ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the counterpart to modal consonance. It looks at what it means to be dissonant within a multimodal ensemble, and its potential impact on meaning and player experience. The chapter outlines a number of examples where modal irony is used to great effect and in fact contributes to the player experience rather than taking away from it. Multimodal dissonance is best understood as a form of irony, which is to say a semiotic 'tension' between modes within an ensemble. Modal irony helps us understand the semiotic mechanisms at play in multimodal ensembles better than any other modal configuration. Multimodal dissonance works in other media before examining it within the context of videogames. Just as other figures like metaphor and metonymy can be monomodal and multimodal, so too can modal dissonance or irony. Modal irony represents a hitherto under-theorized multimodal configuration.
