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The Errant Signal Thread

Ninjerk

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Frank Lantz basically made this point in his Gamasutra post, but he's being extremely cautious about not directly saying these people are full of shit.

flantz said:
The way I see it, from a formalist perspective, most videogames aren't particularly interesting. They tend to be collections of shallow activities with lavish thematic and narrative dimensions - beautiful 3D environments to explore, gorgeous multimedia experiences, entertaining exercises of make-believe and pretend, but usually not that interesting in terms of player choice and action.

So when I see smart young critics complaining about "ludo-essentialism" or "ludocentrism" or "formalism" in a way that implies that being primarily interested in formal qualities of choice and action makes one an ally of the status quo or a defender of ruling videogame conventions I want to speak out and say: No, we feel as disconnected from most games as you do, if for opposite reasons. Everywhere *you* look you see points and goals and competition and puzzles and combat. Everywhere *we* look we see pretend worlds and childish make-believe, imaginary dragons, badly written dialogue and unskippable cutscenes in which angry mannequins gesture awkwardly at each other.
I love all these hipster buzzwords like ludology/ludocentrism to make oneself look smarter while making empty-headed statements.

I would be very hesitant to call these people "smart young critics." When I was younger I very much lacked the vocabulary to describe the very real problems had with games e.g. Oblivion, Fallout 3, etc. These kids have these very sophisticated-sounding words that they use to say absolutely fucking nothing. "dissonance in art is not necessarily bad." "I'm hard pressed to think of a great work of art that doesn't employ at least a modicum of dissonance at some point." "same. really congruent works can get super vapid super quickly."

What is dissonance in art? Dissonance with what? Whom? Congruent with what? Whom? Itself? The intended audience? The actual audience?

"Really great plots can do that as well. Ancient Greek tragedies were about the tension between competing value systems."

:argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::mob::x:x:x:x:x:0/5::0/5::0/5::fight::fight::fight:
 

Gozma

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I honestly kinda like the ludo latinate thing. "Game" is seriously confounded by win/loss stuff (When I call some some shit like Minecraft a game, when a Lego set isn't a game, I feel like I'm just going by a dumb convention) and "toy" or "play" have a lot of normative baggage. Using obvious latinate roots in English strips away normative elements. It just needs people to use it a lot to weather off the pretension.
 

Ninjerk

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I honestly kinda like the ludo latinate thing. "Game" is seriously confounded by win/loss stuff (When I call some some shit like Minecraft a game, when a Lego set isn't a game, I feel like I'm just going by a dumb convention) and "toy" or "play" have a lot of normative baggage. Using obvious latinate roots in English strips away normative elements. It just needs people to use it a lot to weather off the pretension.
Say, do you by any chance have a Youtube channel? :troll:
 

buzz

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I honestly kinda like the ludo latinate thing. "Game" is seriously confounded by win/loss stuff (When I call some some shit like Minecraft a game, when a Lego set isn't a game, I feel like I'm just going by a dumb convention) and "toy" or "play" have a lot of normative baggage. Using obvious latinate roots in English strips away normative elements. It just needs people to use it a lot to weather off the pretension.
You're going by different dumb conventions, the convention of being a dumb bastard with no research and the convention of calling everything a game.

First, Minecraft HAS a win/loss state. There actually is an end to Minecraft, complete with an actual end-boss.
Second, even if Minecraft was a virtual Lego game (it isn't, it's a lite survival game where you're able to build things), I don't understand why it has to be called a game when it's obviously a toy.


This is why this whole artsy-fartsy string of endless conversations seems weird to me. Why can't we use the rest of the common words to describe whatever we have and leave it at that?

Not everything video is a film. Some are music videos, some are camera footage of some kid's birthday, some are talk show from TV. Not everything involving letters is literature. Not everything involving real tri-dimensional objects is a sculpture.

So why is every piece of interactive virtual software called a game? Why not keep distinctions like all things healthy? Virtual toys, interactive paintings, video games and so on. Why the whole ludo-narrativo-pretentiouso-bullshito that says nothing about anything?

Before the whole video game as art fantasy being built on the Internet, it was very simple for pretty much anyone to call things what they are, even if the term "game" could've been applied to many different things, often wildly separated content-wise. The secret of doing it was simple = just add one word before the word "game".

So you had sport games, board games, social games, pen and pencil games, role-playing games, simulation games and so on.


Look, this is the article that coined the phrase "ludonarrative dissonance" the first time: http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html

Look how much he tries not to shit himself in this "critique". What is he even trying to say? Why the fuck are you comparing Citizen Kane (whose influences are of such a different nature than what he discusses it's not even funny) with Bioshock in the first place?
Why is it so hard for him to say "your game is stupid as fuck, it's extremely linear and you don't give me any choice; so fuck off with your pretentious meta-story about video games and come back when you learn how to design a proper one"
 

Gozma

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First, Minecraft HAS a win/loss state. There actually is an end to Minecraft, complete with an actual end-boss.
Second, even if Minecraft was a virtual Lego game (it isn't, it's a lite survival game where you're able to build things), I don't understand why it has to be called a game when it's obviously a toy.

