Ludo-Narrative Dissonance is a pretentious term to refer to the dissonance that sometimes occurs between the story of a game and its gameplay.
This term was originally created due to a serious misunderstanding on the part of a game reviewer, but it’s useful nonetheless.
Basically, sometimes when you’re playing a game, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the story of the game (as it is being told) and the gameplay…or how you’re playing it.
An obvious example would be a game where the primary gameplay loop is killing heavily-armed opponents. If you go through most of the game having no issues…but then the player character has trouble dealing with one guy in a cutscene, that causes some dissonance. Or the opposite could be the case too: you have a lot of trouble during the gameplay, but then your character effortlessly dispatches opponents in a cutscene.A)
It’s a relatively common issue and, as far as I can tell, has gotten worse over the past few years.