BioShock is more a story-centric experience than a mechanic-centric one, and by this I mean that we play the game not to slaughter Big Daddies because they pose tactical challenges, not because plasmids vary our gameplay, but because we value the story and are made invested into the outcome of its actors. And this means that BioShock is a great, single-flash experience, to be consumed at the player’s own pace and then set aside so it may accrue its warranted accolades.
I must say that I really enjoyed BioShock. Reviewers will continually use it in value-comparisons of the single-player experience, and they should because the pleasure of its play weighs so much. BioShock juggles many elements to reach success, which it does through engaged, purposeful gameplay and thematic design.
Linearity
Counter-Strike and the Red Alert series are mechanic-centric games. Even though there’s story to the latter, and even though it has an articulated single-player experience, the heart of Red Alert is multiplayer, and so the story exists for branding purposes, loosely existing for the sake of narrative.
BioShock’s divine element is a story that’s both morally-charged and realistic in its value judgements, which lifts up the experience rather than drags it under. BioShock’s universe, defined in the opening cinematic, becomes a measuring stick of plausibility for play and narrative within the game. The story bounces well within these boundaries that are quickly established before significant player-driven action takes place: a design choice that shepherds our expectations early on and that apologizes (in a way) for play confined in a relatively straight line.
But words like “linear” and my broad assessments of what drives a game don’t really add much to an analysis of BioShock’s design, nor do they openly congratulate BioShock for its merits. I’ve got this saying and I think it deftly applies to any successful experience, particularly here:
Creativity is not limitless thought; it’s the application of free-thought relative to the circumstances set forth for the experience.
BioShock defines its boundaries, knows its boundaries, and fills that space with salient episodes that dull the often-fatal linear knife. This assures me that BioShock’s story will reside in the etchings of video game nostalgia, which in my book is an earned position and shouldn’t be used jocularly.
Experiences like BioShock require a certain minimum of context to pull the player through its technology features. Mechanic-centric games can use play or the technology itself to bear more of this weight. I distinguish this because one can easily leverage value from a story-centric experience through linearity. There’s nothing wrong with linearity when it’s used as a tool and not a crutch, which BioShock uses authoritatively and with thematic purpose (read the final Ryan episode). That said, prevalent story conceits such as the mono-hero and the crossing of danger-thresholds (far past the realms of comfort so that the hero faces overwhelming odds that are both physical and, in BioShock’s case, moral) are conceits that generally require an order to their unfolding. This order allows us to understand the severity of a challenge based on its position within the structure. Defeating Ryan is of course not as structurally important as defeating Fontaine (although one begets the other), and the order of their respective appearances reminds us of this hierarchy.
Myth
In BioShock, as in most games, the structure is based on the myth. Since myths are imbedded in the human psyche, we understand when the form is bunked or when the defining elements are not presented according to genre-specific characteristics. Even if we can’t articulate these requirements in the moment of our encounter, we can still sense them and when they’re being bent for proper use, just as we can tell when they’ve been shaken under the arm of inexperience or laziness, which is thankfully something that BioShock doesn’t do.
According to the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, myths come from human’s need to make sense of his world, “to resolve cultural dilemmas”. The structure of myths embody these dilemmas, which can be seen as the pairing of opposites such as good versus bad, or, as in the case of BioShock, blind idealism versus self-centered practicality. The linear design presents these tensions in legible order, and thus we innately understand how BioShock will unfold just as we understand the importance of the forces at play. But so much adherence to form can seemingly make some narratives, particularly myth-based ones, seem stifled or uninspired. This is a challenge that every story must face, and BioShock bests this challenge by texturing itself through the values that drive character actions, through the glossy yet cracked sheen of a 1950s nostalgia piece, by juxtaposing the compassion of a Big Daddy toward his Little Sister against the Daddy’s physical stature and his aggressiveness toward perceived threats. These elements, particularly the setting, still rings fresh to me even though I’ve beat BioShock and even though BioShock 2 has been out for a while.
Deceptive Details
Details are what give any good story individual flavor while allowing a linear design to sustain its goal of comprehensibility. We are deceived by Fontaine, yet the reasons for his action seem plausible, if not a little flat. Even though he’s the antagonist of the story and even though he’s a caricature of the arch-villain, Fontaine’s push for power is simply an extension of his self-centered nature, which is to a degree empathetic. Some of his speech is written and delivered hyperbolically, and this polarizes him as a character, but this style also allows us to clearly re-define the lines of opposition once the plot shifts the story. No room is left for ambivalence, and that’s probably good considering how close to the story’s end that Fontaine’s full-fledged appearance occurs.
