Determinism and Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bastion

Ludonarrative dissonance—the conflict created when mechanics and narrative communicate different messages—is a design concept that has been creeping closer and closer to the mainstream in the past year. Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us both attempted to ameliorate their dissonance with varying degrees of success. And Spec Ops: The Line took advantage of its own ludonarrative dissonance, using it to emphasize the game’s themes about American military adventurism and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For obvious reasons, violence has been a major factors in the dissonance in most of these games, primarily because violence provides an easy mechanic and tends to result in games that sell. But one game that does not often get mentioned in the discussion of dissonance in games is Supergiant Games’ 2011, action-RPG Bastion. 

Set in a world that mixes elements of fantasy, steam-punk, and the old west, the story of Bastion is a deceptively simple one. The player assumes the role of an unnamed silent protagonist called, “the Kid,” who wakes up one day to discover that an apocalyptic event called “the Calamity,” destroyed his home city of Caelondia and most of the world. The Kid seeks to restore a place called “the Bastion,” which can supposedly fix the world. Along the way he meets an elderly Caelondian named Rucks, who provides the game’s running narration, in addition to two other survivors Zulf and Zia—ethnic Ura, the original inhabitants of the continent Caelondia colonized. Rucks provides one of the most troubling figure in the game. He is a thoroughly unreliable narrator and is the physical manifestation of narrative in the game’s ludonarrative equation.

Rucks is an unflinching imperialist in terms both his interaction with the world and his role as narrator. While The Kid may be the player’s avatar, the areas the Kid inhabits are contextualized by Rucks and through the lens of his nostalgia. Meanwhile, the Kid’s thoughts are locked away from the player through a silence which Rucks’ narration enforces. The Kid is still capable of interacting with other characters, but it always falls to Rucks to relay snippets of the conversation. In essence, Rucks’ dominion over the narration emphasizes the subaltern status which Caelondian society imposed upon the Kid, Zulf, and Zia. No one can speak. During the final level it is established that the narration throughout the game has been Rucks retelling the Kid’s story to Zia in order to pass the time while they wait for the kid’s return from the final mission. This revelation presents a deterministic tyranny of the storyteller but one which is not wholly in conflict with the concept of player agency, since some of the more player driven story elements. For example, like if the player decides to break some environment objects early in the game for no reason, Rucks will note: “the Kid rages for a while.” Rucks story elements tend to fall into place shortly after the actions that prompt them. The lag indicates that Rucks' narration is not the creator of what is on screen but a reflection of it. Yet at certain critical moments, such as the moment when the Kid finds the Journal which kick-starts the game’s central conflict, the Kid’s actions are a fixed point which cannot be changed by Rucks or the player.

The interpretation that Rucks provides runs parallel to the ludic experience provided by the environments and the core gameplay. The overlay of narration on top of the ludic information establishes a space in which the two are able to compliment and inform one another while also being distinct from one another. The ludic information provides authority to the narration while also providing a space where it can be questioned. Although Rucks’ first line of narration notes that a “proper story is supposed to start at the beginning” and that it “ain’t so simple with this one,” the fluidity between fixed points of the story and emergent (ludic) elements call the deterministic authority of the storyteller into question. The tension between these ludic and narrative forces can be seen the first time the Kid encounters an enemy. 

First encounter with a (lonesome ghost of a) Gasfella

As the Kid enters a small clearing, Rucks asks “That a survivor? No ma’am, it’s a Gasfella, forced up from underground.” In theory, the original question of “is that a survivor” must be answered with an unequivocal yes because the Gasfella is clearly alive. Though Rucks is at times an unreliable narrator, he is frank about details regarding the world. He repeatedly personifies Gasfellas, and even goes so far as to outright say that they are sapient: “[they] ain’t much that different from normal folks. All they want is a warm place to stay and a decent meal.” And yet by implying that the Gasfella at the start is not a survivor, he demonstrates his bias against the Windbags and makes it clear that his only interest rests in saving human survivors. Ludically, Rucks’ bias against the Windbags proves correct. With a few exceptions, Gasfellas and other creatures inhabiting the floating ruins of Caelondia are universally hostile towards the Kid. That Rucks’ racism is supported by the ludic language of the game establishes him as a character that the kid and the player ought to trust, while also generating tension. 

