In Soviet Russia, Videogame Plays You!
By Travis Larchuk
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The year is 1960.
Sean Ryan creeps down a dark corridor in a decrepit underwater city, where he knows mutants or deadly machines could be waiting for him around the next corner. In the game’s dank world, things clank and echo, punctuated by screams.
And in real life, Sean screams too. Sean is a 20-year-old student at the University of Dayton in Ohio. And he’s engrossed in the video game Bioshock.
“The storyline of this game is phenomenal,” he enthuses. “It’s the most — oh my God!” he yells, as he is interrupted by the action unfolding onscreen. He’s about to fight a giant mechanical man.
In the game’s story, the big daddy protects a little girl who’s been mutated by scientists. Once the big daddy is dead, Sean can either cure the little girl, which will give him a little bit of power, or kill her, which will give him a lot more power.
Okay, it sounds weird. But this plot point ties into the game’s bigger question: How far are you willing to go in your own self-interest?
A Deeper Storyline
Ken Levine, creator of Bioshock, says this issue was an intentional centerpiece of the game. “I think in order for games to become a fully mature media, they need to be able to explore complicated moral themes. And one of the themes of Bioshock is the extent of capitalism,” he says.
He used Ayn Rand’s books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as inspiration for the game’s plot, where ruthless philosophy leads to the underwater city’s downfall.
Critics have almost universally praised the game’s story, and in February, Bioshock won the award for best writing at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
We’ve entered a new era in video game storytelling, says video game writer Susan O’Connor. Back when games were new, people didn’t expect complex stories because the novelty of playing a video game was still fresh, she says, similar to the early days of film.
“A woman gets tied to a train track, some guy twirls his naughty mustache, here comes the train, he twirls his mustache, her eyes open really big — I mean, technically it’s a story but it’s not a very sophisticated one,” she says of those early movies.
As any movie critic will tell you, a director can’t just throw anything up on the screen and expect to impress people. Audiences want well-told stories. And it’s the same way with video games.
The problem game designers now face is how to tell a good story and keep the game interactive. Because remember: Games have to be interactive. That’s what makes them games.
Becoming Part of a Different World
Interactive storytelling gets a lot of attention at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center in Pittsburgh.
Walk by a life-size model of the fictional robot Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still and you’ll find professor Jesse Schell.
Schell says it’s tough to use mature storytelling elements like tragedy or loss when players know they can try again and correct their mistakes.
“Nobody could make an interactive Romeo and Juliet, for example, because if you have both characters die, people say ‘Well, I guess I did that wrong. Let’s go back and get the right ending,’” Schell says.
O’Connor says the challenge is to create a believable situation where gamers can suspend their disbelief and feel like they’re part of the game’s world.
For example, say the player needs to walk into a room and get some vital information from a guy behind a desk.
“What we don’t want to have happen is have the player walk into the room and immediately shoot the guy behind the desk, because that’s what players want to do sometimes,” O’Connor says. “And you don’t want to disable the gun on the way in, because that’s going to make the player angry.”
So, game writers like her get creative. “You figure out a story reason to get the gun away from him. Like he’s an African warlord, so the guard is going to take your gun away before you walk in.” Because that makes sense in the real world, O’Connor says, the player is much more likely to buy that reason.
Who’s In Control?
Schell calls this plot device “indirect control.”
As a player, he says, you will “do what you want to do, but only because I created a situation where I knew what you were going to want to do. So you had freedom, but at the same time you did exactly what the storyteller wanted you to do.”
Last year, even the Writers Guild of America began to give an award for video game writing.
But as one of the characters in Bioshock asks, “What separates a man and a slave?”
Gamers may have to ask themselves how much they’re controlling the game… and how much the game’s story is controlling them.
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