A Para-causal Ludonarrative Dissonance

Ludonarrative dissonance – When the non-interactive elements and the narrative told through the game mechanics are at odds with each other. Ludomaniacal

The Titan stops sifting through their Vault and looks over to the Hunter in their fireteam also doing the same. “You ever wonder who names all of our guns?” “I have no idea what you’re talking about Chim.” “Like, Submission, Deliverance. All of the gear we got from the Pyramid was clearly named by the Witness as a way to promote their ideology.”

“Uh huh.” “And all of the foundry weapons and Black Armory were clearly named by their respective designers, and the stuff we salvaged from Clarity Control has Clovis Bray’s egotism baked in.”

“So, it sounds like you know who names all of the guns.” “That’s the thing though. Some of the gun names are weird. Spoiler Alert, with a data tag of ‘Someone is going to die’? Pardon Our Dust? Whose dust? Why are we pardoning it?” “Oh that reminds me, can we stop by Xur’s Treasure Hoard for a second? I need to turn in some keys…” The Illusion of Choice Video games are a unique medium because of their intrinsically interactive nature. Movies, television series, books, theater, all of these present character, setting, and story to the watcher/reader/consumer. Different people may have different takeaways from the experience, but their experience will be relatively consistent to one another. Or at the very least, the same set of elements are readily available to the consumer. This does no…