@Foolio:
Hmm I do feel like you didn't really get my point, or maybe I just didn't express it coherently. I was never saying devs shouldn't strive to be cohesive with their gameplay and story (in cases, as you pointed out, where that's the intention, since there are definitely games where the story is just an excuse to present puzzles or whatever, but those aren't the games in question). And as I opened my post saying, I think that's one of the biggest design considerations of them all, to the point that I felt the discussion to be largely self-evident (of course the masses go and prove me wrong, because human stupidity never ceases to amaze me).
But rather I was just trying to say that the two elements of narrative and player freedom are intrinsically at war, and you can't really strengthen one without weakening the other. Which makes it hard when you want to find a middle ground (or "have it all" if you see it as such). You can't simultaneously have the world's most amazing narrative and the most open world. A well-paced, meaningful plot also requires guiding and pacing the player to properly instill things like tension, caring and emotion. (Of course that isn't to say that you can't evoke emotion through gameplay alone either, it's just a different aspect of it.) So figuring out what compromises to make is in my opinion a really hard choice, and one that will never result in the best of both worlds.
Now with that established, my "hypothesis" if you will is that if you do want a game that has both satisfactory narrative depth and satisfactory gameplay depth, you're probably going to have some dissonance. You can try to mitigate it in the ways I mentioned before, but it's still always at the expense of something. I guess for me personally I think I've just accepted that there will be cases where the way I played doesn't quite align with the context of the story, but the alternative (i.e. removing the gameplay options I had or trying to account for every possible thing I could do) is unfeasible. Of course I would be excited to see what people can come up with to reduce that dissonance as much as possible, and I definitely think they should try!
Earlier I had something in my post about how having multiple endings is, in my opinion anyway, a weakening of the narrative. At least if they're drastically different instead of just being tweaked. But that got me thinking that really there are two big types of games in that sense: games where you play as a character, and games where you play as an avatar of yourself. Not necessarily looks-wise, but characterization-wise. Like, Link is a silent protagonist so I would consider that an avatar of the player, not a character with – well -- character development lol. Scripting major plot decisions for an avatar character, if through the gameplay you can contradict those decisions, does indeed sound like bad design. And if there is a plot that ignores your decisions as an avatar, then it makes you sort of wonder what the point is. The reverse too I guess, where you give the player too much freedom or too many superfluous gameplay mechanics, to the point that it just hurts your narrative. But anyway this distinction could in its own right be considered a design choice toward narrative-centric games (a character) or player-centric games (an avatar). I think it still comes down in the end to deciding what your priorities are and how to best balance that. I have a clear gravitation toward more structured games with set progression from point A to point B, at least on a large scale. I enjoy freedom and sidequesting and optional content and what have you, but ultimately I want to be playing through devs' cohesive vision, not creating my own adventure.
Hmm ok. I think having a better idea of what you’ve written (and, you know, not being half asleep) it seems like we’re in broad agreement about the difficulties that can be had reducing the dissonance between gameplay and storytelling. I do think there are examples of games where certain decisions might be seen as positive examples of closing that gap. I cited Fire Emblem earlier as what I think is a good example in the inclusion of permadeath. It doesn’t solve all, or even most of the problems, but I think including that mechanic brings the weight of gameplay decisions and choices closer to the narrative themes the games are (or at least used to be) going for than if they had chosen to just have characters respawn at the end of a battle…Which is of course what they do now anyway hahaha, so really what do I know?
I think in some ways it’s probably a lot easier to call out examples of blatant failure in a devs attempts to link story and gameplay than it is to think of ways they might be brought together better. As you say a game that gives you an avatar but doesn’t give your choices any weight at all has made a bad design choice (cough Fire Emblem Awakening cough), although you probably don’t need a wanky term like ludonarrative dissonance to tell you that :P. I mean ideally this would be approached in a manner more akin to a science, looking at what trade-offs an “average” audience is willing to accept in one realm or the other. And indeed there are more labs than I expected at universities that attempt to explore in a systematic manner how people respond to these types of changes and trade-offs in game design. But I’m not sure how mainstream any design philosophy motivated by those sorts of findings would end up being. I mean film science is, at least from what little I’ve seen, barely a science and is mainly appreciated by a relatively small section of those people that watch and enjoy films while the Bayformers and other CGI fests rake in billions of dollars all over the world, “science” and art be damned. :P
@Foolio:
By the way I was using BotW as an example of a recent open-world game. I think the points I was making are logical. I talked about urgency because from the opening of the game we have Zelda desperately pleading for your immediate help, and even NPCs in various places wonder wtf you're doing jerking off with cooking recipes or whatnot instead of saving the world. It was just an example of how badly the narrative is hurt (what little of it they try to inject anyway) by the gameplay freedom they created. And that, ultimately, you still don't have the freedom to break away from that simple narrative. But yeah other Zelda games have a setup that works by just having a basic story that you eventually have to complete but they don't worry about trying to pressure you or guide you one way or another. It's an intentionally weak narrative because the meat of the game is still in the exploration and dungeons. But there's a… I want to call it a fad, right now, where it's ultimate freedom or nothing. And I think BotW suffered for caving in on that; eliminating what little narrative structure there was in Zelda games to begin with. But that's a whole different topic.
