Bioshock: The Third Dimension of Interactive Storytelling

It is unsurprising that Bioshock has caused so much discussion around games studies. I could see the argument being made that video games as an academic study could never have existed without Bioshock, at least from the narrative perspective. Surely another title would have begun that discussion instead, but the course of games studies and perhaps games themselves would be dramatically different. It used to make you sound smart to be able to utilize the term “Ludonarrative Dissonance” (the conflict between story and gameplay), although now it’s all but the most common term in games studies. It is important to the discussion of Bioshock, however, as the term was originally coined in an attempt to describe Bioshock’s nearly perfect melding of gameplay and story. In today’s gaming landscape, Ludonarrative Harmony has been achieved by many games, and many of them I would consider “better”, or “more fun”, but extraordinarily rare is a game that so completely melds gameplay and story. Although I didn’t enjoy significant portions of playing Bioshock, as a piece of history, it’s fascinating.

Put simply, the game tells the tale of our protagonist’s plane crashing in the middle of the ocean, right next to the entrance of the underwater city Rapture, a supposed Utopia where everyone is entitled to 100% of their own work. As Rapture’s creator puts it, “A city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be confined by the small.” From there, you are tasked with finding a way to escape from the city’s creator, Andrew Ryan with the help of Atlas, a mysterious man on the radio. Pretty basic on its face. The least enjoyable part of the game for me was the combat. It feels imprecise and clunky, and the slow controller aiming magnified this feeling. I felt like I didn’t have enough defensive options, and once I ran out of healing items and money, I was forced to throw myself at enemies over and over, dealing a fraction of their health every time until they died. Missing enemy health carries over between deaths, as do the supplies you lose. That means if you have a bad fight and use up most of your ammo before dying, you’ll respawn with none of it replenished. At first, I found this to be a baffling choice that discouraged experimentation. It does discourage experimentation, but in exchange we get that perfect connection of story and gameplay. Bioshock makes the interesting choice of not prioritizing gameplay or story, but making whatever design decision will best meld them together. This means there are faults in the story and the gameplay, but zero friction between them. Let’s use the respawns as an example; there’s an in-world explanation for why you return to the little respawn tube when you die. It’s not a game over, it’s a canonical part of your journey in Rapture. An essay by Espen Arseth, “A Narrative Theory of Games”, explains this idea well. Games are consistently in a tug of war between ludology and narratology.

Let’s talk about Rapture. Everyone knows that the city at the bottom of the ocean is inspired by Ayn Rand’s writings on Objectivism. Andrew Ryan (Note the initials AR), creator of Rapture, wanted to create a place unbound by religion, politics, and equality, where every man can reap 100% of the results of his own work. The connotation is obvious, the name Atlas is a reference to her most famous work, Atlas Shrugged, which despite being a fictional story feels to me closer to an argumentative essay on the benefits of Capitalism. Both Andrew Ryan and Ayn Rand would probably call Bioshock’s Rapture a Utopia, at least in concept. Ayn Rand’s ideas and beliefs are agreed by most to be impractical. My personal main issue is with her belief that Altruism is inherently evil, without which we would not have a society to begin with, let alone people with the resources to become philosophers like her. Although Bioshock clearly agrees that Rand’s philosophy is flawed, as by the time you arrive at Rapture it is quite literally falling apart. However, it does respect her ideas. There is significant effort put into considering the feasibility of Rapture. Air filtration, food growth, residential districts are all considered and included, and any question you might have about how something might work is likely to be answered, whether through a physical location or an audio log. There is also thought put into the positives to Rand’s ideology, it has allowed for technological and scientific developments beyond anything we can imagine in our Altruistic society. Specifically, superpowers. Plasmids can be found and injected into the player, which alters their DNA to give them powers like mind control or fire blasts. The issue with Rand’s ideology is obvious, though. Rapture is truly Objectivist, even once you arrive. Everyone is out for themselves. Help won’t come easily, and when it does it comes with a price. Plasmids contort the human form in horrific ways, and are used for violence and murder. The people you come across are all muttering nonsense under their breath. An Objectivist society can only exist as long as every member is playing their part correctly until it collapses entirely.

Consider how Bioshock presents us with its story. Referencing back to the Arseth essay, he explains that games slide between the ludic pole (pure game, ex. Minecraft) and the narrative pole, which would not be a game at all. Most games are somewhere on this scale, but I feel that Bioshock is an exception. I would be tempted to place it in the center, but it’s not half-story and half-game, it is off the scale entirely. There are very few cutscenes, few moments where control is taken away from the player. When we meet the iconic Big Daddies, genetically altered humans trapped in diver suits with fearsome weapons we see it brutally kill a previously intimidating Splicer through glass. It might feel like a cutscene at first, like watching a play on a stage, until the Splicer is thrown through the glass, landing next to us, invading our space. The hole in the glass allows us to step onto the “stage”, which, as the game will do several more times in the future, melts the gap between the two ludonarrative poles. This pairs well with some of the themes of the story. Repeated by Andrew Ryan throughout the story are the words, “A Man Chooses, a Slave Obeys”. I found this to be quite poignant as a statement on games as a whole. Especially around the time of Bioshock’s original release, players did what games ask them to do because it was fun, without really thinking of the consequences. Near the end of Bioshock, it is revealed that your mind is being manipulated by Atlas, following his every order by compulsion. But this isn’t a cutscene either– the player really has been doing everything asked of them without a second chance, because it’s fun, because they want to get the next Plasmid power or to see the rest of the story. The Venn diagram of the player and protagonist becomes a circle. These are the narrative swings that Bioshock made at a time when Call of Duty and Uncharted controlled the gaming space, where narrative was nothing more than an excuse for violence.

More recent games make similar swings. The Last of Us Part II forces the player to commit violent acts of hatred that most wish they didn’t have to do. The characters in that game feel the same way. The Venn diagram, once again, becomes a circle. I find these other examples more interesting in certain ways. However, to make this type of artistic choice where there is essentially no precedent for it, as was made in Bioshock’s case, is fascinating. This is all caveated by the actual plot beats of the story, however. They are weak, at least compared to these design decisions. Most of the characters you meet are mostly spoken to over radio, which makes it feel a bit impersonal. Additionally the game struggles to decide if the protagonist is a player-insert, or his own character. He speaks in the opening scene and he screams when he’s shot, but he never speaks any dialogue after the initial cutscene. He has memories of a family, but seemingly no opinion on them. The binary good or bad ending falls extremely flat, as they make a moral judgment on the character, who I felt had no agency in the story whatsoever. I found this approach confusing and would have preferred if the developers had chosen one route or the other.

With all that said, I enjoyed Bioshock as a historical artifact more than a game. It’s a great thought experiment, both as a critique of Objectivism and a successful experiment in melding gameplay and narrative, but it would have been helped by stronger gameplay and stronger story. What’s so interesting to me is how it can fail at the two traditional axes of which we judge games, but so strongly succeed at a third that it nearly makes up for those faults.