed with. It all serves as means of delivering a strong message about how much the world of crime is romanticised in mass media vs what it really looks like.

Can you think of any other video games that do similar things with their narratives?

 

[sXeth]

Assassin's Creed.

That the protagonists story and canon seems entirely separated from how you do or don't do gameplay things reinforces the Animus concept.

Though the obvious build upon that would be that the Animus is not actually a reliable narrator, which never really comes up, and seems unlikely to as the future stuff is just kind of filler nowadays.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Spoiler: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

I don't know if this applies but because the whole game is framed as a past-tense narration from the Prince, any instance in which the Prince (or Farah, whom he's talking to) dies is quickly checked by the Prince muttering "Wait that didn't happen" or something like that. The effect is a little silly if you think about it, as if the Prince's mind is constantly wandering towards imaginary deaths and retelling the same battle over and over.

Spoiler: BioShock

Everybody knows the twist by now: you've been following orders you didn't even realize you were taking. Which is technically the case with every videogame - even the most open-ended game lets you play within an invisible cage, within certain constraints. But I like that the game makes this dynamic canon.

Spoiler: Spec Ops: The Line

A fairly straightforward military shooter until the protagonist does a very bad thing at which point the character blames (indirectly) the player for doing so, and the game itself starts presenting redemption/morality checks that are purely the protagonist's imagination, as an ending twist reveals. A lot of people missed the point and reacted with a gotcha mentality saying you can't feel bad for things you're forced to do. But you can. Happens in real life all the time. And in self-denial we come up with rationalizations that delegate responsibility to something or somebody else - as the protagonist does.

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

My personal example, which also motivated me to start this thread, would be Saints Row 2. You see, in the game you are presented with all those crazy missions requiring of you to constantly kill people and destroy things, and they're all presented as pure, almost innocent fun, sprinkled with some hard satire for good measure. However, pretty much every time you complete one of those "fun" missions, the consequences are, more often than not, horrible, usually with someone ending up getting tortured or mutilated, dying an unnecessarily violent death, or parts of the city getting utterly obliterated. All of that caused by a sadistic, sociopathic protagonist, who stops at nothing to deliver a message that he should not be messed with. It all serves as means of delivering a strong message about how much the world of crime is romanticised in mass media vs what it really looks like.

First off, such an amazing idea for a thread. Kudos to you.

Secondly, allow me to build off your example. While Saints Row 2 is considered to be the best in the series, it is my least liked. I never felt like such a monster playing that game. Some of the decisions and actions felt barbaric and made me feel psychosomatically ill.

It started out harsh with what you 'have' to do to get a new Hideout after you awake. I wanted to shut the game off right there. In fact, I did. And it took me a few months if not a year to try to get past it. But it didn't stop. Revenge against the Ronin and the Brotherhood. How a member of the crew dies. That was a sore issue because I've heard stories all of my life about how people of my race were killed in such a manner if they considered lynching too lenient.

Where we diverge is that I don't think they used it to their advantage, at least to my tastes. I never felt any fun like I did with Saints Row 3 (which admittedly started off rough for me with the opening bank robbery). I never felt anything I did was justified in SR2. While the final villain was certainly villainous... Damn, did he have a point in Stillwater being better off without the gangs if those are what the gangs were capable of. Especially the Protagonist.

What made it worst is that Saints Row has always been billed as the lighter hearted alternative to GTA. I never felt so bad playing a GTA game.

 

[Xprimentyl]

This is of course completely up to subjective interpretation, maybe even a little ?meta,? but I?d have to vote for INSIDE.

Spoiler: SPOILERS!!!

Early on, the game establishes overt themes of control, so I think most players fancy themselves (the boy) a protagonist subverting an authoritarian system. The game ends when the boy joins and ultimately ?frees? The Huddle, but it?s very open ended; you?re never really told what you?ve actually done. But the secret ending (which is ironically unlocked near the beginning) shows the boy you?ve been controlling is somehow himself connected to that same system and when he is [apparently] unplugged, the player is left feeling they are themselves the very system of control they?ve been battling, to question their literal control of the boy. That?s all my personal take on things; feel free to offer your own, but I?ve spent more time thinking about the story of this 4-hour, side-scrolling puzzle-platformer than any game ever; it?s why it?s my absolute favorite.

 

[ninja666]

Where we diverge is that I don't think they used it to their advantage, at least to my tastes. I never felt any fun like I did with Saints Row 3 (which admittedly started off rough for me with the opening bank robbery). I never felt anything I did was justified in SR2. While the final villain was certainly villainous... Damn, did he have a point in Stillwater being better off without the gangs if those are what the gangs were capable of. Especially the Protagonist.

