Is "ludonarrative dissonance" a real thing?

What surprises me is why none of the developers tried to put a "killing is hard at first but gets easier over time" mechanic into the early game.

Imagine if you put the target cross hair over an enemy and then have it get repelled off them, so the player has to really force the cross hair over the enemy so they can shoot them accurately. The more enemies that get killed the easier and less repelled the target cross hair becomes.

Basically it's "reverse" aim assist, they slowly gets reduced over the experience of killing enemies.

Or alternatively they could have just put non-lethal methods of dealing with enemies.

In a way that's what the progression system does but you have to balance ideas like that against the game being fun to play. Fundamentally you just can't make a game with gameplay designed around empowering the player and a story designed around making them seem weak. If you want a character weak in story you have to make them weak in gameplay too like old survival horrors did or you're going to dissonate the fuck out of players.

That just seems shit writing to me. At least the critics I have heard talking about ludonarrative dissonance seem to be talking about game mechanics clashing with the story and no the other way around, also something aesthetic distance violation aka anti-immersion. In the case of Valiant Hearts (a game where narrative is important) it seems pretty obvious that this is the case, since there is nothing wrong with the writing itself, but suddenly when you introduce Healing Hero World War Tour it becomes "dissonant".

I would equate Skyrim's fake time urgency to an error in the manual. They are telling you something could happen if you do X, but even if you do X nothing happens. This is more or less like an NPC saying that a specific weapon in the game can shoot lasers when you are at full health but actually does nothing like that. While the narrative (NPC) tells you something, the mechanics (the fact that you can't shoot lasers) tell you something else, but I doubt you can really consider this a case of ludonarrative dissonance over a case of severe incompetency.

Takes one to know one.

I was kind of expecting Holla Forums to respond against the existence of ludonarrative dissonance because it is related to story and game critics and those are trigger concepts for a lot of anons around here, so I tried to put the most obnoxious cunt I know adopting this position to try to spark debate if only not to be on the same side as Sterling.

Post more horse tits, fam.

Ponyfags have all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop.

Reminds me a bit of the finishers in Spec Ops: The Line. You take out downed guys quickly and efficiently at the start, but by the end you're magdumping into their chests and bashing their faces in with your rifle while screaming/cursing.

are you lost?

"Ludonarrative dissonance" as a phrase has been tainted through use by that fat fuck, but the overall concept of "why is X element of this piece of media at odds with Y element?" is perfectly sound.

Writing as an element of vidya is perfectly fine, it's just a problem when faggots decide it's more important than the player's ability to interact with it.
This is a big part of why Spec Ops: The Line is not held in particularly high regard, and also why ME3 was a shitshow on the scale it was.

...

wait, did the fucking artist just copy-paste the pattern on the pic?
how fucking lazy can bronies get?

It's a real thing that exists, but it also isn't a big deal. It's only laugh-worthy when the cutscenes are played totally straight like Tomb Raider while having completely conflicting gameplay, and the devs pretending that they've made some serious work of art.

It can be distracting during the three or so games with good stories, but most games have shit stories that don't matter.

Sharp eye, user.
Also,
WEW LAD

I'd still fuck it

What?

"Ludonarrative Dissonance" is a term that definitely gets over-used, but it's not very clearly defined as far as I can tell - a bunch of people think it means slightly different things.

I disagree with the claim that HM features this idea though - The narrative is that you're a mass murderer, and you go out and commit mass murder through gameplay. There's *definitely* an attempt to make the player feel repulsed by the violence though - take a look at what happens when you finish a level. They make you walk back past all the guys you killed with no music, and the subtly-rotating screen. It's designed to make you feel uncomfortable about the violence, and a couple of dialogues in the game are directed at the player rather than at Jacket - "Do you like hurting other people?". Would you consider that to be part of the narrative though? The surface-level story is about a guy who kills people under orders from the telephone.

to be fair a lot of bronies can't draw and on shit like that artists tend to take shortcuts

I mean Harry Partridge aka Happy Harry pretty much reuses assets when he can, he'll just alter the timing and flip some of the effects

but yeah looking at it closely you can see shit doesn't connect like it should

If used effectively it can be a pretty powerful tool to really flesh out a scene or character.

Keeping things upbeat in times of turmoil can signify the stoicism of those involved and just how they gotta get on with shit and not dwell on it in the moment.

Likewise with a bunch of brutal killing, making it seem business as usual sets the tone of there being something slightly unhinged with the person(s) committing the atrocity or an air of professionalism to it rather than them just being straight up evil.

The dissonance (or lack thereof) between what the scene should feel like and how the characters within it operate is something that games can do quite well. Thing is, you've really got to be able to tell it apart from games simply being games. Gameplay elements may be implemented in such a way that rely on them being balanced or simply being present over many varying scenes.

For example, we know that murder and killings are horrible atrocities in real life but there are hundreds and thousands of games that maybe don't glorify it but do little to turn one off the action. This doesn't mean there's some additional message hidden to downplay the death going on just that this is the way the game is being made interactive. Which is why it's usually double weird when something that has never stopped a character in-game suddenly becomes a serious threat in a cutscene.

Similarly there are certain ways of interacting or explaining away things in a game that just "make sense" because we have no better way to represent them from a gameplay perspective.

Oft times these elements of ludonarrative dissonance are just coincidences rather than intentional, which is why you need to not only be familiar with the term itself but also games in general and, well, we know how "game critics" are with that.

Got your back, ponii-fam.

Lost where?

While there are some people around here that hold that opinion, there is a big and loud sector of anons that definitely think story in videogames is a bad idea. Some anons even believe we should go back to abstract arcade games like Tetris, but I am not talking about those because they are a minority; what I am talking about is the Carmack attitude toward stories and the porn analogy.

I personally don't think story in videogames is bad. I think it's good and adds much needed spice to some genres, but as you said, it would be naive to put gameplay behind story because if I wanted to watch a movie, I would rather watch a movie.

Its actually defined very well. Its misuse has nothing to do with it being poorly defined.

Another example of Ludonarrative Dissonance I can think of is GTA 4 where you have Niko being a rather ground man in cutscenes who always bemoans violence and only does it out of necessity to protect his friends whereas in gameplay you have the ability to wreck havoc and mass murder people. As others have said its not really a big deal as most of time when dealing with it you have to limit the amount of freedom the player gets.

