4-Player: A Tale of Two Utopias

This week’s 4-Player column is contributed by guest-writer Clinton Nguyen. This article contains no major spoilers, i.e. nothing you can’t learn from a trailer or the summary section of a Wikipedia article.

Great leaders, great ideas; paradise promised, paradise lost. This could be the credo of BioShock, the critically acclaimed first-person shooter series developed by Irrational Games. Among games in its class, the series is known for its rich, imaginative, dystopian worlds, but how does it create a bigger attraction outside of its main story? How does it contain itself to a 12-20 hour playthrough? And, finally, how does BioShock stack up against its spiritual sequel, BioShock Infinite?

Let’s start from the bottom up. The original BioShock takes place in the underwater city of Rapture, an Art Deco decorated bastion for the oppressed, whoever they may be. Rapture is the brainchild of Andrew Ryan, a wryly retooled Ayn Rand. Ryan is a leader whose directions for the masses are to make what you will, chase what you will, and create what you will with no fear of censure from the Man (in his beliefs, the government, the church, and society). Individuals should serve themselves and themselves alone. Effectively, Rapture is a hermetically sealed, libertarian utopia.

BioShock is an exemplary foray in the field of narrative design. The game welcomes you, the player, to learn about the people that made Rapture what it was—the bigwigs, the entrepreneurs, the working class, the mothers, the nobodies, and the shared madness that slew them all.

Your entry into Rapture is preceded by disaster. When you first enter Rapture, the city and its denizens are in ruin after a lengthy civil war. You conveniently start out in rubble of the war’s beginnings: Kashmir Restaurant. On one of the restaurant’s tables you’ll find a blocky cassette next to a cold ashtray. This cassette is an “audio diary,” a narrative device that provides a fuller picture of Rapture’s life before and during the civil war. The diaries have been something of a secondary attraction that the series has since adapted into BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite.

Your first audio diary: Diane McClintock, “New Year’s Eve Alone.”

Transcript

Another New Year’s, another night alone. I’m out and you’re stuck in Hephaestus, working. Imagine my surprise. Guess I’ll have another drink. Here’s a toast to Diane McClintock, silliest girl in Rapture. Silly enough to fall in love with Andrew Ryan. Silly—”

Explosion. Commotion, bedlam.

“What…what happened…oh God, I’m bleeding…oh God. What’s happening?”

Note the amount of acoustic dimension the entry has. Even though the recording has some stylistic artifacts, you clearly hear McClintock’s voice, the background, its music and the ensuing explosion. If you listen closely enough, you can make out what the rioters yell before McClintock cuts the audio off.

BioShock provides a multi-layered experience. First, there’s audiovisual output: the music, environment, characters, enemies. Then, the audio diaries give a specialized and unique voice that takes precedence over other layers of information. Most players are prone to glossing over the audio diaries in the game in favor of moving onto the next point. Understandably, audio diaries are a very self-driven way to tell a story. The player must sit and listen, lest the message be drowned out in (concurrent) gunfire. But the diaries add a whole layer of feeling on top of what would otherwise be just a game about killing spliced-up loonies. They give the ghosts a voice.

Next, let’s take a look at the level design. Beyond dialogue, the world of Rapture—populated by fresh bodies, rotting furniture, and raving enemies—propels the narrative. Few games give you as distinct an introduction to its mooks as BioShock does. After leaving the Kashmir, a Nosferatu-like shadow stretches across a corridor. It belongs to a woman whispering into a baby carriage. Is she a desperate survivor? What is she saying?

Screenshot by Clinton Nguyen.
Screenshot by Clinton Nguyen.

No, she is a spliced-up, killer psychopath. Inside the carriage, she was muttering nonsense to a “baby” revolver. The mother splicer episode is just one among many similarly eerie vignettes the game provides through thoughtful level design and enemy placement. BioShock’s mainstay is in its traditional horror roots. The levels are mostly indoors, but there are many places you can hide in, nooks you can crawl through and niches you can exploit. It’s a rather claustrophobic experience at times, and the thought of being bound by the weight of an entire ocean on all four sides certainly backs that sentiment.

Screenshot by Clinton Nguyen.
Screenshot by Clinton Nguyen.

And now, to BioShock Infinite, where you’re not trapped underwater but 15,000 feet above ground. Though the game still has shreds of horror elements, it takes on a vastly different direction by exposing you to wide, open spaces. You never feel disempowered. You never feel alone. Infinite is a far cry from the solo survival run that BioShock was.

Infinite takes place in the vast and glimmering sky city of Columbia, a sovereign nation that has seceded from the United States. Columbia opposes Rapture in almost every sense. Rapture is godless; Columbia is God’s kingdom. Rapture was founded to disgrace all government; Columbia embraces Democracy and America’s founders. Rapture’s citizens came to unshackle themselves from others; Columbians shackle onto each other.

Within the first hour of Infinite you’re overwhelmed by a showcasing of Columbia’s splendor and pomp. Then Columbia shows its true colors. You’ve been going through a Potemkin village the entire time. The first few moments of the game seemed innocent, carnival-like, and all in good fun, right? Nothing bad until the hyper-racism shows up, as if there were nothing wrong with it. In Columbia we’re dealing with decidedly different folks: your enemies aren’t pathologically insane, but insane with a violent religious fervor. Columbia’s denizens are unabashedly racist, heavily dismissive, and overzealous to the point of suicide, but you are not setting out to correct that peacefully. There’s too little time for that. In Rapture, the city is already gone and what you see is a husk of its former glory. In Columbia, you are given the sledge. Tear it down. Tear it all down.

Although different in theme, your experience in Columbia unfolds the same as it does in Rapture. Columbia’s mustachioed inventor and business magnate, Jeremiah Fink, has engineered most of the technology seen in BioShock: audio diaries are now voxophones, Plasmids (risky, genetic wizard powers) are now Vigors (less risky wizard powers), and—in case you were wondering—guns are now guns.

Narrative techniques, too, are much the same across the titles. The main difference is temporal. Fewer stories need to be discovered, because they are all happening around you. Setting Infinite in the present shifts the direction of the series’ storytelling immensely. The presentness of Infinite lends the player an inherent agency, which lets you contribute more to the story. But I believe Infinite may be a victim of its own ambitions.

Screenshot by Clinton Nguyen.
Screenshot by Clinton Nguyen.

In Infinite, the expansive life of the city is sacrificed for narrative focus. I remember, very vividly, bodies on a mattress in front of the flickering white noise of a television screen in BioShock, next to an accompanying audio diary that explained their story in a cohesive and heartfelt way. In BioShock Infinite, I received very little of that. Instead of the mooks acting within personal dramas, the enemies in Infinite largely have no story. They are just enemies to plow through, which is a shame. The voxophones feel less varied and include more of the story’s major players compared to the audio diaries. It felt more frequently like a platform for the leaders to expose their beliefs rather than for the average citizen to complain about menial things like freezing pipes.There are significantly less vignettes floating around, as the central narrative of the game has taken up even more of the spotlight that secondary characters filled before.

It may be the case Infinite should be judged on a decidedly different set of rules. It gives you the role of a cop rather than of a detective. It is perhaps a different beast. But it is an American beast, nonetheless.

Clinton Nguyen (COM ’15) is a journalism major. He plays odd games, watches odd films, and occasionally reads a boring regular book for kicks. His dad is not a phone. Yours might be, though!

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