You don’t really feel like a spy – the experience of Spyfall is more akin to being a baffled tourist that got on the wrong train in an intensely foreign country. Spyfall though is a game where the mechanisms are utterly at war with the conceits of the framing. The things you do in a game are as much about the narrative as everything else. There is no inherent reason why the game systems cannot be part of the storytelling and in good games that’s what they are. These are synergistic systems, not systems in opposition. It’s a somewhat flawed idea because it heavily implies that the systems (the ludic part) and the story (the narrative) are different things and that’s usually not really the case as Brenda Romero highlights in her experimental game series, ‘the mechanic is the message’.
It’s a fancy way of describing situations where the game mechanics undermine the storytelling.
There’s a dreadfully pretentious concept in gaming studies called ludonarrative dissonance. Okay, fine – it doesn’t actually matter, but this keeps me awake at nights.