A better example is how Aerith dies and you can't use the Phoenix down to revive her.

Pissed me the fuck off they never thought of that at any point. Its not would have been a "moral" thing to do, but getting some god damn intel on the fucking people you went there to help rescued in the first place.

Sure the first few areas made that completely impossible, but there where parts where you blatantly could have knock some guys out easy and started questioning them there in the. There is one part they even drew special attention to where there are 2 guys looking over the raining saying something about how much they love living or something.

Dishonored tried to make the "killing alot, a little, or almost none at all" in its story. A lot of the time the Non-lethals where arguable worse for the victims.

What I hated about that game is how damn fun lethal was, while non-lethal was a neck hug or green darts. Corvo had a million ways to end someones life, but apparently only knew the sleeper hold for non-lethal.

They could have at least made not force push, Wind Blast knock people out as long as you didn't make them fall 2 stories.

Dubs confirm ponyfags are worthless human beings.

Or Iji where she starts off apologizing to every death she causes to laughing at every kill she makes.

It matters if you're building a game in order to push an agenda/ideology/etc., or to tell a story.

It doesn't matter so much if you're building a game for people to play and have fun with.

To put it simply, if people start caring about this shit too much, they're spending time not caring about the thing that matters: the fun.

Pic related, I think.

From what I've read in this thread, it seems to be merely a really posh term for a flawed composition.
Additionally, please consider that the term "deconstruction" in regards to art is undefined for all art forms except literature.

Carmack was more-or-less spot-on as far as FPS games are concerned, which makes sense since he's an FPS dev.
Thing is, not all vidya is FPS, so anyone who tries to apply that line of thinking to other genres is some level of retarded.

Yes its a thing, but they never use it right. They parrot it to look smart.

Watch superbunnyhops video on 'anti war games' where he points out games like spec ops and peace walker still completely glorify combat and make you out to be a bad ass and just try to make you feel like you should feel bad anyway.

His argument was things like arma where shooting is not some aimbot close range deal like halo and death is sudden and without warning from a mile away is a much more efficient anti war message even if the game was designed as a game for warsimfags.

fuck it ill just post it hes not sjw.

Examples of ludonarrative dissonance:
Your character is implied to be one of the fastest gunmen of his time, and during specific cutscenes this is emphasized; in the scene in which the snake oil salesman prods you to perform for the crowd so he can con them into buying his shit, you shoot a man's hat out of the air; in another scene you shoot a woman who is hanging from a rope on the gallows while contending with multiple assailants; in another scene where shoot the gun out of another man's hand. All throughout the game, you command your firearm like a man possessed, taking down hordes of foes; you even develop notoriety and are challenged to duels by random travelers who want to test your mettle. In the final scene, your character is confronted by a small group of lawmen. You are given control of your character, and you can use bullet time to try and shoot down as many of them as possible, but this is futile because you're meant to die as a result of this exchange.

This scene is meant to give Marston some characterization; he was a man who lived and died with a gun in his hand, and did everything within his power to leave his life of crime and wrongdoing behind him in order to lead a happy and quiet life with his family. He was a man who ironically fought and killed for criminals and lawmen alike so that he might see his family again. Fucking great, but the gameplay leading up to this moment has you blasting motherfuckers left and right like some super hero. This scene contrasts with gameplay because it stands to reason that you'd be able to kill a small group of men like that quite easily given all the shit you've done.

Early on in the game, The sickly and dying Joker manages to inject Batman with a syringe of his own blood, which means that Batman is afflicted with a fast acting poison that will kill him within mere hours unless he can find a cure. However, you can play for hours and hours without suffering even a symptom. After you reach certain checkpoints, Batman will sometimes cough up blood or grab at his chest as though he's suffering great pain, but during gameplay this affliction is totally absent. The plot device used to raise the stakes (the poison) is only in effect during cutscenes or when it is appropriate to advance the plot.

Your character is always portrayed as this sympathetic, athletic, powerful, and charismatic individual who always has the best of intentions, and does everything he can for the good of mankind. During gameplay, you're free to run around the city and collect shit and generally interact with the world. You can kill guards just fine, but if you lay a hand on a random civilian, you've gone too far and the game will present you with a text that says, " YOUR ANCESTOR DID NOT KILL CIVILIANS". If you do this enough times, the game will "desynchronize" you, and you'll be taken back to a previous checkpoint. This is an interesting example, because the developers deliberately made it possible for players to run around killing whomever they so please, but then also deliberately added a punishment for doing so. It seems utterly pointless; if they don't want you killing civilians, then simply program that feature into the game from the start. Why allow players to behave in a specific way if this behavior somehow conflicts with how you want to portray your character?

On the RDR point, I'm not sure if twenty men armed with bolt action rifles prepared for volley fire are 'a small group,' but it was still pretty jarring.

If I'm not mistaken errant signal popularized it and hearing it in reviews drives me nuts. He's a shitty critic and his terms are pretentious and gay

It was coined by Irrational Games and Bioshock is irredeemably bad. It is often used as a design challenge to control the experience which modern devs go over with.

Its a valid complaint in some games, for example dmc will have cut scenes where the player will get the shit kicked out of them even if they flawless ed the boss. The term itself is pretty gay though, I appreciate that matty matto just calls it "a disconnect"

I loved his analysis of Hearts of Stone. Blood & Wine, I think he nitpicked the story too hard instead of focusing on open world elements which were both a step forward and backwards.

I believe it's a real thing, however people keep picking bad examples to try and show it's a real thing.
In my opinion, a good example is the Yakuza series where your MC can survive several magazines worth of ammunition from enemies with firearms during gameplay whereas in cutscenes he aptly recognizes the threat of someone with a gun and normally falls down after getting shot once however in Yakuza 2 both Kiryu and Ryuji both get lit up and start beating the shit out of each other, so it's selective. This isn't necessarily a bad thing however since I'd much rather have a good game than a shit game.

...

...

I honestly couldnt tell that was what the progression was meant for, because I didnt use it until the last third of the game.

I dont entirely mind this, unless its a case where both story and gameplay are melded together similar in games like Tomb Raider or Uncharted. In cases like that it just feels awkward.

