Hi. My name is Thomas Baker. I am, among other things, an avid gamer, a freelance writer and editor, an integration aide and a reasonably human being.
No, that's not a typo - I'm an editor, remember?
I was playing through Bioshock, a game recently released by Looking Gla- err, Irrational Gam- err, 2K Boston, and I felt like I had enough opinions on it to bother starting up a blog.
So that's basically what this blog will be for - me venting my gaming spleen.
Bioshock is being hailed all across the vast expanses of the Internet as a game that advances gaming as an art form - it's supposed to combine an involving plot, a cohesive visual aesthetic and solid, enjoyable action gameplay. It's also supposed to present the player with moral dilemmas that require deep consideration, and which are intended to challenge the player's values and preconceptions about gaming, and possibly humanity.
Bioshock is also being given insane ratings: 5/5, 98/100 and A+++A+. The current average of all review scores for the PC version, according to www.gamerankings.com, is 95.6/100 - phenomenal.
Bioshock was dubbed the spiritual successor to System Shock 2 as soon as it was announced, and SS2 was good enough that I married it and had several of its babies. Hence, from the day Bioshock's existence was made known to the public, I've been sitting around, wearing a bib and waiting for its release. When the demo came out I damn near brained myself with excitement. I sat watching it transfer, twitching and laughing nervously. My hype-gland was visibly throbbing.
I'm sure you get the picture - I was looking forward to this game. And don't get me wrong: I've purchased the full version via Steam, and I've played the first couple of hours, and I freaking love it. But in my eyes it's failed on a few vital points.
SPOILER WARNING (although if you've played the demo you'll already have witnessed the elements of Bioshock that I'm about to discuss, so soldier on if that's the case)
The game starts with your character's plane crashing near a surface-level entrance to Rapture, the underwater city that plays host to the game proper. That's not my concern - it's a fairly feasible way for the character to end up in the game's environment. This sequence is done so beautifully - I didn't take control of the character for some time because I thought I was still watching a cut scene - that I really don't mind the "Oh my, that's convenient" factor.
No, my major concern is that you're plunged into a very foreign environment inhabited by genetically modified freaks, called Splicers, and when you first come across a Plasmid - one of the gene-warping products available in the city of Rapture - the assumption is made that the player wants to leap headfirst into this DNA-corrupting lark. You're forced to use the Plasmid in order to open a door; the decision is made for you.
To rub chilli paste into the wound, gaining access to the Plasmid's juicy power-up actually requires you to take a syringe the size of a kitten and stab it into your arm. Despite the exceptionally unpleasant nature of such an act, your character knows exactly what to do, and doesn't hesitate in doing so.
The crux of my complaint is this: the developers don't give you the option, and they don't explain why. They give you options, such as which Plasmids to use and what items to buy, etc., but the assumption these options ride on is that you opted to screw with your own genetic code in the first place. The core of the diversity of gameplay rests on that assumption. For a game that supposedly challenges you to make moral and ethical decisions, that seems like a glaring oversight to me.
Beyond that, there's the frustration I feel about how the Splicers don't use the Plasmids that are readily available to you, and logically also to them. Looting their bodies will sometimes yield Eve Hypos, which you use to replenish your Plasmid ammo. Why are they carrying such things when they don't even use Plasmids themselves?
I won't comment on the presence of the Big Daddies and the Little Sisters, because I've only played a couple of hours of the game - their origin might be explained later. I'm worried that it won't, and that they'll just be interesting game mechanics instead of an integral part of a convincing fantasy world, but I'll reserve judgement.
It may seem like I'm nitpicking, but Bioshock was supposed to be an exercise in philosophy and human understanding, as well as a first-person shooter - so far I'm afraid it's been largely the latter.
A bloody good latter, mind you.
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Thomas Baker's game design blog.
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15 comments:
What would you suggest would be a way to make this need of the game- to pump yourself full of junk, a CHOICE in the game?
WOuld you have liked to have met an enemy you couldnt beat unless you took the drugs? Or read a manual explaining what they were and that you needed them?
Do you think, sometimes, that some mechanics, or vehicles in a game, just need to be force fed/accepted, and you move on?
