OR:

Game designers think you are dumb!


let us discuss the reasons we subscribe to this flawed rationale and how games can grow with their audience.


GO!

I don't think it's game designers so much as publishers. And I'm not altogether sure they're wrong. All the evidence points to the fact that large segments of their customer base are actually idiots.

Do you mean let's discuss why we subscribe (Ergo: play / accept) games with ludonarrative dissonance?
Or do you mean let's discuss why we believe ludonarrative dissonance exists?

Because ludonarrative dissonance is a bit controversial topic...

well that's probably because I am. if I was smarter I'd be a lot better off.


but they ain't as smart as they think they are, either.

Wolfenstein: The New Order took dem lugoscababib discobiscuits and ATE THEM ALL! Seriously tho, that game single-handedly shows us how you can have a clash between gameplay and storytelling and make it work in favor of your product. That game showed us that experienced designers can pretty much laugh ludonarrative dissonance in the face and not worry about it in the slightest.

And generally speaking, I think that's exactly what we should do - not worry about it. Any designer worth his salt will realize that to make a good game, your mechanics need to reinforce the narrative, whatever that might be, and even in games widely criticized for luluempirative deathsonance this was precisely the case - Tomb Raider had mechanics specifically reinforcing character empowerment and development, Bioshock Infinite had the whole "Bring down the system" thing etc. The moment when that particular disswagon goes as far as to shatter enjoyment of a game, then it becomes a real issue - but for as long as that's not the case, let's allow games to evolve on their own, without striving for an arbitrary goal we can't quite make work yet (and which might even turn out to be undesirable in the long run)

the publishers only schlock around what sells. No, the reasons why it exists are obvious, what I would like to discuss is why we take it part and parcel as not mentally deficient consumers.

Well, the most immediate answer is we segment the two? I mean there are people that care only about the story, and don't mind grinding like hell to get it. There are people that care only about the mechanics and skip all story.

So for them there is no dissonance, because they engage only one of the sides of the coin... for them the fact the two sides are kind of deformed when seen together does not really matter. In fact, even if the coin is perfect and the ludonarrative is in sync, they won't care?

What I'm still a bit confused about is what you are trying to say with the "mentally deficient consumers" and the "games can grow with the audience" comments.

Well... critiques pointing to ludonarrative dissonance were a reaction to perceptions of excessive focus on message and narrative in games, to the implied detriment of their more fundamental mechanical attributes. The opposite also, where creators more focused on message, rebelled against the constraints mechanics imposed on their work.

I think the kind of internal coherence being desired when folks critique ludonarrative dissonance - sorry for not playing along with you :) - is one if the things that serves to distinguish games or designers with a more rounded vision of their craft from both mass media offerings and more amateur craftsmen?

I don't go as far to say a game with both is always better than a game without one of them, but I am a tad purist. To me games are defined by the mechanics. The narrative is like sound and music in a movie. It is good to have, and if the artist is good enough it is necessary for the effect, but it is never sufficient (whereas mechanics alone can be sufficient) - and yes, it can sometimes detract from the cinematic whole, badly edited action or horror a good example.

I don't think that's really true - I do believe that there are degrees, but if somebody were truly only interested in story, he'd not play videogames and a person only interested in gameplay would go for score attack and MP games for the most part. I'm pretty sure that if you gave people a game which is completely different in tone and style for gameplay and story portion, people would notice immediately, and complain.

Problem with proponents of pendocarrotive limpsonance being such a grave issue seems to be that they only tend to see the superficial layer of the experience. There's the superficial gameplay and there's the superficial story and if you think about them, they don't make sense. Okay. Thing is, they don't necessarily have to. Gameplay can be used to both tell the overt story, but also to set a tone. Let's take Bioshock Infinite for example, another game criticized for this. Gameplay gives you feeling of immediate danger, of being prosecuted, of fighting the system. These feelings exactly highlight what the early parts of the story are mainly about. Would the gameplay be as evocative if it was presented as, say, an adventure game or an RPG? I don't think so. Then there are other things to consider, like intended pacing for the story, flow of the game etc, individual gameplay elements - playing a videogame is a fairly complex, multi-layered issue and by only inspecting the most visible layers, we tend to miss the bigger picture.