I like my story and gameplay to be completely seperated from each other.

If you are going to discuss something, try understanding it and possibility starting the conversation in a more neutral manner. You sound like someone who didn't know what a morphemic word meant and got upset at it.
Not understanding something is fine, but you might not want to try to be the loudest voice in the room if you dont understand the topic, lest you look like a moron.

I believe this stems from their blatant dismissal of the medium's purpose. Above all else, games are supposed to be, and are created to be, fun. This is the fact they ignore, so when the player is supposed to be having fun during sad parts of the narrative, they treat that like a negative property of the game.

As far as Assassins creed goes I'd say the killing civillians thing actually makes a degree of sense from the gameplay/story alignment sense since if I recall correctly the Animus you use is supposed to give you a semi-accurate model of events based on your ancestors memories but with the player character needing to mimic the ancestor to keep in sync with these memories and keep it all flowing.

Thus it kind of makes sense if you say that Ezio or whoever was basically a decent person who didn't kill civillians but Desmond/the player knows that everything they see is a memory/video game and thus has no issue stabbing passers by because they can. However killing civillians circles breaks you out of sync with your ancestor thus sending you back a bit before you desynced.

Where this gets odd is that the health bar in the Assassins Creed series is supposed to be a representation of how much in sync you are with your character. However despite this there are many things (killing civillians, heading out of bounds during missions E.T.C.) which give the player a warning and then immediately desync them. About the only things that drain your health/sync metre as far as I can recall are weapon attacks and fall damage but this leads to an odd situation where A) you ancestor wearing better armour somehow makes you more resiliant to being de-synced (as you have more health) and B) Healing items in game allow you to get in sync again with your ancestor by healing their wounds… That your ancestor never had in the first place hence your desync.

End of the day though it's as other Anons have said in the thread, if you stop and think it doesn't make sense but the gameplay of the game would generally be radically less interesting/fun if it was brought more in line with the story (or certain story elements would effectively become impossible to portray if you forced the story to gel 100% with what the player could do in gameplay).

The term "ludonarrative dissonance" contains its definition in the term itself. Morphemes and word parts, bro.

Considering they are criticising the literary aspect of games, I would say deconstruction is an appropriate term. Well, that is, if you consider deconstruction an appropriate term at all.

Nice taste in 2hus, btw.

Arena FPS, more specifically. While Quake and Doom did very well with very little story, I think there is still place for FPS with story, specially if you mix it adventure games. Bioshock (the first one) was fairly good and it had a good deal of story, but since Bioshock is far from a pure FPS (it has RPG and adventure elements) I think it was only appropriate to build up ambientation.

The last example feels kind of like a fuck you to the player, but it's more than justified with ingame lore. Basically, the player takes direct control of Altair's player (Desmond in the original trilogy), and the simulation is supposed to play like a videogame; the game intentionally tries to blend reality with the game at some points, like when they describe you the puppet control system and it simply happens to be your controller's button scheme. It's not really breaking the fourth wall because you are technically playing a simulation inside a simulation and they never acknowledge the actual existence of reality, but the game obviously tries to immerse the player into Desmond's reality, which happens to understand that Altair's reality is just a videogame. They do break the fourth wall, but only between Altair and Desmond, and you are supposed to completely insert yourself as Desmond.

When you are playing as Altair, you are playing the ultimate simulation built out of your ancestor's memories. This means it is technically a videogame and you can do whatever you want in it, but if it's not in Altair's memories, it won't be able to be executed. The Animus is building a game level out of DNA data, and you are supposed to roleplay in it if you want to get places. Synchronizing yourself with your ancestor's actions unlocks new content, which is why Abstergo wants you to act as Altair.

I would assume desynchronization is the Animus telling you to stop fucking around and going straight to the point. It's an intentional game mechanic introduced by Abstergo to stop wasting their time by playing their multimillion dollar tech as if it was GTA.

What I am trying to say is, even if the Animus can read so much about your ancestors' past, it still has to fill some gaps, which is why it "imagines" a videogame. However, if shit starts to get stupid and some unforeseen events caused by the player could cause a time paradox (like Altair dying) or inability to imagine the consequences (like Altair going on a murder spree; even if you can do it with little consequences in GTA, in a more realistic approach it would be a huge deal), the Animus simply prefers to disconnect the player rather than thinking of a way to fix the player's errors.

We can deduce from this that the Animus is a console that really does let unlimited movement freedom to the player (sadly this isn't reflected by actual gameplay, but for obvious reasons), but it still has some limits, either artificial (as programmed by Abstergo) or natural (it's still a machine, it can't compute everything and thus can't really imagine what would happen if Altair decided to become knife Hitler). You can kill some of those NPC because the Animus lets you kill things because the avatar can do anything humanly possible, but the Animus doesn't know how to connect the scene where you killed half of the population of a small city to any of the following events.

Nice logical fallacy, faggot. May you point out where am I wrong by paraphrasing the same people that are trying to define the term?

I think that Hotline Miami did pretty good in mixing the narrative and gameplay, all while having nice storytelling techniques and very engaging gameplay.
You want some real ludonarrative dissonance? Try this piece of shit.

Fair enough, I've never actually played Bioshock, I just don't care all that much for mixed genres.

Unrelated, but
This shit triggers me to no end.

Get out.

...

You want an English lesson? Ok
Ludo - game
Narrate - to tell a story
Ive - adjective morpheme

Dis - seperation, opposite, apart
Ance - noun morpheme, state of

Literally means the seperation of game and story

...

And what does that have to do with Valiant Heart's Healing Hero?

Exactly.

The point is it isnt intentionally obtuse, you are just terrible at English and/or inference.

Piss off brony faggot

ni/GG/er plz

He have some good analysis and he do his home work look at his konami vs kojima video
he is one of the few good jornos out there

In later games they added optional objectives to each individual mission that would contribute to your synchronization for the chapter. So, say one chapter is comprised of four missions; each mission has a number of objectives, so if you want to 100% the game, you'll have to go back and replay and do things as the game tells you to. This is really poorly implemented, though, because a number of these objectives are trivial at best and a total pain in the ass at worst. In Assassin's Creed III, there's a number of missions where you have to chase a guy down and catch him, and one of these recurring objectives is, "don't run into another object or person during the chase". This is quite a pain in the ass and not only subject to when and where objects and people spawn but also to your hardware's limitation (on PS3 the draw distance is so poor that you'll often run into shit before it's even rendered into the world).

