BioShock 🦑

🎵 The song for this post is Beyond the Sea, by Bobby Darin. 🎵

BioShock is 17 years old. System Shock 2 is even older. It feels silly to say this, but spoiler warnings ahead. If you somehow still plan on playing these games and don't know the major story elements I'll discuss here, it is a major draw of the game and I recommend you come back later. Or proceed reading and play it as spoiled as I did.

I resigned myself to never playing the original BioShock because:

• When it came out, I wasn't playing games, I didn't have a capable PC (or own a mouse), and don't get much dopamine from playing FPSes.

• Years later I played BioShock: Infinite, and while the post I wrote was pretty middle-of-the-road, as time went on I got more and more upset at the darling critical reaction that game got vs. what I played. It felt embarassing for the medium that people went absolutely ga-ga over its clumsy racism allegories and up-its-ass multiverse plot; it seemed like a set piece and a concept that forgot to make a game.

• I read this essay on Infinite (warning it's long and gets screed-ey), and it validated my dissonance with the critical reaction.

• This post was the start of a long, long, long detour games blogging took into "ludonarrative dissonance," all thanks to BioShock.

• I already knew the big reveal!! And with all that other critical context ☝️, how good could it be now that I've already spent dozens of hours longer than its length reading about it?

But: if you and I are close, and you make me a rec, I'll take it as seriously as I want you to take my recs. Someone I'm close to strongly wanted me to experience it. On break from having a job and trying to resucitate my inner child, in January I played the 17-year old classic and its first sequel.

I have a few groupings of reactions: matching and mastering your medium (BioShock is a great example of a story that has to be a video game) while it's simultaneously pretty bad at being a game. Games and their "auteurs." Finally, aging!

I also played BioShock 2, so I wrote another post about that (most of my reactions there are about sequels).

Mastering your medium

My parents were visiting California when I started playing BioShock, and I tried describing the plot to my dad:

It's 1960 and you're the sole survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the North Atlantic. You swim to a lighthouse, but it's not really a lighthouse! It's a cover for the entrance to a secret underwater city, built by a tycoon, powered by geothermal vents. It's called Rapture, but it's really Galt's Gulch: a place built by an Ayn Rand sycophant named Andrew Ryan, meant to embody his dreams of a city totally governed by Free Market ideals, free from government parasites.

But when you arrive its gone to shit: the brightest science minds, unhindered by ethics, have discovered DNA (and how to manipulate it) earlier than we ever could in the surface world, giving people the power to augment themselves ("splicing") with a substance called ADAM. Meanwhile, the founder of the city got involved in a civil war, so the place is overrun with DNA-spliced addicts of this substance (these are the bad guys who you spend the whole game mowing down).

You get contacted by a guy named Atlas who's trying to escape with his family, and he asks if you would kindly help them escape. When Ryan (the founder), still paranoid and trying to regain control of his city after the civil war, kills Atlas's family, Atlas works with you to stop Ryan once and for all. "Would you kindly go and kill the bastard?"

Okay, pulpy fun! A beautiful art deco setting at the bottom of the ocean! "Splicing" gives your character a sci-fi pretense for what is effectively magic: by splicing your DNA you can shoot fireballs, perform telekenisis, create decoys, summon insects swarms. It's very Video Games, but it's got that sweet Mad Science setting to justify some of the elements of giving your character magic.

So Dad, do you want to hear the greatest plot twist in all of video games? Please, if you've played BioShock, pretend you haven't, and tell me how you'd react to this:

So it turns out the other faction in the civil war took the embryo from the womb of the Founder's mistress, artificially aged it to be an adult man in less than 2 years, mind controlled it with advanced hypnosis and splicing to have an entire identity and set of false memories, then sent it back to the surface, for it to live its life as their "ace in the hole" who they could call on when needed. And this is you!! You're the founder's genetic son and < 4 years old and have been mind controlled the whole time!!! Then they programmed you to always obey any command prefixed with the phrase "would you kindly," including a note on how to hijack the plane and crash it, then forget all of this. The game then shows you flashbacks of every time "Atlas" made a request starting with a "would you kindly?"

Genius, right?!? Or... completely stupid? Ken Levine somewhere:

I'm not saying this here to actually call it stupid. What surprises me about BioShock is, that in the context of playing a video game, it works, kinda? The "would you kindly" moment is iconic. If you want to see the big reveal scene (where you kill the city founder Andrew Ryan), look at all the comments from people talking about this as a foundational moment in their lives consuming arts:

There are movies that make boring novels, song lyrics that are terrible stand-alone poetry. I think, outside of playing the game, the "would you kindly" twist is dumb as hell. The plot works just fine if you're just A Guy who gets fooled by Atlas with traditional lying, without needing to be an artificially aged embryo who's mind controlled (and who's miraculously never told anything by other characters on the way, like Tanenbaum, who ostensibly was an orchestrator of the whole thing and speaking with you the whole time).

But given that you play games, there's something jarring about realizing that every bullet you've shot, every spell you cast, the cortisol flooding your system after that last firefight, were all manipulated by someone else... that's special. The "artificially aged stolen embryo who's mind controlled" doesn't make sense, but neither does a beautifully rendered underwater Art Deco city full of genehacked mutants. A story like this is dumb as hell outside a video game, but inside of one (and to give them credit: with this execution), it becomes the icon that it is. I think we can learn from that.

Stacking the Deck

One of my favorite ideas in creative composition is "stacking the deck with masterful execution." It comes, funnily enough for a BioShock post, from a blog post about Atlas Shrugged, where author John Scalzi discusses Ayn Rand's strengths as a writer (emphasis mine):

[...] that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick. Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt rather than poured into human form, this would be obvious. Oh my god, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that.