As the player finds it easy to accept Rucks’ rationales, so too does the Kid, even though he has very little reason to want Caelondia restored. During the Kid’s tobacco and exhaustion fueled dream of “Who Knows Where,” it is revealed that the Kid’s life in Caelondia was never a good one. He was ostracized by peers, dropped out of school, and volunteered for two tours of duty on Caelondia’s “Rippling Wall,” an act Rucks implies was tantamount to suicide. At the end of the dream, Rucks admits to taking advantage of the Kid’s lack of direction. Rucks is the only character who knows about the true purpose of the Bastion, so he sends the Kid out telling him he’s saving the world. And yet Rucks’ rationales provide an easy security blanket for the Kid and player to cling to even when it conflicts with reality. For example Rucks establishes early on that every piece of floating ground the Kid journeys to has a “Core” keeping it afloat. The Cores are necessary to power the Bastion, but removing the core will cause the area to fall into oblivion. Later Rucks comments that Gasfellas get “territorial” around Cores, which directly conflicts with their earlier characterization as being sentient. Rucks’ characterization of them as “territorial,” creates an easier to accept justification for smashing through them to get to the core than “they will fight you every step because they know they will fall into the abyss.” Moreover, the Kid almost always returns to the Bastion without seeing much of the damage from the core’s removal, but the knowledge of its occurrence remains, creating further dissonance.

The tension between Rucks’ narration and reality comes to a head during the Kid’s dream in “Jawson Bog.” Unlike the dreams of “Who Knows Where,” which fit snuggly into the framing device and act as ludic holding patterns which allow Rucks tells Zia and the player about the back-stories of the three silent character characters, the bog dream is completely disconnected from the framing device. Rucks admits after the dream finishes that the Kid never told him what happened in the bog and the abandonment of conventional tropes of oral storytelling are abandoned in favor of a surreal breakdown imply that the Bog dream’s narration is a part of the Kid’s perception. Rucks’ once supportive voice becomes hostile towards the Kid. Lines and events from earlier in the game get retread and altered in ways that emphasize the Kid’s violence and his complicity in the deaths of many non-human survivors. 

The Bastion: Jawson Bog Edition

When the Kid enters the Bastion for the first time and meets Rucks, the old man narrates “Did anyone else survive? Sure enough, he finds another. He finds me.” In the bog, the Kid enters a Bastion overrun with wilderness fauna and the line changes to “Sure enough, he finds…Peckers. Lunkheads.  Wallflowers.  Pincushions.  Vineapples.  Swampweeds.  Anklegators,” implying similarity between the creatures the Kid has killed and the survivors at the Bastion. The presence of the narration in an entirely subjective space implies that the Kid internalizes Rucks’ goals and rationales while the hostility of dream Rucks indicates his uncertainty and guilt over what those rationales have led him to. The litany of dead creatures acknowledges the ludonarrative dissonance inherent in the Kid’s mission to saving the world by destroying bits of it, and uses it as a metaphor for guilt and self-loathing. That the dream ends with the Kid re-experiencing the moment when he found his first weapon—the hammer which Rucks describes as his “life-long friend”—resulting in a confrontation with a shadow version of himself, further emphasizes his internal conflict over and with his own violence.

The final level is the unraveling of Rucks’ narration, the revelation that Rucks no longer knows what is going to happen frees the Kid from the deterministic bonds of the “story” but not the ludic bonds. Binary choice gets a bum rap from game designers but used sparingly, any choice of that kind is still interaction. The final choice is a value judgment by the player as to whether it is worth attempting to undo everything and risking it all happening again, or setting sail into an unknown future. In terms of game design, this question asks if we want to keep retreading the dissonant laden landscapes of modern design or attempt to find another way forward.