Anyway, about the animus; you're right. However, I just find it odd that they'd allow you to run around killing NPCs if this action is so out of character for their protagonist. I mean, it's not like killing civilians adds anything to the game, and the punishment is pointless as well because it's more like a slap on the wrist than anything else. The whole system is equivalent to getting mad at your kid for using his crayon all over the walls and taking them away, only to give them back a moment after the lecture and leave him unattended.

I mean, I get all of the justification; I'm just pointing out that Ubisoft give you the option to run around as some robe wearing robin hood type and also allow you to kill innocent people, then get mad at you when you do so. It's a fuck you to the player, maybe because someone at Ubisoft realized that these actions would be dissonant against the ancestor's behaviors, and they wanted a way to sort of point that out. I don't think it's a very good way of doing this. Maybe they could have docked points off your health bar for every civilian you killed? Maybe they could have made it so the ancestor's memory could become increasingly unstable the more you did things to desync yourself? All I know is this "YOUR ANCESTOR DID NOT DO THIS OR THAT PLAY LIKE WE WANT OR FUCK YOU" is pretty shit if you ask me.

he has a leftist prejudice and its no coincidence that he's also a bernie cuck. But even if he wasn't his reviews are shit regardless of his kimmbles jimmy coverage

what is it with all the horsefuckers lately?

E3 is my guess, there have been a lot of fags here thanks to that

I think whats weirder is the people who instantly recognize it as "pony shit"

I just see a 2D drawing of a hot girl, you're instantly recognizing it as pony shit in human form

Is there something you anons want to tell us?

being honest I watched the show until about season 4 when it turned to complete dog shit
I can tolerate someone liking a cartoon, but why would you make a thread in a place that is known for despising horsefuckers?#
hide your fucking powerlevel or just go straight to your containment board

Actually, "ludo" is a Latin word. I would love to bitch about how combining ludo (Latin) and narrative (English) is a dissonance on itself similar to the word pansexual, but since narration is a direct borrow from Latin as well, I guess I will have to shut up for now.

Anyway, what is "ludonarrative"? It may as well be a term used to describe gameplay as a story, like when you are telling your friends about that time you managed to kill the whole enemy team with a single rocket. It requires some explanation because it is not immediately obvious. You could use a more specific fully fleshed expression to define this concept, but these guys still decided to make up a new word for it because it sounds cooler, and that's almost the definition of pretentiousness.

About the slight leftist leaning in some of his older videos, so what?

Were you not there when ponyshit was spammed on all boards for months with no stop? Do you really think we wouldn't recognize it? Do you like playing dumb or are you just a newfag?

My favourite example of this is in Tales of Symphonia. The first boss you fight is a bug guy and it's basically a tutorial fight. Whether you win the fight or not, you will always be treated to the same "Dammit he's to strong!" type of dialogue. Even on subsequent NG+'s you can crush him in one hit and still get the same result. It's just silly and lazy.

he said it in the video you delusional shitnigger. Keep sucking that cuck's dick if you want but can you at least keep it on reddit?

He has straight up said capitalism is evil multiple times.

But it is.

you need to go back

I came here to post this.

Definitely was going for big guy.

Same, I can't believe people still haven't gotten off the ride. Although in a way I kinda miss the autism.

Ludonarrative dissonance has been a term in use for a long time. It's abused, but it's very much real. Sometimes the dissonance is intentional, in which case you get some great mindfucks but otherwise it's an accident, and generally not a good thing if so.

No, you're clearly a horsefucker trying your best to "fit in".
Back to >>>/mlp/ or wherever it is you people congregate.

Ludo is actually a full word, not just a morpheme. Latin languages have different rules for morpheme and lexeme separation so its lexeme is actually lud- and not ludo. More specifically, morphemes are usually employed as lexeme modifiers, and thus it would be naive to imply ludo is a "morpheme" in what would be a composite Latin word, because it is a full word formed by its root lud- and a suffix -o.

Morphemes as in prefix, suffix and other ixes usually come from Latin, but it would be naive to think most morphemes come from Latin if you are including full words into your definition of morpheme.

b-but user, we have to anonymously protect the anonymous integrity of the anonymouse community of an anonymous image board talking anonymously about video games

It only really matters in books or mediums where you're only a watcher.

The idea of ludonarritive dissonence is like a happy sounding song with brutal lyrics about ripping and tearing, or a book that reminds you that you're reading a book.

There's nothing wrong with it, and it all depends on how you handle it if you do it.

The idea itself is cherrypicking on their part.

I think it ain't considering ponyfuckers spam the board with their shit.

I think better examples are like, Halo Reach where other Spartans die like flies in cutscenes but are indestructible in gameplay.

Term exist but as others said. Not important to vidya. Even more so when "critics" say the game mechanics clash with the plot instead of vice versa.
The criticism you will see on Holla Forums is when journos use the term to be pretentious. Or when pretentious devs conflict gameplay with their shit story.

That's just inconsistency. A good example would be the scene from Evangelion where the bright classical music plays over the Impact which is about to wipe out all life. The jarring disconnect between the events and the tone of the music is in line with the characters' own disconnect from the events in from of them. What they're seeing is so utterly beyond their understanding that they can't even begin to process it.

That valiant hearts example is odd–cpr is rhythmic, and that works well enough with a medic theme. Hotline Miami does it on purpose, and it works well.

Nah, evil people are evil. Capitalism/communism are just tools. They can be used either way.

No, ludonarrative dissonance covers it particularly well.
The rules that guide the gameplay, don't apply in the cut scenes.

Ludonarrative dissonance literally means the story and the gameplay offer dissonant experiences. Some people don't like it, some people do like it, some people don't give a fuck. It's real, like the color red is real, but whether you like it or hate it or don't care is just an opinion.

Typically, in my experience, the people who use the term regularly lean more towards being storyfags, so they also tend use the term as a negative descriptor. Most crunchy gamers don't give a fuck.

doesn't mean anything.

...

Ludonarrative dissonance is what you get with mainstream darlings like Uncharted.

