Right, a design flaw that wasn't even named until roughly ten years ago is always intentionally kept in even though it could be taken care of so easily. You just need to create a game that is fun (preferably in a novel way), has an interesting setting (ideally one not yet explored in games), a strong narrative (preferably written by someone who is both a brilliant writer and knows games perfectly) and where these three aspects happen to form a coherent whole which is presented professionally and will hopefully be attractive and engaging enough to be economically feasible. Piece of cake.

/topic

I don't think it was intended as that way. Her reply was regarding the physical situation, all you have to do is stick something pointy or shoot someone in the right area and someone dies, she most definitely didn't mean it was emotionally easy although if you are being hunted by someone who is trying to kill you and you end up killing a few of them, chances you are not going to feel bad about at that moment. Her trauma will kick in later in life, perhaps a month or a year after she left the island.

I actually liked the scripting in that game (excluding the "you can do it" speeches, I can't stand those) but the platforming was annoying, it had far too many enemies and there were like no puzzles, only 1 per cave and it was fairly obvious.

By "English major", I hope you mean an officer in Her Majesty's armed forces.... ><

And by Her Majesty, I hope you mean [url=http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/10/27/a-tribute-to-divine-hollywood-s-most-infamous-drag-queen/jcr:content/image.img.2000.jpg/1400396671308.cached.jpg]HER[/url] Majesty

Developers have discovered that they can have their cake and eat it too, and people will gladly interpret hypocrisy, mixed messages, and general sloppiness as artistic insight if you reference enough ivory tower postmodern gimmicks in post-release interviews.

I don't know that Ludo-narrative dissonance is always bad, but I have yet to see it done well. In games like Spec Ops or Far Cry 3, it's just a cheap get out of jail free card.

This is why there's been such a push away from traditional gameplay, in an attempt to fix the problem. Personally I can put up with it so long as the game isn't shoving it in my face and trying to convince me it's a good thing. I think there's always going to be some sort of discrepency between gameplay and narrative at some level. I don't think the solution is to try and excuse it, I think the solution is literally just to accept it's going to be there, and try to minimize it where possible.

And, on the audience side of things, to stop rewarding developers for using it as artsy street cred.

Are there people actually considering it as an actual goal to achieve via design? Can you give examples?

Well, the only big ones that come to mind are Far Cry 3 and Spec Ops: The Line. And maybe Hotline Miami. So maybe it's not fair to describe it as a widespread epidemic :P

I happened to stumble across the written version of a talk that might be of interest:
http://www.heyimjohn.com/rendering-meaning/

Not sure I understand what you mean or what games you're talking about because as far as I can see games aren't changing much but rather more frequently self-referential narratives are employed in traditional games to counter the problem or at least acknowledge that it's there. Unless you're talking about all the indie non-games that keep popping up and receiving praise in all sorts of places.

Edit: Okay, after re-reading your posts I understand that you were actually using self-referential games like Spec Ops, Far Cry 3 and Hotline Miami, which simply demonstrate awareness of their core gameplay's largely unavoidable implications, as examples of tackling the problem in a bad or unnecessary way rather than one deserving praise. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.

Heh, some of the scripting felt WAAAAY to forced. I could see something coming a mile away. Especially with her first kill. Walking through the cave, come close to what appears to be a choke point. Look around up down and everywhere, not a soul in sight. Inch forward and instantly someone grabs you spawned from nowhere...

There's a few places where this kind of thing happens. I forget who complained about it where you could be sneaking through an area and suddenly get attacked as though you ran through without a care in the world, there's no way she should have been noticed.

Reminds me of the same scripting done in Escape from Butcher bay. Sneaking through the duct areas, guards throw smoke grenades and say you're coming, but don't actually know you are there or that you were coming because they didn't actually spot you, you just walked past an invisible line that said 'these guys spawn, and do this, right now'

I can't help but get annoyed at such heavily scripted areas that feel unnatural.

Sorry, my wording was kind of unclear. I meant that I'm ok with ludo narrative dissonance, provided the game isn't trying to convince me that it's a good thing. But games are more frequently using things like deconstructionism etc to try and preserve traditional gameplay design while telling stories that don't mesh well with traditional gameplay (Spec Ops is a perfect example. Its story tries to give weight to violence, while its gameplay follows MMS practices that make violence weightless. So it uses deconstructionism to try and make the two work). They're recognizing the problem, but aren't willing to make the hard choices necessary to actually solve it (or get closer to solving it, at least. Like I said, I don't think it's something that a game can ever completely solve while still functioning as entertainment in some way). Instead they're just using gimmicks to try and excuse it. To me, that's an even less elegant solution than just pretending ludo narrative dissonance doesn't exist.
dat ninja edit :)

I couldn't stop thinking about ludonarrative dissonance and I kept thinking "dude, you have to be able to come up with good examples". Then I thought of that one game, that one awfully aged game... Syndicate. It hasn't much of a narrative but it has a very specific topic. It's a game about evil corporations. The themes are greed, moral ambiguity, megalomania, nihilism. The intro introduces you to these ideas and you're instantly introduced to the things that scare you about big corporations: being above the law, being able to develop dangerous technologies and strategies behind shut doors, nobody being able to control them once they've become too powerful. That's what the game is about content-wise.

