One of the most glaring gaps in my gamer cred is the Bioshock series. While I own the whole set on PS3, the only one I’ve completed is Infinite; largely viewed with disdain by fans and critics alike. I wanted to clear that up over my mandatory vacation… so I set up the PS3, let the system (and games) take forever to update, and then barely put a dent into the first game before bailing for at least the fourth time. Instead, I found myself playing and obsessed with Obduction on the PS4 / PSVR and Telling Lies on the iPad.
Since I like to over analyze things, this felt like the perfect excuse to do some digging into why the latter two games were able to grab my attention, while one of the most acclaimed series of all time keeps failing to do so. So, let’s dig in!
One of the big points of similarity between them all, is they’re narrative heavy adventures, exploring a situation that has already broken bad before the player has arrived; but they go about that very differently. Bioshock is a pretty typical shooter that quickly murders someone right in front of you before handing off a weapon and imbuing you with super-powers; within the first 10 minutes, the narrator encourages a combo where you shock the addicts who have turned the place upside down (very much real human people), then collapse their skull with a wrench while they are frozen in place. This is in stark contrast to the other two games; Obduction might play like a first-person adventure but lacks any form of weapons or combat (not unusual from the developers behind Myst), and Telling Lies (like Her Story) is played through the lens of a character watching videos based on keywords pulled from previous clips.
They each have an air of mystery to them, pushing you to answer the question of what happened and led to the current situation, but the latter two have you playing detective, while Bioshock has you playing a murderer.
This is not a new critique by any means. If you were part of the blogosphere of 2007-08, you remember it being lit afire by the term “Ludonarrative Dissonance”, which Bioshock perfectly embodies. The term refers to a conflict that arises between the two central aspects of a game: the narrative as told through story elements (audio-logs, books/notes, cutscenes) and the narrative as told through gameplay (what you’re actually doing). A critique of Randian Objectivism, a philosophy that encourages personal freedom instead of obeying typical power structures, doesn’t pair very well with a linear campaign that has you destroying what used to be an underwater utopia because an unseen narrator asks you to help them out; no matter how you slice it, that’s a pretty big disconnect.
But there used to be far fewer indie devs making narrative games that reached wide-spread appeal, so a big-budget title from 2K with unique art direction and a critique of outside media was huge news in 2007! In terms of just a couple innovations: the story unfolds through voice-over delivered by audio logs and a two-way radio, which you can listen to without pausing instead of cutscenes which pull you away from the action; and although the game is very linear, you have some real choices when it comes to the style of gameplay (Do you lean into the plasmids? Do you kill or save little sisters? Do you hunt down every last audio-log or suffice with the bare minimum?).
The Ludonarrative Dissonance that now makes Bioshock borderline unplayable today was probably a big part of the reason it succeeded back then. It was a fun shooter that almost anyone could enjoy, with a compelling story hidden like a dogs heartworm medicine discreetly tucked inside a slice of meat. But with each passing year, the dissonance rings louder, feels sharper, and I bounced off it even faster than ever before. That’s because in that decade since Bioshock was released, an indie dev scene has exploded and pushed the boundaries of what games are financially viable, commercially successful, and narratively capable of doing.
That’s how a game like Telling Lies carved out success, allowing us to piece together past events based solely on intersecting discussions on video recordings, making us build our own crazy conspiracy wall to track what actually happened here (vs what is happening in the current time). More than any game before it, Telling Lies makes you feel like a modern day Sherlock; watching for characters tells and chasing leads from otherwise everyday conversations. It’s thrilling not because you’re waiting for the next jump-scare, but because it’s invasive and personal. You’re spying on strangers to learn about years of their life without permission… all with the intent to upload it to the games version of WikiLeaks. And you know the software and video was stolen from the NSA, so there’s an inherent clock ticking down before your door is kicked in by federal agents. The longer you play, the most invested you feel, and the more you need an ending that pays off your hard work (which it pulls off by giving players an ending tailored to which characters timeline they followed the closest).
While the team at Cyan Worlds has been making games since the late 80s, they haven’t put out a ton of titles, instead spending years working on complex worlds the player has to explore every corner of before finding a way forward. In Obduction I found myself learning the basics of a base 4 number system to solve several puzzles… sure, I leaned on guides to help at 3am when I had a headache and just wanted to wrap up the current area before going to bed, but that’s something most games wouldn’t dare ask of their players. Most other environmental puzzles feel a bit simpler, especially since other games have borrowed elements from their playbook (Tomb Raider, Zelda, and Dead Space, to name just a few). We’ve become used to rearranging blocks to create a safe passage, or needing to destroy barriers with a certain kind of tool, but while they’ve had things borrowed, their games are still the best at it… that’s helped along because they aren’t afraid to make the steps involved so complex it means backtracking through whole worlds to line things up correctly. You don’t just need a new power-up to your blaster to open the locked door, you have to follow which chain of events does what, and make sure the doors you need to go through can actually be accessed.
These games create an experience unlike anything possible in a book, movie, or show; they are unique to gaming because agency is a driving factor in their stories. And when done successfully, they pull you into the world in a real way that just isn’t possible in other mediums. These are first-person games, unraveling based on your choices and actions, which is why we can talk about game experiences like we’ve actually lived them. They trick our brains into feeling like we have, because we actually kinda did.
While the story of Bioshock could be distilled into a movie or limited-series without anything important being lost in translation, the same can’t be said for Telling Lies or Obduction because the gameplay isn’t fun wrapper disguising a bitter pill, it’s central to the narrative itself. The story doesn’t work without the gameplay, and the gameplay wouldn’t be satisfying without the narrative that drives it (who would learn a base 4 number system just for fun!?). As videogames grow and mature as an art form, we should demand it focus on the aspects which games can accomplish and other media can’t. After all, we have dozens of streaming services to watch when we want a movie or show; games can’t compete.
Instead, they should do what only they can: grab our attention, pull us into their world, and hand over the controls. Let usus to discover the story. Let us be the main character. When done successfully, it’s really unlike anything else, and those are the games I want to play more of. Not ones that create a sense of dissonance between it’s own internal elements.
That’s not to say I’ll never return to Bioshock again… I still want to play the series from beginning to end for some masochistic reason. But right now, in the middle of an actual pandemic, the world feels crazy enough as is. I don’t really want to feel torn in different directions by my own damn pastime.
References:
https://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html