Jesus that's some B^U tier laziness.

...

I'm just gonna go with they're misusing it like the stupid moralfags they are and are asshurt the developers' intentions don't fit what they want.

Like the artist, by the way. Didn't even give a thought to humanized ponies. They're not anymore, now are they?

Manhunt 2. Danny pukes the first time you kill a guy. Didn't really explore it beyond that, but still.

...

...

First off, I like your taste in horses.

Second, the examples you provided are blatant agenda pushing. By the definition of ludonarrative dissonance (at least the one you wrote), the issue is that certain themes clash. For example, imagine you have a sad funeral where they bury a friend that had been with your the entire game, helped you, joked with you, etc. and it's really, sad, but all the while that happens, the background music is some retarded shit like Gangnam style. It destroys the entire tone and mood of the scene and generally ruins part of your investment in the game, while not providing anything of value.

Your examples, however, are trying to enforce morality, especially with HM. They don't say that there is any such tone clash (because there isn't), but that they dislike that murdering isn't depicted in a more serious and negative light because muh virtual characters' lives matter. Feel free to throw any such critics into the trash, because rather than evaluating the quality of the game, they decide to force their personal politics into it and virtue signal about how good and moral they are because they're against killing.

The end of RDR always bothered me in that regard too. It's a really powerful ending, but they should have gone after him with an amount of firepower he couldn't have handled in live gameplay either, problem solved.

As for Arkham City, I had a different problem with Batman's affliction. Apparently it took Joker the entire what, six months or so since Arkham Asylum to get that sick, so why does the exact same mystery illness take Batman from perfectly okay to death's door in a few hours?

And of course, there's always the amazing difference between Cutscene Dante and in-game Dante in the Devil May Cry series. Cutscene Dante is just mildly annoyed by being shot in the head or impaled several times at once, in-game Dante takes significant damage and gets knocked down by a single clumsy demon swipe.

Yup, it is a real thing, pic related. But I think the term is intentionally obtusely worded by pretentious pseudointellectuals to make themselves seem smarter. After all, the effect is not common and important enough to warrant its own term, nor does "ludonarrative dissonance" accurately describe it without further explanations. I'd just call it a "clash of story and gameplay".

see I don't see it that often, actually I never really see it here on 8ch, besides it's technically not horse shit since they're humans in the pic

Eva is trash anyways

Nice trips.

Disharmony between what happens in the game and what happens in the cutscenes.
The questgiver tells you that you must hurry to deactivate the bomb because it's on a timer and it's a race against the clock but the timer doesn't actually start ticking until you enter the quest area, so you can casually explore the overworld.
That's an example of the game and the story not aligning.

Also stuff like:
- Everything about this situation screams "Ambush!", but my character walks straight in during a clipscene.
- Everyone knows I'm the prophesied hero who will save mankind from its mortal enemies. Why do I have to pay upfront for my equipment?
- That guy is obviously going to stab me in the back, but I must let him go for no good reason.
- You murdered a hundred guys in a country where we hang people for theft? We'll put you in prison for two weeks.
- I just got gunned down by a dozen guys who really want me dead. Then, I wake up in the hospital with 100 bucks less.

TL;DR
Journalists: It's the dev's fault I enjoy the killing!

^
don't give him the {you}s
let him be a retard somewhere else

Yeah it's a real thing. In my case, I was just playing Dragon's Dogma and I got to the "capital city" and it has about three people in it. Maybe Novigrad spoiled me but it reminded me I was playing a game and one that did a poor job of conveying a bustling mercantile hub.

The dissonance seems to be worse the more I enjoy the game too, which is frustrating. Then again, when it happens in games I don't care about I already don't care, so I don't care when it happens. *shrug*

Thanks for the info OP and yeah i agree with you journos are faggots and this ludo thing is not necessary for a game to be good. For fuck's sake we have been having fun killing people since idk carmageddon i think, it's because we understand that the people we are killing are not really people as a person is much more than 5-6 lines of code and real people have several emotions and aspirations etc and that is exactly why we feel sad in games when a character that is actually well developed dies. Otherwise it's really hard to give a fuck about pixels.

sage for the being rambly and not really adding anything to the discussion

...

Ludonarrative dissonance is when it takes five shots in the head to kill any enemies, so you always use hi powered rifles instead but then some asshole gets you at gunpoint with a pistol and you're supposed to be afraid.

Solution : don't make those cutscenes, immediately fire your writers. Start a contest, best screenwriting gets $20 000 prize and then use that as a game story.

Nice act of subversion there pony-fam

quality shit tbh fam
did they even proof-read the script
trying to make sense of it while playing is like half-remembering a fever dream

There are no games with realistically scaled cities and towns and the only ones that don't suffer from this problem have heavy abstraction with your city interaction

Not really, it's for people who think the gameplay's "story" weighs as much as the cutscene story.

Basically people who use the term are used to movies and TV shows and aren't very familiar with how games work.

Yes it's a real thing even if clueless game critics misuse the term, it just means that the story and gameplay are opposed. A great example often complained about here would be something like a fight with a rival or powerful character in-game where you are supposed to be getting your ass kicked because they are so strong but the game is easy and you are completely destroying them while taking no damage. So while you easily murder them your character might say he's struggling or be awed by how strong they are or even start gasping for breath because they are so wounded despite being at full health. Then after you beat them in record time with no effort while taking no damage they end up completely destroying you in a cutscene.

This is often complained about in threads here and is a great example of the gameplay clashing with the story. Done well the gameplay would be really hard so that you don't need your character to say anything to know the enemy is tough, you already think they are tough because they have been wrecking you.

Looks like they're porting more post-modernist academic terms they heard their marxist professors use. Seriously you get used to hearing terms like this if you attend college these days and you quickly learn that it's as much as any buzzword these days. As for the meaning behind it, the problem remains the same although the buzzwords change: they seek to punish gameplay in favor of the story at every opportunity.

The story will always come second because the story must always serve the gameplay. Unfortunately trying to fit video games in the square peg of the story goes back to the 2000s where making fun of games for "game logic" became popular. Despite having innocent intentions this became popular with new brands of game critics that sought every opportunity to sound smarter and punish gameplay for not enabling the story or for having a nonsensical story in general. Thus began the backwards push to make gameplay serve the story when the story should always come second.

