Playing as a "bad" character and ludonarrative dissonance

Try the yakuza games. They are open world crime games where you don't do crimes.

Huh. I expected you to be going somewhere with your pre-amble. That threw me off for a bit.

Anyway. I wouldn't say it's the badness of the person. For me, if I can';t connect, I can't connect. I'm hardly a perfect person, so obviously flawed characters are easier to connect to. For example, you used Booker from Infinite. He accepts his lack of virtue, and his past even haunts him. There's an entire act basically that is his past haunting him. Well, maybe not an act, but there is definitely some stuff. For me, what helped me see things was that I actually became very protective of Elizabeth very quickly. Her mannerisms sort of hit home in a very personal way, and as a result, I was able to justify the number of people I unflinchingly (although, to be fair, as with most games, not in cold blood generally) cut down in the process of, from my perspective, protecting her. (Such a sexist, how dare I!) So while I wouldn't say "being bad" ever makes things easier for me, except perhaps in the case of Trevor from GTA, but that's generally because I usually inhabit a familiar role, or observe as an outsider. If I can't put myself in the shoes of the character, I just observe. I don't get stuck in limbo where I can't seperate myself or my thoughts/feelings from the actions of the character.

I think flaws make people more relatable, but I don't think they really change much of how I look at their violent actions or how much I believe the character or anything. Unless it's an extreme like Trevor and I go out of my way to do things I normally wouldn't (beat the shit out of some random pedestrian who bumped into me, take a bat to the car that just ran me over, start random fights, etc), I have never felt that the moral standing of the character had any impact in the way you're talking about.

But then, I'm also generally more comfortable with violence as a solution or response than most.

This is also weird because I was listening to an old Bombcast within this very hour in which they talked a lot about Tomb Raider, after Brad had finished it and Patrick was still in the process of finishing the game, and there was a big discussion about ludo-narrative dissonance, in which I heard the phrase for the first time.

does playing as a character who the game acknowledges is a bad person diminish the effects of ludonarrative dissonance in a violent game?

If you have your main character not kill anyone, you're making a hipster walking simulator. If your main character is a typical video game character and kills everyone in your path, then people will complain of character dissonance when you attempt to have a deep story. Look at GTA4 - the main complaint was that Niko was trying to be a good guy, but the player could kill and destroy wantonly (listen to the 2008 GOTY bombcast). It really spoiled the game for some people. The way that recent games have been dealing with it is that is by starting their MC as bad guys. It's a trend that's in all different media too: Homeland, Breaking Bad, the Sopranos, etc all feature anti-heroes.

The whole point of these anti-heroes is to justify stuff that you normally can't justify with white bread characters and introduce the player, or watcher, or reader to a story different than normal story telling.

Trevor was one of the most loved characters in GTAV, because he exemplified the GTA mentality of fucking shit up. People felt ok with doing bad things because Trevor was a consistently bad guy.

So yes, very much yes, anti-heroes diminish the effect of "ludonarrative dissonance." That's the whole point...

First off, supposing that every soldier at Wounded Knee was a bad person is dumb and ignores the last 60 years of research in psychology. Secondly and more relevantly to your topic, The games you're discussing generally don't achieve what you're discussing because the element of choice is taken out of your hands. Sure, Booker is called a bad person and yes, he kills people in brutal ways, but he never acts like a bad person in the time you know him.

For the purposes of keeping the player involved, he can't, because you have control over him and you're only doing what you're forced to do. If the game forces you to do something you wouldn't have done yourself, it eliminates your sense of agency and personal responsibility for the events onscreen. I remember this being my reaction in the first God of War when Kratos' character is established by the assholish way he kicks a sailor down the throat of the dead hydra. Note that I haven't played Walking Dead because I'm not into Zombies, but I imagine that this is a case where I would accept my badness.

