When BioShock was released in 2007, it was not the best-selling first-person shooter (FPS) game of its day. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on PC out-sold the Irrational Game title, along with both Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 on the Xbox 360. BioShock did not even make the top ten best sellers for the PlayStation 3 that year.1
However, in relation to artistic credibility, BioShock was the talk of the town. Gamespy wrote “it is a foregone conclusion that you will buy this game and love it… put simply, BioShock is an unparalleled achievement. No other game comes even remotely close to it in terms of raw emotional connection.”2 XBOX 360 review was nothing short of eurphoric, stating that “There’s such a wit in the writing, such an understanding of people that the lines approach the heights of classical aphorisms, great quotable sayings that match the best products of the minds of antiquity. This sounds like ridiculous overblown hyperbole, but it isn’t.”3 Even non-traditional gaming review sources lauded the game. The New York Times declared that “anchored by its provocative, morality-based story line, sumptuous art direction and superb voice acting, BioShock can also hold its head high among the best games ever made.”4 Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Pete Metzger continued the high praise:
It is arguable whether the purpose of video games is purely immersion, but active interactivity was the stated goal of BioShock. Ken Levine, creator of the franchise, wanted to build a game in which the “players were not an observer of narrative, but a participant.”6 In order to achieve this, he needed to find a way to grant players a sense of agency and control beyond what had been done with previous first-person shooters. Seb Franklin, in his chapter “From Narrated Subjects to Programmable Objects” featured in Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic, argues that true control is in the hand of the programmers and the strength of their power is in their ability to maintain this trickery through veiled subterfuge. Rather than attempting to hide these outside forces at play, Levine chose to expose them. BioShock, and its two follow-ups, is a postmodern exploration of agency, simultaneously critiquing how players interact with and are affected by video games, but also falls prey to the very critiques it illuminates. These moments, when the player realizes their passivity, their inability to fully control the game’s narrative, that their choices do not matter, are failures to retain ludonarrative synchronicity. This term of my creation refers to moments when the ludological components of a video game align with the narrative elements at play. In the case of BioShock, when they desynchronize, active interactivity by means of control and choice faulters. It is through this framework that I intend to analyze how Ken Levine tried to build the impossible, emerging players in a virtual reality of their own creation.A game like BioShock… changes everything. Sure, it’s fun to play, looks spectacular and is easy to control. But it also does something no other game has done to date: It really makes you feel. After all, aren’t video games supposed to make us lose ourselves in vast imaginary worlds? BioShock does. And more.5
Tutorial
Defining terms is tricky. There is an unspoken assumption behind the practice: that if a definition is correct-if it manages to capture the essence of the thing under discussion-then everything that logically follows from that definition will be correct too. And so scholars often take great pains to demonstrate that there is a strong correlation between their definitions and reality.
The “correction” of a definition isn’t a property of the relationship between the word and reality; it is a function of the conversation that the definition facilitates. And, indeed, multiple contradictory definitions can all be equally “correct” if they each manage to independently structure a producing discourse.7
Before exploring in detail how I will undertake such an analysis, it is imperative to establish an overview of previous writings about narratological studies, ludology, and their interaction to better contextualize where my research differs.
Gameplay
In the debut issue of Game Studies, the first academic, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the field, editor-in-chief Espen Aarseth declared the year 2001 “Year One of Computer Game Studies as an emerging, viable, international, academic field.”8 Along with the premiere of the journal, 2001 also featured the first international scholarly conference focusing on computer games and it witnessed the rise of game studies as a serious field of study in academia.
Another cause for Aarseth’s proclamation was work performed by his colleague at the IT University of Copenhagen, Gonzalo Frasca, who is attributed with coining the usage of the term “ludology” in 1999.9 Frasca defines ludology as the “discipline that studies game and play activities.”10 His term shares a history with earlier non-video game ludic studies. Frasca refers to grammarian A. S. Hornby, child psychologist Jean Piaget, anthropologist Daniel Vidart, and philosopher Andre Lalande, all as scholars who separated the functions of “game” and “play.” It was sociologist Roger Caillois who sought to find a balance between use of the word paidia (playfulness) and ludus (formal rule-based game behavior). In Man, Play, and Games (1961), Caillois proposed analyzing games as part of a spectrum that lay between play and logic.
In this analysis, I rely on the definition of gameplay established by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, & Robert Zubek and their concept of MDA (mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics). Their lecture series, “MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research,” presented over several years at the Games Developer Conference was intended to establish a methodology to be shared by scholars and developers alike and their terminology has since become industry standard.11 For Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek, gameplay consists of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics.
Mechanics
Mechanics are the ludus of a game, that is the rules at play. They refer to all necessary pieces that one needs to play the game, including the equipment, the venue, or anything else necessary for play to be had. In considering the game as a system, the mechanics are the complete description of that system. Another way to consider mechanics is as a “system of constraints”.12 Designer and scholar Brian Upton, building upon the work of academics Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, explains that the rules of a game (not just video games) are a system of constraints, a varied group that can include:
But mechanics do not need to be constraining. For instance, a game like Borderlands (2009), a bizarro sci-fi FPS set on the perilous planet Pandora, is filled with kooky characters, and even crazier physics. In the game, players take control of a Vault Hunter, inter-planetary mercenaries with little regards to the rules or laws. As such, the laws...the physical geometry of a level, or the behavior of the enemy AI, or the amount of damage that a hand grenade does… Anything in the game that proscribes the player’s actions is a constraint. The player is free to move around within the game world, to trigger actions, even to change the world’s configuration, but always within limits laid down by the game itself.13