This is why this whole artsy-fartsy string of endless conversations seems weird to me. Why can't we use the rest of the common words to describe whatever we have and leave it at that?

Not everything video is a film. Some are music videos, some are camera footage of some kid's birthday, some are talk show from TV. Not everything involving letters is literature. Not everything involving real tri-dimensional objects is a sculpture.

So why is every piece of interactive virtual software called a game? Why not keep distinctions like all things healthy? Virtual toys, interactive paintings, video games and so on. Why the whole ludo-narrativo-pretentiouso-bullshito that says nothing about anything?

I had no idea Minecraft was anything but an endless building mode. OK.

But, you understand what normative means right? Like the reason you have a butthurt when someone says, "Games are art" is because "art" has generally assumed a normative meaning, where something being "art" means it's good, it deserves to exist, it's worth having and the person that made it should be exalted and consuming it is good for you, it should be viewed with quiet reverence and whatever else. Or using something like "artsy-fartsy" is implicitly normative satire of that premise. Normative words obfuscate and turn conversations into chimp status fights.

It's a convention of contemporary English that people use latinate words to de-emphasize normativity. It's why latinate constructions are considered dry and academic and scientific. I like having a chimp status fight sometimes but I also like talking in ways where I don't have to litter what I say with implicit insults and status manipulation at other times.
 

tuluse

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Why is it so hard for him to say "your game is stupid as fuck, it's extremely linear and you don't give me any choice; so fuck off with your pretentious meta-story about video games and come back when you learn how to design a proper one"
Frankly that's a shallow criticism. Lots of linear games are good. I never heard anyone complain that Crash Bandicoot was too linear of a platfomer, even though it's much more linear than the Mario (letting you pick which levels to play, warp flutes, etc) and Sonic (lots of obvious bonus areas to visit) games it followed up on.

Ludonarrative dissonance lets us easily point out that if you're going to make story that important and not have it just be 2 paragraphs in the manual, the gameplay needs to be related to said story.
 

toroid

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Throwing around the term ludonarrative dissonance without objectively and successfully establishing the nature of the disconnect is nothing more than pretentiously deferring to an impotent imaginary authority, and is a manipulative obfuscatory way for saying "it didn't meet my expectations" so as to help lend legitimacy to what's actually just a shitty opinion.
 

Ninjerk

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Throwing around the term ludonarrative dissonance without objectively and successfully establishing the nature of the disconnect is nothing more than pretentiously deferring to an impotent imaginary authority, and is a manipulative obfuscatory way for saying "it didn't meet my expectations" so as to help lend legitimacy to what's actually just a shitty opinion.
Did you read the article buzz linked?
 

AN4RCHID

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Ludonarrative dissonance lets us easily point out that if you're going to make story that important and not have it just be 2 paragraphs in the manual, the gameplay needs to be related to said story.

Is that hard to point out in plain English though? Using the term alone doesn't really give the reader any information - in what way is there dissonance? Is that even a bad thing? In what meaningful way does that impact the experience of playing the game? You'll still have to explain those issues anyway in a good critique, so what's the point?

I don't really disagree with your post so much. The real reason that the term severely triggers me, is that it's almost always used to criticize cinematic movie-games for being too gamey. It's a criticism that's been leveled at Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect, and Uncharted, and the critics are not objecting to the dumb and intrusive stories. Every damn time they're upset about violent game mechanics getting in the way of their larping. Most people can agree that gameplay and story (if it exists) should work together to form a cohesive whole. When the solution is always to choke the already anemic gameplay, I just can't help but have this paranoid suspicion that the Socially Conscious Game Crit crowd is just using the term as an obfuscated attack on traditionally violent styles of games, like shooters.
 

Destroid

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I honestly kinda like the ludo latinate thing. "Game" is seriously confounded by win/loss stuff (When I call some some shit like Minecraft a game, when a Lego set isn't a game, I feel like I'm just going by a dumb convention) and "toy" or "play" have a lot of normative baggage. Using obvious latinate roots in English strips away normative elements. It just needs people to use it a lot to weather off the pretension.
You're going by different dumb conventions, the convention of being a dumb bastard with no research and the convention of calling everything a game.

First, Minecraft HAS a win/loss state. There actually is an end to Minecraft, complete with an actual end-boss.
Second, even if Minecraft was a virtual Lego game (it isn't, it's a lite survival game where you're able to build things), I don't understand why it has to be called a game when it's obviously a toy.