This misguided and pretentious push couldn't possibly be more counter-intuitive when you realize that the reason why games have constantly come up with nonsense story moments is to serve you gameplay. Therefore restricting games in favor of a story reduces gameplay. You might think that it's possible to have a great story intact and preserve gameplay as well, and that is true, but not many developers did that because the genre couldn't allow it or it wouldn't work without inadvertently tipping the scales back to the story.

Think of how today the story has taken center stage and how worse off gaming has become because of it. Around the time this was becoming a problem people were constantly complaining about cutscene overload and now no one even seems to care anymore. More importantly the stories themselves haven't improved at all and this can easily be a sign that there aren't many good storytellers working in gaming but in reality it's because gameplay makes you more invested in the story when your actions directly affect the story, whether it be choice or simulative of the event. This doesn't mean you can save really shitty stories by making you play out every event but when the story serves gameplay it makes decent stories feel better than they are. And above all when you break down the stories of the games with the best gameplay nothing fucking makes sense. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

I've never played Valiant Hearts, but the Hotline Miami one is just juxtaposition. Is Hotline Miami really 2deep4 dumbass critics?

Good trips, I didn't even notice that.

And that is the reason why New Vegas plot actually works

If you don't care about the term, then you don't care. I don't know why you're in the thread if you don't care, but whatever. If you do care, and you have time, then check out this video. It's about 20 minutes long, and I think he does a pretty good job defining his terms and giving examples
Nah, fuck that. First, this guy and his channel are nobody. He's got eleven fucking subscribers and this video has 90 views. Shekels aren't a factor whatsoever. If you want to make one, though, by all means, have at it.

In other words. Truffaut is always right.

20 lawman with bolt action rifles all shooting you at the same time seemed pretty non-jarring to me.

It doesn't matter whether or not you think it's jarring. What matters is that, given your character's abilities and that you've surmounted every prior scenario you've encountered, some of which were equally outlandish in their absurdity, the final scene strikes discord with what you know your player character is capable of and with what is actually occurring. The game prevents you from using dynamite or other weapons and you're not even capable of moving during this encounter. The game has decided for you, "it's time to die now, Marston. Our story calls for it" and there's nothing you can do to change it. It's the equivalent of a scripted gameplay segment. In fact, that's exactly what it is. They purposely did this because they knew that players would be able to fight their way out of that situation they've presented, given they were allowed to do so.

The fact that a single man was killed by a group of individuals who are armed to the teeth isn't jarring; the scene is jarring and dissonant when you consider the context given by gameplay. You as the player have slaughtered dozens, possibly hundreds, of nameless individuals in the name of your family's well being or because you're an edgy prick who takes pleasure in terrorizing NPCs. You've taken down entire camps of armed bandits with nothing more than a pistol and your wits, and you have taken their most powerful and influential members into custody, yet we're expected to believe that Marston couldn't handle the final confrontation with all of his arsenal and abilities?

Whatever you want to think man.

Ludonarrative dissonance in a nutshell. I can't be arsed to think of any examples right now, but I'm sure there are plenty. Hell, we can even make a game out of it: How many games can you name that fit the above description?

I was fond of how Peace Walker handled it, in that it's completely aware that it's preaching peace, yet is letting you become "THE LEGENDARY BIG BOSS." Everything about that game is built around the lie of Big Boss's benevolence. He's actually in the process of becoming one of the shittiest people in history, yet everyone loves him due to runaway hero worship. There is no peace where you're going.

It is real and any game that has it should delete all of the story bits and cutscenes to leave the only important part of the game: gameplay.

I don't mind story when it always fits the gameplay, and sometimes I even enjoy it if it wasn't written by hack frauds (I like Morrowind's), but ultimately story in the vast majority of games is so hilariously garbage that it shouldn't exist in the first place. Just give me lots of individual levels to shoot dudes so you don't bother having to waste my time on smooth transitions between them or stopping gameplay for a couple minutes to explain some retarded story that only biofags would think is good.

There's a lot of people in the city, it's just the problem is that there are only like 20 that have any significance to the player.

New Vegas really did a good job, even if your progression in the world was pretty much railroaded reverse clockwise it felt better than Fallout 3/4.

And it sucked at being that.

I beg of thee to kill thyself, Sir OP of Faggotry.

...

From what I can remember about RDR (haven't played it in a while), didn't John Marston throw his life away because he knew that the law would always come after him and his family so he intentionally got killed to take the heat off his son and wife?

His argument is that you, as the player, would snipe them, dynamite them…whatever you need to do to kill them. Not intentionally walk out into the open.

...

There's only 20 guys there.
Do you think I can't take them out? I wouldn't even need to go back into the barn. I spent all game trashing fags like these.

The thing is, if the had given you control of Marston three seconds before, you could have taken potshots on all of them or even take a horse and flee, everything except stay and take it like the game does.

Yeah, that's the implication. I just think the scene could've been handled differently to really sell the idea that there's no way out. Maybe Marston could've gotten his shooting arm blown off, and therefore the final section of the game would have been the player against a small army of foes while his aiming is deliberately thrown off. It'd still be forcing a specific outcome through deliberate manipulation of the mechanics, but at the very least it'd be a more believable presentation and the justification for the inevitable death scene would be more justified in terms of narrative. Maybe you can think of something better; I just know that this final scene is way too discordant from what is possible in gameplay to take seriously. I'm more upset that they killed him off in such a terrible way than I am about him dying per se. For all Marston's experience, he comes off as pretty naive to think he can just walk away with his transgressions without any sort of ramifications.

I'm sorry, did you want me to shitpost or something?
Rude asshole. Fuck you.

oh shit, I read your post incorrectly. My apologies, it's hard to discern sarcasm through text sometimes.

Yeah, but then you started that ironic greentexting bullshit, so now you've just gone and pissed me off.

doing it wrong.

Games have narratives, you dumb cunt. Every game.
Do things happen while you play the game? Congratulations, you have a narrative. You're almost as retarded as the guy over on Holla Forums who thinks storylines aren't actually stories just because he doesn't like them.

Hey, I said I was sorry. Fuck that other guy, though. He was deliberately trying to contrive what I was saying. I thought you were too. I was wrong.