Oh, that post was from me, Matt. :)
I wish they'd done one of three things:
a) Let the player choose how they tackle the various enemies - let them be a gene-prude and keep away from the mutating shenanigans, using good old machine guns, etc., instead, if they so wish. SS2 did this quite well, although the game's premise was quite different.
b) What you (anonymous/Matt) said: force the player to take the gene-drugs in order to survive, instead of having the player jump in the deep end of the mutant gene pool without it being obvious why.
c) Not crow so much about the degree of choice and thought-provocation they'd imbued the game with. If they just said, "It'll be atmospheric, the weapons will be varied, the AI will be impressive and you'll have a bucket of fun" then I'd be less riled. Maybe their marketing dept is to blame.
There are indeed several ways that the player could be forced to start taking Plasmids in a believable and interesting way.
A water-breathing plasmid in a room slowly filling with water, for a start.
A fire-resistant plasmid when the corrdior is raging in flame.
You've got the choice - fuck with your genetics or die.
As opposed to fuck with your genetics or look for another way around the door, if you get what I'm saying.
Regardless, all art has flaws, man. And you still haven't played through Vampire, which is odd for someone who seems so interested in ethical choice and good/evil mechanics and so forth.
Whether art can have "flaws" is dangerously subjective, but I guess that's what I'm implying - that Bioshock is a flawed piece of art. The aspects of Bioshock that I commented on are the ones that reduced my enjoyment of it, but they might not faze other people, and they might be a game-killer for others still.
It just bothers me that so much effort could be put into immersing the player in this beautifully realised and rendered world, and yet when you're brought face to face with the force corrupting the world there isn't any attempt made to justify why the player should willingly participate.
You're forced to be greedy, and they could fairly easily have made it a survival necessity rather than a thoughtless, default act.
Kudos to the dev's for creating art that affects me/us this much, though.
"Whether art can have "flaws" is dangerously subjective,"
I disagree.
Art can and does have flaws.
What those flaws are is subjective, and you've made a pretty good point as to this one in Bioshock.
To be forced to participate in the corrupting force for survival reasons is an interesting element. To be forced to sign away your soul for meta-game reasons? Dodgy.
I would say that games, in my experience so far, are not 'art'. They are occasionally well-written, with interesting aesthetics, they can be very atmospheric and immersing, but at the end of the day they are always about problems and thinking through them (as well as having the reflexes and coordination to effect the solutions in most cases). Games are applied logic and rule manipulation, despite the colours and flavours they come in. The choices in games are just one of the elements designed to drive along to another set of problems to solve, even if they are couched in emotion- or moral-laden language. I don't think there has ever been an experience in a game that is so engaging as to merit its elevation to the status of 'art'*.
Most commonly, moral choices in games are just signposts for 'which branch of features would you like to try?' Take Oblivion. So many choices you can make, but at the end of the day, you can follow all of the subquests, and become the master thief as well as the chief assassin as well as the savior of the realm – the moral choices are all false, nothing more than just extra 'fleshing-out' of the game-world. And in games where the game-world does change significantly based on your choices, you can just skip the actual morality by simply saving two different save slots on either choice, to experiment. And before you say that's not fair – c'mon, the mechanics of saving, and when and where you should do so, are integral to the experience of playing most games.
The only way you could have a real moral choice is if (1) you couldn't set two differently-branched save slots depending on your choice, and hence (2) were TOTALLY bound by your choices reflected in a persistent set of game-world changes based on your choice, and (the clincher, which makes both 1 and 2 moot, really), if you cared about the others you were affecting, because they were going to persist in the game-world regardless of your interaction, and you knew it. Don't know about you, but I've never played a game like that; all of the games I've played that boast moral dilemmas are just consumerist-thinking, 'pick and choose your options and acquisitions' type of deals: if you choose "good", you get access to this, if you choose bad, you no longer get this but you get that instead. Where is the late-night, nerve-wracking concern for your soul because you chose 'bad'? Where is the shiver of guilt when you consider the possible but unseen consequence of your actions? They don't exist, because, unlike the real world of moral choice, the game-world is "closed", based on rules, and its resolutions are set in advance. It all just comes down to 'how do I choose to progress to the next bit?' I reckon the only authentically moral choice in a game would have to involve other people, whose characters were going to persist regardless of whether you kept playing or not (or if the AI in games become actual AI).
