The Writer’s Guide to Ludonarrative Dissonance
Little Sister rescue from Bioshock, via RabidRetrospectGames
In 2007, Clint Hocking coined the term “Ludonarrative Dissonance” in a Click Nothing blogpost about Bioshock.[1] He did so to articulate a breakdown between a game’s story and mechanics: Bioshock’s story is about challenging Libertarian ideas of Objectivism, the very idea of a technocratic utopia; it’s about free will, whether you will choose compassion over selfishness. The ludic crux of these themes are the “Little Sisters,” NPCs who provide you valuable resources you need to upgrade your powers. When you find one in-game, you are presented with a choice to either kill her, and harvest a large amount of upgrade material, or freeing her and receive less: selfishness versus compassion, a free choice. Narratively, however, the story presents fewer opportunities for player agency. Over the course of the game, you must challenge the technocracy of Rapture, given only the selfless choice; if you chose to harvest all the Little Sisters you found, this might seem strange. You have, at every opportunity, opted into Objectivism, and yet here you are, challenging it at every step of the story. The game has, ludonarratively, failed to express its themes and failed to respect the time of a player who has engaged with its gameplay (“Under the story, if I reject an Objectivist approach, I can help Atlas and oppose Ryan, and if I choose to adopt an Objectivist approach – well too bad… I can stop playing the game, but that’s about it”[2]). What the game is saying becomes unclear: how can my character be considered a hero, a selfless savior, when I have not once made the heroic choice? Not once challenged the very impulse present at Rapture’s conception and its ruin?
While there is no ludology to a short story, we bear a similar narrative burden: how do we make it clear to a reader what it is we mean to say? And, especially when thinking about sending out unsolicited slush-pile submissions, how do we make it clear within the first paragraph, the first page? There is no “player choice” to contend with, but we do have disparate elements to wrangle together under the cohesive umbrella of “story:” syntax, structure, whatever other craft buzzwords you can think of. If our story is an ironic confrontation with high society at the turn of the 19th century, for example, how might we craft a first sentence to make all of that clear to our reader, to set their expectations, to instruct them on how to read the rest of the book? Luckily, Jane Austen has already shown us.
Perhaps the most famous first line in all of literature, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” is an excellent example of our ideal not-so-ludic narrative harmony. We are immediately instructed on how we should read this story: we should keep in mind surface questions of fortune and romance, but also more subtle distinctions between men and women—specifically, how women are made extensions of a man’s fortune, an objectified jewel in his trove of wealth; we should also, noted by the wry opening clause and the final word “wife”—ending an assertion of male preeminence with a singular focus on women—look for subversions to this “truth universally acknowledged,” keep in mind a more ironic tone and approach. In a slush pile, without even talking about extravagant prose or a novel idea, a sentence like this already sets the story apart. It is clear to the (oft overburdened) reader what to look for, helps ensure a generous reading and appreciation of the story’s goals.
Like all craft, this is more guideline than rule: many stories thrive in that dissonant space, using it as an opportunity to deepen theme, augment absurdity, or sharpen tone. It is still useful, however, to be aware of how you’re telling a reader to read your work, how you make those first few sentences, because sometimes that’s all you have to convince someone to read on.
[1] Hocking, Clint (October 7, 2007). "Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock". Click Nothing. Archived from the original on January 14, 2020.
[2] Ibid.
