In my last post, so many aeons ago, I had a bit of a whine about how little genuine human interaction we see in games. I made that post because I was honestly frustrated with the how limited the vocabulary of even the most non-linear of games seems to be. If Gaming is a language, then it’s only vowel is attack, and it’s only consonant is jump. Rare, so precious and rare, is the game that doesn’t revolve around shooting, hitting, or jumping on something or other, and that just seems deeply wrong somehow. Games are about interacting with Systems: Why are we so obsessed with intricately modelling the systems of Kill and Die, to the exclusion of every other kind of interaction in the world?
Recently, though, I discovered an amazing thing:
Boardgames.
Now stay with me, here: In order to directly compare/ contrast the type of interactions and systems generally available in videogames with those in Boardgames, I’ve taken the hit FPS title Bioshock and turned it into something like a card game. These cards below show every action that a player can perform when confronted by a typical obstacle (AKA an attacking Enemy) in Bioshock. The idea here is that we can see what the player can actually do; the different ways in which the game lets you interact with its system.
Let me lay some context down. Firstly, Bioshock is a First Person Shooter, of course, so it’s fair to expect a large amount of the shooting I’m railing against – I didn’t pick Viva Piñata or Sim City here. But Bioshock wasn’t praised so much for it’s pure kill-die entertainment value as it’s environment, characters and philosophy. Bioshock is about Andrew Ryan, about Rapture, about Art Deco and Ayn Rand and old-time music and the fall of a great city, much more that it is about shooting people in the face, right?
Secondly, a word of Boardgame terminology. The story, narrative, setting, characters, and environments of a board game- all the flavour, in other words, the bits of colour and backstory made to enrich the gameplay – are known as the Theme. I think this has to beat our nearest videogame equivalent word, Story, by a mile- so I’ll use it to talk about Bioshocks arty bits. Enough ado!
When you confront an Enemy in Bioshock, you can choose to use a weapon:
Use one of your strange genetic spells, or Plasmids:
Or interact with the environment around you in some way.
Bioshock has an impressively large amount of ways to interact with your environment. But here’s a pop-quiz- spot which of those cards, out of all those little methods of interactions, involve the side of Bioshock that’s so often held up as a beacon of artistic merit. Which of those interactions directly involve Bioshock’s incredible theme?
Found ’em? It’s these two.
Looking around at the environment, art and characters, and listening to the audio logs and music. That’s the only way you can directly interact with the game in a way that actually relates to Bioshock’s incredible theme- and they’re both strictly optional. If this was a board game, then imagine that it comes with a small book; whenever you play one of these cards, an audio log or a short passage about the room is read aloud. These have no affect on the gameplay, they don’t advance your goals in any way, and yet if you went through Bioshock without doing this, people would actually say you were missing the real point of the game.
Here’s another one – the card-game possibility space of Portal:
And that seems just about right. Portal, after all, is about an omnipresent AI forcing you to solve various puzzles involving Portals, and the only things you can do center around listening to that AI and using those portals. Portal is what it is; the theme and gameplay act as one.
So, here it is: We are defined by our actions. Bioshock, as a game, is not about philosophy, or art, or characters, or the fall of Rapture; Unfortunately, it’s about killing people. More specifically, it’s about shooting, hitting, electrocuting, burning, hacking, cracking, smashing and performing a vast range of deadly manoeuvres upon them until they die. The game never allows you to cleave to a philosophy or a political ideal, so how can it be said that bioshock is about philosophy?
In amoungst the recent uproar over Roger Eberts assertion that Games are not Art, one comment stood out to me. A single reader asked if Ebert would concede that a chess board and chess pieces could be considered works of art, even if the actual game itself wasn’t. That really sums up Bioshock, and a lot of games. Bioshock’s theme is the board-game equivilant of a perfectly sculpted board, beautifully intricate pieces, an equisitely-illustrated instruction manual, all layered around a violent bit of juvenile entertainment. Almost all our best games are like that, no matter how incredible their themes are: Underneath, they’re based around shooting, or jumping, possibly racing or exploring at their most daring. As gamers, we excuse this, and take it for read- the mere fact that a game actually HAS a good theme is worthy of jubilant praise. But we shouldn’t wonder if outsiders can’t see past the kill-die filler that’s at their core.
Bioshock is, of course, a liner shooter, so it may be stupid to ask for anything more than lovely things to look at and listen to as you shoot. But this game has one of the most original and riveting themes ever to be planted in front of a set of crosshairs- I wish, wish, wish there was a way to plunge your hands elbow-deep into this theme and actually interact with it, in a way that goes beyond picking a good or evil ending. It’s not just about Bioshock- it’s about nearly every game out there. There is no game where you play as a politician in rapture, making moral choices about what policies to follow and what direction Rapture must take, even though that’s what Bioshock is meant to be about. I don’t know if there’s a videogame like that anywhere.
Something that’s worth noting, as well; the two parts of Bioshock generally agreed to be the best in the game are the introduction and the big twist near the end. In these two parts, all your weapons, plasmids and hacking abilities are taken away from you- leaving you with nothing but those two theme interaction cards. In these two brief, breathtaking moments, you can do nothing but directly interact with Bioshock’s environment, art, story, and characters. In those moments, the game shines like the future.
So, that’s how Bioshock tackled it’s theme. Next, I’m going to write up a look at how overcomplicated Blade-runner style board game Android did it, and how all those little bits of paper and cardboard chalk up.
In that sense, Amnesia is interesting in how its possible actions are just as important as its inactions- “DON’T look at monster” being the prime example.
I’d love for gaming to make the jump into more varied approaches to problem-solving. I think the indies will do it first, though; we live in an era where most commercial games can’t attach appreciably different nouns to their kill verbs.
Really: I love the description on the Insect Swarm card.
Bioshock was always a disappointment for me, largely about the shooting and fighting with a clunky binary good/evil choice stapled into it. As you point out, the start of the game where it’s largely exploring and the Andrew Ryan moment are both the best bits of the game. It is wonderful and haunting to explore but that’s not what the game is about and slowly disintegrates into fight enemy with a few more weapon options than your usual shooter.
Many RPGs, of course, come with bagloads more options. There’s a lot of interaction and dialogue there. I am told I should play Mass Effect. I still have memory of Torment, Deus Ex and Arx Fatalis which all include a more gifted range of action than your standard FPS. (Of course, the FPS is not where you’re going to find more expression, simply by definition: FPS. Bioshock tries to sell you an RPG, but it’s just selling you an FPS with inventory more like Dead Space than Deus Ex)
But I always go back to Carmack on issues like these. He fought with his cohorts on adding more actions to the verb palette afforded to the player. He didn’t want crouch in the game – he thought it was an unnecessary addition that complicates a simple interface. The more actions that are added, the more complex the interface becomes – even if you’re the world’s best designer. The more complex an interface, the more you have to weigh up whether that eats into sales.
Of course, any one can pull out examples like STALKER or The Void or Minecraft as games with complexity that survived. But this tug o’war between accessibility and player expression rages every day in developer studios across the planet. And most of the time, accessibility wins. It often comes down to dollars at the end of the day.
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