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Ludonarrative Dissonance

4 min read

Summary

Ludonarrative dissonance is a conflict between the game (ludus, play: what the mechanics ask and reward) and the narrative (what the story says about the protagonist, the world or the player). When the two pull in different directions, players feel the gap: a story about a gentle hero is played by killing hundreds of people, or a story about scarcity is played with a pocket full of ammunition. The term names one specific way a game can lose thematic-coherence.

Key ideas

  • Two contracts. Hocking described a game as making two offers to the player: a ludic contract (what the rules make worthwhile) and a narrative contract (what the story asks you to care about). Dissonance is when the contracts contradict each other.
  • It’s about meaning, not just tone. Tonal inconsistency (cheerful music in a horror scene) is a cousin of dissonance; ludonarrative dissonance is specifically about what the play means against what the story means.
  • Players are the instrument. Because players perform the actions, they notice when their own behaviour contradicts the character they are told they are. A film can show a hero’s violence from a distance; a game makes the player do it.
  • Harmony is the opposite. Some writers call the aligned case ludonarrative harmony or resonance: the mechanic carries the theme.
  • Deliberate dissonance. A game can create the gap on purpose to make players uncomfortable and reflect on what they have been doing.

In practice

Run a dissonance check on any design with a story:

  1. Write the story’s theme in one sentence (e.g. “a light can guide or lure”).
  2. List the three verbs the player performs most often and what the game rewards most generously.
  3. For each verb, ask: does doing this, the way the game rewards it, say the same thing as the theme? If the character is a pacifist, why is killing the most efficient strategy?
  4. Check the reward schedule, not just the verbs: what is the optimal play, and does the story approve of it?
  5. Where they disagree, either change the mechanic (make the theme the efficient strategy), change the framing, or make the disagreement the point and design for the player noticing it.

In Unity terms this is a design review, not a system: but the fixes are usually systemic (reward values, enemy counts, what scores points) rather than script rewrites.

Evidence

  • Clint Hocking coined the term in a blog post on BioShock (Hocking, “Ludonarrative dissonance in Bioshock”, Click Nothing, October 2007). He argued that the game’s mechanics present a proposition about self-interest (harvesting Little Sisters for ADAM makes you more powerful) while its story removes the player’s choice (you must help Atlas), so the ludic and narrative contracts contradict each other and the game’s central moral choice loses its force.
  • The most cited example since is the Uncharted series: a charming, wise-cracking hero in the cutscenes who, in play, kills very large numbers of people. This is a common critical reading rather than a claim from the developers.
  • The course lecture series uses Duke Nukem Forever (2011) as a case of thematic incoherence: the intended theme was an overblown macho power fantasy played as satire, but mechanics such as a two-weapon limit and long, slow vehicle and puzzle sections undercut the fantasy of an unstoppable hero, and the 1990s humour sat uneasily beside attempts at serious storytelling (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures).
  • Spec Ops: The Line (Yager, 2012) is the standard example of dissonance used deliberately: it uses the conventions of a military shooter, then turns the player’s own actions into the subject of the story.
  • The course lectures use Inside (Playdead, 2016) as the counter-example: the mechanic of taking control of mindless bodies expresses the game’s theme of control (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures).

Implications

  • Arguably the most common source of dissonance is the reward schedule: designers balance combat to be fun and story to be meaningful separately, and only the combination reveals the contradiction. Playtest for it by asking players what kind of person their character is, based only on what they did.
  • Dissonance is cheaper to fix early. Once levels are built around a verb, changing its meaning is expensive.
  • Not every player minds. Many players read genre conventions (a shooter’s body count) as abstraction rather than characterisation; the problem is sharpest when the story explicitly asks you to take the character’s morality seriously.

Open questions

  • Is dissonance always a flaw, or is some of it an accepted convention, like characters breaking into song in a musical?
  • How much does player choice reduce dissonance? If players can play non-violently (as in Dishonored’s low-chaos route), is the remaining dissonance the player’s responsibility?

thematic-coherence · narrative-design · narrative-architecture · environmental-storytelling · character-design · games-as-systems-vs-games-as-stories · player-agency · experiential-metaphor · reward-systems

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