Max Payne 3 is aware of its dissonance, and even has some fun with it, as though in the hope that acknowledging a problem’s existence might be mistaken for addressing it. Max Payne 3, quite possibly the most ludonarratively dissonant video game ever made, amounts to 12 and a half hours of game fiction and game action throwing empty champagne bottles at each other. Some designers and critics regard ludonarrative dissonance as a core problem in modern game design. Ludonarrative dissonance, a term first coined by the game designer Clint Hocking, arises whenever a video game’s fiction says one thing and its gameplay says an opposite thing. Max Payne 3‘s hero is simultaneously a barely functioning alcoholic and one of the most sublimely gifted killing machines in video-game history. Three seconds after claiming to be an incompetent failure, however, Max is leaping in slow motion from a speedboat while shooting an incoming RPG out of the sky and then single-handedly massacring an entire army of Kevlar-encased Brazilian commandos. I’m a bad joke.” Max’s lines usually arrive in dark bursts of Chandleresque narration, much of which is enjoyably overwrought: “I kept moving toward the signs of life - rubbing them out as I went along.” James McCaffrey, 1 the actor who portrays Max, growls every line as though he’s just knocked back a shot of some liver-annihilating rotgut. “I ain’t slippin’,” he says at one point. Over and over again in Max Payne 3, Max tells us he’s old, and fat, and rusty, and is in over his head, and doesn’t know what he’s doing, and can’t imagine how he’s going to get out of his current predicament. It doesn’t help that Max is an alcoholic and a prescription-pill addict, but I’d probably drink, too, if I had as many ghosts clanking around in my past. Max freely admits that he’s bad at his job. If you’ve hired Max Payne to protect you, know that you’ve got roughly an hour left to live. It turns out that Max is worse at bodyguarding than he was at police work. In Max Payne 3, Max has relocated to São Paulo, Brazil (which he calls, in a line guaranteed to offend everyone, “Baghdad in G-strings”), to work as the bodyguard to a family of real-estate scumbags. In previous Max Payne games (and one extraordinarily ill-advised movie) Max worked as an NYPD police officer with an unusual knack for getting everyone he loves - wife, baby, girlfriend - killed. Max Payne is, among many other things, really bad at his job.
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