One of my pet peeves about video game storytelling is lack of consistency. When that internal logic of things breaks down, quality takes a huge hit. The reason I'm thinking about this is because I just had a kind of a close call with something like that. (A thread.)

So last week, working on a thing (that I am going to have to be very vague about because I don't think I can go into any kind of detail, you know how it is, NDAs and such), we realized we'd fucked up, and a part of our narrative logic was broken.

We had us a goddamn plot hole.

Namely, we had Groucho get in touch with Harpo, asking them about Chico. (100% real character names, natch!) This obviously required that at some earlier point, Groucho must discover that Chico even exists. He must hear that name.

But that point... wasn't actually in the story.

I'm still not quite sure what went wrong, to be honest. The best I can figure is that we had hung that discovery on a scene we changed for other reasons, and just... didn't realize the change created this problem. There's a lot of moving parts in this thing, so that's feasible.

(I actually am halfway convinced that we were going to establish this thing in some entirely different moment that we then somehow misplaced. But that doesn't really matter, because the bottom line is that whatever we had intended, we were not establishing it anywhere now.)

Generally, this is something that is more likely to happen if you have a lot of moving parts and the people working on them also have a lot of other stuff on their plate, and production priorities clash with the narrative chronology; i.e., you're developing things out of order.

Throw in things like other departments making changes to their stuff that also necessitate changes elsewhere, evolving design, and... well, even without a pandemic, it gets tricky. That's the thing about game dev, whatever you do, you're always under fire to some degree.

In this instance, we were putting together this complex puzzle one piece at a time, over a period of months, and at some point we made that mistake, and now we honestly can't even figure out exactly how/when that happened.

Whatever; now the pieces don't fit, and it's our fault.

We fucked up. Sucks, but it happens, development is iterative, at least we caught it in time! We could fix it: just insert a moment where Groucho discovers that Chico exists, right? Straightforward enough in principle... but easier said than done. We were kinda out of runway.

By which I mean: we had pretty narrow window to do this in, as it turned out. It couldn't happen earlier than a certain point, because everything before that was already locked. We couldn't touch that. And it would have to happen before Groucho contacted Harpo.

We also had limited narrative bandwidth in general. We couldn't just add a whole new scene for this, and the existing narrative spots available to us were already pretty full of other stuff we had to retain, and anyway, they were about other characters doing other stuff.

But... we had to do this, because we had hung a lot of other stuff on this conversation. It had to take place. And yet, the ONLY reason for Groucho to contact Harpo was to ask about Chico. Chico can bring Groucho and Harpo together, but only if Groucho knows Chico exists.

It was stressful and annoying. I knew that if worst came to worst, we could just have that discussion take place anyway. We could just kind of brute force it. Imply that Groucho heard about Chico off screen somehow, some vague handwavy bullshit like that, make the best of it.

But it wouldn't be believable. It wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. Honestly? It'd be stupid, lazy writing, a bad, shitty compromise. It nagged at me, both professionally and personally. It wasn't driving me nuts, exactly, but yeah, I felt bad. We should've caught it. I should have.

In the end, I realized that we had another scene that still had space we hadn't utilized, and while it wasn't about any of these characters, it actually provided an interesting parallel I could use to kind of pivot it to Groucho finding out about Chico. I could make it work.

And that's what I did. It was a pretty good solution, we were happy with it. It all fit together now, I felt smart and good about myself for like a whole half an hour for solving what had become a really annoying problem, so... go team! We sorted it out.

(This, incidentally, is how most problems of this nature work out! These are such complex constructs, you run into snags all the time. Most of them are fixable if your foundational work is solid and you are given time. Very often, this is where the real effort in writing lies.)

Now, here's the thing: you could very well argue that this problem didn't matter. That it was a minor thing, not a key plot point, most people wouldn't even notice the discrepancy, you could just assume that it was something Groucho conceivably learned off-screen, etc.

And you would be technically correct. We could've -- WOULD have -- gotten away with it, there's no question. Some people would notice, but even they wouldn't go, "this makes no sense." At worst, it would've been "but how does Groucho know about Chico, why don't they explain it?"

But it does matter. Consistency in these things -- all things, really -- makes a huge difference in how we feel about a story. When things click into place and make sense, it feels nice and natural. You feel you can follow along. You're in that good cognitive flow.

When things don't fit together... that's when you get what I'm gonna call narrative friction. You have to work harder to understand what's going on. The picture you're unconsciously putting together in your head doesn't quite form properly. It hangs crooked. You have to squint.

When cause and effect no longer line up, processing things takes extra effort. Maybe you're not sure if the material is flawed, or if you're just not understanding it. You might not consciously remember the details, anyway. But going "uhhhhh..." in your head a lot? Not great.

The thing about narrative friction is that it's pervasive and persistent. You might not be consciously aware of it, but if you get a lot of it, it really chips away at the foundation, whether it's immersion or suspension of disbelief. Makes it hard to give a shit about the story.

What this means in practice, and what the real takeaway here is this: LACK OF CONSISTENCY ROBS NARRATIVE OF ITS POWER.

And this is what that old bugbear, ludonarrative dissonance, is too -- where what you experience in the game contradicts what's stated in the narrative. That's the narrative friction at work, slowing everything down, making everything harder to process, and thus to enjoy.

All of this is not to say that everything must be linear or explained! Ambiguities, mysteries and pscyhedelia are effective tools. But even then there's a distinction between a consistent experience that follows its own logic, whatever fuckery that may be, and mere randomness.

It's often hard to define, I know. But I'd argue that the real difference between a trippy David Lynch experience and the legion of forgettable Lynch imitators is that narrative consistency: conveying that feeling of things just... clicking into place is the secret sauce.

Even if you don't understand it. ESPECIALLY when you don't understand it.

Still, being realistic about it, it's hard to have zero narrative friction and absolutely no suggestion of any inconsistency anywhere, particularly in games. There's a degree of... let's call it mental lubrication that we're willing to apply to an experience.

That's why genre conventions and accepted narrative shorthand hide a multitude of sins, if you wield them correctly. You know, "how come nobody says goodbye in movies before they hang up?" We just accept it. That's that good ol' brain lube, taking care of the friction there.

That's why you can get shot fifty times in a game and then you pick up a health pack and you're okay, and we go, okay, that's fine, it's a game. But what is no problem at all suddenly becomes a point of friction if you start hanging other narrative elements on it.

For example: you get shot in the shoulder in a cinematic, and it's a OH NO WE NEED A DOCTOR BEFORE YOU DIE moment? That's harder to accept. What, THIS bullet's significant? The others hitting my face were fine, but not this? Now the engine's seizing up. The lube just wore out.

And I mean, maybe you grit your teeth and get through that, and because you've done okay overall, it works out, and you come out mostly smelling like roses. Happens all the time! But if your design -- narrative or otherwise -- keeps accruing that friction all the time?

That's when people start to check out. They don't feel that good about the story anymore. They don't pay attention, because it's harder than it should be. It's just... hard to care about a story that doesn't seem to care about itself, or how it's told. It takes extra effort.

That's why it would have been harder for us to get away with Groucho calling Harpo to ask about Chico: we hung a bunch of stuff on it. Doing that makes it seem important. It invites scrutiny, even without actively thinking about it. The audience isn't stupid. It catches on.

So, yeah. Consistency? I get pretty anal about it, because I think it really matters. I know it's really hard to get those details right, what with any game project being this weird ever-changing chimera. You'll likely drop the ball here and there.

But making that effort counts.