The fact that apparently a very large number of people don’t recognize Galt as the genocidal prick he is suggests a) Rand’s skill at stacking the story-telling deck is not to be discounted,

That phrase came to mind with the Would You Kindly. While it's silly and unnecessary, for it to work at all you've got to recognize how well Irrational Games stacked the deck in their execution.

More on mastering the medium: set design

I wrote about this reacting to the Tomb Raider movie, but one cool thing about video games is how they can do things that are impractical in other mediums. The following was, if I remember correctly, the most involved action shot of the Tomb Raider movie? It probably cost several million dollars to shoot and VFX these few minutes of footage:

Whereas here's one of many chase sequences in the 2013 game. Think of how hard (and dangerous!) it would be to translate all that crumbling infrastructure to film, and have a union actor and crew jump through it:

Rapture, as a set piece, is gorgeous and inspiring. It's my favorite artifact of the BioShock games, and like a kid researching space travel after Star Trek, I got so inspired I looked up how you could build an underwater city like that (answer: not bloody likely, obviously. My favorite treatment is Rose Eveleth of Flash Forward, but there are quicker YouTube videos too). On the theme of mastering the medium, it's really, really hard to imagine a better setting suited for the medium of video games, or a better medium for this setting and story.

Forgot to actually be a game

One thing people don't really rave about: the gameplay. I've never heard of people raving about how tight the shooting was, or the level design (from a gameplay perspective, not a set piece). I would agree with its forgettability:

• The "harvest or save Little Sisters?" isn't really a hard choice for the teddy bear gifts Tanenbaum leaves you on the "save" path. It's supposed to be like "get less ADAM?" but due to these gifts, you really get almost the same amount saving them as you would harvesting them. Maybe that's the authors Making A Very Important Point but it frankly made the game way less interesting to me after the 20% mark. I wish I struggled more for being good.

• Most of the weapons aren't that useful, and most of your weapon switching is informed by ammo drops, not tactical choices (or serving fun). Most of the plasmids aren't useful enough to justify their EVE cost, or general enough to justify having to swap them.

• The hacking minigame is so repetitive for how useful hacking is. I must have done it 500+ times over the course of my run? Felt like padding.

• The game sets the weapon hotkeys and doesn't really let you reset them. If your favorite plasmid is in hotkey 4, you need to buy one more plasmid than you have slots for to re-order them. Ditto weapons.

• The city is rendered beautifully, but the map-design, FPS-wise, is bland as hell. You open the minimap and just see a bunch of rooms you're going to have to shoot through.

Auteurs, Having your schtick and hitting it

Ken Levine is one of the most famous named auteurs in games and while I have begrudging respect for it, it also bugs the hell out of me. His schtick is "video games's M. Night Shyamalan," where every major game he makes has the big twist, but as I point out they are often really silly, each is more preposterous than the last. Let's go through them:

• System Shock 2: you're frequently communicating with a collaborator to fight against the ever-present, world-dominating, sentient AI. Late in the game you finally meet that collaborator, only to find she's been dead for weeks and you've been communicating with the AI impersonating her.

• BioShock: the whole "would you kindly" thing.

• BioShock: Infinite: the old villain you're in this multiverse war with is you from another universe. But because he looks into multiverse portals he's aged 20 years older, it also changed his voice, and it made him infertile, and he's obsessed with genetics so to have a child he stole yours, setting off the events of the game.

I'm reminded of a favorite passage from a blog post by Paul Constant, waaaaay back in 2008, when he wrote about the Twilight books, and he said my favorite thing about them (and wildly successful authors):

But the truth of megapublishing is that mega-authors must only do one thing really well: Stephen King writes a disturbing scene more effectively than any other author; Dan Brown moves a plot forward with such velocity that readers don't have time to realize that nothing makes sense. What Meyer does, maybe better than anyone else in popular fiction right now, is capture that sensation of new teenage love, when one's genitals have just come alive and the desire to copulate is so powerful and all-consuming that the teenage brain, still reeling from the recent passage from childhood, has to interpret it as powerful, undying love—the kind of love that nobody on earth has ever or will ever experience again.

One thing I learned from Ramp was not to take a "focus on improving your weaknesses" approach, but more of a "hit your strengths." I'm embarassed how long it's taken me to be okay with this! Focusing on shoring up weaknesses is like picking a wizard in a game but spending all your time leveling up their swordplay. I think I (and many other people) pick a losing strategy so we don't have to risk trying to win and failing. Or, for many of us, "winning" life isn't entirely about winning obvious objectives, like the kids who play Minecraft for community or the "building stuff" open world, or deciding to play Mario 64 in a the coolest, least-practical way possible.

Ken Levine has a schtick, and he hits it. If you're feeling trapped by your flaws, realize that, like Dan Brown or Stephen King or Stephanie Meyer (or Ken Levine), you probably don't need to be well-rounded: and if you hit your strength well enough, you can change the world and nobody will care about your weaknesses.

It's an old game and yet...

Last thing: BioShock is 17 years old. And it looks... not that bad? I mean, you can see the screenshots/videos above. But what did games look like 17 years before BioShock? Like this:

And you see in re-releasing The Last Of Us they had these comparison images from its 2013 release date to its remaster in 2014 and its remake in 2022, and I'm like... who cares?

I mean, I can spot improvements if I'm really squinting. But I also think it's kind of amazing how little advancement I feel compared to what I grew up with. I thought I'd feel a lot older playing BioShock, and I wonder what happens when things don't change like they used to.