Letters from Days Past Part I: Bioshock
So while I’m thinking about writing stuff about games again, I’ve been going through my old stuff and reminding myself why I used to write. I’m actually proud of a lot of what I’ve done on this blog, which is surprising. What was more surprising was being unable to find articles I knew I had written. I distinctly remember writing the below bit about Bioshock, for example, but I cannot for the life of me remember where on the Internet it’s got to. Luckily, I kept soft copies on the hard drive, so I’m now able to post it for your reading pleasure, along with a few other finished pieces I’ve found.
The following was originally written 2 May, 2009.
A stream of water breaks over an outspread palm of leaves, trickles like glass down a metal bulkhead overgrown with ivy, and pools at your feet. The pool swells. It creeps over the floor then down a small flight of stairs and there makes another pool. Here the water stops to accumulate.
If it hasn’t occurred to you before stepping into Arcadia, it certainly does here: Rapture is beautiful. And despite the melodramatic narrative of Andrew Ryan, Atlas, and Jack that takes place within, it must also occur to you at some point that the main character in Bioshock is not the player character or even Andrew Ryan but Rapture itself.
Rapture, you see, is a utopian, underwater palace. But it is also a place where noisy vending machines chatter loudly at passers-by, and where hospital rooms are filled with carnage that, you can be sure, was wholly effected by nurses and surgeons. It is a place where you can stare out at a turqoise sea in one room, and a blood-red autumnal hell in another.
It was Rapture that players fell in love with a year and a half ago, not the Big Daddies or masked splicers or Plasmid powers, and it was so enthralling that Bioshock became a timeless classic almost overnight. It is a feat not to be underplayed, even if the constituent gameplay elements of Bioshock are not so revolutionary. In fact, little occurs in Bioshock that can not also be found in System Shock 2, and special powers like lightning and fire, while nifty, are hardly earth-shattering. No, there’s nothing really wrong with Bioshock’s gameplay, but the gameplay is not what imprinted the game upon the collective minds of millions of players either. Rapture did that.
Yet all is not right in Rapture, and I don’t just mean its citizens have all become Adam-crazed crackheads. In fact, that’s just the problem, for no sooner do you set foot in this amazing world then a bunch of hooligans set on you like bees on honey. And that’s the end of any peaceful progress.
It’s rather disheartening to be in a world so consistent and so rich that provides only one means of communication between its characters, namely bullets. To put it another way: here we have a world steeped in the philosophies of morality to such an extent that its floors are painted with phrases like, “Aesthetics are a moral imperative.” It’s a world in which you hear and see Ryan and Frank Fontaine and graffiti artists engaging in a dialogue about the role of the individual in society, the role of society in the world, and the role of morality in the world – and the only thing you get to do in it is shoot things. It’s a thematic dissonance that is altogether tragic.
A microcosm for this problem occurs at the transition into the game’s final act. There you encounter a plot twist so unnerving, so damn perfect, that it literally explains everything that had happened before. It’s a one-of-a-kind plot twist actually accounts for the cliched video game logic of mindlessly following your mission in a way that neither breaks the fourth wall nor parodies itself. It’s genius, and a twist of this type can very likely never be done again.
Then, irony of ironies, you get to the last act of the game, an act filled with every possible video game cliché you could imagine: an extended fetch quest sequence, an escort mission, a diabolical and thoroughly unrealistic super villain, it’s all here. So Bioshock becomes just another video game literally on the heels of it superceding every other video game both narratively and existentially.
It’s such a missed opportunity. Consider what we’re talking about here: thematic dissonance, the nature of morality, the existential signifiance of being a player character in a static, unchanging adventure. Most game criticisms get stuck in mud about level design, player control, or even gameplay, because most games can’t even get beyond those steps. Bioshock is such a sound experience that it actually provides us the opportunity to talk about things relevant to the human experience, and if it undercuts its message now and then, well, so do some of the best novels. The game is still, at the end of the day, a watershed moment for video game design.
Let’s see where it goes from here.