Edit: I started typing that before I saw your response, but I think I actually mostly tackle your points in this post... Right?

Edit2: My point is that games always present a degree of abstraction. There are feelings and tones we can't (with current technology) get across by approximating the "real thing" - when you get thrown into a jail and are left there for weeks, you're going to feel oppressed. When your in-game character gets thrown into jail and is left there for weeks, you're just going to feel irritated and bored. To approximate the appropriate tone and to get the player to feel like designer wants him to, designer might find himself using tools which would be wholly inappropriate in real world or in any other storytelling media, yet which were proven to make player feel how designer wants to.

I don't think it's necessarily the case (but I will agree with you, it's a huge part of it). I think it's also because many people in the games industry are supposedly either from the film industry, or frustrated film makers themselves, and as a result, see cutscenes as the principal way to deliver the narrative (e.g. COD), when it really should be through gameplay and/or game mechanics (e.g. Spec Ops: The Line). The result is nonsense where to further the plot, the player dies from a pistol round to the head...in a cutscene after beating a level where they magically regenerated from being hit by thousands upon thousands of bullets.

Shit, this is becoming harder to respond. I don't really have the time for it :( but I want to :)

So, yes, I'm not going to advocate a strong dialectic is universally true. Pure narrative driven folks might prefer movies or books to games, obviously. But still the kind of interaction and engagement from games is different to the kind of engagement from books and movies. So it's completely valid to want narratively heavy games. Heck, in boardgames that's what I would consider as the main distinction between so called thematic games, and the more traditional games or the more modern euros, but I digress... So I still think what I pointed is true, it just cannot be stretched to some extreme caricature. The stereotypes I described are real and common - both the skip all lore and non interactive scenes type - and the connect the dots, read walkthrough or even apply cheats and hacks to progress through the narrative arc type. I don't think you are disputing these are factual / representative of reality?

As to ludo-narrative dissonance being a grave issue. Did I say that? :) I detect some straw being stuffed into me ;) To the point you are making, I think I agree on lore and world building, just I would include that in the narrative side of the implied binary. Sure, in more literary stuff context / characterization and plot are separate, and you can separate world building and narrative arc in games as well, but those both still stand in contrast or in coherence with the actual mechanics. I think they can be lumped together in "narrative" understood broadly.

Then on the points in my later reply, which go more into my own opinions rather than attempting to synthesize the debate: do you agree or disagree the folks dismissive of ludo-narrative dissonance typically are focused on either the ludo, or the narrative exclusively? More importantly do you agree or disagree that the defining aspect of a game is its mechanics, like the defining aspect of a movie is its images?

Lastly on abstraction. I could not agree more. Simulation is only of the many possible goals, or emerging properties of games. Play is not exclusively about pretending to be or do something real. I personally see several types of play when I think of such stuff. Approximate something real via simulationism, act a role via fantasy, master a system. coordinate performance... and I need to run to a meeting... bye for now.

Edit: Fuck, I actually think in books as in games all 3 are elements of narrative: world building, plot, characters.

I do. Some people can't design their way out of a paper bag. If they want to deliver a Very Special message, it is incredibly important that the game mechanics do not undermine it. I don't mean "make for a fun button-mashing exercise without the story" -- I'm fine with games which aren't competitive, or replayable, or one true build RPGs. The story is what happens when you play. Everything is part of the story.

A game environment is a model of the world. It rewards, punishes and teaches the player about how things are. It is easy to take away an implicit message "and the real world works the same way" (and some games do an explicit "and the real world is exacly the opposite, here's why that matters").

I'm playing Stardew Valley now. It's a game about community building, friendship, caring, living in harmony with nature and all that adorably wholesome stuff. The designated antagonist is Joja Corporation, a cubicle farm your character is a former employee of. In the beginning, there's a scene intended to be oh so sincerely poignant in which the protagonist's grandpa is dying and bequeathes them a farm ("when you're tired of the rat race and want some peace and quiet, here's your salvation" -- not an exact quote but close enuff).

