Ludonarrative dissonance and dominant narratives

Abstract

This paper explores ludonarrative dissonance as it occurs in sport, primarily as the conflict experienced by participants between dominant narratives and self-generated interpretations of embodied experience. Taking self-narrative as a social rather than isolated production, the interaction with three basic categories of dominant narrative is explored: transformative, representing a spectrum from revelatory to distorting, bullying and colonising. These forms of dominant narrative prescribe interpretations of the player’s experience of play and of self that displace their own, with the end result of dissonance and self-alienation.

Keywords:

• Ludonarrative
• dissonance
• dominant
• narrative
• experience

Notes

1. By Hocking (2007). The term has been discussed frequently since then. Some useful explanations of the term can be found in Juster (2009), Sawrey (2013), and Ballantyne (2015).

2. Dunne (2014), quoted by Seraphine (2016).

3. I do not intend here to presuppose any particular theory about narrativity – other than its ubiquity and its importance in understanding of self and identity; my own views are expressed in Howe (2005, 2008, 2011).

4. These terms and the basic concept are borrowed from Lyotard (1984), though I am not presupposing his larger theoretical stance.

5. There may well be more, but these will be sufficient for my purposes here. I take the boundaries between these to be somewhat porous: clearly, a distorting narrative may be bullying, and vice versa.

6. I here exploit for my own purposes concepts developed by Marxist theorists such as Lukács and Marcuse, and anti-colonialists such as Fanon, Friere, and others. See also de Beauvoir’s comments on women, 37–8, in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1991).