I haven't gotten to Inquisition yet but awwww, out of context that's the sweetest topic title I've ever seen. In the other DA games there was an approval bar in the companion's equipment screen, that's all I know.
@jasonr86: That sounds like a good teacher and I definitely need to learn to not get "hung up." Still, the way I see it I'm not trying to fight the development of the videogame vocabulary so much as providing an optional path for it to develop if it wants to.
@veektarius: If you change how you use language, then people are changing the way they use language, because you are people! Unless you are a mutated animal or a renegade algorithm or some combination thereof.
That's because there's more to Doom than its gameplay. (I am assuming gameplay means "the elements of play.") There's more to any game than just its gameplay. Given the nature of video games, all the elements of a game will inevitably overlap. However, it's still possible to separate them for discussion's sake, and then bring them back together to discuss how they affect one another.
To me every aspect of a game is also an inalienable element of play. When I describe "play" of a game I answer the questions "What are the rules the player engages with?" and "How does the player engage with said rules?" which is roughly equivalent to simply asking "What does the player do?" With that in mind, I don't think any meaningful demarcation can be made between the elements of play and the rest of the elements of the game as a whole.
I don't remember for certain what Clint Hocking was referring to, but I vaguely recall that his problem might have been that the player benefited more from harvesting the little sisters than saving them. Feel free to correct me there. If my recollection is correct, I think it is a very similar case to the example I made up; the mechanic causes dissonance purely because of its narrative framing, the same mechanic represented differently could have been in perfect accord with the game's themes.
@dissension: That makes me think about this topic in a different way, but I think you use the term narrative way too liberally. The first kind of narrative you describe is a story, a plot at best, but way too loose to be called a narrative. A story section in a manual is extratextual and that's a whole other, very interesting discussion. The only narrative, from my strictly literary perspective, is the sequence of events presented to the player on the screen, potentially including cutscenes and more interactive sections alike - this is up to the reader.
I think it's fair to say you consider ludonarrative dissonance to be a conflict between a static (cutscenes etc.) and a dynamic (gameplay) narrative. I think this perspective fails to acknowledge the player as a reader and interpreter, and instead casts her as an input monkey. I would say ludonarrative dissonance is a conflict between the narrative (as represented on screen) and the perceived authorial intent. As games are made by teams the author of a game is a purely theoretical construct, but it is still a relevant concept. We intuit and extrapolate the author's intent and objective from the presentational aspects of the game, much like we do with any text. In the case of games it is often the case that the less interactive and the more scripted a sequence is, the more useful it is for understanding author intent. When there is any kind if friction between what the game communicates to us, and what we think the game is supposed to communicate to us (and what we think the game would have communicated to us if it was a non-interactive medium like a book) ludonarrative dissonance occurs. I say there is no "ludonarrative;" there is presentation (from which we extrapolate intent) and representation (from which we construct a narrative) and the interactive nature of games provide unique opportunities for misalignment of the two - ludonarrative dissonance.
I believe my definition of ludonarrative dissonance more accurately describes the phenomenon than yours (which I assume is the generally accepted one) and since it makes no reference to game theory or "gameplay" I think it's safe to drop the ludo-. Perhaps your definition is better for teaching good game design practice and mine is better for game criticism?
@video_game_king: @dissension: OK, so you two probably feel that ludonarrative could be translated as gameplay-narrative dissonance whereas I consider it to simply be game-narrative dissonance (even though I wrote gameplay-narrative dissonance up there at one point. I guess I changed my mind.) At one point it was very clear to me what gameplay means, but now I'm not so sure. Specifically, I don't know how to formally divorce what I consider gameplay from other parts of the game. If I were to summarize the gameplay of Doom, I could say you move around in a three-dimensionally represented maze viewing from a first-person perspective while avoiding and trying to shoot enemies and picking up various helpful items. That's me trying to describe the gameplay alone and nothing else, but I have failed in many ways. Firstly, I have described lots of things, the graphics (3D etc.) the crux of the plot (shooting enemies) the crux of the interactive narrative as it appears on my screen (guy enters room and kills enemies) etc. and secondly, I have not satisfactorily summarized what it feels like to play Doom, I have really just described player input. In fact, the plot set-up, the sound effects and the enemy sprites are elements of play, they completely control the stakes and the significance of the player's actions, it would not be play without them. I'll admit that I am engaging in hypocrisy of the grandest and most selacious scale here, because I use the word gameplay a lot. Does it really mean anything though?
Picking up health-restoring painkillers from a medical cabinet and picking up health-restoring kittens from a vacuum cleaner are the same gameplay mechanic if you divorce them from their narrative context, yet one of them would cause ludonarrative dissonance in a realistic military shooter and the other would not. Doesn't that sort of prove that the narrative context must be considered part of the mechanic? Am I making sense? I'm pretty tired.
@hockeyjohnston: I have never heard anyone use the term narrative dissonance in that way, but if you have then this is a very valid point. Also, wouldn't resonance be a better analogy for a shift between two tones that has a positive effect or two tones that compliment each other somehow?
@video_game_king: I feel like an idiot for being this stubborn but I do think I mean the same thing when I say it. Are you saying that things like music are not part of the game? Or do you mean that it could be dissonant with something completely outside the game like the glass of wine I had while playing?
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