What made it worst is that Saints Row has always been billed as the lighter hearted alternative to GTA. I never felt so bad playing a GTA game.

That's the point. In GTA, everything you do is shown in a positive light. The games tell you that being a gangster is cool and just like an action movie, making you desensitized to all the killing and other terrible things you do. Saints Row 2 on the other hand, shows you the real consequences of doing such things and how "uncool", dangerous, and full of cruel, unscrupulous people criminal underworld really is. What I'm talking about is even represented in the game itself in form of Carlos - a young guy who joins The Saints because he thinks it's all fun and games. Because of his naivete he actually gets it the worst out of all because he's not prepared for the "real" world of crime.

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

Where we diverge is that I don't think they used it to their advantage, at least to my tastes. I never felt any fun like I did with Saints Row 3 (which admittedly started off rough for me with the opening bank robbery). I never felt anything I did was justified in SR2. While the final villain was certainly villainous... Damn, did he have a point in Stillwater being better off without the gangs if those are what the gangs were capable of. Especially the Protagonist.

What made it worst is that Saints Row has always been billed as the lighter hearted alternative to GTA. I never felt so bad playing a GTA game.

That's the point. In GTA, everything you do is shown in a positive light. The games tell you that being a gangster is cool and just like an action movie, making you desensitized to all the killing and other terrible things you do. Saints Row 2 on the other hand, shows you the real consequences of doing such things and how "uncool", dangerous, and full of cruel, unscrupulous people criminal underworld really is. What I'm talking about is even represented in the game itself in form of Carlos - a young guy who joins The Saints because he thinks it's all fun and games. Because of his naivete he actually gets it the worst out of all because he's not prepared for the "real" world of crime.

I understand it is the point. And that's where I agreed with you for the most part. But where it diverged for me is that it was overdone.

There is Pretending to care for a Puppy to seem like a good guy in front of people but you really don't care about it. There's Kicking a Puppy to Show how Evil you are. And there's gathering the puppy and all its siblings, throwing them into a pit and giving them no food but pouring BBQ sauce on all of them until one of them finally snaps and tries to eat the others.

SR2, to me, goes right into that last absurdly extreme example for me. I get the point is a good one to make. That harming innocent people for shits and giggles is insane. But when it goes beyond rational thought to me, all it does it take me out of the game to the point that I did not want to continue. The Disconnect doesn't seem advantageous for me as a gamer. I'm glad it reaches others, again it's an important comment to make. But it was too sickening for me to even tolerate the game to get its intention when I first played it.

To get a message across, it has to be palatable. Saints Row 2 is simply not for me. But again, for me.

 

[CaitSeith]

Wait. What's the difference between ludonarrative dissonance and breaking the players' expectations?

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Wait. What's the difference between ludonarrative dissonance and breaking the players' expectations?

I always thought lud.diss was when the gameplay and story didn't line up. The example always being Lara Croft in story having never held a bow/arrow in her life, but in gameplay the player is instantly 360 no-scoping the entire layer of badguys in .25 seconds.

whereas breaking expectations is just...well, that.

 

[Silvanus]

Spoiler: BioShock

Everybody knows the twist by now: you've been following orders you didn't even realize you were taking. Which is technically the case with every videogame - even the most open-ended game lets you play within an invisible cage, within certain constraints. But I like that the game makes this dynamic canon.

That doesn't seem like ludonarrative dissonance at all; the gameplay mechanics are perfectly in line with the narrative (even more so than usual, in fact; it's like the very opposite of ludonarrative dissonance-- ludonarrative harmony or something?)

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

This is of course completely up to subjective interpretation, maybe even a little ?meta,? but I?d have to vote for INSIDE.

Spoiler: SPOILERS!!!

Early on, the game establishes overt themes of control, so I think most players fancy themselves (the boy) a protagonist subverting an authoritarian system. The game ends when the boy joins and ultimately ?frees? The Huddle, but it?s very open ended; you?re never really told what you?ve actually done. But the secret ending (which is ironically unlocked near the beginning) shows the boy you?ve been controlling is somehow himself connected to that same system and when he is [apparently] unplugged, the player is left feeling they are themselves the very system of control they?ve been battling, to question their literal control of the boy. That?s all my personal take on things; feel free to offer your own, but I?ve spent more time thinking about the story of this 4-hour, side-scrolling puzzle-platformer than any game ever; it?s why it?s my absolute favorite.

Is relieving to know I'm not the only one with that game burrowing itself far into the mind. The second ending definitely jolted a lot of metaphorical possibilities on how much or little the narrative is really alluding to, beyond the initial discovery.

 

[Dalisclock]

Assassin's Creed.

