Worm Sighing

Okay, I know I’m a little behind the curve here. Everyone and their uncle have already completed Bioshock three times, one for each different ending (well… two-and-a-half endings, I suppose), and once on Hard so that they can get their final, shiny XBox 360 ‘achievement’. And a great deal of these people have taken the time to write about it.

It’s one of those games, where the disparate, hazy community of hobbyists seems to surge into debate as one. Where you don’t feel like you’re done with it until you’ve talked about it. Head over to RockPaperShotgun for a collection of excellent critiques and links to reviews, interviews etc.- including an encounter with Bioshock’s creator, Ken Levine, that’s really a must-read.

All of this- and much of what shall follow here, to be sure- is riddled with spoilers. If you live on the moon or have no real interest in the medium, then you might be unaware of the fact that Bioshock includes one of the all-time-greatest-ever twists of anything ever, somewhere just after the middle of the game. If there’s ever any chance that you’ll pick it up to play for more than a few hours together, you DO NOT WANT TO HAVE THIS TWIST SPOILED FOR YOU. So stop reading, please. And stop reading comment threads, articles, reviews, walkthroughs or editorials from the gaming community until you’re done with Bioshock. Look, just play it, alright?

It’s unlikely that I’m going to have anything to say here that hasn’t already been mentioned by others already. All the same, and perhaps with an eye to my rant of a few weeks ago, here are some thoughts.

Firstly, I’m glad I took my time over the game. I got it the day after it was released, and have played it slowly ever since. This morning I finished, which is perfect because as of next week I’ll actually be a busy human being again. Now, the forums are stuffed with people bragging about how they completed the game in one or two sittings, with only ten or less hours of play. And there’s some strength to the argument that games, in general, are far shorter than they used to be, and whether or not this is a Good Thing. But I am very thankful that I had stuff to do, and so couldn’t follow my impulse to storm through the game in a couple of all-nighters. The richness of the environment, of the atmosphere- decaying, retrograde 1950s art-deco opulance- absolutely demands reflection.

And it’s this that leads to my first real criticism of the game. It’s too busy. I recognize that the tight, enclosed space of the game helps lend it much of its horror, and makes possible the kind of closed-circuit mechanic (gatherer/hunter/guardian) that makes the whole thing special. But it’s stuffed with action, and noise, and light, and movement (voluntary or otherwise). Momentum is one thing, yes- but there isn’t a spot in the game where you can simply observe your world without the loud buzz of a nearby camera, the maniacal shrieks of some splicer in the distance (boy do voices carry underwater), the thump, groan and miniature earthquakes of a Big Daddy that you haven’t got around to dealing with yet. There isn’t enough space to make the whole thing feel like a city, which is what it’s supposed to feel like. Horror and action work best where the breaks feel like breaks, where you can contrast the action and the fear with, erm, absence of action and fear. The game, on occasion, was simply too loud. The Thief series arguably does it far better-and freedom, too. But more of that later.

If I had created a soundtrack and effects as sumptuous as these, I’d probably play them loud as well. The voice-acting is simply the best I have ever encountered in a video game, as is the script. The game’s plot and twists are very script- and delivery- dependent, and a lesser game might have let you down on this.

It’s also these twists that make Bioshock, I suspect, the first game to contain a truly effective critique of the medium. After having my own poodleish antics thrown in my face as they were here, it’s actually going to be hard picking up another shooter anytime soon without seeing the lines, the joins, the places where all the bloody orders just stop making sense. In this sense, Bioshock is not just a great story- it’s a story that could only have been told as a computer game. This alone sets it on a plinth, in the company of very few others. That it also takes the time to say something we didn’t know we were all already thinking, to be truly reflexive, almost Brechtian in tearing down the third wall, showing us a mechanic for what it is… that’s just phenomenal.

