In many roleplaying games, you’re given the chance to make moral choices that can help flesh out what kind of person your character is. Choices like whether or not to punch a reporter in the face, or deciding if you should reduce a city to ash for a rich man’s entertainment.
But there are some choices where the player can say one thing in a conversation, go and do the opposite in the game, and still be held to what they originally said with no one regarding their recent actions.
The best example can be seen in the Witcher 3. On several occasions throughout the game you encounter bandits looting the dead. You have the choice to leave them be or to intervene. The bodies can range from soldiers who died on the battlefield to villagers killed by a band of marauders, but in the end, a corpse is a corpse.
Obviously if you choose to let them loot the dead, you part ways and nothing happens. But if you choose to stop them, a fight usually ensues. You kill the bandits, get some experience and feel like you’re the hero. But then your hands are immediately in their pockets as you take their weapons and the pittance of coin they had.
This raises an interesting question. Is a case of ludonarrative dissonance or is something else going on?
Ludonarrative dissonance is when something happens in a game’s story that is then countered by something in the gameplay. Like in the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot. Lara Croft kills a man in a cutscene and is extremely distraught over the fact that she took a human life. But then, a few minutes later she’s mowing down hordes of enemies without shedding a single tear for them.
This counteracts the character growth of Lara having to come to terms with the fact that she has to kill people to ensure her own continued survival as well as the survival of her friends. Ludonarrative dissonance often creates an inconsistent character, making them harder to sympathize with.
But then our characters in these roleplaying games aren’t unsympathetic, and I think that’s because this isn’t really a case of ludonarrative dissonance. While one could argue how this could be an example, I would argue two points.
Firstly, that when we loot the dead, it’s only because that’s what games have trained us to do. Secondly, that since it’s our choice, it doesn’t deviate from the story we have created for this character in our own minds.
The loot that we get from our defeated enemies is our prize for doing the right thing. Those few pieces of gold we find on the decapitated corpse of a bandit are what we get for being a hero. The player has earned that loot for their actions.
Also, if the player chooses to take from the dead to give to themselves, then does that really make it out of character? If the player is making the same decisions they would make if they were in the same position as the character, then it’s not really out of place in the story.
Either way, if you view this as a case of ludonarrative dissonance or just a case of loose roleplaying, you’re still most likely going to play the game and probably get some joy out of it. That’s what matters the most.
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