Dynamical-meaning Focused Design: Overcoming Ludonarrative Dissonance

This paper presents a stylistic game design document for Elapse, an original narrative game conceived by Jasmine Liang as an undergraduate exploration of design process. Its central aim is to demonstrate how a designer can address ludonarrative dissonance, the perceived clash between what a game's mechanics communicate and what its story asserts, by adopting a dynamical-meaning focused approach. The author treats ludonarrative dissonance as a design challenge to be solved rather than an inherent property of games, distinguishing it from the broader ludology versus narratology debate.

The proposed game, Elapse, is positioned as a successor in conversation with Braid and Undertale, which both use unconventional handling of time to reshape player roles. Elapse introduces its own temporal mechanics, including experiments with ratios of in-game time to real time, location-dependent passage of time, and memory as a representation of chronology. Its narrative theme asks how one should live when time is fleeting, aiming to prompt players to reflect on their subconscious perceptions of time and how those perceptions shape their understanding of themselves and others.

The work's methodology is primarily design-based and reflective rather than empirical. It draws on a review of existing time-driven narrative games, the concept of dynamical meaning developed by Jonathan Blow, and research on choice poetics that addresses how choices and narrative can harmonize. The author supplements these sources with limited personal game development experience, presenting the document as a record of learning the design process independently. No playtesting data or player study results are reported, so the work's contribution rests on its conceptual framework and the proposed design rather than on measured outcomes.