Ludomusical Dissonance in Twilight Princess

Midna's Desperate Hour

Rushing across Hyrule Field in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006) after completing Lakebed Temple is a matter of life and death. Zant, the Usurper King of Twilight, has trapped Link in the form of a wolf and critically wounded his companion Midna, the eponymous Twilight Princess. With Midna on his back, Link races to Hyrule Castle to find the only person that can help: Princess Zelda. Where Hyrule Field generally stands as a site of grandeur and adventure, denoted by its heroic musical cue, Midna’s uncertain fate at the end of Twilight Princess’s second act—along with the music that accompanies it—urges the player to make a beeline to Hyrule Castle, ignoring everything but getting Midna help.

Compounded by audio and visual elements such as Midna’s labored breathing, her deathly pale complexion, and heavy nighttime rain, the music that accompanies this scene instills a sense of urgency and desperation. First and foremost, the cue—titled Midna’s Lament—is set primarily to the minor sound of the Dorian mode. While minor tonality does not universally signify sadness, familiarity with film music and video game music tropes, reinforced by other audiovisual signifiers, allows listeners to interpret minor-mode music (and especially the Dorian mode) as expressive of sorrow and vulnerability. In Midna’s Lament, played by a lone piano with generous use of the sustain pedal, the Dorian mode amplifies a sense of desperation and uncertainty. Diminished seventh chords, a hastening harmonic rhythm, and a stretto-like melodic pace heighten the drama as the track prepares to loop.

In Midna’s darkest hour, Link’s single-mindedness, Midna’s condition, and Midna’s Lament all tell the same message: the situation is desperate and Link must save Midna. Experienced together, this agreement between gameplay, narrative, and game audio can be described as harmonious or ludonarratively consonant. However, as Wolf Link races across Hyrule Field, he frequently encounters enemies that distract from his rescue mission and interrupt the music of Midna’s Lament. I want to argue in this essay that these encounters represent moments of ludonarrative dissonance, a term coined by game developer Clint Hocking in 2007 to describe contradictions between a game’s story and its mechanics and gameplay.1 In particular, Midna’s crisis represents a significant site of ludomusical dissonance, Michiel Kamp’s musical analog to ludonarrative dissonance.2 In Twilight Princess, there is an apparent contradiction between the music’s narrative and ludic functions on the one hand, and the game’s narrative stakes and gameplay priorities on the other.

Ludonarrative Consonance

Moments of ludonarrative consonance and dissonance rely on a player’s ludoliteracy. Coined by José P. Zagal, ludoliteracy refers to the ability to interpret a video game in relation to the broader culture, the gaming industry, and gaming hardware.3 More fundamentally, it is the capacity to read and decode a game’s signifiers (e.g., a green bar shrinking as the player runs) and derive meaning from them (e.g., running depletes stamina). Literacy is also a pillar of Isabella van Elferen’s ALI (affect-literacy-interaction) model for game audio immersion.4 First, game music literacy relies on a familiarity with musical conventions of Western art music and audiovisual media including film and television.5 To achieve an immersive result, game audio leans heavily on pre-existing systems of musical signification. As van Elferen puts it:

Game music is not often very original or complicated, and this has a clear reason. Literacy in game music’s interpretation should be easy to acquire: because of music’s crucial role in gaming interaction, the sonic cues that the player gets must be immediately recognizable and interpretable. Game musical literacy’s contribution to immersion, thus, must be characterized by an almost clichéd audio-visual intertextuality.6

By engaging with musical conventions players are already frequently exposed to, game audio allows players to easily understand what it means to communicate.

Both ludoliteracy and game musical literacy allow for moments of ludomusical consonance. Writing in terms of “ludonarrative harmony,” Frédéric Seraphine points to an agreement of gameplay incentives and narrative directives as a site of consonance.7 This is evident when incentives guide the player toward gameplay decisions that match the intended narrative of a particular game. This extends too to game music. In a discussion of Hocking’s ludonarrative dissonance, Michiel Kamp points to its inverse as a situation in a game “where a change in musical signification can easily be interpreted against a change in game state.”8 In other words, ludonarrative consonance, a term coined by Kamp, also arises when game audio and game mechanics are in conversation.

