Chapter 20 Quiz
Eighteen questions on the concepts of Chapter 20. A mix of multiple choice, short answer, and applied analysis. Answers appear after all questions. Self-grade honestly — the goal is to know what you know, not to collect a score.
Questions
1. Who coined the term "ludonarrative dissonance," and in a blog post about which game?
a) Jonathan Blow, in a post about Braid. b) Clint Hocking, in a post about BioShock. c) Ken Levine, in a post about System Shock 2. d) Warren Spector, in a post about Deus Ex.
2. The chapter argues that ludonarrative dissonance is a "structural rather than cosmetic" problem. What is the strongest reason for that framing?
a) Dissonance is usually about graphics, and graphics are superficial. b) Dissonance cannot be fixed with more or better cutscenes — it is fixed at the level of what the game asks players to do. c) Dissonance only appears in AAA games, not indie games. d) Dissonance is subjective and most players don't notice it.
3. Define, in one sentence each: embedded narrative and emergent narrative.
(Short answer)
4. Which of the following is most characteristic of emergent narrative?
a) Precisely crafted emotional beats that every player experiences. b) Stories that arise from the interaction of systems and player actions, unique to each playthrough. c) Cutscenes that deliver plot information at scripted moments. d) Dialogue trees with thousands of branches.
5. What are the three layers of the three-layer narrative model, and what does each contribute?
(Short answer)
6. A designer claims their game offers "meaningful choice" because it has forty dialogue options across ten scenes, all of which lead to the same final cutscene with minor flavor differences. Using the chapter's vocabulary, how would you classify this agency? Is the designer correct?
(Short answer)
7. Why do systemic narratives produce possessive feelings in players ("my dwarf," "my colony") while authored narratives typically do not ("my Joel")?
a) Because systemic games have better writing. b) Because in systemic games, the player generated the story — no one else's playthrough produced it. c) Because players dislike authored stories. d) Because systemic games have longer playtimes.
8. The "combinatorial explosion problem" in branching narrative refers to:
a) The tendency of narrative bugs to cascade across branches. b) The exponential growth of content required to fully branch every choice. c) The risk that players will get confused by too many options. d) The visual problem of displaying all branches on screen at once.
9. Name the four components of a working story generator, as described in the chapter.
(Short answer)
10. Why, according to the chapter, did Mass Effect 3's ending produce such intense backlash — despite being comparable in quality to many other game endings?
a) Because the writing was uniquely bad. b) Because the ending betrayed the promise the trilogy had made about meaningful player choice. c) Because the graphics were disappointing. d) Because players had played for too many hours to accept any ending.
11. Which of the following is an example of "calculated agency"?
a) The Witcher 3's Bloody Baron quest, which has four distinct endings that branch within the quest but reconverge afterward. b) Telltale's The Walking Dead, where choices produce flavor differences but the plot is broadly fixed. c) Detroit: Become Human, where most major characters can die and the ending changes significantly. d) Dwarf Fortress, where no story is authored at all.
12. The chapter describes a specific design pattern as one of the most durable in the medium. It combines a linear structure at the macro level with systemic agency at the tactical level. What is this pattern?
(Short answer)
13. A writer proposes a scene in which the protagonist mourns a friend by silently watching a sunset for ninety seconds. The designer says the scene will not work in their game. Which of the following is likely the designer's strongest reason?
a) The graphics engine cannot render sunsets. b) Players are trained to act and will find passive spectating frustrating if not carefully framed. c) Voice actors would be too expensive. d) The scene would be difficult to translate into other languages.
14. Why does the chapter argue that narrative games should not treat interactive storytelling as a compromised version of film?
(Short answer)
15. According to the chapter, what is the "Uncharted problem"?
a) The games are too long for their own stories. b) The games have a mismatch between a pulp-adventure narrative and a cover-shooter gameplay genre. c) The games are too short for their stories. d) The games do not have enough dialogue.
16. True or false: A game that has significant ludonarrative dissonance is by definition a bad game.
Explain your answer in two sentences.
17. In the chapter's framing, which of the following would NOT count as "emergent narrative"?
a) A raider in RimWorld killing your best colonist, who had just had a baby. b) A dwarf in Dwarf Fortress going mad and attacking a tavern. c) A scripted cutscene in Final Fantasy VII where Aerith dies. d) A chaotic sequence in XCOM where a rookie scores a lucky crit and saves the mission.
18. Sketch, in 3-5 sentences, one specific scene in a game you have played where the ludic and narrative layers were in strong harmony — where gameplay reinforced rather than contradicted the story.
(Short answer)
Answer Key
1. b) Clint Hocking coined the term in a 2007 blog post about BioShock. The term originally critiqued BioShock specifically, but has since been applied across the medium.
2. b) Dissonance cannot be fixed with more or better cutscenes — it lives in the gap between what the story says the character is and what the gameplay makes the character do. That gap is structural because it sits at the level of the core loop, not the surface content.