I wrote a blog about this actually, using Spec Ops: The Line as an example: http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/veektarius/blog/can-games-tell-some-stories-better-than-movies/99117/. In short, my point is that you can only make a person (me) feel bad for a game character's actions if he does not notice that the game has not permitted him a choice he would have made given complete freedom.

I think the entire concept is so specific to a certain group of people's reaction to these games and I don't really understand it. As someone who grew up on Schwarzenegger (and similar) action films, it was all about the good guy beating and shooting the hell out of the bad guy. Killing TONS of people over the span of an hour or two. But our hero was still a hero and a good guy because the reasons for doing what they did were justified by the story. Sure, you might kill more people by the numbers in a video game than a movie, but that's because it's an exaggeration to create gameplay, so I don't really take it literally by the numbers. And besides, most of it is done in self-defense anyway, otherwise you're not getting far in Uncharted or any other game. And combat in Uncharted to me wasn't so much an issue of Drake being a big killer at the same time as a good hearted explorer guy, but combat to that degree not being needed in that franchise since the interesting parts of those games were everything else. I never felt like the games justified why it had to be that much combat.

Personally, it doesn't matter if the game initially says "this character is good or bad" because it's completely arbitrary given that the game is going to, by most evidence, make you root for that character.

I think the only character recently I've seen that has been bad, and people has actually reacted to as saying they don't even want to play that character because of it, is Trevor from GTA V. Yet at the same time, Trevor feels like the embodiment of the rampage you can create in GTA "just for fun". Which stands at contrast to something like Sleeping Dogs where I personally due to how the game presents itself, didn't go berserk on civilians and police. To me, it's all about framing the game for the player in a way that makes sense.

Also, just because the developers didn't lock your ability to shoot at any given point, doesn't mean you have to. To that degree, I think some people do things because you can, complain and don't realize they're just spoiling their own fun for the sake of their own argument.

If you think everyone who was at Wounded Knee is a bad person, you have a simple mind.

THAT'S RIGHT. INTERNET INSULT.

I suppose you think all the Romans were bad guys, and YEAH LET'S GET CONTROVERSIAL - you probably think all the German and Russian soldiers in World War II are bad guys too. Simple, simple, simple.

Millions of soldiers have fought for horrible causes and committed incredible atrocities without ever becoming "bad people". They're caught up in something far bigger then they are.

ANYWAYS. To get to your actual question, I think you've muddled some things up that may not be related.

Ludonarrative dissonance is when gameplay disagrees with itself or with the world/story/plot. Just because you kill/fight lots of people doesn't mean there is any dissonance at all. Dissonance also has nothing to do with realism. In Tomb Raider there is dissonance because Lara is portrayed as someone who would have a problem murdering hundreds of people (and yet, you do). This is the same problem that Uncharted famously has: Charsimatic Jokester Murders 10,000 Pirates. Last of Us is mostly dissonance free. Joel and Ellie be shivving and murdering dudes at the drop of a hat in cut-scenes, so it's not weird that you have the option to kill folks in game too. Both Tomb Raider and TLOU have intensly hostile environments, but in TLOU murder feels like the only way out often, whereas in TR it feels too easily done.

Generally speaking, yes, playing someone who is a murderer makes murdering easier (Trevor is a great example) but it also has a lot to do with the World Intensity and the options the player has. There aren't very many ways I can think of at all to knock people out in GTA. This can be very frustrating if you want to play a more human Franklin. So GTA has some dissonance here for me. Accidentally running over hundreds of civilians over the hours doesn't help, but it also makes the game more cartoonish, which in term actually diminishes the dissonance as the game becomes less serious. Less serious = less rules to break = less dissonance. In TLOU, where pretty much everyone has been reduced to living like an animal, you'd actually have to be crazy to leave some of those people alive post-confrontation. Especially the mutated ones.

"Wanton murder" seems a bit far considering the enemies in BioShock who are only barely human. In Infinite that might apply more.

@mrcool11: Ludonarrative dissonance isn't just limited to good guys mowing people down. It's any time that the game's actions don't mesh with story and characterization. Choice or lack thereof doesn't matter, because yoh could be given gameplay choices that feel severely out of character.