I would say to this point, and I’m not sure how much of it aligns with the opinion you hold and how much it is more related just to conversations of Zelda and BotW specifically, but I do think that part of what causes your concern in particular might be revealed in how you refer to the narratives of the other Zelda games. Now that’s just fairly baseless speculation on my part, but I personally definitely wouldn’t call the narratives of MM and OoT weak. They have story beats and revelations, modest character development and a world that changes with your actions (and in the case of MM then changes back to reinforce the more central themes). I would call them more loosely structured and less restrictive but I don’t think that in anyway needs to be a weakness. And I think that’s kind of what I wanted to get at in my previous post; there are some types of narratives that can be told in ways that are robust to the creative freedom offered by gameplay. That’s excluding the type of narrative construction Noqanky talks about in her post (and I don’t mean excluding as in I disagree with the idea, I’ve written elsewhere about my support of it before, I just mean that I’m trying not to get to sidetracked in this particular reply :P.) I mean, there are stories I’ve read that I think could, in some cases maybe stretching my imagination a bit, lend themselves well to the freedom that games offer in their gameplay, as the tone and theme and ideas are conveyed in particular setpieces and in the ways in which the narrative meanders and is structured between those more rigid beats. I think, for example, a Persona style game married to the narrative mechanics of Infinite Jest could actually be a really interesting one. Spoilers for the ending of Infinite Jest and one of the theories of its intended structure below for those who haven’t read it:
! In fact Infinite Jest doesn’t even really have an ending, it just sort of focuses its lens more and more into the internal reflections and dreams of the two characters that could probably be described as the protagonists. Its temporal structure is also really interesting (at least according to a theory I’ve read that I found pretty convincing :P) with the ending kind of “wrapping around” to the beginning and the information you’ve gained from your first read through the book serving, if you’re attentive enough, to provide explanations and tie-ins for things the seemed kinda random or tangential at first, a narrative style I could see lending itself well to the game idea of replay value.
It is a story that is even full of what might be called optional content in the almost 200 hundred pages of footnotes that you don’t need to read (although I imagine most people would encourage it). A footnote that’s multiple pages long about the insane hazing rituals of a terrorist group from Canada sounds like perfect side quest material, just to pull a random example from memory.
I don’t want to go into too much detail here since the book is just an example chosen at random, but I do just want to emphasise that not all successful narratives need to adhere to the idea of tight narrative structure and progression. Some people might like and prefer that and that’s perfectly fine. I for example roll my eyes hard whenever I come across people that clamour for more “grey” morality or “complexity” in their stories. I hate it. But I do think that we might do the idea of games as art a disservice if we too rigidly define the types of stories that might be told, excluding by the veneration of tightly structured, sequential narratives, vehicles of storytelling that might actually marry themselves really well to the medium of gameplay.
@Noqanky:
The thing regarding Bioshock is a mechanic wherein you can get more power for your character, but in order to do so you pretty much have to kill these Little Sister characters. I believe the problem with that in the long run is that the game rewards a specific choice. This counteracts the sheer notions of having a choice by reducing the outcome towards a mathematically better choice. It is easy for a player to just do what is best as intended by the game, not based on what their morality dictates.
For me one of the big examples that always bothered me is the Tomb Raider reboot. Here we're talking about a game with hours of cutscenes, a lot of which focus heavily on the huge impact and stress Lara suffers from being a survivor, from having to kill in self-defense, and overall from all the violence she's witnessing. But then the game happens, the game in which you just tote around with half the arsenal of an army killing people left and right because, ultimately, the game is designed so that everything is easiest by mowing down everyone.
"Players can choose to use stealth" but then the game has levels designed that force people to use stealth TO KILL, not to avoid killing. Then in the second one you have bits like surviving a bear encounter, and then the game focuses on Lara learning how to kill the bear, not how to survive it.