That the protagonists story and canon seems entirely separated from how you do or don't do gameplay things reinforces the Animus concept.

Though the obvious build upon that would be that the Animus is not actually a reliable narrator, which never really comes up, and seems unlikely to as the future stuff is just kind of filler nowadays.

The weird thing that the animus not being 100% accurate gets some mention every so often, but not much is done with it. For example, it's asked in the first game why nobody has a period accent in the middle ages. The response is: "Ever Read Chaucer? Exactly" In Black Flag it's mentioned certain things weren't even around in that era but were inserted because it's iconic(in this instance, the Queens Steps in Nassau and the fact you could catch Moby Dick if you played the whaling game enough). So basically that gives plenty of wiggle room for errors.

There's another issue with the fact that memory, at best, isn't 100% accurate and people can "remember" things that didn't happen to them, or somehow forget things that seem inconvenient. Not to mention there are numerous times that things are shown in the animus that the character couldn't possibly have seen, heard(The Templars in Syndicate having their meetings) or remembered(Ezio being born).

Sadly, neither of those get brought up much but can pretty much account for pretty much anything they want them to.

 

[Dalisclock]

My personal example, which also motivated me to start this thread, would be Saints Row 2. You see, in the game you are presented with all those crazy missions requiring of you to constantly kill people and destroy things, and they're all presented as pure, almost innocent fun, sprinkled with some hard satire for good measure. However, pretty much every time you complete one of those "fun" missions, the consequences are, more often than not, horrible, usually with someone ending up getting tortured or mutilated, dying an unnecessarily violent death, or parts of the city getting utterly obliterated. All of that caused by a sadistic, sociopathic protagonist, who stops at nothing to deliver a message that he should not be messed with. It all serves as means of delivering a strong message about how much the world of crime is romanticised in mass media vs what it really looks like.

First off, such an amazing idea for a thread. Kudos to you.

Secondly, allow me to build off your example. While Saints Row 2 is considered to be the best in the series, it is my least liked. I never felt like such a monster playing that game. Some of the decisions and actions felt barbaric and made me feel psychosomatically ill.

It started out harsh with what you 'have' to do to get a new Hideout after you awake. I wanted to shut the game off right there. In fact, I did. And it took me a few months if not a year to try to get past it. But it didn't stop. Revenge against the Ronin and the Brotherhood. How a member of the crew dies. That was a sore issue because I've heard stories all of my life about how people of my race were killed in such a manner if they considered lynching too lenient.

Where we diverge is that I don't think they used it to their advantage, at least to my tastes. I never felt any fun like I did with Saints Row 3 (which admittedly started off rough for me with the opening bank robbery). I never felt anything I did was justified in SR2. While the final villain was certainly villainous... Damn, did he have a point in Stillwater being better off without the gangs if those are what the gangs were capable of. Especially the Protagonist.

What made it worst is that Saints Row has always been billed as the lighter hearted alternative to GTA. I never felt so bad playing a GTA game.

Yeah, SR2 it's really hard, if even possible, to feel like you're the "Good Guy" in stillwater. Because nothing you do is remotely good. SR2 is probably one of the most straight up Villian Protagonist roles ever.

Wierdly, SR3 makes things really wacky, but you still end up doing a lot of awful things that would have you on the FBI's most wanted list for terrorism, among other things. Possibly blowing up a building? Raiding military bases to steal their weapons? Sinking an aircraft carrier? Dropping a couple large planes onto the urban areas of a major American City? This sounds like a resume ISIS would love to have. And yet when the saints do it, it's treated as lovable banditry instead of terrorism. At least SR2 doesn't try to sugarcoat their misdeeds as much.

Don't get me wrong, I like the SR series far more then the GTA series but I'll also call out that the main characters are not good people.

 

[ninja666]

I get the point is a good one to make. That harming innocent people for shits and giggles is insane. But when it goes beyond rational thought to me, all it does it take me out of the game to the point that I did not want to continue. The Disconnect doesn't seem advantageous for me as a gamer. I'm glad it reaches others, again it's an important comment to make. But it was too sickening for me to even tolerate the game to get its intention when I first played it.

To get a message across, it has to be palatable. Saints Row 2 is simply not for me. But again, for me.

Yeah, I can understand why you might not like it. Saints Row 2 isn't exactly a shining example of good taste, even as far as games about killing go. Although I'd still say it's mostly your personal feeling on the matter about whether or not it's advantageous for the game itself - most people usually find murdering people in games fun.

 

[Asita]

Wait. What's the difference between ludonarrative dissonance and breaking the players' expectations?

Ludonarrative Dissonance stems from conflict between the story told through the narrative and that told through the gameplay.