It's not really a problem that affects my enjoyment, but I suppose I could see how it could others. Sure, as Niko, you could run over dozens of people on the way to a mission where Niko laments his actions, but you don't have to. Its a matter of separating video-gamey gameplay and story.

I don't think it helps all that much. Standard shooter gameplay is in a weird place- too wildly divergent from reality to be salvaged, but not abstracted enough that it's super easy to gloss over in a serious storytelling attempt. Unless your character is very specifically an unconflicted mass murderer with superpowers, it's gonna be hard to make it work. Arguably Spec Ops did, but I think it only worked there because it was specifically trying to poke holes and acknowledge just how messed up the "realistic shooter" actually is. I don't think it would've worked without that meta-commentary.

@mrcool11: I guess what I'm saying as it regards ludonarrative dissonance is just that the gameplay is sabotaging the emotional impact the story is going for by removing the illusion of agency, which is pretty central to an interactive experience. Things are going to hit home harder if you feel responsible, and hit home less if you feel like a bystander. A game that's a great example of something that really makes you feel agency is the Witcher.

@towersixteen said:

Trying to strip the meta-commentary from Spec Ops is like saying "Mario wouldn't be any good without jumping!". It's an integral part of the game and was left there for a reason.

Word. I recently experienced this with Beyond - I didn't have a problem associating with a young woman, or the way she could go to guns on some fools at the drop of a hat but when the game basically decides that the character loves Captain Douchebag I just stopped being able to connect with the character as easily especially because the game had actually given me the choice of how to behave towards said dude up to a point. So I think coherency is maybe more important to me than consistency with my own personality when looking at that kind of dissonance?

I'm just going to quickly interject that there's a difference between being a "violent" person and being a "bad" person. Bioshock Infinite, to me, is much more of an exploration of violence than a good vs. bad, dynamic. It's easy to say that murder is bad, so anyone who kills is just bad by nature, but almost all of the player characters in these games are fighting back against people trying to kill them.

Which I think is what I meant? Nothing wrong with some good meta stuff.

On a side note, I wouldn't consider Joel a bad guy... Pretty much at all. The worst thing he did in my eyes was near the beginning of the game he broke that dudes arm and then let Tess shoot him. Even then, that ass hole started by sending people to kill him and then shot at them himself. Pretty much every other violent act was done in self defense. If all those ass holes didn't shoot first and try and hurt Ellie, Joel would have no reason to kill.

I would neither laud a soldier from Wounded Knee as a hero, nor condemn them for being morally corrupt murderers. It's not that black and white. There were obviously bad men committing bad deeds. There were also men following the orders of their superior officers, and men suddenly and without warning caught in the crossfire. Not every soldier on the battlefield was complicit in murdering the elderly, sick, women, and children. Anyway, I don't wish to debate that with you further. We can agree to disagree. What I think your takeaway from that reveal should have been, was that Booker is accustomed to conflict, and won't hesitate to resort to violence when it's warranted, not that he's inherently a bad person.

I don't chime to the idea that Booker's past immediately forgives the huge logic-leap that he'd be fine with mowing down hundreds of people over the course of the game without a second thought, mainly because I don't remember any dialogue that even hints at him being anything but a fairly normal guy. Joel says some cold shit in The Last of Us that makes you realise underneath he's pretty much a monster, while Booker just mumbles about how "you can't forgive the things i've done", then acts perfectly affably for the rest of the game. In between murdering everybody.

I don't see how portraying or playing a "bad" character in a videogame is a necessarily a bad thing.
If the developers wanted you to play a bad character, why is that a problem? You're not necessarily playing yourself.

I still feel we are in that infamous level of morality, feed the homeless or take the ration for yourself.