I've used terms like toy to make the distinction between goal based games and sandbox games, but even when you explain why you use the term and that there's nothing wrong with liking toys, the people who like them will still usually think you are trying to devalue the stuff they like. It doesn't matter much when you're having a casual discussion but when you're getting technical it's useful to be able to use more precise terms.

It's kind of funny because the physical analogies are so good. Football and chess are games. Building sandcastles and flying model aircraft aren't.
 

Gozma

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People say "gameplay-story segregation" too.

I remember playing LA Noire before ever hearing the term, and I definitely noticed when a covershooter where you end up killing like 50 people broke out in the middle of a semi-realist noir detective adventure game (and that giant body count goes completely unacknowledged by the game's story). That feeling is worth a word or a concept.

So that fits the role of a story game that has video game violence break out in the middle of it, but I can think of one that went the other way. In RK47's LP of DAI there's a scene where the PC has this highly choreographed cutscene sword fight with some nobody, where you are never allowed to go into a real fucking game combat to fight. Someone on your side upbraids the PC for risking his life over a duel, with everyone involved ignoring the fact that you probably fought your way through 20 demons on the way to buy milk that morning. It's the same feeling, even though the "violence bad" SJW narrative is reversed.
 

tuluse

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Segregation doesn't necessarily mean dissonance. To go back to Crash since I have it on the mind. In that game you beat some levels, you watch a cutscene, and repeat that for the whole game. One doesn't really affect the other (except bosses being introduced in cutscenes). The story is completely segregated from the gameplay. Yet, there is no dissonance between them. The story is a silly romp about a mutated bandicoot saving his gf from a mad scientist and the gameplay is about jumping on giant crabs.
 

Jick Magger

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I did think that it was a genuine issue with Max Payne 3 as well, though I think it was just an issue with the story overall as well: at the beginning of the game, Max is a drunken, barely functional fool in the cutscenes, drunkenly stumbling from scene-to-scene, while gameplay Max Payne is a walking god of death who's able to clear entire rooms full of people in minutes.
I'd say with something silly like Crash Bandicoot, there's a level of suspension of disbelief that the audience is willing to endure in order to enjoy the experience, like with children's movies or comedies. I consider this experience the game equivalent of encountering a moment in a film where you say aloud to yourself "There is no organic, in-universe reason why this is happening; it's only happening because the writers say it's happening". This isn't an issue with slapstick or absurdist comedies because making sense isn't necessarily the overall goal of such stories. You're just supposed to have fun and enjoy the experience. With something like LA Noire, a story which concedes to real world logic, when I'm presented with something like the protagonist getting his career ruined by an adultery charge, with nobody mentioning the fact that he's single-handedly killed more suspects in his first year of detective work than the entire rest of the LAPD combined, I find an immediate break in the logic of the story.
 
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buzz

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I had no idea Minecraft was anything but an endless building mode. OK.
What do you mean OK? Is it "chimp status fight" to say words in plain english but talking out of your ass about video games you've never played or read about is just OK?
90% of the butthurt I get from this place is because idiots like you talk out of their asses without grasping correctly the situation at hand.

But, you understand what normative means right? Like the reason you have a butthurt when someone says, "Games are art" is because "art" has generally assumed a normative meaning, where something being "art" means it's good, it deserves to exist, it's worth having and the person that made it should be exalted and consuming it is good for you, it should be viewed with quiet reverence and whatever else. Or using something like "artsy-fartsy" is implicitly normative satire of that premise. Normative words obfuscate and turn conversations into chimp status fights.
It's a convention of contemporary English that people use latinate words to de-emphasize normativity. It's why latinate constructions are considered dry and academic and scientific. I like having a chimp status fight sometimes but I also like talking in ways where I don't have to litter what I say with implicit insults and status manipulation at other times.
Except you just implicitly insulted me in your post as well :lol:. So much for not wanting chimp status fights.

First, I don't understand your take on normative. Art doesn't carry normative meaning, it's a word that describes a plethora of things. And again, this is solved by using other words against the term itself.
Art can mean anything from a masterpiece to something awful. We have terms like "high brow", "low brow", kitsch (this is german, not latin :P) to describe something in detail.
Or shit, you can just call it "bad art", it's that simple.


Second, I understand the need to use complex words to remove obfuscation. Like you said, this is done in academic circles where there is a rigour and a purpose behind clarifying terms.
But pretty much ALL the conversations involving the expression "ludo-narrative dissonance" serves ONLY to obfuscate and turns into a chimp status fight. Every forum, comment section or tweet exchange will at one point include a discussion on what it means and it invariably turns into a so-called chimp status fight about how some people use big words that explain nothing versus others who just "don't get it"

You don't understand the context in which these words are used. They are used by random nobodies with no talent, no proper experience in game design, who hold extremely biased and poorly researched opinions and call them "critiques" of video games. People like Crapster just use the big latin words to either state the obvious or to obfuscate their extremely poor opinions by trying to sound smarter.