I think some of the choices made by the developers of Bioshock also betray a distinct lack of imagination. Based on an experience of the demo (and hence being inconclusive at best, I guess, but that won't stop me ranting) all they have done is actually narrowed the choices that were present in System Shock 2 for sake of controlling the way in which you experience the game, while still being totally dependent on the SS2 structure. There is a very basic set of comparisons between the two games: SS2 - wake up in spaceship infested with bad things, but with a friendly voice to help you (at least in the beginning). Bioshock: get marooned in an underwater city infested with bad things, but with a friendly voice to help you(at least in the beginning). SS2 - personal diaries fill you in on the backstory. Bioshock - personal diaries fill you in on the backstory. SS2 - watch out for cameras, as they set of security alerts and attract enemies to you. Bioshock – blah blah.
Surely it wouldn't have been too hard to differentiate those two elements of the game (being introduced to the world, exercising caution around every corner, etc) in some distinctly different way. In other words, the game mechanics are very immersing and fun in and of themselves, but I feel they were a very lazy in the ideas department, partly because we've done all this before in their previous game –and partly because they could, because it's a game, and not some work of art: they know that we'll have fun anyway, even if it's not that original.
I think Joe's ideas about how they could've solved the plasmid issue are great and would be much more engaging, instead of actually disconnecting you from the experience, because the existing ones do make you think "why the hell would I do that?" instead of giving you the choice – even an ultimately illusory choice would have been better. But as for the obvious disjunction between the availability of plasmids and the enemies just not using them, that's just really sloppy, and there's no real excuse for it. It's actually pretty patronising.
Having said all that, I think you already hit on the real culprit in your response to Matt above: isn't the real problem here not that the game is a "flawed piece of art", but rather the marketing language tries to make it art when it's not, raising unfair expectations about what kind of experience one might get from it, what kind of experience the developers made, or sought to make, and could make given the limitations of the medium (as they currently stand)?
[I had this problem with the recent announcement of the features that next BiA game is going to have. They had a "fact sheet" which stated "Unprecedented character design: Lifelike characters look, talk, move and think with incredible realism...." (THINK? Ummm…) and "See and feel the blast of nearby explosions..." (so, I can expect it to come with small munitions that it sets off in my study while I play the game? cool!). "Fact" sheet indeed. Self-destructively hyperbolic nonsense if you ask me.]
I am not trying to say that games cannot be art. I am just saying that I have never experienced a game in a way which I would consider to merit referring to it that way, so far, and when it is referred to that way it misleads as to the nature of the experience, and just highlights problems, such as the dearth of ideas in the way Bioshock plays out, at least in the beginning. It should have had much more time spent on its ideas, and they hamstrung themselves by making a category error in calling it 'art'. But having said that, it certainly doesn't stop it from being a good game, or hurt its sales…
anyway, blah, the end.
p.s.
you might be interested to have a read of this: www.next-gen.biz/index.php ?
option=com_content&task=view&id
=3518&Itemid=2
*["What is art?" is, of course, an actual question for ages, and its persistence would seem to indicate that it is irresolvable – but rather than acting as a foil to the question, I would say this actually is part of its answer: it is something that resonates with experience and is not reducible to a clear moral, emotional or perceptual "point", something that can't be broken down into a schema – which a game can, because it is based on rules. That would be the difference between a painting as a work of art, say, and an illustration; a good example of the latter marks technical proficiency, but doesn't convey some resonant, meaningful experience, and it is most often based on rules, like perspective and scale and so on, whereas paintings that are deemed as 'art' are not – in fact in most cases I have think of they distinguish themselves precisely by "breaking the rules", etc.
In fact, even more tangentially, I am quite skeptical about the way games have been embraced in the contemporary arts scene; to me it smacks of a desperate attempt to (re)invigorate arts institutions by linking them to what is currently an exponentially growing site of consumption, as well as a self-legitimating practice on behalf of the hip art kids that are also avid gamers. But that's an argument for another time.]
sequels are almost invariably going to be a let-down. Flogging a dead horse until it's nothing more than a bloody pulp appears to be what gets the money flowing these days. Movies, games, wars... bad sequels are everywhere.
2 much good gramma in these postz!