I find the ludo whatever the idiotic thing ridiculous , especially regarding Nathan Drake , becaue he is funny and stuff he somehow cant be a murderer????? Thats is peprosterus , only if he was a pacifist I would believe the hipster journos so called dissonance. Also to me they forget that Indiana Jones was the same as Drake (and as murderous , even if he killed nazis) and no flinch or word about a so called ludo narrative dissonance there.

they keep the train of totally fucking people up rolling until the end of their respective games.

People always seem to forget that the dudes Joel and Booker "fuck up" are dudes that are trying to "fuck them up". They're both placed in kill or be killed situations, and they don't want to be killed, so they kill. Often brutally due to the tools they have. Fighting back and eventually killing someone that tried to kill you first does not qualify a man as "bad" in my book. Do you expect to talk them out of it or something?

It's a more complex topic than "are they good or bad men?" If you need it simplified, they're quite clearly anti-heroes.

The problem is that, because of gameplay constraints, the "kill or be killed" thing always feels rather artificial. Infinite has that problem much more than the last of us, but because the main gameplay system is shooting, it's practically all anyone ever tries. Outside of maybe the very beginning, there's not really any attempt to ever do anything but charge in guns blazing and kill interchangeable enemies and it makes the claims of self-defense and necessity seem a little hollow.

Nathan Drake is basically a happy-go-lucky mass murderer that never suffers any ill mental effects or legal ramifications despite his kill-sprees tallying multiple small militias.

I think if we tried to constantly make sure all these characters make real world sense the games would not be very entertaining to play.

I agree.

I can't remember where I heard it (I think it was a PAX panel a couple of years ago) but I remember someone liking it to a play or a musical. Something along the lines of "What the fuck, this gritty teen drama is suddenly just bursting into song? Totally ruined my immersion" (Grease).

I mean even though they were joking about it, it brings up a good point. I can understand the complaint of 'dissonance' sometimes, but many other times I really just don't. You get the people who complain about how "it's totally unrealistic that this guy would kill that many people" when they fail to realize that if it was more realistic it would also be really boring.

The Military (Infantry, that is)? Real life is pretty much 99% boring shit with 1% pure hell and action. That doesn't really translate into a game well.

Realism isn't always something to strive for. Personally, when I look at a game's story I'm looking at what it is trying to tell. In Bioshock Infinite Elizabeth not reacting to the constant murder never really bothered me, because they game wasn't about that. The Uncharted Series isn't trying to tell the story of some tragic tale, it's a big blockbuster-style game. The entire point is to put you into ridiculous situations with a lot going on. It doesn't really matter if Nathan Drake kills like 800 people, because him killing people isn't even hardly related to the story they are trying to tell.

Like how a musical might just interupt into song (when that'd never happen in reality) a game will interupt into gameplay that might not be a completely believable thing. It all depends on what the developers are going for.

All of that said I do think dissonance is an issue when a game actively contradicts its self on a primary story element. Some games can get around this (Far Cry 3 is seen as a satire, for example) but some games might feel a bit awkward because of it. In the new Tomb Raider the entire point of the story is you are new and young and inexperienced. When you turn around and suddenly are able to do these incredible things it's kind of weird.

If it's a more minor thing though I really don't care.

@aetheldod said:

Dissonance does not exist in movies because its created in the juxtaposition of interactive and non interactive sections. Movies doesn't have interactive sections...

And its not only about murder and violence. That is only the easiest example. Its about every time the character in gameplay expresses differently than the character in cutscenes. For example, the gameplay in Hitman encourages Agent 47 to act stealthy and have a low profile; through gameplay, it informs us about the personality of the character (professional, dead serious, not fond of small talk). If during cutscenes he acts like a gun happy, bombastic, wisecrack John McClane, the game would have a dissonance problem.

I have no dissonance problem with playing with the bad guy, as long as the game acknowledge it. That goes beyond having "safe targets"... When they don't, I would expect the game to acknowledge the situation or my character as messed up. That is why I have a lot less problems with The Boss and Wei Shen than with Niko Belic...