This is why I can't stand this bullshit. Because it brings nothing to the table except trouble. The masterpieces of gaming were made without the giant debates about nothing that came many years later, they just came from the minds and hardwork of talented people. They knew what they had to do without the need of critiques or latin words. The only thing bullshit people like Campster managed to influence is something like Gone Home, not your Fallout or Megaman or Master of Orion.






Frankly that's a shallow criticism. Lots of linear games are good. I never heard anyone complain that Crash Bandicoot was too linear of a platfomer, even though it's much more linear than the Mario (letting you pick which levels to play, warp flutes, etc) and Sonic (lots of obvious bonus areas to visit) games it followed up on.
Well, the criticism wasn't on the game being linear but rather it being linear and the devs making a "meta-commentary on blindly following rules" and "having no choice". I always hated that kind of tripe, where the game/movie/book plays the shitty tropes pretty straight in order to emphasize them. If you're better than that, you do better games. You don't have to follow Atlas if you design properly, in fact - other developers would've probably let you pick sides.

I don't have any problem with Bioshock, in fact I actually quite like it, except this meta-commentary bull.

Ludonarrative dissonance lets us easily point out that if you're going to make story that important and not have it just be 2 paragraphs in the manual, the gameplay needs to be related to said story.
Uhm, why? And what makes you think the gameplay is not related to the story?

:negative: you people, I swear...


I did think that it was a genuine issue with Max Payne 3 as well, though I think it was just an issue with the story overall as well: at the beginning of the game, Max is a drunken, barely functional fool in the cutscenes, drunkenly stumbling from scene-to-scene, while gameplay Max Payne is a walking god of death who's able to clear entire rooms full of people in minutes.
See, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about.
Think again about the game, when do you see Max Payne drunk to the point of passing out? In fucking flashback cutscenes.
During missions, he acts the way a bodyguard should. He takes a few drinks here and there, but you don't see him extremely drunk seconds before a fight starts. There is an actual precedent for this in real life, it's called being a high functioning alcoholic.
Not to mention, halfway through the game, Max gets his shit together and sobers up. Part of the plot is how always he survived despite popping pills boozing it up like a madman, but this shit starts catching up to him finally in small doses.
Also, the game is meant to be cinematic, not realistic. It's like in tha movies and TV shows where people smoke and drink and only get in trouble when the plot demands it. You know, Stormtroopers hitting anything but the heroes? Rocky being able to stand up/win against the world champion after only a few weeks of relatively normal training regimen? Conan not being killed by a random slash and stab across his naked body?

Finally, the most important point which I think makes the whole notion so ridiculous. Why in the name of fuck do you care? If anything, Max Payne 3 alleviated your problem much more than the first two games did. In Max Payne 1 and 2, he popped painkiller like it was nothing and there was no in-game reaction to it. At least in MP3 they tell you it's fucking him up.
People loved Max Payne 1 and 2 and I don't remember anyone raising criticism about his use of painkiller: No one was dissonant in the butt back then, it just was a gameplay element hidden under a clever justification for health packs. A better game would've done more with it, sure, like creating an addiction effect to taking too many painkillers or other reactive things. But it was fine just the way it was at that point.





With something like LA Noire, a story which concedes to real world logic, when I'm presented with something like the protagonist getting his career ruined by an adultery charge, with nobody mentioning the fact that he's single-handedly killed more suspects in his first year of detective work than the entire rest of the LAPD combined, I find an immediate break in the logic of the story.

Again, the story concedes to cinema logic, not real-world logic. It's ridiculous pretending otherwise when the name of the game has the word "noir" in it :argh:
I mean, you know this game was heavily influenced by LA Confidential, right? One of the most violent cop movies out there. Here's the final fight near the end of the movie:


And here's another shootout earlier in the movie:


Of course, the entire movie tackles the issues of police brutality and corruption, but that's what makes it a good movie. No one says LA Noire is a great game or anything. But it's not bad because you can shoot some suspects in the game.

Especially since it actually fits. He never just straight-up kill people with no reason, it's always people who don't give up, don't care about the warning shot, straight up shoot at you or can't be tackled/disarmed in a proper way. People taking hostages and so on. I think you can actually shoot them in the leg/arm and Cole calls the ambulance instead of the coroner.

Also, this is only a problem with the side missions. In the main missions you have to arrest them most of the time. It's only during the end where it gets into more killing, but again, this shit makes sense in this context.





Man, this shit really grinds my gears. :negative:
 

tuluse

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Well, the criticism wasn't on the game being linear but rather it being linear and the devs making a "meta-commentary on blindly following rules" and "having no choice". I always hated that kind of tripe, where the game/movie/book plays the shitty tropes pretty straight in order to emphasize them. If you're better than that, you do better games. You don't have to follow Atlas if you design properly, in fact - other developers would've probably let you pick sides.