It would seem Bioshock is a game intent on forcing the player into new gameplay relations. If you want to play a game that doesn't require you to shoot yourself full of modifications then you have only one choice; play another game. I know the creators have hyped Bio in a certain way, but it seems like complaining about having to make questionable moral decisions (or at least exercising somewhat limited "freewill") in Bioshock would be similar to playing Half Life 2 and not wanting to kill anything. That's just not the game it's designed to be.
The game developers have forced players into a particular kind of gameplay because that is, ultimately, the more satisfying experience.
I'm really not seeing anything new here...
Systemshock 2 had almost identical gameplay...
The gravity gun in halflife = telekenesis
fire, ice, lightning = same effects in dark messiah
flavours of ammo have been around for ever...
Its not really RPG... the inventory doesnt really exist, nor stats... just a couple of hack things.
Doom3 engine was what i was hoping for for sysshock3 and playing this its still looking like a good option.
Solid game, one of the better releases of recent times... but sooo over hyped.
-jimmy
Great atmosphere!
Dangerously Subjective:
Thanks for your epic contribution! It would take an aeon and a day to respond to all the issues you raised, but two stuck out.
1 - your idea that the only way a game could genuinely give the player moral choices is if it restricted them from being allowed to save, hence disallowing them from exploring the other choice, and forcing them to experience the consequences of their actions.
I feel this is a somewhat cynical view, in that it assumes that the player will aim to "gain" as much as they can from the choice, rather than making the choice they feel morally compelled to make. Bioshock has a sequence - numerous, actually - where the player makes a choice, and one option is obviously going to benefit the player and hurt a character in the world, while the other option benefits the other character while providing a diminished benefit to the player. By making the "good" choice you make the game harder for yourself in the long run.
I went the "good" route, and the outcome was so uplifting that I didn't feel compelled to load my game and see what the alternative was. Perhaps game developers need to provide the player with emotional benefits in place of statistical/mechanical ones in order to emulate the doing of good. It's entirely possible that the "bad" outcome would've made me feel so horrible that I would've wanted to load, or that I would have made a different choice the next time - if that's the case then I feel that the developers have gone some way to alleviating the absence of "late-night, nerve-wracking concern for your soul" that you described.
2 - "the marketing language tries to make it art when it's not" - in actual fact, Ken Levine, the lead designer, describes the game as art (http://au.gamespot.com/news/6177728.html?sid=6177728), so it's not just the marketing department. I find the "what is art?" question simultaneously fascinating, tedious, deep and meaningless. My impression of art is that it's something that someone creates in an attempt to express something significant or personal, and I think Bioshock is and does that. To me, some games feel like art and others don't - Bioshock does, a lot. It's very beautiful, in a macabre way, and I think that alone qualifies it.
Cameronronron:
Bioshock is by no means a bad sequel - it's a very fitting one. It has all the elements of its pseudo-prequel, and many more. Dangerously Subjective pointed out that seems to lack imagination in terms of the core mechanics, but it definitely captures and builds on the oppressive atmosphere and compelling gameplay of SS2. I wouldn't consider it a cash-in by any means, but - and this'll sound quite lame and rather fanboi - a labour of love.
Rodney:
It's true - the gameplay is satisfying, and if the dev's had given you the option of not jacking yourself up on genetic modifications then you'd get people complaining about the fact that you can't survive without them. My complaint is quite different - it's about the way they force you. It could have been so much more elegant - Joe described several options that would have completely satisfied me.
anonymous/Jimmy:
Yes, massively hyped, definitely, and quite derivative - but isn't it incredible? It probably depends on the sort of game you like to play and the type of gamer you are, but to me Bioshock is close to perfect - exciting, disturbing, empowering, immersive and enormously fun.
You raised good points Tom and I agree with you on them, I had precisely the same reaction to the supposed 'choice' about using the Plasmids having been taken out of my hands.
After playing through the game however (in my obsessive 'collect every diary availiable way') I found a revelation which, could with some desire to stretch it, explain precisely that problem.
"... and a reasonably human being."
Come on Tom, we all *know* you're a Time Lord! Get with the Time-Lord Pride and out with it!
https://imgur.com/gallery/5rEUxGW
GAMES ARENT FART
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