Tension doesn’t float well without proper reason, and plenty of games sentimentalize tension by shoe-horning dramatic episodes into the story despite proper foreground work and context. I wrote about the Sister-Daddy mechanic and the claustrophobic, suffocating theme that surfaces both in specific episodes (read Professor Langford’s demise) and in the overall sense of Rapture as a setting. These are examples of dramatic episodes that the developers rightfully earned within their narrative.
To a certain degree, BioShock’s plot shift only confirms its use of enclosure as a tensive element, which I guess sort of makes it okay as an anomaly of the narrative. At first I found it trite because my personal studies have made me resistant to when an author doesn’t fully disclose events to his reader. But the more I consider it — the more time I put between completing the game and writing this piece — the more it seems like a relevant and successful choice because the plot twist shifts tension from our relationship with Ryan to ours with Fontaine, thus villainizing us as the player to a certain degree, which rounds out the protagonist — something that even RPGs rarely do with much success. I mention it here because, like details, the shift is a way to offset the predictability of a linear design, which is something BioShock does with more or less success. Linearity, while a powerful tool to pace and convey story, must not be too harsh else it will overwhelm the experience. We’re dealing with thousands of years of oral and written human stories that pervade humans regardless of their gender, ethnicity, creed, etc. There’s a fine balance between keeping form and remaining aloof. And to be successful, each new story experience must find their appropriate position on this spectrum, checking its honesty-meter to ensure that it aligns with the story’s need and not the writer’s goal of unpredictable events, which may sacrifice clarity of message for entertainment.
Now, I’ve loosely talked about character details and the plot shift as a way to skirt pitfalls of a linear design. Another way is by revisiting certain sites, or, if you’ll allow me the term, staging areas. In the Medical Pavilion we see branching paths to explore, but we must traverse the same staging area before we proceed to Neptune’s Bounty. To run these halls multiple times breaks up the treadmill of straight-forward progress. It’s a tool more so than a developmental shortcut, which impresses me because it’s both complementary to the story and it’s an efficient use of developmental resources. As a narrative, BioShock must enforce control for successful delivery, but to string us along with unhindered and constant progress is to fold back the facade of what makes the fiction real and engrossing in that very moment. When revisiting staging areas such as the Medical Pavilion or the forums of Arcadia, we are allowed a certain illusion of independence, which becomes more palpable than the actual narrative. Linearity is then allowed to mutate beneath contained gameplay, beneath our direct vision. What was linear reads of free-will and the promise of fulfilled wanderlust. But this illusion is not too strong, not like sandbox games such as Fallout 3. Instead, BioShock paces its narrative so that it can create a sense of purpose through the pairing of the opposing principals that I mentioned earlier.
The Plot Shift
I’m no fan of plot shifts but I did have an ah-ha moment during this one, and it wasn’t because of how the politics change within Rapture but because of how the theme almost justifies BioShock’s use of the shift to compliment its linear experience.
I’m so highly conscious of structure that I can often miss the details that individualize stories. Structure is how we as consumers (or gamers, readers, whatever) understand how to engage a new world before us. It’s familiar for a reason, and that familiarity draws us closer to things that the real world are ignorant of but are essential in this created fiction. I once saw structure as an unneeded crutch, but my opinions have changed over the years. That’s both the wrong use and wrong understanding of proper structure within a narrative. Structure is the straw through which we suck story. When not pressed against how a story is delivered, we may better sympathize with its characters, which is very relevant if we are to give a damned about the outcome of the loose ends that dangle near a story’s climax.
The plot shift, in general, allows a new jolt of freshness into a narrative whose end we’ve already solved before completion. Granted, it’s so commonplace that we quickly know the succeeding end too, but the shift allows a break in linearity, and it is most successful when the context for that shift is relative, not occasional. The shift, being a deviant of the standard linear narrative, is also an anomaly through which we can understand the consequences of Rapturian life. It underscores the misalignment of ideals that, taken alone, seem purposed and right-minded, but within the context of a larger social function just simply don’t work. To Rapturians, Rapture’s demise signals the failure of their aspirations, the chances that they took, their work toward an evolved society. That this was either flawed from the outset or that it was undermined by Fontaine is of less concern to us. The shift is a narrative manifestation of Rapture’s lost potential. And that, precisely, is why it’s relevant.
