#narrative dissonance

Each time something disappeared in the finale, my hope that it would be reversed stubbornly grew. Right up until it was just them in a bookshop. Because clearly—CLEARLY—our Aziraphale and Crowley wouldn’t stand for it to end that way!

But after all the effort put into stopping total destruction, their “decision” effectively did just that: Go ahead and snuff out the very last bits of a perfectly lovely creation, we trust you to resurrect a new one in our image.

Cyberpunk: You're dying, literally you only have weeks to live, you get worse every day, you're gonna DIE it makes ZERO sense in-universe to do 95% of side content. Every main mission reinforces how time is of the essence, it's extreme whiplash to go from "Oh I just passed out and nearly died because of the hostile AI in my brain, I don't have much time, it's time to get to Mikoshi and end this" to "hey River this barbecue is nice :))"

Fallout: New Vegas: The second battle for Hoover Dam is fast approaching. For the first half of the game, doing side quests and DLCs is fine, but once you actually REACH the New Vegas Strip every main mission leads DIRECTLY into the next. Worse, every NPC will constantly remind you that you're wasting time if you do side quests later in the game ("I hear the NCR and Legion are amassing at the dam, it seems the battle will start any moment"). It's frustrating.

Actually let's add literally ALL the Fallout games to that list. "I need to find a water chip or my entire community will die?? Time to hunt some geckos :))"/"I need to stop the Enclave so my tribe can survive?? Time to become a porn star"/"I need to find my dad/stop a literal genocidal AI from destroying the Wasteland?? Time to write a book :))"/"I need to find my kidnapped infant son?? Time to single-handedly reestablish human civilization in Massachusetts for some reason :))"

Open world games implement most side quests TERRIBLY into their plots and it ANGERS me. Side quests are some of the best content in these games, but I can never justify why my character is wasting time like this when the main plot is constantly reminding me how important my task is and how time is of the essence.

Basically, what this finale attempted was circular storytelling, which can be a beautiful thing when done right; what it ended up doing, however, was making it clear to us that in the end, you can’t escape your upbringing; who you were 100% determines who you’ll be. 

(That’s hugely different from well-made circular storytelling.)

That’s why the characters who escape (narratively) unscathed are people like Sansa, who grew up adored in a loving household and becomes a version of what she’s been taught to be her entire childhood: the lady of the mansion. 

Meanwhile, Jon never fully got over his ‘bastard’ upbringing: military success, camaraderie, the love of two remarkable women and the respect of entire armies – none of that could fundamentally change who Jon was on the inside: the bastard, the brushed aside orphan always on the margins of things. Arguably, that’s why he kept taking so many risks, and that’s why he always felt it was on him to fix whatever was fixable: because his life didn’t, in the end, truly matter to anyone. As a bastard, he had no true family, no name and no inheritance; and as a member of the Night Watch, of course, he had no future, in the sense that he could take no wife and father no children. Thus, Jon rejoining the Watch (what Watch, by the way? unclear) and disappearing beyond the Wall places him back where he was at the beginning: among the unseen, the unwanted and the unknown. 

The same goes for Daenerys, who, despite atrocious sufferings and an iron-will determination, saw her entire character arc collapse back into the person she was apparently destined to be: the daughter of a madman, the fire and blood princess, the destroyer, the abused child who claws back and hurts everyone else because ‘they don’t love me, so they might as well fear me’. Because that’s what you learn from a life of abuse, isnt’ it? That it’s either love or fear that will keep you safe. And all along, GoT teased an end to that destructive cycle so many people are trapped into IRL – through her kindness, empathy, profound sense of self-worth (problematic in some ways, but also a miracle in itself for someone who was raised to be sacrificial cattle) and her courage, it seemed that Daenerys would learn that you can trust yourself to love others and be loved in return, even if you’re not sure what the feeling is; that you can choose to do the right thing even if it’s risky; that you can survive without turning into your abusers. But - lol, jk. All of that was undone, as it was undone for so many other characters: Sandor, who died in that fire he feared so much to kill a brother that should have meant nothing to him; Jaime, who was so close to letting himself become a better person; Bran, whose profoundly spiritual path was apparently preparation for the very mundane game of politics; Missandei, who died in chains; and Westeros itself, which is returned to its Baratheon state (a king who’s got no real right to the throne, a council that represents almost nobody, lords chosen for their loyalty to powerful friends, and all those brothels in King’s Landing which will soon reopen - and quickly be filled, no doubt, with poor, vulnerable women who’ve got no other choice). 

