510°

The Last of Us director Bruce Straley on ludonarrative dissonance

'We didn't necessarily have the wherewithal, the clarity so to speak, that we do now', says Straley.

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gamesindustry.biz
RazzerRedux2002d ago

"Nathan Drake seems like a generally decent guy, but he's also killed thousands of people, and appears to be largely unbothered by that fact."

Those "people" are a collection of pixels. They are not real. Neither is Nathan Drake.

FinalAeonX2002d ago

Why are you even here?

uNcHaRtEd iS jUsT a gAmE

Brave_Losers_Unite2002d ago

Your comment is a bunch of pixels. It is not real. Neither is your account.

RazzerRedux2002d ago (Edited 2002d ago )

True statement. My comment and my account are ultimately nothing but 1s an 0s.

So if my account killed your account, should my account feel remorse?

Christopher2002d ago

Please continue. I'm writing my manifesto and how banning people was never me to begin with.

XVision842002d ago

@RazzerRedux it should if your account's goal is to be liked among the general public :P

Sono4212001d ago

@Christopher

Your comment is off topic, please remove your comment.

Christopher2001d ago

@Sono421: It's not my comment, it's just a bunch of pixels.

Sono4212000d ago

@Christopher Only enforcing rules when they are convenient to you, nothing has changed I see. Or sorry, that is the trend with the pixels that spell out Christopher.

+ Show (3) more repliesLast reply 2000d ago
XVision842002d ago (Edited 2002d ago )

Part of artistry is delivering a message or experience which feels real. The emotion and connection you feel with characters is real. It takes effort and skill to pull that off (from a creator's point of view).

Your interpretation is only skin deep. People take their personal experiences, lessons, and other aspects of their lives, and ingrain them into their characters. In that sense, a character is a mosaic or "stitching" of many real things.

So Bruce's comments are on point in regards to how we connect with Nate.

RazzerRedux2001d ago (Edited 2001d ago )

My interpretation is that the shooting gameplay is fun as hell and that is ok because......it is just a game. This so-called dissonance in Uncharted doesn't exist. Call that "skin deep" if you want, but sorry this isn't a book of the month club where we practice our pretentious literary criticism. It is just an action game.

XVision842001d ago

@RazzerRedux

Why can't games be something more? I say kudos to them for trying to tackle this difficult problem and pushing the boundaries of video game storytelling.

My skin deep remark was more so geared towards your point about games just being 1s and 0s therefore inconsequential. I don't believe that's true and it's not the full picture. Hope you didn't take it personally since I didn't mean it in an insulting way :).

The dissonance, by its very definition, does exist in Uncharted though. There is a disconnect between story and gameplay.

RazzerRedux2001d ago (Edited 2001d ago )

There is certainly a place for games that want to be more creative with gameplay. That has been the case long before Uncharted arrived. The article seems to suggest that the fact Uncharted is a shooter is a "problem". It just isn't, imo.

"The dissonance, by its very definition, does exist in Uncharted though. There is a disconnect between story and gameplay."

lol.......so there is dissonance in Uncharted because of the dissonance in Uncharted? If you felt a disconnect, fine. I didn't. No idea how something like that exists by "definition". It is an interpretation and that will vary from person to person. Saying it is so doesn't make it factual.

XVision842001d ago

@RazzerRedux

The article doesn't suggest at all that Uncharted being a shooter is a problem in and of itself. The point of the article is to shed light on the challenges game developers face when trying to balance story and gameplay elements. They state that Uncharted struggles with ludonarrative dissonance and Bruce (the game director) gives us more insight into that. They even show other shooters (The Last of Us, Spec Ops The Line) which tackle the dissonance in a more effective way.

The definition of ludonarrative dissonance is a disconnect between story elements and gameplay elements in a video game. Unless you know something that even the creators of Uncharted themselves (and some of its critics including fans) don't, then it has this dissonance. In the gameplay you can kill and teabag enemies like a psychopathic killer, but in the story Nate is a cool and caring guy. He hesitates to kill people and shows signs of empathy. They try to mediate this in the story by having the villains question his killing sprees in Uncharted 2 and 3, but that doesn't fully address the dissonance (just tries to acknowledge it). That's how, by its very definition, Uncharted has ludonarrative dissonance. It's literally the name of an achievement in the game itself. It isn't up to you or me to say Uncharted doesn't have dissonance because it doesn't rely on opinion, it's in the very elements of the game itself. You can argue that you don't MIND that it has dissonance, which is something I would agree with because I personally loved Uncharted.

RazzerRedux2001d ago

Well, there is nothing more to discuss if you believe that dissonance is a matter of fact and not a perception. I'll leave you with....

