Posted by Matthew on September 11th, 2007
I’ve been playing BioShock
on the 360 for a few weeks now, often in the evenings when my brain is too puddly to code but not ready for sleep. My son Dylan has been watching me and he has been playing it himself. I will likely write a few posts about it. In this post I want to extol the game’s overall mood of imposing, sinister breakdown and corruption. I was a great admirer of its ancestor System Shock
which had a similar mood.
It’s a brilliant thing when a game strongly engages the emotions. I don’t think I have a memory of a movie-watching moment which is more vivid than the memory I have of the feeling of doom I felt when as older Link I walked out of the Temple of Time in Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time
and saw the transformation Ganon had wrought, or the dread I felt when in the original Doom I picked up the chaingun, all the lights went out, and the sound of demons surrounded me
. I’ve seen a lot of great movies, and maybe the adrenaline-injection scene, or the basement rescue, in Pulp Fiction
compares to the heightened senses, tension, and dread I have felt so palpably when playing BioShock. The fact that this engagement occurs at all is an indication that games are a legitimate art form, but I digress.
BioShock’s mood is more than the knowledge that something is going to eventually jump out at you and yell booga-booga. Like a good thriller, it builds the tension, sometimes towards a climax, and sometimes deliberately abandoning it. This latter is, I think, a way to make one tense about the tension– you can’t just tense yourself up and brace for the inevitable conflict, because it’s not inevitable. Instinct (and a selection against all our ancestors who wore out their hearts freaking out every time a bear lumbered by the cave) prevents us from completely gearing up our adrenaline if we are not sure if the threat will manifest or not, and that itself makes us worry if perhaps we are not worrying enough, because doom really is just around the corner. I’ll leave it to the artists, both visual and audio, to analyze how they pull this off, but the game design component here is also significant, in how 2K arranged lines of sight in the level design, tuned the AI, and paced the events.
The mood in BioShock on the 360 in particular is heightened by the nature of the controller. This is a whole big post in itself; as one who has designed, played, and loved console first- or third-person shooters I know I just flabbergasted many of you. But while I concede that console controllers have strong limitations for shooters, this is the kind of game where it’s not just less of a disadvantage, but arguably an advantage, because the mood of claustrophobia and uneasy silence is sharpened by the fact you don’t have a godlike ability to whip your head around 180 degrees in a tenth of a second, draw a perfect bead on the nasty thing behind you, and shoot it between the eyes. I hope never to be in a situation as awful as BioShock’s, but if I were, I can guarantee you that I’d love to have speed, fluidity and control half as good as what the 360 controller gets me, nevermind a mouse and keyboard. I’d be fortunate not to be flattened by that burning cabinet the first freak chucked at me as I went up the first set of stairs.
The ability of games to put you into a situation makes mood so wonderfully palpable. In a movie, you can’t do anything but watch and wait in dread as someone else gets up the courage (or the foolishness) to round the next corner. In a game, you can stand there and cower for as long as you like, wrestling with your own wimpiness, so that when you finally take that big gulp and start moving forward, it’s an especially rich and real experience.
It’s often when I play BioShock that I moan miserably to Dylan, “Why the hell do I play this game??” I just know that ahead of me are moments even worse than the time we turned around to see… I don’t want to ruin it for you who have not played yet; I’m so nice like that. Anyway, we both screamed at the top of our lungs and spend the next minute laughing uncontrollably at our reaction. That is pure gold and I can hardly wait to see what games get up to as we start to jack in even more deeply. Fortunately, cardiac arrest recovery will have also advanced by that time.
Tags:
bioshock,
control,
Design,
dylan,
games-as-art,
immersion,
joy,
mood,
shooters,
tension
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