Part of the strength here is in subverting a fundamental weakness. Compared to Deus Ex, Bioshock is practically a half-life-esque linear shooter. Slightly disappointingly, this doesn’t really alter after we have the essential nature of our hobby used as a major plot point. My initial excitement at realising I had to collect some elixir but that there were two batches of it in different parts of the game world was quickly quashed. I needed both, of course. What looked like a big decision turned into a minor one- not ‘what would you like to do?’ but ‘what order would you like to do it in?’.

This holds true throughout. Real divergences and areas not required by the main plot are few and far between. This is a retrospective qualm, however, as I felt constantly driven by the game’s plot- even in the final third. There was enough emotional investment to make me seriously want to push through to the end. Most games don’t offer you such a compulsive experience. If they do, you can be damn sure they won’t give you much of an option to ignore it. Bioshock does, in places, and that’s nearly a miracle.

And the key mechanic for the game’s compulsion is where Bioshock’s ’spiritual successor’ status comes in. Both of your key enemies in the game are essentially godlike, and this is a direct echo of System Shocks 1 and 2. Atlas/Fontaine (note the references to Rand’s books here in the monikers of our key nemesis) and Andrew Ryan all, inevitably, remind us of Shodan. And the best thing I can advise you to do here is read and enjoy Kieron Gillen’s essay on the queen of all game villains, here. Come back when you’re done.

Shodan, of course, was the real Deus Ex Machina - or Deus Est Machina. As a gameplay mechanic, she was a stroke of genius. We fear specific things- death, the unknown. More than these we fear a malevolent god. And Ryan, in the first part of the game, fulfils these same roles. As you progress, he mocks you, taunts you. He sets traps for you, punishes you for resisting him. When one god is felled- not because you defeated him but because the bastard ordered you to, to prove a point- our new, worse deity takes over. This one really is the devil, because he’s a trickster. Like any trickster, he gave you all the clues you needed- visual suggestions- the tattoos on your arms, the momentary flashbacks, the repetitions of that phrase.

This is why I don’t think the game’s finale- the much admonished Boss Fight- was a bad idea. In fact, I enjoyed it. I’m not a truly skilful gamer, and so found that the difficulty was pitched just right- frustration vs. excitement. The plasmid/tonic technologies even give a decent in-game excuse for such a titanic figure to struggle against, which is more than I can say for most games. Like every other part of Bioshock, this last section was self-aware. It was The Way Games End. It was a Boss. The removal of your regeneration system was important here. too. You fought, you died, you fought harder. Eventually you won, and you felt that familiar flush of victory- and then you hated yourself for it, because the game’s just told you that you’re playing a game. But critically, in an experience where you can’t die, not ever, where all your fear and anger stems from a sequence of gods- you are given the power and the opportunity to destroy one. Not because you were told to- but because you wanted to. That’s satisfaction.

Andrew Ryan’s ‘utopia’ of Rapture is an explicit and repeated homage to the works and philosophies of Ayn Rand. To what extent is it a critique of them? As the man himself intones: “It wasn’t impossible to build a Rapture at the bottom of the ocean. It was impossible to build it anywhere else.”

Levine has said that he is attacking absolutism- in that any absolute ideology is dangerous. But I believe that Ryan represents the impossible predicament of a totally anarchistic society. He betrays his own ideals in order to attempt to do away with Fontaine, nationalising assets, forming armies, even introducing state-led capital punishment. Bit of a departure for the ultimate libertarian. The destabilising element is, of course, a twisted side of human nature. Fontaine is a crook with ambitions. Within a super-capitalist society such as Rapture, he is free to become the biggest fish in the pond. The ultimate flaw with Objectivist ideology, as with any, is that there will always be someone willing to subvert it to their own ends (in this case, a nihilistic con-man).

There’s so much to be said about this great work. It neatly summarises everything a piece of interactive art should be. Embrace it, love it like a brother. Lose yourself to Rapture. I really feel that there’s no coming back. The only first-person games that appear remotely palatable after this are Half Life, Thief, the first Deus Ex and maybe sandbox games like Oblivion or GTA.

Rapture really has changed the world.