BinfiniteSecrets

Bioshock Infinite and the Great Divide

There is a great division in games, well several actually. There is a division between the press and gamers, between gamers and developers, and between the press and developers. There is a division between how we, as gamers writers and developers, think about games and how we *think* we think about games.

We make and play games and imagine we are evaluating them as objectively as possible. But instead are almost always looking at them with a radically warped perception compared to "more developed mediums." We celebrate minor differences and upgrades. A touching scene where there previosly was none. We don't see the forest for the pixels.

Games exist in a bubble culture. An environment in which fans of games often find themselves apologizing for the mediums obvious shortcomings and peculiar stubbornness about growing up and actually having something important to say. We are so keen to praise the things that we know make games good, that it seems like we are often forgetting to actually think about the experience of playing games at all.

Can you really blame us? Games have been training us for the past 15 years to not think. To disconnect the gameplay experience from the story one. "Never the two shall mix." We very rarely think about how a total stranger to games would view the activity in which we are engaging. We tell ourselves that it doesn't matter if they don't see how great games are, because they will keep on being great even if nobody likes them. But that's just not true, the way that a "non-gamer" experiences a game is the reality of that experience. If you truly care about games and games criticism, then you must stop treating games as some sort of deformed and mentally handicapped younger sibling to the other storytelling mediums that needs you to stick up for it and coddle it and love it despite how ugly and dumb it really is.

The sad thing is that game designers often don't think of games very differently. And even worse, they share the same coddling and protective attitude towards the players of their games. We, as gamers, are routinely treated as complete idiots. "Oh no," says the strawman game designer, "you won't be able to handle this game unless you have some serious hints, or a giant arrow constantly pointing you to your next objective." Designers are so scared that you will hate their game that they  come up with virtual doppelgängers to follow you into your home and nervously watch you play. "Don't forget to use your Vigors!",  Bioshock Infinite's doppelgänger reminds you, like an overprotective parent trying to coerce a child to eat more veggies. "It's good for you!" But is it really? Bioshock Infinite is a game for adults, not for children. If children could make it through the crushingly difficult The Legend of Zelda 25 years ago, and our modern gaming collective recently tackled the similarly difficult and very adult Dark Souls, cursing and loving every minute of it, then surely you can trust the players of your game to figure it out eventually, right?

Oh, wait. I forgot. We're trying to tell stories here. "Eventually" just isn't good enough. It's impossible to pace out a story effectively if we only know that the player will "eventually" make it to this point in the game. This is precisely why both the original Zelda and Dark Souls are so light on their story, having what essentially amounts to a maguffin or two. But now we are telling these grand and epic and dare-I-say "cinematic" stories. We don't want players to get stuck before they get to "the good part."

So what do we do? How can we tell effective stories and also be respectful of players and games as a medium which can stand proudly beside the others.

 It's simple. If you want to tell stories in games, just tell stories. Don't worry about trying to fit into some preconceived notion of what constitutes a "game." It doesn't have to have any more shooting than necessary to tell the story effectively. Don't feel like you have to have "core gameplay" just because "that's what games do." Don't be so afraid of players disliking your game that you compromise your vision to try to please everybody. You don't have to be conflicted if you just believe in what YOU find interesting about your project and have faith that your players will find that interesting too. If you want to have a scene of dialogue that is relatively non-interactive (or completely non-interactive), feel free to do that. Just don't try to tell a story with "believable characters", and when partway through writing it you get scared that some players are not actually interested in paying attention to all that cool stuff you wrote, you panic and take out most of the dialogue and all of the believability. Those players are not worth catering to, they don't actually care aboexperiencing what you find meaningful. They are not your real fans, and trying to please them will destroy you and your game.

We need to start thinking about games as cohesive experiences. As designers, what is the experience that we want to give our players? Do we even need to tell a story? Do we even need to have traditional gameplay? How is the gameplay helping or harming the story? How is a pile of rotten fruit on the floor informing the gameplay. Is it?