Well, that's okay.
Just cut that ironic shit out, for fuck's sake. It wasn't acceptable in 2011, what the hell makes you think it's okay now?

...

Yes, retard, every game.
Do thing happen in Tetris or do you stare at an empty screen until you turn the game off?

good job derailing your own thread, though

That stance broadens the definition of narrative to the point of making it cheap and useless.

No it doesn't.
A narrative is a sequence of events that tell a story. Let's look at Tetris' narrative:

It's simple, but it still varies from player to player. Some dipshit 8 year old is not going to have the same Tetris story as some Japanese grandmaster. The journeys are different.

More like 50% comedy and 50% feels

Don't be obtuse. Nobody says story to refer to the specific way/order someone interacted with gameplay mechanics, and you know it.

Unrelated, but here's a really nice video about Tetris.

A story isn't the same as a narrative. It's why we have different words for them.
Tetris does not have a story, but it does have a player narrative. Any game that lets the player exert control over it ALL OF THEM, by default, has a narrative.
Just like how a group of people, by default, have a culture.

Is it Tetris' intention to tell a story? You can extrapolate a story, and by extension a narrative from anything, down to the shit you took last night. Thus, the dilution.

At its core, Tetris is a simple game with no aspiration to be anything more, and that's perfectly fine. Any narrative it is presumed to have, you have to make up for yourself.

This is even more obtuse. If we accept the definition of a narrative as the act of telling a story, your position is invalid barring your own headcanon.

Sorry, I meant to say narrative. People use the word narrative to refer to a story, and as such,
I suggest finding a different term for that purpose.

You're right, I can.

No, it's not a dilution, it's just an inherently broad term.

Which is why I explicitly said player narrative. Every single player has a different experience while playing Tetris, and hence, they make a new narrative.

Woah, shit, I just got deja vu really hard. I swear I've had this exact argument

GEE, I WONDER WHY.
before. Weird.

Wew, I totally meant to split that sentence in half. Yup.

Now that's a postmodernist position. However, my position is that it's headcanon with connotation of autism - which is more banal, but much less one-shoe-fits-all.

What point are you trying to make? All you demonstrated is that my point is literally in the dictionary as the primary definition, and that doesn't support your position at all.

Bit pretentious, but this is what he's trying to say.
To extrapolate, narrative falls into it too, since each person has his own account/interpretation of how a series of events occurred, and by internalizing or externalizing it (both made trivial in today's world) a new narrative is born - a story a person tells himself. This is basically a wording of the law versus the spirit of the law situation, with added gymnastics.

...

What could Marston do but take the Feds offer at face value?

So it's like you're portrayed as a very athletic and capable character but you press simple buttons like in a quick time event to accomplish it. Just seems like a fancy term that people use because they heard someone else say it like Uncanny Valley.

Carmack was wrong. He thinks that because he worked ok fast paced fps in the 90s. But he had to be crazy to think everything people were gonna make until forever with that genre was gonna be fast paced gameplay with no story.

Link?

...

More like you have an athletic and capable character but they start panting and wheezing like an asthma sufferer after running for 10 seconds in-game.

hubbahubba
more like lewdonarrative dicksonance

I must be missing something here.

goddamn the new Tomb Raider looked bad.

It is definitely a real thing, usually it stems from the gameplay sequences and story elements being in stark contrast to each other. I.E. in Two Thrones Dark Prince is described as a lot more powerful, but all it does is put a timer on the game, it is a lot easier to beat the same place without turning.

Stuff like that doesn't hurt the game much as long as the gameplay is good, it might create some ridiculous scenarios but those are easily ignored. What worries me is that recently the term has been used as an arguement for limiting player's control. Forced walking sections, no shooting sections, turning off jumping. Making the entire thing a cutscene. Press x to see your character cry. All that shit is cancer and it can fuck right off.

How about sharing where you've read anyone bitching about "ludonarrative dissonance" and the words you said about these two games?

Only one I ever hear about is Tomb Raider reboot.

Term is real but don't apply it to rpgs–because that time-problem is just baked into the genre.

It applies to more story focused games. Shitty SJW reviewers like Errant Signal would over-apply it to games like GTAIV and Farcry3 (which were actually not that bad LND-wise)–and then drop it completely when shit like Tomb Raider 16 came out.

How many Zelda games is Zelda herself even a captive the whole time like that, though? I think the writer was confusing Zelda and Peach, since Peach is the one who's frequently locked up in a tower or dungeon or whatever. Zelda tends to run around disguised as a ninja or as some alternate pirate incarnation, and even when she was captured in LttP, she was stuck in a giant crystal. Which would really make it hard to rape her.

horse bump

Yes, but a lot of today's writers are just being a pretentious bunch jerking over words and misusing them to push the idea that you should feel bad about killing people in-game and shit.

Ludonarrative dissonance can apply, for instance, to a zombie horror survival game where the game is supposed to scare you with the threat of dying to zombies except you're romping through them so easily that you never feel any actual pressure. The gameplay completely undermines the tension of the setting. It can also apply to Dragon Age Origins where the story puts the heroes under time pressure to rally against the blight as quickly as possible but the gameplay immediately takes a detour for you traipsing the countryside and doing a positively absurd number of unimportant sidequests. It also happens in Dragon Age 2 with blight infection and dead siblings. Cutscenes forcing shit on you that never happens in gameplay, with the end result being a "you have got to be kidding me" effect.

Still, most people refer to this as some kind of clash between gameplay and story. They don't actually use the term ludonarrative dissonance, which is a bit more of a circlejerk term used to qualify yourself to other people who know the word so that you can get applause for being a clever boy who clearly knows his literary criticism. Why, he used the word ludonarrative dissonance, that must mean he's smart.

Do you really want me to link to a Spanish YouTuber who seems kind of a SJW, quotes relatively dank memes on a regular basis and thinks Sterling is hot shit.

Those critics missed the whole fucking point. HM is actually works way better than any Spec Ops shit, because it makes violence appealing when it's needed, it works when you kill the last enemy embed kicks in and when you crawling through corpses back to your car, you thinking "did I just do that?". You can't accuse player for enjoying killing, if he doesn't actually enjoy it.