"It's literally the name of an achievement in the game itself."

About that.

"Uncharted 4 has a trophy called “Ludonarrative Dissonance” for killing 1,000 people. That’s a reference to the criticism that Nathan Drake doesn’t respond emotionally to all the killing he does.

I told all the people on the team, “This is my proudest moment, the fact that I came up with this trophy on this project.” We were conscious to have fewer fights, but it came more from a desire to have a different kind of pacing than to answer the “ludonarrative dissonance” argument.

Because we don’t buy into it. I’ve been trying to dissect it. Why is it that Uncharted triggers this argument, when Indiana Jones doesn’t? Is it the number? It can’t be just the number, because Indiana Jones kills more people than a normal person does. A normal person kills zero people. And Indiana Jones kills a dozen, at least, over the course of several movies. What about Star Wars? Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, are they some sort of serial killers? They laugh off having killed some stormtroopers. And in The Force Awakens, we see that a stormtrooper can actually repent for the person he is and come around, and there are actually real people under those helmets.

It’s a stylized reality where the conflicts are lighter, where death doesn’t have the same weight.

We’re not trying to make a statement about Third World mercenaries, or the toll of having killed hundreds of people in your life."
~Neil Druckmann

https://www.rollingstone.co...

XVision842001d ago

@RazzerRedux

There are a few things we can go over in that excerpt, because it's a great piece. Neil Druckmann doesn't believe that the notion of ludonarrative dissonance is an issue that plagues Uncharted specifically because 1) Indiana Jones and other much-loved characters don't face the same level of criticism in this regard 2) Uncharted isn't meant to be a commentary on the moral impact of killing many soldiers, it's just a light hearted action adventure game.

I agree with both of these points, which is why I don't mind that such inconsistencies exist. However, and this is important, Neil himself is acknowledging the ludonarrative dissonance argument. He's just stating that he doesn't buy that it takes away from Uncharted and that many media icons beyond Nathan Drake have this disconnect. Neil isn't stating that ludonarrative dissonance doesn't exist, it seems to me that he's saying he doesn't believe it's a problem (moreso a quality of the game). You are saying that it doesn't exist. There is a big difference.

If there were no elements of dissonance in the game, Neil would not need to address them and we wouldn't have Bruce Straley on here talking about game developers (such as himself) tackling it in their games. Just because Uncharted isn't a moral commentary, it doesn't mean Nate being a nice guy and then teabagging/ruthlessly murdering people isn't dissonance. It just means that the dissonance isn't really important towards the central theme of the game.

We have this all the time in art where we excuse certain things due to the nature of the piece. Mad Max Fury Road is an awesome movie. However, it doesn't directly have a deep and moving message that changes your view on life. Is that a bad thing? No, that's not the point. It's an all out action movie. But that doesn't mean that the lack of such a message in the movie isn't true.

+ Show (3) more repliesLast reply 2001d ago
gameboyz_manifesto2002d ago

You're totally removing the fact that these 'pixels' serve a narrative. Any book you read is made of 'just words' characters can be 'just text.'

Reducing the argument to the idea that 'because it's fictional that it doesn't need to abide by the underpinnings of narrative structure' -- how we tell and understand stories -- is a total disservice to the whole point of the article.

Nineball21122002d ago (Edited 2002d ago )

Can we all agree that if people cannot separate reality from make-believe, then they have a problem?

Gaming is not, nor ever will be, reality.

What Straley is talking about isn't an easy thing for developers (and more specifically writers) to solve.

RazzerRedux2001d ago

These pixels serve a GAME, first and foremost. The shooting part? Yeah.....that's part of the game. It is no more a problem (as stated in the article) in Uncharted than it is in a Indiana Jones movie. Why does a video game need to reconcile the shooting of people when movies, TVs, and books don't?

gameboyz_manifesto2001d ago

@Razzer A 'GAME' is something made out of multiple moving parts, full systems even. As games become more complex, so do the conversations having to do with immersion. If something doesn't feel 'real' it pulls you out of the experience of the game. We see this all of the time, games that imitate reality are measured up against that reality.For example, if you're playing a realistic shooting game and you pressed the reload button and instead of there being an animation that shows the reload you just saw a pop-up that said 'reloaded' you would find that to be sub-optima.

This is a type of dissonance. The mechanics of the game aren't abiding by the terms that the reality that the game is imitating does.

This is what's happening in a much larger sense when it comes down to the story. I also have to say that I find it bizarre that you would minimize the argument to the fact that Uncharted is a game when it obviously builds itself around a narrative.