Now, I mentioned narrative dissonance because – in themselves – the collapse of a character’s arc exactly back to the beginning and a complete inability to escape destiny are not bad writing. 

What they are, though, is the very definition of tragedy. 

(Laius is told his son will kill him – casts the baby aside, and still dies. Priam dreams his youngest son will doom Troy – casts the baby aside, and the city still burns. In the TV version, Arthur chooses to spare Mordred out of kindness - Mordred still kills him.)

Entire societies are or were shaped by the idea that you can’t, in the end, defeat fate and defy your heritage. It may be a gloomy worldview, but it’s a fascinating one, especially on a stage. We’ve all cried for Romeo and Juliet; we’ve all cried for Achilles. Sometimes, people fail; sometimes there’s no way out, and that’s the terrible beauty and fascination of the story. 

The thing is, though: GoT is not a tragedy. It’s got a very clear happy ending: the two main villains of the season (the Night King and Cersei) get their comeuppance, and that is a direct message to the back of our brains - a very loud siren - signaling that all is now well. The quietly hopeful music and the cheerful group portrait of a bunch of rational and beloved characters working on further fixing the kingdom cement that subconscious feeling. 

But this is where the narrative dissonance comes in. Characters like Daenerys, Jon and Jaime were a central part of the main cast: we rooted for them to make it, to survive, to succeed. In order to deny them a happy ending while not turning the entire thing into a tragedy, the show needed to change their status mid-story, and this is what it did. Jaime chooses to die for his horrible sister; Jon kills the woman he loves in the most treacherous, underhanded way possible; and Daenerys, of course (and most visibly, because women) becomes this unredeemable butcher of children.

So here is the distortion, and here is the dissonance. It’s cheap, and it’s worse than cheap: it’s badly made. 

(There is not even shock value here - we’ve all seen this coming for a while now.) 

I really like the idea of a RoL game in the style of Pokemon Go, an Augmented Reality app where you can walk around London and meet ghosts and see weird shit and interview members of the demi monde. It would be the best thing. And it doesn’t have to be exclusive to London; you get to explore any town/city/rural area and the stuff you meet is particular to that place...

So yeah, that should happen.

Except... there’d always be the Thing where you have to suspend your disbelief because in Rivers-verse, your mobile would be kaput if you did, in fact, use it around magic.

So I figured I would make this short little post about something that came to mind because of Watch Dogs. When Watch Dogs was first announced, I was very excited by the potential that the setting, gameplay, and narrative presented. It seemed like my kind of thing as I am very interested in game mechanics and stories that revolve around digital technology and empowering characters through it as well as near future settings with a cyberpunk angle. However, as time wore on, my interest began to wane as the game seemed to focus more and more on being a slightly altered GTA. One of the first video's they showed started out great with slipping into a club and interrogating some people, hacking a computer to get some info on a target, stuff like that. Then you head out into the street and use your hacking to set up a roadblock and wreck the bad guys car. But from there it devolved into a standard third person action game of shoot the bad guy in the face with a gun. It hasn't gotten better.

But one of the things that finally turned me all the way off from the game was something they showed the Friday before launch. The scenario started out with the player getting an alert that a crime was about to be committed a few blocks away from them, the kind of spontaneous mission that pops up in these sorts of open world games that encourages the player to make a quick detour for a little reward. In an effort to reach the site of this little quest all the quicker, the person playing the game runs out into the street and carjacks a woman. So, to reach the mugging, we just committed a even worse crime? Now of course, the player could have just run to the other incident, but that really isn't the point. The point is that in a game where your character is supposedly motivated by the victimization of the powerful, maybe, just maybe, don't give them the ability to victimize other people in the exact same way.

I understand that part of these games is that you can choose to be a selfish bastard that only cares about his own revenge and screw anyone who gets in your way, or you can be a punisher like figure who only hurts the bad guys. But to me, it creates a very uncomfortable space where the narrative is being corrupted by the freedom we have given the player. In the end this sort of thing only ends up sending one message - that your motivations are justification for behaving in whatever way you see fit. That no one is more important than you. Why are we as game developers so obsessed with letting people play with the abuse of their power while sacrificing the narrative to it. What in the game would have been harmed if the character in Watch Dogs simply hadn't had the ability to victimize innocent people who had nothing to do with his quest for vengeance?