Both gameplay and story must form a cohesive whole if a game is to remain intact as a creative and meaningful work. To artfully make games and master this medium (and to have our "Citizen Kane" moment which everyone won't shut up about) we have to start thinking about how all the different parts of the game affect the whole. This means if you want to give the player freedom, you probably can't tell stories that are not about psychopaths. So the reality is that Saint's Row is probably a more cohesive work of art than GTA IV. If you want desperately to tell the story of redemption, or love, or anything even slightly specific, you are going to have to limit the player drastically. But we don't want to do this haphazardly, we want to make intelligent choices about where we allow the player to interact with the story.

I'm not advocating for removing player freedom from games entirely. Interactivity is the only useful component to differentiate games from other mediums. But giving the player freedom has a direct and very negative impact on the ability to tell an effective story.

"What? Gameplay and story don't mix? Ludonarrative Dissonance? You pretentious asshat!"

Gameplay and story can conflict with one another, but I'm not advocating removing story from games either. I love stories just as much as the next person. Story is important tool we use to understand the world and communicate experiences. I might however suggest exploring a different approach to storytelling than the commonly used three act structure which does not fit well in games that have much longer running times.

People tend to believe these are just difficult and intractable problems in games. Someday we will just magically realize a way to fix them. It's just gonna be a slow and grueling path uphill towards cultural relevance. Games will find a way to make a good and well paced story that still has plenty of fun RPG loot grinding in it. We just need to stuff enough technology in there and it will happen. Better AI will solve the problem. More polygons. The Playstation 4.

The hard truth is that we will never solve these problems if we keep making the same kinds of games we are making today. It is impossible to integrate a story which values human life with a story where the protagonist shoots 960 dudes in the face. (And that's just with the shotgun!) Think about what this means. If we can't value human life effectively, then we cannot even tell good dramatic stories. Drama is practically the holy grail of artistic storytelling, amirite amirite? And even if we try to do comedy, we will be limited to black humor.  Jokes about how gross the violence is. How crazy the protagonist is for going on such murderous rampages.

I am not here to ruin the fun. I am not here to kill the stories. But please, if you are going to make or review or criticize a game, stop treating games as a substandard storytelling medium with it's own arcane rules that are just impossible for us to fully understand yet. Start treating it as though it's already grown up. It is not condescending to think of how your grandma or your non-gamer friends would react to the way the game presents itself. Stop apologizing for games and start demanding they be coherent.

Look, I understand the fear and conservatism that comes with making investments that fly high of the 100 million dollar mark, and I also realize there isn't a lot of hard data showing that players are happy with games that try to maintain artistic integrity at the expense of challenge or storytelling. But I don't think the combined critical and commercial success of Dark Souls or Telltale's The Walking Dead are completely accidental. And I hope they become part of a trend towards diversification in the types of games available, rather than an anomaly on the bumpy road towards complete cultural abandonment.

The large commercial "Triple-A" games space is a difficult place to be creative in. But it is just ridiculous to think that games need to stay exactly the way they have been since 2001 to keep being popular. They need to change, or else they will fade into obscurity.


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Bioshock Infinite is a deeply conflicted game. If you listen, you can hear the reverberations of earthquakes rumbling deep below it's lush exterior. The different composite parts of Infinite, as we rarely think of them inside the gaming bubble, are rubbing together awkwardly and generating friction like a poorly engineered machine.

Individually, these parts are all quite beautiful and well crafted. The gameplay is unique and groundbreaking for the shooter genre. Skylines are a joy to interact with and feel exhilarating. There is a ton of shit to collect that feels valuable, plenty of skills to discover, and lots of unique ways to engage in combat; more or less effectively. The story is very impressive for the genre, but also for games in general: it actually draws on interests and ideas which stretch outside of the mainstream science fantasy and fantasy fantasy wells that give life to most other games. It delves into issues of racism, and explores "what if" questions that have circled inside my brain for years. The game is a picturesque place, every  inch of Columbia is screenshot-perfect. Every scene looks like a postcard painted by Norman fucking Rockwell. It is gorgeous and lush, an undeniable aesthetic experience.