I don't have any problem with Bioshock, in fact I actually quite like it, except this meta-commentary bull.


Uhm, why? And what makes you think the gameplay is not related to the story?

:negative: you people, I swear...
I was speaking in hypothetical about why ludonarrative dissonance is a useful term, I was not responding to any specific claim of said dissonance.
 

buzz

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Even hypothetically, why?

Why there has to be a perfect mesh between gameplay and story?

The gameplay part of a game is heavily abstracted more often than not and you're supposed to willingly suspend your disbelief when playing them.

Feeling that there's a dissonance/segregation between gameplay and story reminds me of SJWs saying they "get triggered". No wonder the camps often intersect.

I don't get it, why can't you just allow to rule of cool to overwhelm you during the gamey bits and not interject with the story bits? This is allowed everywhere else, but why not here?

In the first Matrix, Neo and his girlfriend arm themselves up to the teeth and bust into a giant building, starting a massive shootout and killing a shit-ton of dudes. They are not computer simulations, they are actual people jacked-up to the Matrix, doing their jobs as SWAT/Security forces. He kills tens, maybe hundreds of people in order to save his buddy Morpheus. Then he's hailed as a hero.
MUH DISSONANCE.

Or you can just ignore the malefic implications, enjoy the shooting scene and move the fuck on.


It's a video game. They can't just have you be a cop/gangster who sits around, drinks his coffee like it's nothing and very rarely kills one or two people when the situation demanded, followed by year long trials where you're accused of police brutality or sent to jail. The games are supposed to be fun first, plausible later. Not to mention, most games ARE plausible in the sense that they do follow a relatively decent logic. I've said the same thing with GTA before, in that game YOU DON'T KILL CIVILIANS unless you're an utter idiot who enjoys wasting his bullets and time. The game doesn't really demand you to, very few missions involve hurting civilians much without a proper context (a hit order, you want to scary a jury etc).

For example, killing cops in those games makes it worse for you, so there's a gameplay incentive not to. Killing civilians is very dangerous and provides little reward (mugging them for pocket change).

Most of the time you just kill other gangsters or killers. Why there are tens or hundreds of them instead of one and two? Because it's a video game, it's supposed to be more than half an hour and it's supposed to be fun instead of boring realistic simulators.
 

Gozma

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I had no idea Minecraft was anything but an endless building mode. OK.
What do you mean OK? Is it "chimp status fight" to say words in plain english but talking out of your ass about video games you've never played or read about is just OK?

I have played it? Several hours, plus hanging out with a guy that played it a ton. It gave no indication it had anything but an endless build mode and he never told me there was anything else to it but building stuff (complicated by creatures, lava, etc). I figured you were telling me it was like Darklands and goal oriented things appears later on, which someone that played a few hours wouldn't know, so I said, "OK" to accept your authority on the issue. I'd have used Dwarf Fortress as an example but I thought Minecraft would be fine and less obscure.

Except you just implicitly insulted me in your post as well :lol:. So much for not wanting chimp status fights.

Yes, I too am a chimp and I can't escape our nature except in short bursts.

First, I don't understand your take on normative. Art doesn't carry normative meaning, it's a word that describes a plethora of things. And again, this is solved by using other words against the term itself.
Art can mean anything from a masterpiece to something awful. We have terms like "high brow", "low brow", kitsch (this is german, not latin :P) to describe something in detail.
Or shit, you can just call it "bad art", it's that simple.

You've never heard someone scoff and say, "That's not art" for some abstract sculpture, a comic book, or some summer blockbuster movie, or for some Thomas Kinkaid painting? You've never done it yourself? You recognize people insert normative content into everything they say five times before breakfast. It colonizes words like a mold. It takes active effort not to do it.

You don't understand the context in which these words are used. They are used by random nobodies with no talent, no proper experience in game design, who hold extremely biased and poorly researched opinions and call them "critiques" of video games. People like Crapster just use the big latin words to either state the obvious or to obfuscate their extremely poor opinions by trying to sound smarter

The first time I head someone say ludonarrative dissonance (btw, I think saying "dissonance" is the really pretentious and annoying part of that construction, not the latinate compound) I thought, hey yeah I really know that feeling, I've noticed it. I was glad someone had articulated a wordless concept into a term of criticism. What more do you want out of a critic?
 

tuluse

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Welp, time to go full VD.

Even hypothetically, why?

Why there has to be a perfect mesh between gameplay and story?
My bad, you're right. I attached a value judgement to said dissonance when it's just a descriptor. As was posted above "dissonance in artis not necessarily bad." It is a dissonance though which is typically not pleasing.

The gameplay part of a game is heavily abstracted more often than not and you're supposed to willingly suspend your disbelief when playing them.
Well that's the point of this conversation. To establish exactly what breaks said suspensions.

