Maybe this is just nonsense. I don’t know, and it reads like fanboy ramblings. I’m only half-way through the game, as well.
The world of computer games and the world of cinema have had a constant and uneasy relationship since I started gaming.
By and large, film-related computer games have been some sort of crap merchandise created after the cinema title. ‘Watched Spiderman? Enjoyed it? Now play this shitty imitation of a 5-year-old game to relive the experience’. Yeah, right. The long and disreputable franchise of Star Wars games from LucasArts ought to be enough to prove the point. The compliment goes the other way, of course. Anyone who has enjoyed the experience of Mario, Doom and Streetfighter on the small screen has had the opportunity of a piss-poor cinema experience on the big screen to choke all the happiness out of their memories of those games.
[SPOLER WARNING : LOOK AWAY]
Bioshock offers better, more realistic graphics than former shooters and a musical score that draws the player in. But you’d expect that of the next big game. Like my own previous favourites in immersive shooters, Deus Ex and System Shock 2, you get to customise your character, choosing and adding skills as you go, leading to further identification, although the main action is First-Person-Shooter along the lines of Doom, rather than a role-playing game. You are cast in the role of a ‘stranger in a strange land’, some guy called Jack, so your personal past doesn’t seem to matter, aiding the identification process (though I get hints this will be pulled away as the game progresses).
The game is set in 1960, albeit in an alternative past, and the cultural references are to film noir and early sci-fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, rather than Star Wars. It appeals to nostalgia, in other words, rather than some sense of wonder about the future. I think that may be important to the immersion level, too, though that may be limited to players of a certain age. It takes from your past rather than extending your future, is what I mean to say. It’s your own alternative past, inasmuch as you identify with the protagonanist through the suspension of disbelief, and the use of fiction and history aid the player in that disbelief.
This might be spoiling things for some future players, but Bioshock also builds in quite credible moral choices for players. This comes quite early in the story. Small girls have been reined-in to aid the forces of evil. The player has the option of using the girls’ stock of evil to further their own power, and thus killing them. This quite possibly the best choice for progression, or they have the alternative, less immediately profitable choice: to save the girls. The sight of a small girl struggling in your arms on-screen, a girl you can kill or cure, pierces the screen. Whatever your choice, the consequences of that do not only follow in the game-play, but the player’s conscience. This is totally new, I think. Yes, you can kill people, including little girls in previous games, but for that to involve (or more importantly allow) a moral decision from the player rather than it simply being a gameplay decision is different.
This is a device to increase engagement in the game, of course. But it’s not one I have seen before. The only remote comparisons I can find are in cinema and in novels. It’s the Sophie’s Choice of computer games in that way, not just in cinematography, but also interactivity. Yet even in the highest achievements there, you don’t get the choices: what Raskalnikov does is ultimately already decided, however much you get to understand and think and agonise through his choices.
To gush a little more. This feels like some part of the future, not of games, but of interactive media as a whole, and of film-making. People have been harping on about interactive media for years, but this is the first time an actual example of that has touched the sides, personally. This isn’t ‘choose your own adventure’ put into a film or computer game: the aesthetic whole means that you really interact, really care.
Bioshock took about five years to create, as I understand. Ask that of the next thing you see at the cinema.
Postscripts:
[I just looked at the Wikipedia article on the game, and came across this from the LA Times: “Sure, it’s fun to play, looks spectacular and is easy to control. But it also does something no other game has done to date: It really makes you feel.”]
Something else to add: Throughout Bioshock, there’s no doubt that you’re playing through a set — well written/envisaged — narrative in some ways, so it is ‘create your own adventure’ in some ways. But the marriage of cinema techniques and game techniques makes the difference. This is an interactive story, that realises the possibilities of both ‘interactive’ and ‘story’. Ultimately, you’ll be good or evil or somewhere between. What I hope I’ve touched on here, is some of the ways that they’ve actually made the game touch the gamer.
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The reason why games have been poor at immersing players is because the stories are ridiculous and completely unrealistic. take for instance, the gaming world’s prodigal son, metal gear solid and actually think about what is being said — it’s all poorly scripted cliched nonsence.
However, if you enjoy being emotional immersed in games you have to try either Ico or Shadow of Collsus on the PS2.
I’m not necessarily talking about immersive — I recall crying when Sephiroth kills Aeris back in FFVII. The new bit is when this extends to morality.