Hello, readership. As I'm sure all seven of you know I'm going to try pushing up game essays regularly each Sunday from here on out. We'll see how it all comes together.
Today's essay is about Bioshock and the concept of games as art. It contains spoilers, albeit spoilers for a year and a half old game which has had its brains written out but still, fair warning. If you so choose to read it, I hope you enjoy.
And so, without further adieu: Bioshock and the discussion of what makes a game art.
Games are still fighting their way towards widespread recognition as a viable art form. The movement truly kicked off with Half-Life, although you could trace it back to the first meta-textual Lucasarts adventure games of the early 90s. But Half-Life was one of the first titles we saw that recognized what it meant to be a game and tried to tell us a story in a way only a game could. It was subtle, challenging, and a decade later we’re still left with pieces of a puzzle and thematic points to debate. It was one of the first major releases that proved that you could use games to tell stories that simply cannot be told anywhere else.
Over the years games have had both their artistic champions and opponents, both ridiculous (Roger Ebert and Clive Barker’s debate comes to mind) and sagacious (who doesn’t love Tom Chick?), rattling shields and spears on either side of the line, but of late we’ve had a modern Half-Life, another game we can point to and proudly declare “This is a story that can only be told through this medium. To tell it any other way is to do it an injustice.” This game was Take2’s not so modest Bioshock.
Ken Levine’s previous title, System Shock 2, was in its own right an impressive work. It used its technology expertly and told a great story while immersing the player in a richly and fully imagined world aboard the Von Braun. But it’s hard to imagine someone sitting down with SS2 and calling it a work of art. It’s a great game, and it certainly makes a statement, but that statement is largely beware the hubris of man. System Shock 2 doesn’t really show players anything about themselves, aside from how easily they flip shit when horribly mutated creatures bear down on them. It used the confines of the game to tell us a story about a character, SHODAN, but it never sat down and made us a part of that story.
Bioshock, however, dropped the player right in the middle of its twisted, objectivist paradise. From its tragic, gripping opening cinematic, easily one of the most memorable in gaming history made all the more forceful for its brevity, it drew the player in with just enough information: a few fragmented images, the sound of screams and then bam. We didn’t need much to get started, really.
We had all, after all, been there before. A hostile series of tunnels populated by hideous creatures and our lone amnesiac hero, for whom this world is just as new as it is to all of us. But Bioshock used these set pieces to great effect, to comment on both what they meant and represented and what they made us.
Bioshock was a very self-conscious game. It was a game that knew it had a weak outlining plot. The whole thing could be equated with Quake 2, after all. It was just a stripped down bit of tripe to explain why you were all alone in this terrible place. But Bioshock recognized that. Through this story there were cracks miles deep, and Bioshock traded on these cracks, making the player a participant in telling and uncovering the story. The vignettes of Rapture, the brief audio logs and hallucinations, expose the player to bits and pieces of his life. And when you finally reach the moment of revelation, when the game takes control away from you, it does so perfectly. It does it to prove a point: that as a player you really don’t have any power over how this will end. You’re not going to change the outcome of the game. You have three choices, one more than in most games: a good ending, a bad ending, and to walk away from the computer.
But in the spaces between these forced events, the metaphorical births and deaths games force us to experience, we find room for self-realization. It is here we define our character. I’m not just talking about the choice to save or harvest the Little Sisters, although that certainly does shape the way you see the game world. Bioshock surrounds the player with context and allows the player to interact with it in a way only a video game ever really could.
It drew us in and took us to a place and left us there with its twisted inhabitants. And it did it all for a reason. Every horrible act, every dark corridor, every tragic missive uttered by one of its shattered vestiges of humanity, was there to tell us something about the nature of man. And our own true nature. When you found yourself beatingAndrew Ryan with a golf club, how did you feel? Frustrated? Satisfied? Helpless? Empowered?
Or confused?
Bioshock did what most games avoid doing: it took the enduring training that we all have, the special mindset we bring to games where crates are our greatest ally and the bigger the target the bigger the threat, and it took this logic apart. Why would icons ever glow in our vision? Why would we instinctively know, through a magical compass arrow, where we need to be?
This logic we’ve come to see as normal is not, and the fact that we’re so accustomed to it and think nothing of it is unbelievably odd. Bioshock wants us to think about that fact, about the way that we obey faceless voices without a second thought. It wants us to consider that maybe the people who are telling us what to do don’t have our best interests at heart. But it also wants us to think on our own. It wants us to step back and look at the game we’ve been playing, to reflect on all that’s come before, and go “huh.”
To its credit, it doesn’t force us to. You can play through all of Bioshock and just enjoy beating horribly spliced human remnants with a pipe wrench. But Bioshock gave us more than that, if we were willing to look. It gave us a game that commented on how games are made and played, which commented on the way stories are told, and still told a great story while doing it, using all the tools at its disposal to do so. And, beyond all that, it gave us a wonderfully realized world, a horrible, shattered one that asked us what we were going to do about it.
I want to close this post by mentioning GTA4. Following release there was a big push in some parts of the community to ask “Is GTA4 the first great work of gaming art?” The answer was a resounding no, for a number of reasons, but I’d say a big one is that GTA4 forgot it was a video game. It wanted to be a venue for performance art, and even there it was sort of half assed. If you ignored the tacked on bits, rife with Rockstar’s juvenile and occasionally wonderful humor, you could find a pretty fun game buried under there. But GTA4 never really approached art in my mind because it never made me feel anything. When I completed GTA I walked away with a few fond memories of 70 hours of gameplay and a bevy of X-Box accomplishments. GTA4 wasn’t the right pick for our gaming champion. It tried, but it focused all its energy in the wrong places and did it in ways that really broke the game.
Bioshock, though, it cemented games as art for me in this decade. There are other games that belong with it, but to me it is the most prominent title and the best one to point to and say “pretty much that.” It isn’t accessible to people unfamiliar with the genre, sure, but the same could be said of most great artistic books or films. But if we were to say “what makes a game a work of art?” you could take any single aspect of Bioshock and break it down to show just what it expressed and how.
Except for that bullshit Pipe-Dream hacking mini-game. I don’t know what was up with that.
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