It’s been a solid two years after Bioshock first wowed me with underwater cities, open-ended gameplay, and a ludicrous amount of Ayn Rand references. That’s been enough time for me to casually romp my way through Rapture a half dozen times, and read The Fountainhead about….oh who am I kidding? I don’t read Ayn Rand. Never will. I just know Bioshock really references it a lot. And by a lot, I mean enough that I might just read Atlas Shrugged to see if anyone has Insect Swarm 3.
Where was I?
Oh right…the game.
It’s funny that I spent a whole paragraph referencing a book to introduce Bioshock. Funny, and probably appropriate. I’m not one for that whole ‘Are Games Art?’ debacle. I think it’s a stupid thing to argue, since any form of media has creative forces behind it, and thus, artistic statements are made. All games could be considered an artistic expression on some level, no matter how shallow the endeavor. The trick comes in trying to decide what qualifies a game as a shining example of its kind.
Books, for example, have a wide variety of outlets that strive for different goals. Children’s books are not the same as cookbooks, and a Dean Koontz novel does not strive to be high-brow literature. The same is true for games. The Mario series carries about the same emotional weight as a Dr. Seuss picture book. The Resident Evils, Final Fantasies and Metal Gears of the world are basically Japanese producers trying to haphazardly slap all the crazy imagery of a Miyazaki movie into an interactive format. And then we come to Bioshock. When I first played the game late last year, I held the opinion that games needed to go a long way to tell a truly compelling story from beginning to end.
Bioshock changed my mind.
The thing that it does right, and that so many other games do so very, very wrong, is that successfully weds the advantages of an interactive medium with the central themes of the story. The story itself is only so compelling. In fact, most of it is downright silly. Something about an underwater city founded by an egomaniacal real estate tycoon and then changed forever by the introduction of DNA enhancements that fundamentally change man for the better…and for the worse. It’s vaguely familiar territory tread by many a video game hero before whatshisface in Bioshock.
What makes this one different is that one of the central mechanics of the game, the heart-wrenching decisions to save little girls lives by pressing Y or murder them by pressing X, actually feeds right into the game’s central theme: That you have a choice. A man chooses. A slave obeys. That sort of thing.
Granted, while the moralistic stylings here don’t go very deep (the plot doesn’t play out much differently whether you decide to save or murder the Little Sisters), the whole package is put together so effectively that choices do seem to matter more than they do. So help me if I didn’t feel a genuine pang of guilt every time I slugged Mr. Bubbles in the face with a round of electric buck.
That, to me, was the compelling aspect of the story. Movies and books develop a link between the audience and the characters by developing empathy. I always found it odd that video games tried to do the same thing in the same way. Bioshock got the formula right, mostly by throwing the formulas out the window. Instead of forcing the player through rigid cutscenes to forcibly insert emotional feeling, it simply says:
Hey dummie. You don’t need to feel for the character. You ARE the character. Do what you will. Learn as much backstory as you want. Or don’t. Save the Little Sisters. Or don’t.
That’s the bees knees, homie. And to think, it accomplished all that emotional gravitas without any prominent voice talent leading the way. After Bioshock, I explored a post-apocalyptic wasteland in Fallout 3, and hung my head in shame after Liam Neeson told he was disappointed to hear I became a cannibal.
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