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Ludonarrative Dissonance

They all sat down again on the white leather couch as Lore stood there and told them again: “This whole place is a game.”

That earned her confused looks.

Hamish said, “What?”

“This place. This…experience. It’s a game.”

“Yeah, we heard you, Lauren, ” Nick said, suddenly angry. “You can’t call it that. You can’t just…you can’t just say that and make it true. It’s not a fucking game. It’s serious. You’re a hammer, so everything you see is a nail, but—”

Owen interrupted:

“She’s maybe not wrong.”

It was his turn to get the looks. Even from Lore, who seemed shocked he was agreeing with her. Which was fair, because Owen was shocked he was agreeing with her. But again, she wasn’t wrong.

At least, not entirely.

“It’s not a game,” he said, “but it’s like one.”

Lore snapped her fingers and pointed at him. “Yeah. That.”

“Think about it. We come here from another place, through—not a portal precisely, but a staircase that functions as one. Kind of like the moongate in the ring of stones from Ultima . Then we get here and it’s like—”

“It’s like Zork . Or any of the old text adventures from Infocom. What’s the opening? West of House. You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door —”

Owen joined in, said the rest with her:

“ There is a small mailbox here .”

He remembered it well—he and Lore used to play games like this all the time. They’d play them sometimes together, in the same room. Or when on the phone with each other until two, three o’clock in the morning. Zork, Ultima, Wasteland, Elder Scrolls, Bard’s Tale, King’s Quest, Space Quest, Maniac Mansion 1 and 2, all the PC games that made them want to make games, too, or tell stories, or make experiences that other people could join. Of course, only Lore really got to do that part, didn’t she? Owen found that dark core of bitterness inside him rise up like acid in the back of his throat. He choked it back down.

“It’s like that,” she said, “or like Bard’s Tale . You have a room, you have things in the room, you have your exits—”

He continued on, staring darkly at her. “And if you go the wrong way, if you make the wrong choice, you’re eaten by a grue. Game over.” Just like it was game over for me. That thought turned in his head like a screw.

“I don’t know what a ‘grue’ is,” Hamish said, looking confused.

“Yeah,” Nick said, “we weren’t nerding out and jerking one another off with this dork shit, okay? Me, Ham, and Matty were getting stoned like proper kids.”

Lore gave him a look like he’d just spit in her soda. “Nick, we used to play D&D every Sunday. You were there. We took turns being the Dungeon Master, you dick.”

“Yeah, but we got high while doing it.”

“No, but see—” Owen jumped in. “Even with D&D, it’s like that, too. The grid paper, designing dungeons, choosing which door to go through, finding monsters, avoiding traps—”

“This isn’t a fucking game, man!” Hamish bleated. “Okay? This is fucked.” He stood up. “Nick’s right. Let’s pick one of those doors and just walk through, let’s just keep moving, okay? I say we pick a direction and we hard-charge it until we find the way out. It’s like going on a hike and getting lost. You pick a direction and you walk until you find a highway or some shit.”

Lore barked a bitter laugh. “That’s not what you do if you’re lost in the woods, Ham! If you get lost in the woods, you pick a spot and you stay there. You shelter in place, same as you’d do in a storm or a zombie apocalypse. And this isn’t the woods. Those doors? Don’t go in a straight line. Right now, one seems to go to a bathroom full of broken mirror glass and the other to a—a dark bedroom. And we can’t go back through the closet—”

“The way is shut,” Nick said. “Where we came from is gone again, and there’s no door. It’s just a wall now.”

Hamish buried his face in his hands. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Owen felt bad for his old friend. Somehow, Hamish was handling it worse than he was. And Owen wasn’t handling it well at all. He felt he had to disassociate from this experience entirely unless he wanted to grab fistfuls of his own hair and rip them from his scalp like grass from a lawn.

Lore continued: “I’m just saying, there is no ‘straight line path’ to a highway. Maybe there’s an easy way out, and if there is we will find it, but we’re going to have to do this in a smart way. Like in a game, in a dungeon, we have to think about our choices here. And we have to do it together.”

