Game Play: BioShock Narrative

There are times when I see Ebert's point.

But first, this post is for people who have finished BioShock. If you haven't - there be spoilers.

So, back to our old friend Ebert - who threw down the gauntlet some time ago that games are, at best, a troublesome form of art. While I don't agree with him, and still don't, games like BioShock exist as a kind of sample of the trouble games have as narrative.

Firstly let's dispel one of the most common misconceptions people have with game narratives. A backstory is not the same as a storyline. In Doom, you start the game as a marine trapped on a Martian base with everyone else killed by a horrible experiment gone wrong. That is not the story, that is the backstory. Doom actually has a better backstory than most - in fact it had a much better backstory than most games of the time - but the actual story persists as "lone marine travels from room to room blowing crap up."

My problem with modern shooters is that most haven't progressed much more than that. Now the main mechanic is to add a goal to provide some excuse for the player to travel from point A to point B. These reasons are usually pretty artificial and once the player reaches point B - largely forgotten. Usually the most substantial character development is getting a new gun.

So while we have all these fancy graphics for rendering characters - we just don't do much of anything with them. Many writing classes will tell you that a story is essentially characters in conflict - but most game narratives never have characters complicated or rich enough to have any conflict other than pointing weapons at each other.

Which can make for a fine game, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't make for a fine story. A fine story is when you can remove all the shooting and still have something worth watching.

And backstory is important ... mystery novels for instance are mostly backstory - but there's always a tangled plot to get to that backstory. It's never as simple as breaking down a door.

BioShock tries - and in some places succeeds - to break this mold. A little bit, at least. I think the most brilliant moment in the game is when you kill Ryan because you're programmed to kill Ryan. It's almost postmodern in nature ... why do you kill him? Because you have no other choice. You have to in order to progress. And calling out the fact that Atlas has been whispering instructions in your ear and then you having little choice but to follow them ... it is a moment which excels merely in framing the typical shooter scenario into a clever frame. You just experienced a dash of character development, free of charge.

The ending though? The ending? What the hell was that?

Instead of framing anything within the game - you're submitted to a cinematic which barely makes any sense. You have no control over your actions - you simply betray the Little Sisters without any warning and then inexplicably escape into a hundred bathyspheres and ... nukes? What? Someone sent a rescue sub with nukes?

BioShock has a pretty lovely backstory - but honestly that is all for naught if it can't even arrive to a sensible conclusion. Can't even allow the player to achieve their original goal - to escape - by themselves. In the end, the player is robbed of both the experience and the narrative.

I still liked BioShock. Quite a lot. It ranks up there as one of the better shooters. Just don't try and tell me how great the story was, if you please.