Games Within Games, Games Within Stories
So I finally finished Bioshock. Yes, nearly a year-and-a-half late. Since the publisher's DRM limitations seemed to enforce the idea that the customer was only renting the game, I declined to purchase Bioshock last year when it was released and instead only rented it. I'd planned to buy it for the PC, but instead rented it for the XBox 360.

Hey, they made the rules! I'm just working with what they gave us.

Anyway, I didn't finish it last year, and it had literally been a year since I last played it - over the four-day Thanksgiving holiday. Not realizing that I'd have little time to play between the Thanksgiving festivities, pen-and-paper RPGs, and my daughters wanting to play Kameo, I went ahead and rented it a second time, managing to finish it in spite of limited playing time.

I was treated to a Lord of the Flies-esque climax, and received the good-guy "Savior" ending (which I felt was satisfying, if abrupt). Go me for not murdering any of them to harvest their "Adam."

I was a little disappointed with the number of "Get X of object Y" missions (quests). When you boil it down from a gameplay perspective, these are functionally equivalent to the colored keys from 1992's Wolfenstein 3D. These are simply a way to force the player to explore most of the level in order to progress, and impose some level of linearity on the level progression. It's preferable to having a strictly linear level, but they still felt tedious.

I was impressed by what they did with the Little Sisters. I understand that at one point, they were supposed to be slug-like creatures. I expect the change to making them little girls forced a complete change-of-direction for the plot during development. By mid-game, it became clear that the story was as much about those creepy Little Sisters as the player's own quest. This is probably a good thing, as it's hard to identify with a first-person-perspective character. What you gain in immersion you lose in character identification. Hey, 2K Boston, you want to borrow my talking-portraits idea from Frayed Knights for Bioshock 2?

The game's level design is, of course, phenomenal. The nightmarish vision of Rapture after all hell has broken loose is the showpiece of the game, and in many ways Rapture is another character in the bizarre story. It's very videogamey in its layout to keep it interesting. I mean, single-use weapon upgrade stations? Being able to bribe video cameras? Whatevah! But called it "Flapperpunk" or whatever, it's got an incredible sense of style.

I was going to complain about the stupidity of characters in the game leaving tape recordings of their diaries and personal secrets all over the game world. How unbelievable is that? Then I remembered that we live in a world of YouTube and Twitter. Objection withdrawn, your honor.

I think ultimately, the game shows that a few clever gameplay twists, a strong story, and a powerful sense of style in the setting can cover a multitude of sins - or even just a single glaring one. In this case, the sin is that first person shooters are kinda boring. It's been played out a thousand times since Wolfenstein 3D. But somehow, while half of my brain was screaming, "Played It! Got the T-Shirt!", the other half remained dominant, saying, "Quiet! I'm having fun!" I wasn't focusing much on the individual battles and periodic hacking and jumping puzzles. I was focusing on the bigger picture - trying to untangle what was really going on in Rapture.

That "meta-game," on it's own, isn't exactly killer gameplay either. We're talking not far beyond a game of Candyland, here. But the artistic aspect of it was strong enough to hook me emotionally and intellectually into solving it. Something as simple as Wolfenstein 3D wouldn't do it for me anymore, but Bioshock did. There was stuff to discover, dang it.

I feel the same way about RPGs. The basic gameplay is pretty straightforward, though there are hundreds of interesting variants. But when you get a game like D&D - and there are people still playing first edition (and the original version) now, thirty years later - the little atomic action and risk/reward elements that people like me tend to think of as "gameplay" are pretty heavily played out. Those aren't even important to players anymore at that point - they have been fully internalized by veteran players. Just as the whole aiming, dodging, "straffing, pick-up keys and ammo thing is no longer skills to be "developed" for the target audience of a mainstream FPS game. Instead, those mechanics become simply building-blocks for the "real" game. The bigger game, involving setting and characters and plot.

An example that occurs to me during this stream-of-consciousness late-night brain dump is X-Com. The strategic and building portion of the game, if taken on its own, was lame. It was sparse and uninteresting - nothing compared to similar strategy games of its time. The tactical combats were of course the meat of the game, but if taken on their own they were meaningless and empty. You combine the two into a game-within-a-game, however, and they worked extremely well, the result better than the sum of the parts. Mix with a very cool atmosphere and setting, and you've got a game made of awesome.

Depths of Peril has an RPG-within-a-strategy-game approach, with an overarching (albeit thin) storyline on top of that. I remember loving Archon, even though the arcade-action combat sequences were a poor match for the methodical chess-style meta-game.

No, this isn't Einsteinian revelation here, but it's an interesting way to think about game mechanics. I am probably guilty of spending too much time focusing on the individual building blocks, and not enough on the overall structure. That sounds a little like focusing on individual notes while ignoring the composition.

So it was for me with Bioshock, and with many RPGs. The core mechanics may not be anything incredibly innovative, but the drive to uncover and assemble the puzzle-pieces of a well-crafted storyline made it cool enough for me to push forward to the ending.

Labels: Game Design, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 3:14 AM (Permalink)