“One problem,” Nick said.

“Which is?”

“We’re going to need to eat food.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Right! Of course. Here—” Lore still had her backpack, and from there, she pulled out a couple of protein bars. Some bougie brand called Elation. Lore tossed one to Hamish and kept one. “Ham, you and Nick split that. Me and Owen will have the other. I have more, but we should ration.” Implicit in that last sentence: just in case . And implicit in that ? Just in case they’re stuck here. Really, seriously stuck here. Trapped in the maze. Owen pictured it in his head like a game map. Staircase to Hallway to Marshie’s Room to Thumb Cake Room to the Greige Room. Hallways between them. Shadows lurking.

“I’m not fucking hungry,” Hamish said.

Nick was already unwrapping theirs, though—breaking it in half and shoving that piece into Hamish’s hand. “Here. You need to eat. It’s—” He checked the crumpled up label. “Hazelnut Crunch, with lion’s mane, rishi, and cordyceps mushrooms. Jesus, Lore. Can’t wait to chow down on the forest floor!” He popped the whole thing in his mouth and gamely chewed. Hamish mumbled something about “I like this brand” before biting into his half, nibbling at its edges.

As Lore ripped at the packaging of theirs with her teeth, she said, “Have a snack. Then let’s try to, I dunno, rest a little. Lie down. Shut your eyes. Even if you don’t sleep, I think we need it. Again, remember, we were all trudging through the woods a few hours ago. And since then it’s just been adrenalin and cortisol dumps, and I know I feel like someone has run a serrated steak knife across my brain—and maybe if we give it some time, the rooms will shift again.”

Owen looked to the doors at the far end of the living room.

One of them which apparently opened into darkness.

They all agreed. Hamish sat back, staring at the ceiling, eating his bar with the hesitation of a pukey fifth grader. Nick went to the other end of the couch and lay right down, shoes still on, his arms crossed across his chest like a mummy—it was the way he slept, always. Owen wondered if he was still so sound a sleeper. Nick would pass out hard, and the only way to wake him was essentially to waterboard him with a washcloth. That always got him up.

Owen pushed himself into the couch as Lore walked up to him and offered him his half of the protein bar. “It’s peanut butter, quinoa, and collagen.”

At that, he couldn’t help but laugh a little. “God, Lore, why do you have these cursed protein bars?”

“Trying to, like, min-max hack my health.”

“Is it working?”

Her turn to laugh. “Probably not. I still have a BP high enough that I could probably squirt blood out of the corners of my eyes, like a lizard.”

“Mine’s so low, they’re worried I’m dead.”

“Shit. Getting old is stupid.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

They ate their protein bars. It was somehow both good and gross. The peanut butter flavor was real, and not chemical-tasting, and the quinoa provided real crunch. But it also had a weird oily taste—and not edible oil, but almost as if it had been run through a dish of aloe vera lotion beforehand.

He finally said, around a mouthful of the weird food, “I’m…sorry I rolled up on you so hard earlier.”

“Nah. No. You were right. I fucked it. I fucked us. I ran up those stairs without thinking. I could’ve been smarter. I should ’ve been smarter. I just…” Her voice withered to a soft sigh. “Mistakes were made.”

“You missed Matty.”

“Yes. But no. I—” She shook her head and said stiffly, “I can’t do this now. But I just wanted you to know, you were right. This is my fault, and I should’ve been better. I will be better. I’ll get us out of this.”

“You’re not our leader, Lore. It’s all right.”

Her mouth formed a hard line. Her words were firm when she responded with, “I said I have to do better. And I will.” She took the wrapper trash back from him and looked around for a trash can. Shrugging, she just stuffed it back in her pocket. “Whatever. Get a little rest. Then we figure out what’s next.”

“Lore, I think we need to talk—”

But she was already walking away from him, to the other side of the room, where she moved one chair across from the other and used them as a kind of clumsy, makeshift cot. Already he could see her eyes were closed.

Owen sighed.

And he shut his eyes, too. A valiant, if worthless, endeavor.