Feeling that there's a dissonance/segregation between gameplay and story reminds me of SJWs saying they "get triggered". No wonder the camps often intersect
Let's be civil, please.

I don't get it, why can't you just allow to rule of cool to overwhelm you during the gamey bits and not interject with the story bits? This is allowed everywhere else, but why not here?
What other art forms have non story "bits" or parts of the story that are not controller by the author? At any rate drastic tonal shifts in movies and novels are generally criticized as bad things.

In the first Matrix, Neo and his girlfriend arm themselves up to the teeth and bust into a giant building, starting a massive shootout and killing a shit-ton of dudes. They are not computer simulations, they are actual people jacked-up to the Matrix, doing their jobs as SWAT/Security forces. He kills tens, maybe hundreds of people in order to save his buddy Morpheus. Then he's hailed as a hero.
MUH DISSONANCE.

Or you can just ignore the malefic implications, enjoy the shooting scene and move the fuck on.
This seems wholly irrelevant to what we're talking about. To have something similar, you'd have have the same scenes and then in the next scene Neo refused to attack a person because they're an innocent civilian. See how that is a dissonance and potentially displeasing to the audience?

It's a video game. They can't just have you be a cop/gangster who sits around, drinks his coffee like it's nothing and very rarely kills one or two people when the situation demanded
I remember this game called Full Throttle, and I think there was a whole series called Police Quest...

, followed by year long trials where you're accused of police brutality or sent to jail.
So just stop the game before this and wrap it up with a text scrawl or something.

The games are supposed to be fun first, plausible later.
Well first we must define what is fun*.

[Not to mention, most games ARE plausible in the sense that they do follow a relatively decent logic.
No one has said anything about plausibility. However, if a game doesn't have ludonarrative dissonance, then it doesn't have it. You don't need to say the term is bad because there exists a set of games which don't have it.

I've said the same thing with GTA before, in that game YOU DON'T KILL CIVILIANS unless you're an utter idiot who enjoys wasting his bullets and time. The game doesn't really demand you to, very few missions involve hurting civilians much without a proper context (a hit order, you want to scary a jury etc).
Well the best GTA example is 4 when you do in the course of the game kill dozens if not hundreds of gangers and then watch cutscenes as the mc decides whether or not to kill one more and it's really jarring.

For example, killing cops in those games makes it worse for you, so there's a gameplay incentive not to. Killing civilians is very dangerous and provides little reward (mugging them for pocket change).

Most of the time you just kill other gangsters or killers. Why there are tens or hundreds of them instead of one and two? Because it's a video game, it's supposed to be more than half an hour and it's supposed to be fun instead of boring realistic simulators.
You seem to have not understood what ludonarrative dissonance is, and you seem to be mostly talking about tone and tonal shifts.


*I'm actually not even kidding here. Millions of people found Fallout 3 more "fun" than Fallout 1. A big reason people like the first one more than the second one (which again is more popular) was that the first had more verisimilitude. You say a game should be fun first and story should come second. Well that's fine but it means the story should actually come second and support the actions you are actually taking as a player. If they're unrelated, I would question why that story is part of the game at all, and even worse when they cause dissonance, I want them to change one or both elements because I generally find dissonance displeasing and jarring. I have seen some games use it for great effect though. Ben There Dan That and Time Gentlemen Please were very funny at pointing out the dissonance of solving adventure game puzzles with compared to the events transpiring. Kojima uses ludonarrative dissonance quite well it getting absurdity across. So it can be done well. It's usually done very poorly. I don't want gameplay removed, I want video game narratives fixed because 99% of the time they suck, get in the way, and cause me dismay.
 

buzz

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
4,234
What other art forms have non story "bits" or parts of the story that are not controller by the author? At any rate drastic tonal shifts in movies and novels are generally criticized as bad things.
Except when they're not; see: black comedies and dramedies, action and adventure movies with romantic/dramatic moments, crime thrillers turning into horror flicks and so on.
Of course, the tonal shifts are better built in movies and books rather than video games, but that's rather a case of different mediums and environments.

But the fact it's more "drastic" and "jarring" (though I'm still waiting for those valid examples) in games is rather a part of video games in general, where everything is drastic and overblown. Ultimately, video games are a medium of gameplay over storytelling, with the story bits just being the small reward you get after completing the challenges.



This seems wholly irrelevant to what we're talking about. To have something similar, you'd have have the same scenes and then in the next scene Neo refused to attack a person because they're an innocent civilian. See how that is a dissonance and potentially displeasing to the audience?
Yeah, that's bullshit and I wouldn't enjoy it either.
But let's stop pretending that this is what happens in most video games.