Perhaps if you were saying this argument about a roguelike or a battle royal game then I would get your argument, but the fact is that most triple-A games these days have a fundamental commitment to creating fulfilling narrative experiences.

RazzerRedux2001d ago

And yours is intelligent?

Kornholic2001d ago

Well, it's more accurate than yours.

RazzerRedux2001d ago

Congrats on having the "more accurate" low IQ post.

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2002d ago Replies(1)
bluefox7552002d ago

This whole discussion is just dumb. It's a summer blockbuster, a certain suspension of disbelief is assumed going into it. I mean, how is this not blatantly obvious to everyone?

2002d ago
xX1NORM1Xx2001d ago

Naughty Dog doesn't want to make "summer blockbuster" games they want to make a great story and world that will live on past just that game...

gangsta_red2002d ago (Edited 2002d ago )

"Nathan Drake seems like a generally decent guy, but he's also killed thousands of people, and appears to be largely unbothered by that fact."

Not a fan of the Uncharted series but aren't these guys also trying to kill Nathan Drake? I would chalk that up to self defense. It just so happens he's self defending against a thousand people.

TheColbertinator2002d ago

Killing mercenaries, pirates, assassins, bounty hunters and warlords doesn't seem too strange considering it is a deadly business.

bluefox7552002d ago

The complaint is more like: "How is this not affecting his conscience?" The reason for this is, it's a fun, light hearted, action flick, not a serious drama.

Pedrof2001d ago

No one would complain if there was not such an emphasis in the cutscenes, dialogues, on Nathan being such a nice, normal guy from the normal world. He's not the Indiana Jones macho type, nor Marcus Fenix badass syfy soldier dude. He's treated as a character that could live next door in the real world. That's why we're so bothered that he can kill hundreds of people like it was nothing.

I think we could say it's some type of uncanny valley.

Jrios3552001d ago

Remember when Naughty Dog games had fun stories that didn't take themselves seriously? I think The Last of Us has taken Naughty Dog into a direction that they're taking WAY too seriously.

I loved Naughty Dog games because they were fun and over the top. Not because they were melodramatic.

monkey6022002d ago

That was actually a good read, I can see people taking it the wrong way but it shows a growth within the studio I appreciate.

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70°

It Has My Face — Game Overview • VGMM

In the future clones walk amongst us, and you need to kill them before they kill you.

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140°

Nintendo president apologizes for Switch 2 shortages

Nintendo president comments on the situation with Switch 2 stock and apologizes for shortages.

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nintendoeverything.com
jznrpg2d ago

I might get one in a couple years but I’m in no hurry. Nothing at launch I want to play.

GotGame8181d 8h ago

60 fps Switch games with higher resolution makes it worth it to me.

badz1491d 7h ago

you basically has no choice because it only has old games with ONE new exclusive and a scummy paid demo. old games are all you have and you fanboys are eating it up and let Nintendo get away with this.

PRIMORDUS1d 23h ago

If there are no shortages then why can't we just easily order a Switch 2 online, from Best Buy, Target, Newegg, Amazon etc. No shortages means we can get it by any means, online or in store.

kindi_boy1d 1h ago

move your ass to the nearest Target or Best Buy and you'll find a lot of them.

Benjaminkno7h ago

I’ve been looking. They go as soon as they hit shelves. It’s ok fanboy. You’ll be ok

shinXseijuro2d ago

Maybe there’s shortages in Japan ? But they’re pretty much available lol

shinXseijuro2d ago

But hey saying that creates more hype right !

Good-Smurf1d 10h ago (Edited 1d 10h ago )

There isn't one in US, I saw plenty posting pictures of it many stores in still have plenty in stock.
This is just them referring to stock situation mostly in Japan.
Sounds like he low key also spreading FOMO pressuring people to go out and buy one for no good reason?
It's not exactly flying off the shelves here in Thailand though, there's basically no real hype here at all other than the fanboys lining up for it the first few days.
You can easily order one right now in Thailand from all the official authorized stores, not out of stock at all.
The price of 17800 THB or around 550 USD here for a standard SKU and high game prices probably has a lot to do with it.

badz1491d 7h ago

the standalone Switch 2 is more expensive than the PS5 slim in Malaysia and just $2 cheaper than the Disc PS5 Slim. what a rip-off

Benjaminkno7h ago

Some areas in the states have more demand than others. In Columbus Ohio you can’t find one.

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60°

Rogue Trader producer reveals his dream project: a CRPG SCP game with an actual budget

Owlcat Games producer Anatoly Shestov reveals his dream project: an SCP game with Owlcat RPG flair and a proper budget.

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videogamer.com