And then, it two years, Grandpa's ghost pops up and berates you if you haven't hyper-optimized your farm and married the first person you got to know.
This was patched out in the newest version -- but seriously, what was the dev thinking?

I also tried Undertale, famous for its nonviolent path which launched a thousand thinkpieces. It actually starts with a very heavy-handed moralizing challenge: "ah, you think you're so high and mighty to try a pacifist playthrough, but when you keep repeatedly dying, your patience will eventually wear out and you'll go for the easy genocide solution, because you humans are all the same".

Now most videogames, even Undertale at its surface, have a more powerful pro-violence message than real life. Real life has no takebacksies; games do, and you can actually look at the mechanics and see which method of dealing with obstacles produces the best outcome. You won't ever know if your decision was really the best and if things could have turned out differently. But in the game, you know. You can reload, or retry, or refer to the communal experience, or look at the code. There's always the best solution, and the more "highbrow" the game is, the more it demands that you accept its best solution as true IRL.

So, in Undertale, most monsters try to kill you to death, lethally. Your character is 100% justified in trying to kill them. The game only works because it goes meta and save/load is part of the narrative: you the player are immortal and have the godlike power to kill or redeem monsters, only limited by your divine patience and benevolence... and, uh, reaction speed. Because there's a stupid fucking minigame to be played in between talking attempts. Learn your lesson, disabled people, you can never be heroes and peacemakers.

It figures; all the people who have English as a second language know what the hell this is about.

Myself on the other hand, who was an English major, am sitting here with a dictionary totally fucking lost. :P

If there's one principle I have it's my utter belief in diversity. I don't think there's a universal goal in fiction that we should strive for. People should create what they want if it's sub-optimal but then try to make it as viable as possible (business, time, UI, controls, design etc..) I also like to be surprised. For example, I didn't much enjoy playing Pathologic in the traditional sense but I sure as hell don't regret playing it as it was very interesting. One of the reasons that one should "I didn't regret it playing it" rather than "games are supposed to be have fun" since that puts a huge limitation even if the majority is after simple entertainment.

Playing on the strength of the medium is the wise course of action though. With books, it's creating a place or characters where the imagination takes care of the details. With movies, it's the visual spectrum like cinematography. With games, well everyone knows it...interactivity. That said, while I become less and less interested in typical narrative driven games that uses traditional methods (cutscenes, audio tapes, occasional stereotypical NPCs etc..) doesn't mean I want the entire genre killed for the sake of something better, merely that I will play more games that tries to define new areas of video gaming where narrative and gameplay can assimilate together, hopefully not only to find a new, interesting game but possibly a new genre or way of playing.

As for who thinks who is dumb or what not, one can't forget that this is a business. To quote Greg Berch: (I actually don't know who he is but the quote was mentioned at Less Wrong)
You have to find your inner will to use hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism , we all have it.. :P

I feel like picking on Final Fantasy 7 some more.

Remember how I mentioned in another topic about how the Bahamut summon was 30 seconds long? Well, that's not the only long summon animation in that game; Neo Bahamut is 45 seconds, Bahamut ZERO is 60, Knights of the Round is 80, and one attack that the final boss uses is (in the US/EU/International versions) is 120(!) seconds! Yes, just because the final boss used a certain attack, you have to wait 2 full minutes before you can get back to the game! Did the developers *really* feel like players would enjoy watching the same animations over and over again?

(For a frame of reference, I remember playing Paladin's Quest on the SNES and getting impatient when certain spells would have 10 second animations. I think that the final spell had a really long animation (something in the 30-45 second range), but still not as long as some FF7+ summons.)

There are other issues as well. At one point, there is a minigame where you have to give CPR to someone. Why is that necessary in a game that has resurrection magic? Also, there are other times the game turns into an action game, like when you have to go snowboarding to reach the next level. Does that really belong in a game that claims to be an RPG? (I'd argue that such scenes actually disqualify the game from being an RPG, and this is the sort of game that is almost universally placed in that category.)