james’ opinion

In my long and adoring entry about Panzer Dragoon Saga a few weeks ago, I mentioned a particular creepy postmodern twist it half-shares with Bioshock, or would half-share if Bioshock actually went through with it, which it didn’t. In fact, I am not altogether sure if the creepy postmodern twist Bioshock hints at even occurred to the developers in the way I interpret it. Whether intentional or not, I feel it nonetheless highlights an interesting and mostly unexplored area of game design and the curious relationship between player and game. (Spoilers follow, if you are the kind of person to heed such warnings.)

Bioshock, if you don’t know, was one of the more successful games of 2007, selling surprisingly well and pleasing critics and fans alike. It’s a non-linear first-person shooter with role-playing elements, set in a fairly bizarre underwater utopia-gone-wrong with creepy art-deco art design and insane jazz flappers who want to kill you. There was, altogether, a lot of imagination and love poured into it, which made it painful for me to dislike it.

And, pleased as I am that something so bravely not involving space marines or World War 2 was met with such a strong reception, dislike Bioshock I did. In fact, I had a very peculiar negative reaction to it. Usually bad games just bore or frustrate me, but Bioshock invoked something else, a strange, more vital kind of displeasure. The art direction, though creative, was weirdly sickly and cartoonish in execution, and its unrelentingly grisly mood started to seriously depress me after a few hours. (Naturally, I understand that a dark atmosphere is intended to evoke feelings of unease, but even scary, ugly art should be nonetheless beautiful, I think— see the works of HR Giger, or Cormac McCarthy, or David Lynch— and Bioshock just isn’t beautiful.) By the time I finished the game, I was experiencing a weird nauseous fatigue, as if I’d spent too long on a delayed flight or sat through all three High School Musicals consecutively (there are three of them, right?). This is to say nothing of the various mechanical issues the game has— the clumsy technique of delivering plot information via voice recordings inevitably muffled by action sequences, the ambiguous upgrade choices with no indication of which is best (a problem characteristic of western RPGs), the dumbed-down hacking and inventory systems recycled from System Shock and Deus Ex. But all those problems pale in comparison to the curious psychosomatic reaction the game provoked in me. To this day the sight of plumbing still makes me feel a bit queasy.

But all that’s beside the point. I think the most interesting failure of Bioshock— and I am aware that I am unusual in claiming it has any particular failures at all, but hey, that’s James’ Opinion for you— is in that creepy postmodern twist. If you don’t know already, the twist, detailed chronologically, goes something like this:

So you’re this guy, Jack, and you’re on a plane, and it crashes into the ocean. You survive the crash and find an entrance to Rapture, an undersea city. Things have gone badly wrong for the once-utopian Rapture: its citizens have turned into roaming psychopaths and the place has sprung more than a few leaks. But you have a friend in the form of Atlas, who gives you directions via a radio. He fulfils that classic dual videogame role of game tutor and plot motivator, telling you where to go and what to do, which is useful in a non-linear game like Bioshock. Atlas directs you to a plasmid, a kind of mad DNA-altering drug that gives its users special powers (the usual video game abilities of lightning, ice and so on), and tells you to inject yourself with it. So Jack does. This is important: Jack does, not you (the player).

In the vein of Half-Life, the entirety of Bioshock is seen through the eyes of the player character, Jack; there are no third-person scenes where you see Jack doing stuff from outside his perspective, ala Halo. Done well— i.e., by Valve— I find this a very powerful device. But Bioshock undermines the conceit by frequently taking control from the player and giving Jack a mind of his own. (A mind of his own: this, also, is important.) One minute you’re walking around as Jack, making your own decisions; the next you’re twiddling your thumbs while Jack walks around doing stuff of his own accord. I don’t like it when games do this. It’s inconsistent, counter-intuitive, and frustrating. What’s the deal here, Bioshock? Is Jack his own guy, like Solid Snake, or am I Jack, like Gordon Freeman? (It turns out Bioshock has an answer to this, though it is, to my mind, an unsatisfactory one. I’ll get to that.)