I remember this game called Full Throttle, and I think there was a whole series called Police Quest...
Full Throtle, huh? I remember that game begins with you busting open a door, threatening a barman with a beatdown and then fighting a bunch of jackasses by throwing their bikes off-road. Hardly the most boring of a gangster's life.
You're right with Police Quest, though you do somewhat prove my point since PQ is the least well-remembered and beloved pf the Sierra games, even by fans of adventure games.

Anyway, those are adventure games, not action games. Even there I'm sure you would have pretentious bullshit artists argue that "solving puzzle is ludo-narrative dissonant and it hurts me in the butt". After all, people who use these kind of terms are the people who praise shit like Gone Home and The Walking Dead, where puzzles are minimal to non-existent and it's all about story.
Sorry, but if the purpose of the ludo-narrative dissonance conversation is to diss gameplay completely out of my video games, I'm heavily against that. If it can be made more logical and fit more with the story and tone, that's fine, no one is going to hate that - as long as you're able to do it properly.

But don't give me "press F to pay respects" or "move mouse to brush teeth" because I can't accept that bullshit.

So just stop the game before this and wrap it up with a text scrawl or something.
So you want a game where you only kill one dude, then a text epilogue where they tell you what happened? I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say here.

Well first we must define what is fun*.
...
*I'm actually not even kidding here. Millions of people found Fallout 3 more "fun" than Fallout 1. A big reason people like the first one more than the second one (which again is more popular) was that the first had more verisimilitude.
If it helps, I'm one of the people who never understood the bullshit criticism about Fallout 2's lack of verisimilitude. F2 has lots of faults, but gangsters and Monty Python references were not some of them. Mainly because the first Fallout doesn't hold much water in that regard anyway, with F2 just pushing more of the same. Gangsters, casinos, religious cults, pop-culture references, wild-wasteland cowboys. You can make the argument that the jokes and parodies were more crass in the second game, but you can't say Fallout is a better game because MOAR REALISTIC.
Again, it's a deep hole that doesn't lead to anything pleasant.

As for why many more people find Fallout 3 fun or why the Codex finds Fallout 1 more fun, that happens for entire different reasons. Better gameplay, actually plays like an RPG, much more pleasant to look at, better writing (as in actually clever and interesting rather than more "life-like") and so on. The people who like FO3 more are just dumb bastards who wanted an FPS with dialogue scenes.

Again, if you hate FO3 mainly because VAMPIRES, something is wrong with you.

You say a game should be fun first and story should come second. Well that's fine but it means the story should actually come second and support the actions you are actually taking as a player. If they're unrelated, I would question why that story is part of the game at all, and even worse when they cause dissonance, I want them to change one or both elements because I generally find dissonance displeasing and jarring.
So ... you're getting triggered by the dissonance? :troll:

I don't know man, you just sound like you're looking for the problem in the places it doesn't belong. Should video games not have stories unless they completely react to your gameplay style and choices in-game? Should the AI be so good that fighting one mook instead of hundreds be actually challenging as fuck?
Sure, lets do that. Right after we erase Fallout 3 from existence, bring back Black Isle together with Tim Cain to make Van Buren and Arcanum 2 and other PT-like games, solve world hunger and other such minor things :P.

Honestly, I could care less for stories in video games and I don't praise them either. Just remove them altogether and do good games with good gameplay and small blurbs of text for atmosphere, that's all I ask.


No one has said anything about plausibility. However, if a game doesn't have ludonarrative dissonance, then it doesn't have it. You don't need to say the term is bad because there exists a set of games which don't have it.
Considering the pre-menstrual attitude of the people talking about it, I'd hardly argue any of them are at all. Or at least, they're vastly misinterpreted due to political biases or some serious lack of understanding/experimentation/research. Kinda like your next quote:

Well the best GTA example is 4 when you do in the course of the game kill dozens if not hundreds of gangers and then watch cutscenes as the mc decides whether or not to kill one more and it's really jarring.
See, this is why I can't take you folks seriously. Did you actually play this game? Do you remember the specific cases when that happen? Do you remember much of the story of GTA IV and how it related to its gameplay?

I mean, seriously, you can do basic research like searching a wiki related to the game and you're done. You don't have to vaguely remember details from a game you barely paid attention or take the honest word of an idiot like Campster as truth.

Your cutscenes as the MC decides whether or not kill one more, I suppose you refer to those stupid choices you have to make during the game. Here, check out the choice (about 9) you have to make in the entire game:
http://gta.wikia.com/Player_Choices_in_GTA_IV

See how they somewhat fit with the story context. The first one actually gives you a reaction in-game if you decide to go dating instead of saving Roman.

The second one is the "ponder if I should kill" one. Except in this context it DOES actually make some sense, because it's relatively early in the story and it's a pretty small body-count by GTA IV's standards. You beat up some thugs, steal some shit, kill one of Roman's bully early on (again, with a comment from Niko if he doesn't), then shoot/kill in self-defense in one or two of the Jamaican's missions.

