Ludonarrative Dissonance

At this point, the Gaming Desk are almost beside themselves wanting to finish their catalog of games completed this year. Alert readers will recall that after finishing A Plague Tale: Innocence and A Plague Tale: Requiem (neither of which I much liked), I completed God of War (2018), which I did like, although I still haven't played its sequel, God of War: Ragnarök, yet, as it's still not available on PC. 

But before playing God of War, I played the first two games of the most recent Tomb Raider trilogy, Tomb Raider (2013) and Rise of the Tomb Raider.   They were both fun and more than adequate, diverting entertainment for my amusement. Not great literature or master works of art by any maans, but a competent rebooting of the classic games.  Lara Croft was reimagined as an adventurer and extreme sport enthusiast, and desexualized from the busty cartoonish character from the 90s games.  

It was from the first game, Tomb Raider (2013) that I learned the term ludonarrative dissonance.  The game is the Lara Craft origin story, and opens with Lara as a graduate student on a field expedition with her professor and other archeology students to a Pacific Island. Through some conversations and flashbacks, her character is depicted as a wealthy party girl, more interested in nightclubs and boys than research and science.  There is no hint of any kind of martial arts training or e-sport enthusiasm.  She's just a spoiled British heiress on a steamship to complete her college degree, but when her crew are inevitably shipwrecked and ambushed, suddenly she is able to pick up an AK-47 and quite adeptly take out a small squadron of hardened mercenaries. Then she can later scale vertiginous cliffs with only a pickaxe and swing from cliff face to cliff face with only a rope and death-defying aerial leaps. 

Still, the dialog continues that she's only a university student suddenly thrown in over her head, but the gameplay shows her to be a hardened and cold-blooded killer capable of taking on entire platoons of pirates and religious zealots.  The game designer Clint Hocking coined the term "ludonarrative dissonance" in 2007 to describe the conflict between a video game's narrative told through the non-interactive elements and the narrative told through the gameplay. "Ludonarrative" refers to the intersection in a video game of ludic elements (gameplay) and narrative elements. 

To be honest, I don't know if I would have done it differently if I were the game designer.  The game would have been quite dull if at the first confrontation, Lara just threw up her hands, surrendered, and waited for her estate to come pay her ransom.

In the second game, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft has accepted her new role as an epic adventuress. The vast majority of the game takes place in Siberia, and the extreme weather and challenging terrain made the survival aspects of the game feel urgent and credible. People often use the term "immersion" to describe the goal of a video game. One long scene in the game takes place in a huge abandoned sawmill, and after the game, immersion made me feel like I had actually experienced that setting.  I've been to that mill, even if only virtually. 

I had already played the third and final installment of the trilogy, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and while playing the first two back to back was enjoyable, I didn't feel compelled to replay the game.

The original, 1996 Tomb Raider was probably the first video game I ever played. I think I purchased the DVDs for the game at Best Buy sometime in '97.  So it was oddly satisfying to me to revisit the franchise, see a less sexist, more realistic version of Lara, and observe the arc of her character from its origin story to the socially aware denouement of the finale. It turns out that robbing the cultural and spiritual treasures of other societies isn't the most ethical way to make a living.