Ludonarrative dissonance and solutions
Game, as a kind of media, is to give people some kinds of experience. Admittedly, ingenious design of gameplay and mechanic as well as the performance of sounds and graphics can give player pleasure experience like what in sports. However, after years of development, games and industry wanted something more than what John Carmack said, “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.”. Narration, which is the essential element to give player complicated and various emotional experience, became the core part of game development. And of course, this is an important reason that makes game an art like literature and movie.
However, gameplay and mechanic is still the kernel and cornerstone of game, and these are essentially design of interaction. Interaction as the key to distinguish game from other art form provides player with freedom to participate in and influence the performance of game. And combining with the exploration desire of player, this freedom leads to unexpected behavior, which makes narration unstable and incoherence. The situation can be defined by the concept proposed by Clint Hocking: ludonarrative dissonance, which is a description of the conflict between the player's behavior and the idea in the game narrative caused by the choices provided in the game in his discussion of Bioshock. In fact, there are many very common and intuitive phenomena that reflect this conflict. For example, in Assassin's creed, many players will choose to kill all enemies to complete the spying task, which obviously contradicts the narrative setting of "Assassin" and "sneak in" that the game designer wants to deliver.
Obviously, using gameplay and mechanic is a direct method to limit player's behavior. For example, the most regular way is to use punishment and difficulty to guide players to choose the behavior branch that the game designer wants to serve the narrative needs, especially in Stealth game like Hitman and Mirror's Edge. For example, in The last of us, to achieve the narrative purpose of creating the difficult survival and dangerous atmosphere in the eschatological environment, designer guide the player to avoid the direct conflict with the enemy by limiting the combat resources. Besides, linear narrative has limited the number of branches of player behavior as far as possible.
Another way is to separate the story of game world from the player's individual gameplay, which is a common way to deal with multiplayer games, especially MMORPG. Specifically, the player is no longer an important character in the world story, and the behavior of the player has no influence on the world story. But this does not mean that there is no story for the player himself, the behavior of the player is creating his own story. Moreover, in MMO games, the behavior of players will be affected by each other, and the behavior of players as a group will be more easily controlled. This situation lets the game designer to turn some parts of the narrative into reality. For example, the experience of dangerous environment brought by the open PVP mechanism of World of Warcraft and WOW-like games, the suspicion relationship in players and the uncertain incidents in the Dark Zone of The Division and the lawless area of EVE are all typical examples of the consensus of the gameplay and narrative goal of multi-player games.
In recent years, the idea of some games is to jump out of the framework of performance when dealing with narrative, which also uses the interactive characteristics of the game to cater to rather than against the exploration desire of the players. In Souls Series, the game designer attach narrative information to items by words which is the most simple and unfriendly way, and hide them in different places in the world. But in fact, It uses the desire of exploration to drive the players to actively discover the narrative rather than destroy it. Besides, this kind of secrecy and mystery itself is part of the narrative experience that game designers expect to deliver. In fact, the concept of delivering narrative experience through expression form is not just used in games. For example, in the relatively avant-garde fantasy literature movement, the new weird movement, some representative books and works, such as the southern reach trilogy series, the author is always describing things and events in a logical but unreasonable way, which makes the readers feel upset and resistant in reading. Actually, this seemingly bad writing is intended to create the certain kind of obscurity and impatience, so that the reader's impatience becomes a part of the story's sophistication.
About getting out of the frame, there is a more radical approach: meta narrative. In novels and movies, this means that the author tell audience the story from a perspective out of the story, while in games, the typical form of expression is to jump out of one of the game elements -- the rules, at least the superficial rules. For example, The Stanley Parable and ICEY cater to the players' destruction of narration, but actually they let more narrative content occupy the exploration field of players in advance. NieR: Automata also extends narrative beyond the game system. This kind of meta games not only give players a sense of surprise, but also create an alternative reality in experience.
In fact, there is no conclusion about the perfect way to deal with the problem of ludonarrative dissonance. In other words, ludonarrative dissonance is not a problem, but the characteristics of the game as an art form. The dissonance of gameplay and narrative is actually the innovation point for game designers to explore the game forms.