A recent example can be experienced in the battle against the Cogwork Dancers in Hollow Knight: Silksong (2025). Before the battle begins, two large gears can be seen winding up mechanical bugs sitting dormant in the background. The dancers always move synchronously to the beat of the music and their moves telegraphed by beams of light. After dealing sufficient damage, the dancers return to the background and the gears wind them up more hastily. The music quickens as do the dancers’s attack patterns. The dancers return to the background once more at the end of this second phase where the winding gears now rotate out of sync, cluing in the player on the asynchronous attack patterns they will face in the battle's third phase.

When one of the Cogwork Dancers has been defeated, the mood shifts. The music reverts to a slow pace and becomes understated in its orchestration, the remaining dancer moves more slowly, and the mechanical challenge becomes lighter. The musical, ludic, and narrative shift humanizes the dancer, communicating its perceived sorrow at the loss of its dancing partner. This kind of ludonarrative and ludomusical consonance is often seen as a goal of contemporary game design and is expected by players. It is against these expectations that moments of dissonance become especially perceptible.

Ludonarrative and Ludomusical Dissonance

As we saw earlier, Midna’s desperate hour presents a significant site of ludonarrative and ludomusical consonance. All the ludic, narrative, and musical signs initially point to the same meaning of urgency and gravity. When an enemy approaches Link, however, Midna’s Lament is overtaken by Twilight Princess’s generic battle music. This kind of alternation between danger and safety music has been a common practice in Action-Adventure games, as described by Zach Whalen,9 and has been a fixture of the genre since at least Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987). As such, Action-Adventure players are familiar with the combat implications of sudden fast-paced, cluster chord-filled, low-pitched music.10 In this darkest episode of Twilight Princess’s story, however, the usurpation of Midna’s Lament by a harmonically dissonant and frenetic battle cue urges the player to disregard the severity of the narrative in favor of combat. The onset of battle music puts into conflict all the game aspects that had previously been in agreement, producing a moment of ludonarrative and ludomusical dissonance.

In a critique of BioShock (2007) for his blog Click Nothing, Clint Hocking argues that the game “seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story.”11 For Hocking, ludonarrative dissonance appears as a conflict between the game’s “ludic contract” and its “narrative contract.” In essence, a ludic contract involves gameplay tactics and choices a player uses to overcome challenges and complete a game. In the case of BioShock, the ludic contract reduces to “seek power and you will progress.”12 A narrative contract involves character arcs and the moral of a game’s story. According to Hocking, BioShock’s ludic and narrative contracts contradict each other.

Central to Hocking’s argument is his interpretation of BioShock as an explicit commentary on the inherent problems with Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.13 On the one hand, the ludic contract offers the player opportunities to act in Randian rational self-interest. After defeating a Big Daddy, for example, the player can choose to “harvest” or save their companions, defenseless and genetically altered orphans called Little Sisters. Harvesting Little Sisters, and thereby killing them, rewards the player with resources that enhance their abilities. To Hocking, this “seems not only the best choice mechanically, but also the right choice.”14 On the other hand, BioShock’s narrative contract demands the player aid the revolutionary figure Atlas. To borrow again from Seraphine, this brings into conflict its gameplay incentives and narrative directives.15 BioShock simultaneously incentivizes Randian self-interest in its gameplay while directing the player to embrace altruism through its narrative.