You see, Ivan is the first straight-up murder in the game. The first time you're sent to actively kill someone, as in chase him down and put a bullet in his face.

After this mission, you kill the guy who sent you to do the hit and from there-on is an on-going carnage where Niko becomes a straight-up gangster and hitman for various people. This isn't bullshit, the ingame story places Niko as an assassin. He's not a poor sod caught in a terrible place, swearing not to kill anyone anymore. He's a murder for hire and he hates himself for it.


The third one is there simply because you can kill the girl, but there's no reason to. You're after the money and a dude who shoots at you, there's no demand on killing her (and if you do, you get a reaction from her ex boyfriend).

The fourth one is the one closest to your problem. You're sent to kill a negro, you kill a bunch of his henchmen then you get the choice of sparring him or killing him. Yeah, you could argue this is bullshit but it still kinda makes sense in the context. The guy who sent you to do the hit was an asshole who blackmailed you, the target was unarmed and surrendering himself, he promised to reform and blabla. Also you still get to kill him later on anyways because he wants revenge and bullshit.

Then there are two or three choices where you HAVE to kill someone (out of 2 possibilities), it's mandatory. Again, lots of people seem to remember the story of GTA IV really wrong, as if Niko was a constant pussy who always acted innocent during the story bits or was only conflicted about one or two murders. He wasn't, in fact the "official" kill count (as in, stuff required by story aka assassination and shit and not nameless mobs) of GTA IV is bigger than the killcounts of GTA III/Vice City and San Andreas combined. Because Niko's defacto job in the game is that of a hired killer.

Then there's the big one, killing or sparring Darko, the traitorous soldier from back in Yugoslavia. This one also makes sense because it's a "personal" kill, since it ties back to his backstory in the war (complete with civilian killing and other nightmarish bullshit that are far worse than the mafia hits he does in the game) and the reason he's in Liberty City in the first place. Killing or not killing him is not "dissonant" because it's more about his own satisfaction of killing that dude and having his revenge; or not.

:x See, that's what I'm talking about. The game is not suffering of ludo-narrative dissonance, you're just a bunch of jerks who don't bother playing the games you bother criticizing.

You could make the argument "yeah bro but you can kill civilians and cops and shizzle". Yeah but you can also climb and jump all over buildings, or spend the entire game sitting and playing darts. That doesn't mean the story should conform to those free, meaningless gameplay choices and make Niko an X-TREME parkour sportsman or a Darts veteran. Sure, a better game would have the world react much better to the thinsg you do but no one called the GTAs some masterpieces (and IV was a dissapointing mess even to a fan like me).

There's no actual incentive for killing civies or cops. It doesn't count for 100% completion rate, it might not even have achievements tied to it. You have achievements for doing all the stunt jumps or beating the highest score in Darts, but not for senseless killing.


You seem to have not understood what ludonarrative dissonance is, and you seem to be mostly talking about tone and tonal shifts.
No one understand what ludonarrative dissonance actually is, that's the joke. It's a pretentious term used by pretentious faggots who never really attempt to explain or make a conscious effort to sustain their arguments. It's almost always the same bullshit coming from the same background.
 

tuluse

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Joined
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Messages
11,400
Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I'm tired of multiquotes, so just going to reply to parts I find interesting.

You give some examples of tonal shifts working in movies, well I agree with you. I even give 2 examples of ludonarrative dissonance working well in games. Like I said at first, it's not strictly a bad thing, it's just a descriptor.

No, I didn't play GTA4. I watched parts of a friend playing it. Saw him go through a mission where he guns down 20 dudes then has a moral quandary about murdering one last dude in a cutscene and it was a dissonant as fuck. My reaction and my friend who had played the whole game to this point was to wonder why the game was making such a big deal about, and he just wanted to get back to the action. This is a story mission you can't skip and you can't avoid killing those people, so you can't argue this is a player going off the rails. This is something someone planned. So, "Should video games not have stories unless they completely react to your gameplay style and choices in-game?" is a straw man. The game doesn't even reaction to what it makes you do to advance. Let's get some consistency there first if it's not too much to ask.


If it helps, I'm one of the people who never understood the bullshit criticism about Fallout 2's lack of verisimilitude.
:rpgcodex:
 

Athelas

Arcane
Joined
Jun 24, 2013
Messages
4,502
Uh...you murder a dozen people in these types of games simply by pulling out of the drive way. It's unavoidable. And it has gameplay consequences - police chase you, you can take their money, etc.
 

Dim

Not sure if advertising plant?
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562
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Syndi Vegit notanatzi
Its still a mmorpg with emphasis on grind and negatively rewarding. Improvements on the formula may be a threat to humanity.
 

Grunker

RPG Codex Ghost
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Just rewatched his BioShock Infinite review. Goddammit Franklin is spot-fucking-on when he is spot-fucking-on.
 

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