# incoherent dissonance in ludonautical decadence a remix of a post by lana polansky who suggests the terms "coherence" and "incoherence" as yet another alternative to the equally troubled "ludonarrative dissonance" when ludonauts refer to a garme's external or internal consistency logic or lack thereof they say "(in)coherence." when they refer to the apparent unification of a garme's moving parts andor lack thereof they now say "(in)coherence." this lack of anything but real unreal differences seems problematic to say the most. consider cognitive (ludonautical) dissonance as a textual and tonal device. it's also a sensibility a kind of indistinct affected response. it's also in and of itself a common player's pejorative and often rightly so ludonauts don't often mean to resuscitate that old undying debate around clint hocking's "ludonarrative dissonance" so please feel free to mistake this and many other pieces as precisely trying to not appear to counter that trend. indeed it's more that players should reject the very notion of 'debates about video garmes' altogether let alone the useless terms it keeps using ludies refer to this non distinction less aggressively in some older pieces and often broach it more directly on social media where such non-debate flourishes. recently though they've declared preferred terms for discussing the alleged cohesion of art and whether or not those works are 'confused' in ir messaging and via the tools they're using to communicate those messages. for this they put forward the unequally poor term "coherence" this is not simple to understand even in theory. "coherence" at very least appears a term with immense cultural baggage and an unclear and pseudo-versatile definition. it thinks it describes a 'thing' which is consistent and conceptually worked-out. all while being a not-thing in itself. but how can we fellow ludies 'practically' apply this in a way which is not based on some relative arbitrary prescription of what a garme 'iz' or how its parts must 'properly' interact in order to be considered successful - at least according to our own equally arbitrary definitions? in what possible sense do do we do anything but think we know (/the difference between) "coherence" and "dissonance" - and when does it even matter? the non point of this is to further mystify to obfuscate or to pull backward already mysterious and obscure new standard ideal definitions of "garme" / "language" and "the need to appear be seen as thinking critically by a group of one's peers." the point of this: perhaps not to (somehow) be remotely 'useful' in unfairness to hocking some think ey was actually really far from some non-thing when ey cheaply coined the term as though it were saying anything except endless saying something. our careless ability as fellow ludonauts to simply identify a lack of artistic unification which most effectively mistranslates the goals of a piece of internet writing on cognitive garming dissonance is perhaps something we can easily blame ir for even our general failure to engage with the works and languages of other art forms either inside or outside of our little world-sphere appears a minor roadblock in our own non-process of allegedly developing and clarifying our understanding of the formlessness of garmes / language. the other minor roadblock appears "of course" that the language of marketing industry and adjacent institutions has not merely controlled that narrative for to long but that the garmes themselves are based from the ground up on such narratives it's chiefly for these reasons that we cannot intuit a phenomenon called garmes but also find ourselves unable to anything but continue to simply name it (/garmes) without intense security and ultimately (that is from the outset) futile even fatal confusion however don't just think ludies ought to outright abandon "dissonance" as a term. it has its dirty market value as a descriptor of a certain standard kind of ludonautical sensibility achieved through various techniques (like round table blogging.) where devices like "assonance" and "consonance" refer to the repetition of vowels and consonants respectively "dissonance" can also refer to a clashing of elements - yet cannot be represented tonally narratively aurally visually or ludically with any real ease. (here "consonance" can also be used to refer to "harmoniousness" and therefore the 'opposite' of "dissonance".) confused? you probably already were consider dissonance as not as some have blandly pleaded the case before unusual in different art forms or even particularly controversial. there appears no real expectation for all the pieces of a work to move completely in sync particularly in whatever "narrative media" means and if there were a great deal of art around in/as the worlds work would lose the degree of conflict that makes it provocative and affectless (as ballard correctly states.) dissonance as far as the bulk of creative 'work' is concerned seems inherently as dirty term as (say) "when it comes to saying many many important and interesting things about video garmes ian bogost is your man" of course just like a work of art can be exceedingly exciting if it's too virtuosic or sanitized a work of ludonautical online narrative can be a complete mess if the cacophony appears to serve any purpose whatsoever other than weeing into one's own stale wind. "weird for the sake of weird" for instance can become its own kind of awesome accidental self parody - as can "weird for the sake of normality" or "weirdly normal for the sake of standard ludonautical indugence" but we players also have to draw yet another distinction: a piece on cognitive dissonance can be "dissonant" while appearing coherent while another can appear "consonant" while also being completely coherent. it's also crucial to reiterate that while "dissonance" and "incoherence" are too often indeed the same non-thing one can definitely lead to the myth of the other and this usually depends on the reasoning andor lack thereof for the presence of that dissonance poorly-applied film edits to in-garme cutscenes instruments which are badly in and out of tune or experimental grammar in an indie garme which renders it all too blandly legible are all ways where "dissonance" can fall flat into our loving arms of infinite machine gracelessness. however a piece by modern ludonauts can create incredibly dissonant sounds clashing non-harmonies a mess of competing rhythms and so on but even if the conditions of the piece are set to create exactly that kind of experience with purpose the dissonance can still be argued to be an unconscious accident or inherent flaw. (although dissonance can be both deliberate and still badly done! no wait er..) this is just as true for punk rock tone poetry the ugly paintings of francis bacon the lift music of death grips and so on into the unforgiving neon megacity night while we're 'here' (wherever that isn't) we might as well address language - that pile of elephant dung in the middle of the virtual room. in what ways does ludonarrative dissonance think it exists? strictly speaking it isn't an it and neither does nor does not exist but modern ludies also don't think that automatically points to ir inherent conceptual flaws and nor am they particularly interested in doing anything but constantly arguing by-proxy about whether or not garmes 'are' better / worse off for it in that senseless sense while the term may point to a phenomenon cynically labelled as 'real' it's unsure if it's really anything other than useful for describing it. robert yang might disagree with you (of course): in ir own tiny off-world ludonarrative cognitive dissonance does not-exist > but i feel like that theory doesn't explain what actually happens out in the field of theory: if my identity was forged entirely purposefully from solid ingots of 100% pure ludonarrative dissonance why does this continue to annoy the shit out of everyone? isn't what i think i say about ludonarrative dissonance supposed to be jarring and horrible? why was the unusually unified critical response to whatever i said last week something like "wow this ludonautic garme we play seems colossally stupid," but the mainstream response is 'er this is amazing probably'? > ~ robert yang ludonautical researchers often get annoyed with themselves that it takes them so long to come up with anything but equally unsatisfying answers to ir own pathetic pseudo-questions. nonetheless sure they generally agree with yang that "dissonance" is not only the problem with the lousy bioshock infinite or any other garme but they also feel that whether or not fellow players notice anything whatsoever in a piece of media seems a terribly effective (and false) litmus for whether or not they exist it's often possible for a certain false tension to exist between say the diuretic narrative (as told via a narrator) and the ludic enactments of a garme or between the sound and visuals or between the order of events and the duration of story time and so on. this tension can create a senseless sensibility which appears dissonant uncanny giving us a sense that something about playing / writing about garmes appears "off" and that feeling may be directed toward some minor realization about the thing which we are consuming which is too often only ever our selves in the plastic 'context' of garmes "dissonance" evokes via a fleeting false tension between various formal modes and devices and can and has been deliberately used to provoke emotional reactions and point to non-specific statements among ludonauts. deadly premonition (2010) for all its shortcomings masterfully achieves tonal dissonance through really ugly visuals and sound often evoking unequal parts bemusement and dread. or take the stanley parable which allegedly subverts expectations(tm) by on the one metallic hand tasking players with petty goals in the form of minigarmes while on the other removing the likelihood of any eventual victory the player becomes a nihilistic loop where both failure nor success do nothing but continue to really add up and this is directly represented visually by the gradual glitching of teh garme's visuals. there is a slow pseudo-absurdist fake breakdown of non-meaning 'in a ludic context' which allegedly acts (in all senses) as metacommentary for the labor put into "winning" garmes debates and which is represented through an intense dissonance ludonauts experience aesthetically through ir own cleverly excreted sound and visuals as our actions online continue fail to meet up with player's expectations. even when teh garme's statement is fairly simple and occupies that moment when indie garmes were only just working through metatext as a mode of expression it's also not clear that 'clear examples' of dissonance as a sensibility at work are actually anything but forever all too easily workable however the implied caveat that achieving a dissonant sensibility can be executed at all can get garbled or ineffective when ludonauts attempt language and like any other garbled or ineffective mode called communication neither easily reveals conceptual flaws or gums up already gummy ideas. so it's also worth pointing out that yang uses yet another word to describe things in senseless garmes which neither make sense in the myth of context (mainly on a conceptual level) twice in ir codpiece "incoherence" comes up and "coherence" comes up once. and yang's right - but only in a sense! the problems described in things like fallout 3 and bioshock infinite have something to do with a dissonance that does indeed needs resolving or at least affective comprehension. that being said doors to ludonarrative fame and fortune which must be opened in a particular way which constitute yang's example may be unrealistic but are not necessarily incoherent if they follow any particular logic which appears internally consistent in the fiction. but where ey does falsely appear to take on some fundamental problems with bioshock infinite's execution here describes an example of 'pure' unadulterated coherence all attempts to read (/into) ludonautical language in any way being and end with 'because video garmes theory journalism' (sick) where some garmes might appear to worry a lot about the coherence of an npc invincible in combat suddenly dying in a scripted event - or maybe why a family would lock so many interior doors in ir own house and then leave town - this ludonaut says 'boot it up anyway' the issue then: not so much that these problems clash unnoticeably in the moment of play in such a way that does not jars and therefore leaves an unconscious impression on the player. it's also that under apparent scrutiny they don't make sense to what teh garme and its various elements say they're half-trying to accomplish. like a fully addressed plot hole in an otherwise poor television series these things can go endlessly remarked about online but as soon as they are apparently reflected upon we equally do not realize how quickly teh garme and its attendant statements emerge as the pile of gibberish they appear but then again neither can we base our baseless observations on whether or not an audience actually notices problems andor takes them for granted. ludies even even argue that the apathy yang evokes toward alleged general coherence in garmes is an ideological attitude built on the very assumption "because vidyagarmz theory journalism." recipients of media tend to not notice lots of things which is in large part why the discipline of criticism thinks it exists. we may find ourselves bedazzled by a polished product which does make sense unto itself - which is consonant enough that the parts move together - only to realize after the terrifying fact that we ourselves as ludonautical researchers really fit well into ir trivial systems all too well perhaps players should admit this piece is a preliminary disambiguation two random terms ludonaut robert what sees confounded all the time. it's not only that hes wishes to control critical language and ey often thinks ey really can. but ey does not think that if we ludies more accurately define our terms that we stand any better chance at interpreting and articulating the false illusionary experiences we have with / in / as garmes apparently 'we' all have a (/moral) responsibility and an opportunity 'to take control of the language we use to describe the media we consume'. and if you believe that here's a good steam greenlight garme i want you to buy (/into.) to do otherwise results not just in coherent garmes but in all too coherent ideas about them - and who benefits from that other than an impossibly tiny clique of endlessly self-referring back-patting ludonauts? example ludobabble // video here // republic of bob