I find lot of video game narratives unsatisfying. There’s an immediate explanation for this that a lot of people reach for: most games are just poorly written. I’m not sure this is true, I think it devalues the work of games writers, and I don’t think it’s really specific enough about what the problem actually is.

I tend to reach for a different explanation: ludonarrative dissonance, which refers to a mismatch between a game’s “ludic” elements (fancy term for the gameplay) and it’s story-as-written. But how do you know when you’re experiencing ludonarrative dissonance? I don’t think I have all the answers but in this post I’d like to present a framework I’ve found useful in articulating criticisms I’ve had of some of the games I’ve recently played.

It is worth saying that ludonarrative dissonance is sort of out of vogue in some circles. I was struck by Jacob Geller, in a recent video on God of War, commenting something along the lines of “I don’t want to talk about ludonarrative dissonance” in a discussion about the game’s story. My immediate reaction was: why not?

With the caveat that I haven’t followed the contours of this debate that closely, my sense is that the main reason we’ve collectively moved on from ludonarrative dissonance is that it’s just an intractable problem. Ludonarrative synergy is difficult to accomplish, it doesn’t match the formats of many popular game titles, and audiences just don’t seem to care about it.

But I’m going to keep writing about it for two reasons: firstly, I believe that if we want to really see games flourish as an artistic medium we need to try to seek out things that games are uniquely capable of, and ludonarrative is one of those things. Secondly, I hate lowering my expectations, and I’ve found that being a stickler for good games storytelling has made me appreciate titles that actually pull it off much more than I would have otherwise.

With that out of the way, here’s three questions I’ve been asking in games lately that I’ve found are very useful for investigating ludonarrative:

• What do you spend most of your time doing in the game?
• What’s difficult in the game?
• What’s the game supposed to be about?

The first two get at slightly different aspects of gameplay, and I’ve found they give you a pretty good picture of the overall player experience. The last question is me trying to get a holistic picture of the story-as-written — what is the dialogue and exposition trying to communicate to the player?

As an example, let’s take a look at Pentiment, which I’ve been playing recently and might be the best ludonarrative experience I’ve ever had in a game.

What do you spend most of your time doing in the game? Pentiment is dialogue-heavy so by far the biggest chunk of time in the game is just talking to other characters.

What’s difficult in the game? Pentiment frequently asks you make difficult choices about how to spend your time in the game. Your goal is to solve a series of murders by running down clues in the game’s Bavarian village and monastery setting, but investigating clues takes time and you can only look into a subset of the available options. It also means you’re always second-guessing your decisions, and adds an additional layer of challenge that you have to inevitably make decisions about who to accuse of murder without having a full picture of the events that transpired.

What’s the game supposed to be about? At the surface level, investigating murders. Some other things interesting aspects of the story include: characters transgressing (and not transgressing) strict medieval social norms, the relationship between art and technology, historiography, and generational trauma (of course).

How does my test do? If we compare the first two answers to the last one, I think there’s a clear relationship between the gameplay elements those answers expose and the most surface level part of the story — the murder investigation. If you wanted think about how the ludic elements of Pentiment do or don’t relate to generational trauma you’d have to dig a bit deeper, and I think that’s OK.

I also find this test works quite well in the opposite direction; circling back to my complaint about mainstream games, it’s quite common for AAA games to have players spend a ton of time on, essentially, busywork, and to have the challenging parts of the game be combat sequences that feel disconnected from the main story.

Overall, I don’t expect this to give you all the information you’d ever want about ludonarrative in a game, but I do think it works well as a starting point. I don’t have a catchy name for it (the fishthoughts test?) but I wanted to write it down because it’s something I expect to come back to in the future.