So: the moment you walk over to the plasmid, Jack stabs the massive glass syringe full of gaudily-coloured DNA-altering nuclear juice right into his arm and hits the plunger. He does this entirely without player intervention. Apart from the frustrating lack of player control, Jack’s eagerness to go along with this whole DNA-altering idea doesn’t seem quite sensible. The sequence would have been better handled if the player had to use the plasmid to progress (e.g., defeating some environmental obstacle), which would force the player to make the decision himself (via going into the inventory and selecting it, or whatever). That would have removed both the frustrating lack of player control and the frank strangeness of Jack’s hunger for syringe action. But Bioshock is full of moments like these. Atlas asks you to lower your weapon, and Jack does so, completely without player prompt. It sucks.

But here’s the twist. It turns out that Atlas is really the villain, and he’s been manipulating you all along. That’s not a very original twist— an identical thing happens in System Shock 2, Bioshock’s precursor, and a thousand other games— but how Atlas has been manipulating you is almost (almost) clever. Jack, we learn, has been programmed via sinister hypnosis to follow any instruction tagged with the phrase “would you kindly”. (Examples: “Would you kindly pick up that shortwave radio?” “Now, would you kindly find a crowbar or something?” “”Head over to Fontaine Fisheries when you’re ready, would you kindly?”) The climax comes when Alex sends you after Andrew Ryan, Rapture’s founder: “Now would you kindly go to Ryan’s office and kill the son of a bitch?”

In what would have been a spectacularly ingenious commentary on the nature of video games had Bioshock been just a little smarter about it, Ryan, confronted by Jack, says: “In the end, what separates a man from a slave? Money? Power? No. A man chooses, a slave obeys […]Was a man sent to kill, or a slave?” He begins to taunt Jack: “Sit, would you kindly? Stand… would you kindly? Run! Stop! Turn round.” Jack helplessly obeys all these instructions like a trained dog. Finally, Ryan hands him a golf club and instructs Jack to “kindly” kill him with it. Jack obediently does so. Between blows Ryan cries again, “A man chooses, a slave obeys!” Then he dies.

Like everything else in the game, we see all this unfold through Jack’s eyes; but like numerous other occasions, the player has no say in the matter. The entire sequence is exempt from player input. The reason for this, ostensibly, is that Jack is being mind-controlled. I don’t think this works. Here’s why.

First— and this is the less important part— it’s not even consistent. Bioshock contains numerous non-interactive sequences where the phrase “would you kindly” is not used, and so Jack is not, at that moment, being directly mind-controlled. (The plasmid-injection sequence is one example of this.) Some might explain these sequences as nonetheless part of a longer-term goal, which are inevitably prefaced with “would you kindly”; but if that’s so, there is no explanation for why some stages of achieving that goal are interactive and others aren’t. To take that argument to its logical conclusion, if one is to defend the non-interactive sequences as being part of Jack achieving some long-term “would you kindly” objective, then the entire game should be non-interactive, since Jack is ultimately always being mind-controlled. (This is excepting the final chapter, where Jack regains his autonomy, but who cares.)

More important, and more complicated, is the issue the mind-control twist (perhaps inadvertently) raises about the nature of video games as a medium. Games, as we all know and love/fear, are unique in that they are dependent on player interaction. (This necessary degree of non-linearity, coincidentally, is also why Roger Ebert considers video games an inferior art, but he is a sick old man and will soon die.) This has long posed interesting challenges for games (such as Bioshock) that attempt to tell stories, because stories are very hard to tell without a confident degree of authorial control. How do you write a character when there is no telling how the player will act? How do you make the star of Grand Theft Auto a sympathetic character when he has callously murdered dozens of innocent people on the way to the save point? Issues like these have yet to be definitively resolved by the video game industry, which still struggles to come up with good box blurbs, let alone complex interactive narrative arcs, but there have been some interesting attempts.

I think Valve make a pretty good job of it. I don’t want or need to discuss their system of narrative in detail here, but their method is to create environments with typically only one way to go and problems with only one solution. The Half-Life games are effectively guided tours of exciting scripted events, like a Universal Studios ride— the bridge always buckles just as you step off it, the spaceship always crashes just as you’re in the right place to see it happen. Portal, perhaps the most cherished of Valve games, strips this premise of all illusion by reducing each area to a sparse room with a button-pressing objective, an explicit artificiality appropriate for the game’s test-subject setting. By restricting the number of options available to players, the designers are able to confidently predict their actions. (People like Warren Spector argue this creates too narrow a narrative and mechanical scope, undermining the very appeal of interactive storytelling, which is fascinating, but now isn’t the time.)