Take for instance Final Fantasy VII. At the end of the first act, one of your party members is skewered, leaving them immediately and irrevocably killed. The narrative is saying that death is easy, terrible, and permanent. However, the gameplay itself shows your party both dealing and tanking far worse (up to and including an exploding sun engulfing the damn planet), and revival from anything being as easy as slapping a relatively cheap phoenix down on the dead party member. Where the narrative treats death as harsh, the gameplay treats it as little more than an annoyance. See also any case where there's a desperate fight for survival and you have an arbitrary headcount limit for no discernable reason.

An interesting example crops up in Monster Hunter. It's present to a degree with basically everything you hunt, but it becomes especially egregious in the case of "Elder Dragons". A single Elder Dragon is somewhere in the realm of a natural disaster, they're rare and can singlehandedly alter the local ecosystem. When you first take the quest to fight any of them, it's presented as a once in a lifetime challenge, something that most hunters never encounter (not that many want to), and in some cases it involves monsters so rare that people forgot they even existed. The quests, however, are repeatable, and you will face them a great many times to get the parts needed for your equipment. This hits Ludonarrative Dissonance in two ways: First, it exaggerates the appearance rates of the monsters well beyond what the narrative suggests. Second, it downplays the amount of materials you get from any given monster by what can be a positively absurd degree. Canonically (as seen in other Monster Hunter media), these fights only happen once and result in all the materials a hunter could need. Gameplay wise, you may end up fighting even the incredibly massive Shah Dalamadur dozens of times in hopes of finding certain drops.

 

[Xprimentyl]

This is of course completely up to subjective interpretation, maybe even a little ?meta,? but I?d have to vote for INSIDE.

Spoiler: SPOILERS!!!

Early on, the game establishes overt themes of control, so I think most players fancy themselves (the boy) a protagonist subverting an authoritarian system. The game ends when the boy joins and ultimately ?frees? The Huddle, but it?s very open ended; you?re never really told what you?ve actually done. But the secret ending (which is ironically unlocked near the beginning) shows the boy you?ve been controlling is somehow himself connected to that same system and when he is [apparently] unplugged, the player is left feeling they are themselves the very system of control they?ve been battling, to question their literal control of the boy. That?s all my personal take on things; feel free to offer your own, but I?ve spent more time thinking about the story of this 4-hour, side-scrolling puzzle-platformer than any game ever; it?s why it?s my absolute favorite.

Is relieving to know I'm not the only one with that game burrowing itself far into the mind. The second ending definitely jolted a lot of metaphorical possibilities on how much or little the narrative is really alluding to, beyond the initial discovery.

Oh, trust and believe, you?re not alone; it?s been the gold standard of gaming experiences for me since I played it over two years ago.

 

[CaitSeith]

snip

snip

Ah. So ludonarrative dissonance are merely gameplay plot holes.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

snip

snip

Ah. So ludonarrative dissonance are merely gameplay plot holes.

Another good example is Borderlands 2. In game there are NewU, which when you die basically create a clone of you to keep going for some money. Functionally its there to keep the gameplay upbeat and fun and whatever.

In story however main characters can be and are killed permanently, even though at the end of the cutscene the place they died in has a NewU that brings the player character back to life, but not the NPCs that just died.

The story doesn't line up with the gameplay.

 

[ninja666]

Ah. So ludonarrative dissonance are merely gameplay plot holes.

That's a weird and pretty funny way to put it, but yes, kinda.

 

[Kyrian007]

Wait. What's the difference between ludonarrative dissonance and breaking the players' expectations?

Ludonarrative Dissonance stems from conflict between the story told through the narrative and that told through the gameplay.

Take for instance Final Fantasy VII. At the end of the first act, one of your party members is skewered, leaving them immediately and irrevocably killed. The narrative is saying that death is easy, terrible, and permanent. However, the gameplay itself shows your party both dealing and tanking far worse (up to and including an exploding sun engulfing the damn planet), and revival from anything being as easy as slapping a relatively cheap phoenix down on the dead party member. Where the narrative treats death as harsh, the gameplay treats it as little more than an annoyance. See also any case where there's a desperate fight for survival and you have an arbitrary headcount limit for no discernable reason.

I agree about some of the over the top attacks that just do some amount of damage... but slight correction about phoenix down.

Spoiler: as if this was necessary but spoiler for FF7

Sephiroth killed Aeris. They made that abundantly clear.

Phoenix down "cures KO status." It revives a character if they've been knocked out. In an encounter no one "dies" unless the entire party is killed and no one is left to render assistance. It isn't a D&D style resurrection, it's more like an adrenaline shot.