Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Bioshock 2's Storytelling!

There are many ways to discuss Bioshock 2, amazing game that it is. People have attempted to do so before. They’ve attempted to establish it as a diatribe about politics, fatherhood and objectivism. They’ve made a game about storytelling, the way games fail and succeed at it, the heavy-handed logic they utilize. But above all else they’ve made a game about narrative. The way it’s told, the way it subverts our expectations, the way we feel betrayed by it and rewarded by it in turn. They’ve made a game about storytelling, fiction, the way we tell and interact with it, and it’s pretty awesome.

On its most basic level Bioshock 2 is all about establishing both your place and role as a father figure. Are you the cruel father or the nurturing one? Will you kiss your daughter or slap her? These are the banal questions you endure, same as the original Bioshock, until your daughter enters the dialogue.

At that point you become a supporting character. You interpret her vision of you. You shape the game, but not through your own actions. Instead you do so by interpreting and carrying out the actions of another. In a way, Elenor is the designer and you are realizing her vision. Depending on how you realize it the game changes. Her response to you changes. And, as always, the way you respond to the world changes.

Bioshock 2 is, in a way, all about this sort of narrative response. As a sequel that never needed to exist it seems keenly aware of the fashion in which narrative functions and the manners in which it does not. The audio logs, the set pieces and the characters are as much about interpreting places and philosophies as they are about telling a story in and of themselves. Ryan constructs Ryan Amusements to express his interpretation of both the surface and Rapture. Grace’s apartment building and her hidden personal room are interpretations of both what Rapture has become and what it stands for for her. Stanley Poole takes it farthest, flooding an entire district of Rapture in order to eliminate any other possible permutations of his narrative. Each person, each place, is as much about their story as the way they tell and interpret their story.

This self-awareness is a great part of what makes Bioshock 2 work as a video game. Compare it to another game which is, ostensibly, story heavy: Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect 2’s story has relatively little room for interpretation. You select options and then are told what the consequences of your choice are almost immediately. There is an unprecedented degree to which you can select these options but the insistence on concrete, often overly complex narrative and strictly enforced linear gameplay makes interpreting and recodifying this story, what video games are really good at and how they operate best, all but impossible.

What games offer that novels, poems and films simply cannot is a narrative experience which responds to your interpretation. Sometimes developers mistake this ability for response for the ability to influence the narrative itself, something books accomplished about as well as games did with choose your own adventure stories. Fortunately games accommodate this influence better than books do, but it’s rarely a mark of strength that a game provides you with an insurmountable number of ending permutations. Instead the capacity a game has within for interpretation is usually what strengthens its capacity for storytelling.

Another good example would be Red Faction: Guerilla. Red Faction’s writing, line by line, was terrible. It was a collection of clichés seen hundreds of times before and characters as paper thin as the storylines adjoining them. As a rule, if a game opens with your brother, sister, mother or father being killed before your eyes, it’s probably a result of poor writing. Regardless Red Faction: Guerilla had a remarkable capacity for story thanks to a game play engine which allowed you to do almost anything. Want to destroy an entire building to eliminate the handful of men inside? You can do that. Want to carefully remove the support structure so that half the building collapses and you can snipe out the remaining enemies? You can do that too. Your ability to iterate and participate in the story wasn’t governed by the thoughts a writer had had during development and, as a result, you were left with a system by which you could fulfill an existing story. Sure, the story itself was kind of bad, but the engine that allowed you to interpret it was great.

Bioshock 2 has all the good qualities that Red Faction: Guerilla had and none of the terrible story or character elements. It’s lean, thoughtful and carefully designed through and through, and it shows. The number of approaches available to any given situation, the number of interpretive gestures that allow you to tell the story of how you shot that dude or how you saved that Little Sister are overwhelming. To compare this to Mass Effect 2’s average storytelling iteration, you’re given between three and five options in terms of how you’d like to tell the story. Occasionally an option will be offered to you which will clearly change the course of the entire narrative, and you’ll know this because the option will have a bright and unusual color. The end result is something closer to a choose your own adventure book than a game, something that barely pays lip service to the tools at its disposal.

Bioshock 2 grasps this aspect of games, their tendency to either veer towards running players along rails or creating lackluster characters or narratives and rarely utilize the full potential of the medium. It grasps it not only well enough to sidestep it but to weave it into its narrative the same way the first Bioshock did and even use it poke fun at and explain some of the foibles of the original game. There are pitifully few titles capable of such delicate and deft balance, and, not to spend too much time knocking Mass Effect’s failings, when done incorrectly it simply exacerbates poor storytelling and character development, lending a game the character of a blinking applause sign begging for our tepid approval.

Each joke about Ryan, each stolid debate and repetitive action is refined in Bioshock 2 and purposed towards encouraging exploration throughout the course of play. There are issues with Bioshock 2, certainly, and as Leigh Alexander pointed out it is a sequel that never needed to happen. But as Leigh also points out, it’s good that it did happen. It’s a game about telling a story, and despite the two affixed cruelly to its name the story its telling is its own. Bioshock 1 could have never occurred and Bioshock 2 wouldn’t want for impact. And that’s why it’s a great game: because it had a story to tell and it didn’t compromise on telling it. Every distraction, every problem, every twitchy annoyance contributes to the narrative that is Bioshock 2. And this is an economy that any game could aspire to that few every realize, and if more games seemed to be working towards this end I doubt we’d have nearly as much trouble as we do nowadays acquiring respect as a medium. So kudos, 2K Marin, for making such an incredible story and telling it to us and proving that it could only be told in a game. You’ve done something many veteran studios struggle to do with your flagship game and you’ve made me care about games in a way I haven’t in a long while.