The point is that all this doesn’t just apply to explicitly narrative-orientated games like Valve’s. Everything with semi-linear problem-solving design, from Mario World to Doom, requires the player to move forward into the next area if they want to advance the text. It’s not like literature, theatre or film, where the narrative is the active agent and we, the viewer, are passive, watching it happen, letting the experience roll over us. (There are theories about art and agency — does a book in the woods contain any words if no-one is around to read them? — but, again, this isn’t the time.) Video games demand we make an active contribution to the proceedings if we want the proceedings to proceed at all. If, faced with a button to the open the door to the next room, we instead run around in circles, or jump up and down, or simply lay down our controllers and weep at the futility of it all, the game world enters a state of infinite stasis, lost without our intervention. “Come on, Gordon!” Alyx prompts, staring, waiting, forever. The poor girl.

Back to Bioshock. Imagine if that final sequence had been interactive, and it was the player who was ordered to kill Ryan with the golf club, not the hypnotised Jack. (And why not? After all, the player is the hypnotised Jack.) We’ve just been told that we’re under mind control. “Kill!” orders Ryan. Well, our first urge would probably be that of defiance, or simple curiosity. What happens when we break the story by not following Ryan’s orders? What happens if we don’t kill him?

Let’s say we follow Valve’s lead here and design the environment so the player’s choices are limited. There is no exit to this room. There are no weapons available beyond the golf club Ryan has handed us. There is nowhere else to go, nothing else to do but kill Andrew Ryan. This is not particularly different from the environment the scene actually takes place in, so this wouldn’t require any dramatic redesigns. But Ryan’s script would have to be altered to accommodate the player’s hesitation. Ryan would have to know, just as the designer knows, that his death at the hands of the player is inevitable. He would be happy to wait, and he would not have to wait long, because the player would have no choice in the matter. There would be no way to progress in the game without doing as the player has been ordered to do; the player must either obey or turn off the game.

This is no different, mechanically, from having to jump over that first pipe in Mario Bros in order to progress. What makes it different— narratively and thematically— is the issue of mind-control. “A man chooses, a slave obeys!” are the final words of Andrew Ryan. So is the player choosing, or obeying? When a game makes a demand of us— kill this boss, get that key— are we “obeying”? What “choice” do we have in a limited, Valve-style environment, anyway? What choice do we have in jumping over that first green pipe?

When I played the (non-interactive) Ryan-killing scene in Bioshock, I thought its developers had achieved something almost, nearly, sort of a bit profound. Everything I’d done so far in the game had all been the result of the game manipulating me into doing it! My God, I’m such a pawn! Am I playing the game or is the game playing me? If they’d pulled it off, the ramifications would have been totally new to the medium, a thought-provoking and potentially dangerous new commentary on the strange, still-developing relationship between games and players that would have made everyone think very hard about things for a while. But Bioshock doesn’t so much mind-control the player as it does mind-control Jack, which undoes the whole thing so comprehensively it’s difficult to know if it was even there to begin with. If I’m honest, I’m betting the creepy postmodern ramifications didn’t even occur to the game’s developers. I imagine they thought it was merely a neat plot twist. Which is a damn shame.

Still, there are other a few games that explore similar ideas more meaningfully. Shadow of the Colossus asks the player to defeat a series of roaming giants, a David-and-Goliath-style quest not uncommon to gaming (it’s what most boss fights amount to). But it becomes slowly apparent that these giants don’t necessarily deserve to die, and in fact many of them don’t even make any particular effort to defend themselves. The hero’s actions might be more selfish and destructive than noble, and indeed by the credits he’s become a pretty tragic figure. This is powerful not only because it is surprising but also because it is us, we, I, you, the player, who is going around murdering the poor colossi. We have no choice in the matter. But it is not us who murders Ryan in Bioshock, and so our hands are clean.