Exploring ludodissonance

Readers of my previous post on ludonarrative dissonance may have noted that formal dissonance and moral/ethical dissonance didn't sound all that bad.  Defying genre expectations?  Putting two ethical systems into conflict?  It sounds more like art than bad game design, right?

To be quite clear, ludodissonance can be quite bad--bad meaning that it creates effects contrary to the desires of the game designer.  If the goal of the game designer is to make a serious game, but the mechanics of the game make the characters look ridiculous, the game designer has unequivocally failed.

However, "bad design" is not all ludodissonance has to offer.  Dissonance is a very useful tool in the creation of art, so I want to survey examples of dissonance outside games, within games, and then speculate on ways to think about ludodissonance going forward.

Going deeper into dissonance

Way back in 2007, Clint Hocking proposed the term ludonarrative dissonance to describe the disparities that often occur between the "story" elements of a video game and the rules that govern its gameplay.  The example he used to put this idea forward was Bioshock, but it has since been applied to many games to understand where they fell short.