Applying the idea of ludonarrative dissonance to game audio, Michiel Kamp discusses ludomusical dissonance in terms of Heideggerian semiotics and what he refers to as “broken signs.”16 Broken signs produce moments of ludomusical dissonance in which a change in musical signification does not seem to accompany a change in game state. According to Kamp, this dissonance is evident in a musical cue heard in the celestial Gardens of Hope in Diablo III (2012). Kamp observed that, as he moved his character across a bridge in the heavenly setting, “two ‘epic’-sounding tutti chords” sounded with a “portentous quality to them that didn’t quite fit the routineness” of hacking through “trash mobs.”17 As an avid game player, Kamp expected the narrative implications of these tutti chords to be accompanied by a grandiose gameplay event. When they weren’t, he was left wondering what the bridge cue meant.

The Problem with Midna's Lament

In the case of Midna’s Lament, musical signification is not “broken” in the Kampian sense. In fact, it works as designed: the shift between lament to battle music communicates Link’s relative safety. Players of the Action-Adventure genre are familiar with separate musical cues mapped to moments of relative danger and safety in gameplay. The problem with Midna’s Lament is that this musical mapping undermines the narrative stakes of the moment. Where dissonance occurs in Twilight Princess, therefore, is not with a confusion of musical signification, but with a conflict between the ludonarrative contract and ludomusical contract.

Examined above, a ludonarrative contract involves the gameplay tactics needed to progress through a game’s story. In Super Mario games, for example, this contract involves performing platforming challenges, collecting power-ups, and defeating enemies to complete each level and rescue Princess Peach. A ludomusical contract, on the other hand, involves the interaction between gameplay and musical architecture. Under this contract, music “actively communicates information that is significant for the mechanics of play.”18 When Mario collects a Super Star, an energetic musical cue plays for the power-up’s duration that communicates both Mario’s increased speed and invincibility. These contracts are broken by instances of dissonance where mechanics and fiction are at odds (as in BioShock), or where mechanics and musical signification come into conflict (as in Diablo III).

Both contracts remain intact in Twilight Princess. The ludonarrative contract consists of the need to quickly move through Hyrule Field in order to save Midna, affirmed by the dramatic music of Midna’s Lament. The ludomusical contract involves the danger-/safety-state binary, as expected in the Action-Adventure genre. If these contracts are viewed separately, they contribute to ludonarrative and ludomusical consonance. Everything is working as it should.

When near an enemy, however, Midna’s Lament, operating as safety music, is abruptly usurped by the game’s generic battle music (see Example 2). While the narrative urgency demands that the player focus on saving Midna’s life, the battle cue instead insists that fending off enemies takes precedence. Using a term from Elizabeth Medina-Gray, the two musical cues exist in complete modular disjunction.19 Between the two musical modules, there exist no commonalities in tonality, meter, orchestration, timbre, or affect that might otherwise render their interaction smooth.20 The abrupt alternation in musical cues draws attention to the game’s modular music design. Because enemy encounters are frequent in Hyrule Field and during the ascent of Hyrule Castle’s central tower, this modular disjunction produces a whiplash effect as Midna’s Lament and the battle cue vie for dominance. As Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers note, “Music that jumps rapidly between different sections, reacting to every single occurrence in a game can be annoying or even ridiculous.”21

To test this, try jumping between the two tracks below:

The yo-yoing between lament and battle cue tears the player’s gameplay focus in two. The ludonarrative contract urges the player to focus solely on their dying companion on the one hand, while the ludomusical contract incentivizes combat on the other. In doing so, the musical architecture places narrative stakes and gameplay priorities in direct opposition.

Towards the Intentionality of Ludonarrative Dissonance

Dissonance is inevitable in video games that aim to tell a story. Operating between game mechanics and fictional worlds, video games are understood within Jesper Juul’s “half-real” framework. Game fictions are generally incomplete (not every aspect of their world is explained) and incoherent, “where the game contradicts itself or some game events cannot be explained as part of the fictional world.”22 When Mario falls in a pit and reappears at the beginning of a level in Super Mario Bros., I do not understand this as a fictional scenario in which Mario possesses the ability to reincarnate, but rather I understand this in terms of game mechanics: I have three lives—or attempts—to finish the level and I just expended one of them. As such, games with fictional worlds have an inherent and largely unproblematic dissonance that can be explained through game rules.