3. Embedded narrative is authored — written, scripted, directed, and placed into the game by designers and writers. Emergent narrative is systemic — it arises from the interaction of rules, systems, and player choices, and is not scripted in advance. One is designed; the other is designed for.
4. b) Emergent narrative arises from the interaction of systems and player actions and is unique to each playthrough. The other options describe embedded narrative.
5. (1) Authored plot — the scripted structure the designers built; what every player experiences. (2) Player agency — the space left for players to make choices that affect outcomes. (3) Emergent moments — unplanned stories that arise from the interaction of systems and player behavior. Great narrative games deploy all three in a way that reinforces rather than fights.
6. This is theatrical agency — the appearance of choice without the substance. The designer is not correct in claiming "meaningful choice" unless the game's tonal or emotional experience varies meaningfully with the choices, because the mechanical state of the game is not varying. Theatrical agency can still be effective if the player feels like their choices matter, but calling it meaningful choice is misleading.
7. b) In systemic games, the player's specific playthrough generated the story through their interaction with the systems. No other playthrough produced exactly that story. In authored narratives, every player is experiencing the same authored content, so the story is the designer's, not the player's.
8. b) The exponential growth of content required to fully branch every choice. A game with 10 binary choices has 2^10 = 1,024 possible playthroughs; fully authoring all of them is infeasible for any studio.
9. (1) Characters with interiority — not just stats but traits, histories, preferences. (2) Systems that collide — systems that interfere with each other rather than running independently. (3) Memory — the game must remember what happened. (4) Legibility — the player must be able to see and understand the events the systems produce.
10. b) The ending betrayed the promise the trilogy had made about meaningful player choice. Players had accumulated decisions across three games, and the final sequence did not reflect those decisions in ways commensurate with the promise, producing a sense of broken commitment rather than an unsatisfying ending per se.
11. a) The Witcher 3's Bloody Baron quest branches meaningfully within the quest but reconverges — this is calculated agency. Option (b) is theatrical agency; option (c) is real agency (within the scope Detroit manages); option (d) is not agency at all but pure emergence.
12. The linear-macro / systemic-micro pattern. The overall story arc is fixed, but the tactical-level decisions (what to equip, which abilities to develop, which side content to engage with) are systemic and player-driven. Final Fantasy and most JRPGs use this pattern; so do many modern action-RPGs.
13. b) Players are trained by the medium to act and will find passive spectating frustrating unless the scene is carefully framed so that the passivity feels earned. (This is not a hard rule — long passive scenes can work — but it is the strongest reason to push back on a naive version of such a scene.)
14. Because games are a medium with their own native grammar — first-person participation, systemic meaning, agency, emergence, failure, mastery — and none of these capacities are available to film. When games try to imitate film, they surrender their own strengths and become weak versions of another medium. The best game stories are stories only games can tell.
15. b) The games have a mismatch between their cinematic, pulp-adventure narrative (in which Nathan Drake is a lovable rogue) and their cover-shooter gameplay (in which Drake kills hundreds of enemies). The narrative and the gameplay are shaped by different genre expectations and produce contradictory characterizations.
16. False. Many beloved games (including the Uncharted series) have significant ludonarrative dissonance and are still excellent. Dissonance is a structural issue to be aware of and manage, not a binary pass/fail criterion. Being able to name the dissonance is a better practice than trying to eliminate it in all cases.
17. c) A scripted cutscene in Final Fantasy VII is authored content; every player sees Aerith die the same way. The other options describe events generated by systems and player behavior.
18. (Student answer — any specific, articulated scene is acceptable.) A strong answer names the game, the scene, and explains specifically how gameplay mechanics reinforced the emotional or thematic point rather than contradicting it. Examples might include: the quiet giraffe sequence in The Last of Us (exploration mechanics become wonder instead of violence), the slow walk at the end of Red Dead Redemption 2 (pacing mechanics match the emotional weight), the climb in Journey (traversal mechanics embody struggle and perseverance), or the final room of Spec Ops: The Line (the mechanics the player has been performing are named as horror). A weaker answer names a scene without explaining the mechanical harmony.
Self-Grading Rubric
Count your correct answers on (1), (2), (4), (7), (8), (10), (11), (13), (15), (17) — ten questions worth 1 point each.
Short-answer questions (3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 14, 16, 18) — grade yourself generously on 1-3 points each. A full-credit answer covers all the core elements of the key; a partial-credit answer gets one or two main elements but misses others.
- 22+: You have a strong grasp of the chapter's concepts and vocabulary.
- 17-21: Solid understanding with some blind spots. Revisit the sections where you missed points.
- 12-16: You understand the big strokes but the details need another pass.
- Below 12: Re-read the chapter with the questions in mind, and revisit the exercises.
What matters more than the score is noticing which concepts you missed. The ones you missed are the ones most likely to trip you up in Chapters 21-25.