That's one of the points the guy made. He seems to realize it is intentional, but still comments on how you are a bad person for liking killing and the silence after the massacre is supposed to make you feel bad for killing all those people. I doubt that's what the devs were trying to accomplish, because otherwise they wouldn't be making a tribute to the 80s ultraviolence and basically glorifying it through a score system based on how brutal you were.

The guy still gave it a fair review, other than implying that making the music almost overshadow the rest of the game was somewhat cheap because a game should shine for its mechanics (just after spending half of the video talking about the game's story), even if necessary for the game.

Come on, that doesn't happen and you know it. Why would you keep playing the game, otherwise? Because you enjoy the killing. That's why.

Doesn't ludonarrative dissonance describe when a good guy is killing hundreds of dudes but a bad guy only kills one and the bad guy is rendered evil and things like that?
I thought it only applied to stories, not to things like gameplay or aesthetics.

Ludonarrative Dissonance is very real, but its not Too much of a problem, if you understand that videogames are video games.

A couple times I can think of it are:
1. Red Dead Redemption. You're playing a character forced to kill his friends to save his family from the government. He's generally a good guy, but you're allowed to go on a murderous rampage, adn you're rewarded with "evil" morality points for doing it.

2. Sonic Lost World. near the end of the game, the villains are sucking the life out of the planet and Amy is basically dying, yet the level has an upbeat and colorful theme to it.

I'd consider any scene in a game where you're surrounded by weenie enemies yet it's treated as an actual threat as an example of dissonance.

Thats not ludonarrative dissonance.

Ludonarrative dissonance is when the lore does not comply to gameplay mechanics or vice versa.

Like when it takes 200 shots in gameplay but only 1 in a cutscene to kill a character.

Thats ludonarrative dissonance.

...

So what's the answer, Julius?

oh, so thats what it means.

that describes Resonance of Fate perfectly.

Couldve sworn op was using the term wrong

How did the thread progress so much after this?

How, you faggot OP? Juxtaposition is totally a fucking thing and it happens all the time. And it doesn't matter. Game reviewers are pretentious losers who failed film/journalism school.

the real ludenarrative dissonace is why an ugly nerd fagot like you hav such a hot mom with nice piece of ass lol ;)

I always felt it was more like the title screen of the chapter is the rising action, the level itself is the action, landing that one final kill is the climax, and walking back to your car is the falling action after you've blown your load and your mind goes blank.
Then talking to Beard is like the cigarette afterwards.

I'd say that's plain old shit writing. Riot is very guilty of this, considering Demacians are painted as the good guys despite having a crazy justice system that can put you to death for minor theft and being quite brutal in their wars (but it's okay, they just kill the bad guys!), while Syndra has only one confirmed kill in self defense "but her mentor was only trying to take her powers away, she could have lived without them!". Well, you can also live without your arms, but I would still expect a violent response if I brought a chainsaw near to them and she's painted as quite the monster. Doesn't help that this is the only thing we know about her and her actions.

Well, that's quite a lot of nobodies, but considering Sora went face-first and happy go lucky into a legion of >1000 heartless just about some hours before and killed them all even more easily than when they are in small groups, I'd say this is a case of ludonarrative dissonance. What's worse is that the gameplay doesn't seem to reflect itself when its easier to die to a group of 20 heartless than to a group of 1000.

Why do you say that? I remember them doing quite cuhrayzee stuff both ingame and during cutscenes.

because in battles you shoot enemies 3 million times, but in cutscenes they die in one shot

...

I played the game long ago, but if I recall correctly, they only died in one shot during the cutscene after putting 20 tons of lead in their bodies during the battle. I might be wrong tho, I played the game when it came out.

It used to be fine pre-season 3. Then they removed the JoJ and lore became non-existant. The entirety of the game went to shit after season 2 anyway, I just kept playing it out of peer pressure.

yeah, isn't that fucking stupid?

what makes the cutscene bullet any stronger than the other 3 million you shot at them before?

Back when I quit, I remember they were going through and changing the lore in all the worst possible ways.
I remember Amumu's lore got changed to like, a single sentence or something ridiculous like that.
Karthus's lore got raped so he was just the big evil skeleton wizard guy.

Well, it's unrealistic, but it's following game mechanics. If we consider enemies do have HP and they aren't killed as easily as regular humans because they have a billion trillion HP and you have to reduce it to 0 before killing them, what they are doing during the cutscene is putting their HP down to 0 from 1 in a single bullet. Basically, it's a case of game logic rather than a case of game and lore doing opposite stuff.

I would say there is more of a case with the weapons customization system. Why even represent the boosts as accessories and bling bling for your weapon if they are not going to work due to their ass backwards disposition? The gameplay is telling you the character is aiming faster due to the amount of sights you have put in the weapon, but there is no way your character could use all those unaligned sights. Boosts seem to be abstract buffs, but the narrative (their representation as accessories) clashes with this fact by giving them an inappropriate shape. The narrative tells you sights are like real sights (same shape, same utility) and are used for aiming, but it also allows you to put signs in a manner that would make it impossible to use them for aiming, but the gameplay still recognizes these sights and still improve your aim speed.

Wow, really? That's pretty bad. I just remember Soraka's lore rework and it wasn't perfect, but it was not that bad.

I think they tried to recover some of his lore for the Pentakill update, but it was still not as crazy as it was during the JoJ times. Fuck, the full story of Pentakill and its members was silly as hell.

This all happened after they changed their lore team. Supposedly it was to improve it and make it more accessible to casuals, but they ended making the game feel more lifeless. With the JoJ you could learn a bit about the champions, their daily lives and personalities outside their backstory, and that helped reinforce the lore behind the whole game and the meaning and purpose of the League of Legends. It made the game feel more fluid and political like the fucking lore told you, but then they removed it and it almost seems the characters are cryogenized between games. It's almost a miracle they still recognize the concept of summoners, considering how they raped the whole lore.

The lore of LoL was not perfect, but it was quite original in the way it tried to explain everything and the way it reinforced itself in this regard. With events such as the single Ionia vs Noxus battle, it made the player think the skirmishes it played were for some small political dispute between factions. Now you just fight for the sake of fighting because that part of the lore has disappeared.

Basically. Like whenever a character permadies while your characters have resurrection magic, you're gonna have problems.