And that's pretty much what the game's mechanics are about. Syndicate sees you committing crimes such as murder, extortion and downright terrorist attacks. You command an R&D department, you "hire" people against their will, you grow uncontrollably, you command agents to do your bidding. But what's worse is what happens more subtly while playing the game: you stop caring about individuals, obviously something that comes to mind when you think of big corporations. When you start the game you think "damn, it's kind of a living world with civilians minding their own business". But as you try to achieve your goals you just stop acknowledging them. You may go nuts and intentionally kill civilians in cruel ways just for lulz but if you're actually playing the game and trying to win, the civilians just disappear from your mind. You aim at the hostile agents and don't even really see those people standing between you, you don't really acknowledge them on the mini map, they are like ants on the sidewalk. And those population numbers on the strategic map aren't people, they are income. It's nihilism, radical capitalism and cancerous corporate growth at its finest.

I don't know, maybe I'd have to think it over, maybe the gameplay isn't quite exactly about the same thing that the narrative is about, maybe the game doesn't have enough of a narrative to qualify but I'm pretty darn sure that that's one game that deals with ideas as abstract as say BioShock with its objectivism or Deus Ex with its transhumanism and actually hits the mark in how you interact with the game and what the gameplay itself conveys.

That sounds like a really cool bit of interactive storytelling! I like when a game does stuff like that through its gameplay, letting you naturally take a certain path or develop a certain mentality, without having to force its message on you overtly.

When I was little, before cell phones were a thing, me and a friend used to play Douchebag: the Game. This comprised sitting in a parked (soundproof) car, pointing at people and calling them douchebags. The fact that the biggest douchebags were probably ourselves wasn't lost on us.
On a less douchebaggy note, there's a classic Russian font called "Academy", a quite distinctive serif whose "p" glyph lacks the top, uh, serif. As a kid, when I read a classic book which used the font, I would set a quota of 2 pretty "p"s per line and count them to see if the book met it.

What I'm saying is the spectrum of pastimes which count as "games" is immensely diverse, and a linear scale implied by the term "ludonarrative" is unhelpful.

I'm primarily a tabletop roleplaying fan, and in tabletop, there is in fact a rather sharp delineation between story and mechanics -- because the "story" takes place in people's heads, is expressed in natural language and regulated primarily by vague unspoken sociocultural conventions, and mechanics is a supplementary mathematical tool. Rolling a die is distinct from describing what your character is going to do.

Videogames, however, make no such distinction. Everything happens on a computer, everything is code, everything is game. I don't think a game can have "more game" or "less game" vs "less story/more story". What would be the gauge, bytecount? Worker-hours spent per aspect? What if the engine is licensed? Interactive fiction is 100% story and 100% game. People say "walking simulators aren't games" (and I kinda see what they mean -- they are objectively a distinct category of electronic entertainment), but what, then, makes a game a game? Impact the player has on the plot? Many "true games" (shooters, adventures, strategies) have a fixed plot, move it forward or be stuck. Suggested difficulty? Many easy/casual games are "light on story", too, and difficulty levels are a thing. Videogames simply produce a variety of player experiences; trying to slice it up like a cow carcass and point out a binary border is unhelpful. If there is to be a border, it should be drawn elsewhere: like in tabletop, let there be "mechanics" and "everything else". (I take "ludonarrative" to mean that.) And a game can't "not have" mechanics, or have "less" or "more" -- if someone says it does, I take it to mean "this game's mechanics suck, they're either trivially solvable and involve no decision-making beyond the initial solution ("less") or incomprehensible to the point of depriving the player of meaningful choice and agency ("more").

Now, the ways a game can be good or bad aren't on any sort of linear scale; and human language is weird, too. The games I'd call well-designed, the games I'd call good, and the games which I personally enjoyed (playing, watching, or reading a let's play) overlap, but don't exactly match. That being said, do I have the right to say a game sucks? Yes, absolutely. Everything is subjective. Art is an area where opinion is the highest, the only form of knowledge. Bias can only exist where the scientific method applies (for example: I hate a game and I'm editing a wikipedia article on it, seeking out negative reviews to compile a "critical reception" section). Personal opinion "bias" is a batshit meme which needs to die.

In the silent movie example, the parallel to gaming would not be "Voices: Yes/No" but "Sound design: Voice+Music or Voice or Music or Completely Silent", "Dialogue: Voiced or Cards or Subtitles or zomgNone", etc. I keep saying how I love the stories of Teslagrad and Botanicula, even though these games don't have written words at all (except some Norwegian character substitution cypher or so I heard, but I can't Norwegian so I can't confirm).

P.S. "Douchebag: the Game" is a real commercial game which exists and is sold on GOG.

I haven't played Bioshock, but I'm a story nut and "turning pages" is exactly what I hate in games. I call it "dissociated mechanics" (term borrowed from tabletop). Why on earth I'm wasting my life jumping through hoops if said jumping doesn't contribute to the story at all? Why am I paying for the game in money and time when there are cutscenes available on youtube? If I want to watch a movie (no, I don't), I'll watch a damn movie.

When it's done well, it's just called "contrast" or "poetic irony". To quote a designer, "Evil, if defined as "things we don't like", is pretty much exclusively composed of things we don't like." There's always some dissonance in fun games about terrible RL events or their fantasy equivalents.

That was a rhetorical device. Obviously, not very disabled pereson even has a condition which negtively impacts manual dexterity. My point is, a game, in a narrow sense, is a series of RL challenges flavored as a series of fictional challenges. There are games where you can be better at stabbing people by being good at math, or having fast reflexes, or spending a lot of time, or paying money. Only the last one is strictly worse. Similarly, there's nothing immediately wrong with flavoring a twitch game as making friends. It's only when people claim Undertale is some sort of bestest ever commentary on the human condition which you can take at face value and draw Very Important Lessons from that I have to point and say, "No, wrong, this here part doesn't work". If a player has good reflexes, they can win the game peacefully without knowing English, without actually engaging with the story and characters. If a player has bad reflexes, no amount of benevolence and "emotional intelligence" will help.