(As an aside, I'm sure the audio is actually good if I have one of those fancy surround sound systems, but it seems increasingly as though developers are just dumping decent stereo mixing by the wayside as "old-fashioned." That's probably our industry's undeniable tech lust speaking.)

But all these beautifully polished parts don't fit together quite as well as the mainstream games press would have you believe. Or rather, most critics  seem happy to ignore how these parts of the game feel completely separate and hot-glued together. They feel like different games.

Bioshock Infinite represents a turning point, definitely for the first-person shooter genre, but possibly for games in the large. It is the first shooter I have played that ACTUALLY has me spending more time walking around than shooting at anything. The reason that you do this is because every time you get into combat it completely undermines the story that Ken Levine wants you to hear. So what are we doing instead of fighting? Looting the shit out of everything. Walking around and staring at people. Hoping Liz has something to say about anything. Anything. Is this much better than shooting?

I'll would like to leave that as a rhetorical question, but I will say that I personally believe it does much less to damage a story than randomly having action scenes spewed about because "we were afraid that players might get bored," or for no reason whatsoever. But I am not certain that the actions that we are doing in Infinite are serving an ideal of actually helping tell the story. They seem mostly unrelated.

Bioshock Infinite is the first shooter that I have seen to actually have another character react to your prescribed psychopathy. Elizabeth is just too naive, too innocent to not call you out for the monster you are. "I might as well get used to it, I guess," the invisible hand of the writer waves away all emotion and empathy from Liz in less than 2 minutes, because "Sorry, you might've gotten bored there." At least Lara Croft fucking cried when she murdered somebody for the first time in the new "gritty" Tomb Raider, even if it is ultimately just as hand wavy about getting on to "the fun stuff."

Bioshock Infinite is so great in all of it's disparate parts. Elizabeth is probably as great as she can be in a game that is trying to let you shoot lots of different kinds of things in different kinds of ways with different amounts of auto-aim. The story is about as good as it could be in a game which is arbitrarily having you shoot at people every 15 minutes because, "well, that's just what games do." The shooting is about as good as it could be in a game that is trying to tell a story all the time, and that takes away your guns or locks you in a room to convince you to pay attention to the story, or is just generally spending an exorbitant amount of time not giving you things to shoot at. The setting and art art about as great as they can be in a game that cannot define interactivity with the world or characters in it unless it nicely ties into the loot grind or "core gameplay" somehow. "Look, but don't touch the specimen." "Don't talk to the specimen."

Although Bioshock Infinite is impressive relative to it's peers,  it's easy to imagine the possibilies if the design limitations of making what is currently seen as a "commercially viable" game were lifted. Elizabeth could be much more interactive. I could talk with her. We could have meaningful conversations. I could show her all the amazing things she's been missing by being trapped in a cage. I could maybe hug her after a short firefight instead of having to convince her that it's okay because she'll be forced to watch me murder 15 more people in the next room. I could really try to not be a monster. We could be friends. Or whatever. The story could be well paced with great twists and turns, an interactive drama where every step in the story has a dramatic point and is not just a gameplay maguffin. (See Telltale's The Walking Dead) The skylines could be running all over the city. I could always have interesting things to fight. The loot grind could be just incredible. I could really enjoy a challenging action experience. (Dark Souls) The world could be rich and beautiful but also interactive. I could pick up all the individual items for sale at vendors stand. I could talk with the people around Colombia and get to know them a little or a lot. I could watch kinetoscopes just for enjoyments sake, without feeling like they are cut short so that too much time won't be spent on exposition. (See Skyrim, almost.)

That's the dream right? Well, I'm glad to say that I believe we can have all these things in our medium and more. You don't have to lose the things that you love about games, but I am certain that we cannot effectively have all of them in the same game.