The question, then, is not whether to avoid dissonance in games, but how to use it effectively. When unintended, ludonarrative contradictions undermine immersion: self-interested gameplay challenges the perception of selfless characters, broken musical signs lead to narrative confusion and gameplay disruption, and interruptive battle music erodes the stakes of emotionally fraught scenes.

Designed intentionally, though, dissonance can be a powerful expressive tool. When traveling through Winters, a snowy area in the world of EarthBound (1994), the player faces challenging enemies on the one hand, and hears festive music on the other. This seems to be a broken sign: when the music communicates holiday cheer, why must the player be on guard? This ludomusical dissonance, however, is reflective of the game’s competing narrative themes of innocence and corruption. The childlike glee of exploring a winter wonderland and celebrating the holidays is deliberately contrasted against disturbing realities that encroach upon it.

The issue with Midna’s Lament is not the presence of ludonarrative or ludomusical dissonance, per se, but in its unintentionality. In fact, exempting the typical safety-danger mappings would itself present a conflict between soundtrack and genre, according to Kamp’s definition: “Ludomusical dissonance, then, is a particular kind of ludic experience that arises out of (sub)genre expectations in a historical context of ever-changing scoring practices.”23 Twilight Princess allows its genre-specific musical logic to assert itself in a moment when its exception would better suit the narrative. When the modular system shifts between Midna’s Lament and battle music the same as it would in any other scenario, it maintains the routineness of enemy encounters in the midst of an extraordinary episode.

Bibliography

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• Collins, Karen. Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• Elferen, Isabella van. “Analysing Game Musical Immersion: The ALI Model.” In Ludomusicology: Approaches to Video Game Music, edited by Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, and Mark Sweeney, 32–52. Sheffield, UK, and Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2016.
• Fritsch, Melanie and Tim Summers. “Creating and Programming Game Music: Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers, 59–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• Hocking, Clint. “Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock: The Problem of What the Game is About.” Click Nothing (blog). October 7, 2007. https://clicknothing.com/2007/10/07/ludonarrative-d/
• Kamp, Michiel. Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
• ———. “Ludomusical Dissonance in Diablo III.” In Music in the Role-Playing Game: Heroes & Harmonies, edited by William Gibbons and Steven Reale, 131–45. New York: Routledge, 2020.
• Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011 [2005].
• Medina-Gray, Elizabeth. “Meaningful Modular Combinations: Simultaneous Harp and Environmental Music in Two Legend of Zelda Games.” In Music in Video Games: Studying Play, edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, 104–21. New York: Routledge, 2014.
• Seraphine, Frédéric. “Ludonarrative Dissonance: Is Storytelling About Reaching Harmony?” Frédéric Seraphine (blog). September 2, 2016. https://www.fredericseraphine.com/index.php/2016/09/02/ludonarrative-dissonance-is-storytelling-about-reaching-harmony/.
• Whalen, Zach. “Play Along: An Approach to Videogame Music.” Game Studies 4, no. 1 (2004).
• Zagal, José P. Ludoliteracy: Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Games Education. Halifax: ETC Press, 2010.

Ludography

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• 2K Boston and 2K Australia. BioShock. Various platforms. Music by Garry Schyman. Novato, CA: 2K, 2007.
• Ape Inc. & HAL Laboratory. EarthBound. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1994.
• Blizzard Entertainment. Diablo III. Various platforms. Music by Russel Brower, Derek Duke, Edo Guidotti, Laurence Juber, Joseph Lawrence, and Glenn Stafford. Irvine: Blizzard Entertainment, 2012.
• Nintendo EAD. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Nintendo GameCube and Wii. Music by Toru Minegishi and Asuka Ota. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2006.
• Team Cherry. Hollow Knight: Silksong. Various platforms. Music by Christopher Larkin. Adelaide, AU: Team Cherry, 2025.