To me this is what I assume to be "ludonarrative dissonance". The fact you can have games that portray the characters as real, struggling with violence and damaged psychologically, but then the gameplay forgets that entirely and instead they are serial murderers of w.e. mook enemy unit the game has. And then instead devs work not on how to humanize the player, but how to dehumanize the enemies in order to justify the murdelizing.
I don’t have much to add to this point just to say that I agree with what you’ve written here. One of the most common examples I used to see cited whenever it come up of this was Grand Theft Auto IV, where the devs wanted to tell the story of an immigrant, sick of killing and violence coming to America to follow the American dream, but then proceeded to undercut it by the gross amount of vile acts you can have the character unthinkingly perform.
@Noqanky:
In that sense I don't think Zelda is a legitimate example of this. I mean, you DO have epicly stupid moments of it I guess. Things like one of the first cutscenes i BotW having Zelda tell Link to "hurry up, there's no time, EVERYBODY PANIC!" to then open up to the player to a game with mechanics that encourage dicking around for hours and not doing the story. That definitely counts as a huge moment of stupid and I cannot believe a high-level producer somewhere figured "yea, let's leave that line in"
The game as a whole though feels internally consistent. The music, the art, the mechanics and the systems are all designed to focus on the player's narrative. Even cutscenes and story segments are formatted so that the player may encounter them in any order and at their own pace. Here's where it helps to remember narrative is not just the story the game has in cutscenes and lore, but also the stories that arise from players experiencing it. To one person the narrative in Zelda is how naked Link marched headstrong into Hyrule immediately and through a combo of shield-surfing and stealing managed to persevere. To another person, the narrative is how Link built a highly diverse town, helped various civilizations, avenged his champion friends and then went on to rescue Zelda. Everything in the game supports this sort of thing happening.
Pokemon is kinda similar to this, where there IS a story that you are handheld through pretty much the entire time, but when you think about it, it's not so much YOUR story as the story of other characters (your friend, your rivals, the team leaders, etc.). This means that the game, by virtue of having mechanics wherein you can build your team as you wish, lets you construct your own personal narrative, naturally within a specific scope. Whether it's the adventures of Asshat doing a nuzlocke or getting to the champion with a team of cutieflies. Those are stories that belong to the player.
While I agree with most everything you’ve written here I do think that the initial sense of urgency and desperation the game provides can clash pretty hard at some points with the internal consistency of the rest of the game world. This depends a lot on how much you let the narrative framing device shape your experience so it might not be a concern worth thinking much about, but if you take it to heart the dire warnings of impending doom don’t really sit well with the more relaxed, melancholic and peaceful state of the world that you explore. To that extent my player narrative of the game is much as you describe it but since the tentpoles of the overarching narrative set by the devs are as they are, my own narrative has within it points of confusion. Did I really need to bother with the divine beasts for example? I mean they’re not really doing anything. But I did it anyway as it seemed like an idea consistent with the conceit of the overarching story. But then drawing attention to that conceit makes it obvious how little of my narrative actually matches what I was told about the framework of my narrative.
Now most (or all) of that isn’t really going to be a problem if you don’t think about or frame things in that way. So it might not mean much of anything but I did want to share it just to provide an example of how a poorly thought at narrative conceit in a game can distort the narratives that players might construct.
@Noqanky:
As a random thought, I think part of the problem we are experiencing is the fact that so many game mechanics have been developed for the same exact actions mean that over the course of several games being released it all grows stale and narratively limited. There are SO many games that revolve around similar tropes like guns, fantasy violence, guns, post-apocalypse, guns, inter-personal drama, guns, drugs, guns, revenge, guns and so on. Over time it becomes mechanically stale that solutions to problems presented to a player are constantly just an equation of when to kill and when not to kill. It by default makes most stories non-sensical, such as Dead Rising being about a journalist (of all things) that somehow can survive all of the zombies, or even things like Overwatch being about an awe-inspiring future with heroes that fight for the planet… by all getting together in lobbies and shooting at each other until a score ticks down.
Yeah I can agree with that to an extent. As I mentioned to Foolio I do think for some games it isn’t a concern as story integrity or integration is clearly not what devs are going for. More generally though I do think that most people are going to be pretty forgiving of games that fall down in the “delivering an engaging story” department provided its fun to shoot people and so on. Perhaps those of us who want to encourage devs to stretch themselves and try to maybe produce a result that is more than the sum of its story and gameplay parts, to achieve some sort of synergy or whatever representative of the unique opportunities provided by an interactive fiction medium are in too much of a minority for it to ever really matter overmuch. Or maybe its like the video says and we are just in the early stages of the history of games as an art form and a pretend science.