BioShock (2007)
It’s not every day that a video game enters public consciousness as an instant classic. Most things have to age before they earn such a distinction, after all. Perhaps it helps that the creators of BioShock were already legends with a classic under their belt, though. After all, System Shock was famous for being a narrative treat, one that tackled the concepts of free will, not to mention its RPG-shooter gameplay was ahead of its time, becoming influential in the coming decades. Both of these games owe a great deal to the man with the plan, Ken Levine.
The story of BioShock is, a man survives a plane crash in the middle of the ocean, only to find a mysterious lighthouse at his crash site. Upon entering it, he finds propaganda and more, and a bathysphere that takes him down into the murky depths, where he comes face to face with Rapture. Rapture is an underwater metropolis, one that was intended to be free from the hang-ups of a global society, but that is now a graveyard because of those very same hang-ups. The player must navigate the city, with intent to find a way out of the deep and back to civilization.
That’s the basic framing, but in reality, the path is much more twisted and complex than that could ever do justice for. I’m going to be honest here - the true beauty of BioShock lies in the choppy waters of spoiler territory, so be warned that I won’t be holding back on that front.
The truth of the matter is, Rapture is a perfect facsimile of the problems of the modern era. While it’s set in the 50s, much of the conflict that brought the city to its knees is not foreign to our post-millennial sensibilities, even though we’d much rather it was. Class warfare, racism, corruption, and the hijacking of the American Dream are all on display in gory, tangible metaphor. Even the player character, a seemingly foreign entity with no connection to the city, is not as in control as he would like to be.
Throughout the story, you’re working with a man named Atlas, a jolly Irish fellow who simply wants to take his wife and child out of this hellhole and get them back to the relative safety of terra firma. Along the way, you learn more about Atlas, who rose up against the founder of the city Andrew Ryan, in an attempt to tear down the classism that began to fester in the supposed utopia. Ryan founded Rapture as a place removed from politics, from governmental overreach, from the petty squabbles that prevent true progress in both society and science. In doing so, he created an underwater casket, a boiler where all of the problems of the surface would reach an unstoppable fever pitch, and he himself was not the messiah he believed himself to be, anyway.
Ryan’s corruption and ruthlessness set the gears in motion for a bloody conflict, with he on one end and a man named Fontaine on the other. This business war involved real bloodshed, with Ryan and Fontaine employing goons and red tape in equal measure in a bid for the keys to the city. Amongst this power struggle, Atlas rose as the voice of the little guy, blue collar folk who had been scrapping the sides of the mountain for years, trying to get a slice of that utopia Ryan had promised them. Though Ryan would eventually win by killing Fontaine in a supposed police action, he and Atlas would continue to fight up until the protagonist arrives, many years later.
However, players with conspiratorial dispositions will start suspicious of this jolly Irishman, as he starts asking favors in an overly-gracious manner from the moment you arrive in the city. He asks for things in a perfectly friendly manner, but in doing so, is actually telling an interesting, meta tale of player agency.
Atlas has a phrase that he’s rather fond of, one that he tends to use when asking the main character to do something for him. “Would you kindly do this thing for me?” It’s a verbal tic, one that an astute player will notice him defaulting to from time to time. If you’re like me, you write this off as just that, a verbal tic. I have things I say repetitively myself, so it’s not that big of a deal. However, no matter what the request, Atlas will invariably use this phrase, even when doing something as grisly and violent as asking you to kill the head of the city, Ryan himself. This point, however, is when it becomes abundantly clear what’s been happening to you the entire ride.
Ryan uses this same phrase, and your character’s horror, it causes an unstoppable compulsion. Sit, stand, all commands that the MC follows without question. He even orders you to finish what you started and kill him, handing you a golf club to make it easier. At that point, you realize that, from the very beginning, primary objectives for the game have been accompanied by that turn of phrase, even going so far as being the first words Atlas said to you. Back then, he asked you to pick up the shortwave radio that was in the bathysphere, and upon doing so, a golden glow indicated that you need to pick it up to progress.
This is more than just an interesting tale of brainwashing, though. It’s still that, don’t get me wrong, as you learn that even the plane crash was engineered through a letter asking you to kindly hijack the plane and crash it at just the right moment. Atlas is actually Fontaine himself, having faked his death and instead arising as a people’s folk hero, and he created you as the perfect sleeper agent for the job, a baby when he sent you off, and returning as a man.
Again, that’s all a great narrative, but the true genius of this plot is one that transcends the fourth wall.
A video game player often is used to being told what to do. After all, there has to be progression in some capacity. Especially in this modern era of narrative complexity, games are very rarely a simple “find exit to level” quest. Those games have made a small comeback, of course, but especially back in 2007, they were only just starting to get the momentum they have now. John Carmack, programmer of the momentous 1993 shooter Doom, once famously equated the story in video games to the story in pornography - it’s expected to be there, but it’s not really important. The 14 years between Doom and BioShock would see that mentality going away, but the linearity of those stories would become pretty clear.
There are outliers, of course. There’s Deus Ex, or Levine’s own System Shock series. These games had a bit less of a straight line for their stories, but by the end of it, the outcome is the same, and the line is still a line, no matter how many curves you put in it. Most games are a roller coaster ride, a single path from start to finish that occasionally does some wild stuff on said path, but that ultimately arrives at its destination without deviation.
BioShock didn’t try to buck that trend, but rather, make it a core element of the actual plot itself. Your character is going from objective to objective because that’s how video games work, right? Wrong. He’s doing so because he is genetically programmed to do so. He can’t stop himself from completing the mission objectives that are presented to you, the player, as standard game mechanics. He is lacking in free will, just as much as the player is when they’re taking his reins.
You believe yourself, as the player, to be in control of the events, but in reality, the only control you have is over how you accomplish the tasks that are given to you. They will be accomplished, and then the next mission will be given to you, and you’ll do this over and over again until you hit credits, because you are not the one in control of this story, the game is. You are simply a means to an end, the vehicle for progression that can only be steered in a cursory manner, but that will ultimately go where the developer wanted you to go.
This is why BioShock is so timeless and legendary. Modern games have strayed further and further from the path of linearity, but if you really think about it, no matter what path you take in any branching storyline, that path only exists because the developers allowed it to. Even in this era of choice-based storytelling, the player is still only able to follow the tracks that the creators lay for them.
BioShock isn’t a gameplay masterpiece, but it is a masterclass in narrative trickery, a shining example of how a medium can be used to comment on the medium itself. Ken Levine is currently hoping to do this sort of thing again, using the phrase “narrative Legos” when talking of his upcoming game, Judas. In doing so, he hopes to create a game with extreme replayability, one where those tracks might finally become unique.
In the meantime, though, would you kindly give BioShock a play? It’s always time for another walk through Rapture.
