Extra Lives (20 page)

Among the games of this era,
BioShock
has Himalayan stature. From writing to level design to art direction to gameplay, it is a work of anomalous and distinctive excellence. The story takes place in 1960, in an underwater city known as Rapture, secretly designed and just as secretly overseen by a wealthy madman named Andrew Ryan. Ryan is a cleric of a philosophy clearly intended to resemble the Objectivism of Ayn Rand, and he runs his city accordingly. Rapture is a place, Ryan says, where science is not limited by “petty morality,” where “the great are not constrained by the small.” A mid-Atlantic plane crash leads to the
gamer’s unplanned, many-fathomed descent into Rapture, which has been recently torn apart by riots and rebellion; its few surviving citizens are psychopathic. Thanks to a two-way radio, a man named Atlas becomes your only friend and guide through the ruins of Ryan’s utopia, and your first task is to help Atlas’s family escape.

The only thing of any worth in Rapture is ADAM, an injected tonic that grants superhuman abilities such as pyro-and telekinesis. One way to gorge on ADAM is by “harvesting” small, pigtailed girls—known as Little Sisters—who wander Rapture under heavy guard. But Little Sisters can also be restored to uncorrupted girlhood. Thus, whenever the gamer comes into contact with a Little Sister, he must decide what to do with her. This involves taking the girl into your arms. If the gamer saves her, the reward is a moon-eyed curtsy of thanks. If the gamer harvests her, the Little Sister vividly and upsettingly transforms into a wiggling black slug—but the reward is ADAM, which makes you more powerful.

“BioShock,”
Hocking writes, “is a game about the relationship between freedom and power….It says, rather explicitly, that the notion that rational self-interest is moral or good is a trap, and that the ‘power’ we derive from complete and unchecked freedom necessarily corrupts, and ultimately destroys us.” The problem is that this theme lies athwart of the game itself. For one thing, there is no real benefit in harvesting Little Sisters, because refusing to harvest them eventually leads to gifts and bonuses of comparable worth. In other words, the gamer winds up in a place of equivalent advantage no matter what decision he or she makes.
BioShock
was celebrated for being one of the first games to approach morality without lapsing into predictable binaries, but if the altruistic refusal to harvest Little Sisters has no sacrificial consequence, the refusal cannot really be considered altruistic.

For Hocking, this was only the beginning of
BioShock
’s dissonance: “Harvesting [Little Sisters] in pursuit of my own self-interest seems not only the best choice mechanically, but also the right choice. This is exactly what this game needed to do—make me experience—feel—what it means to embrace a social philosophy that I would not under normal circumstances consider.” But
BioShock
, Hocking argues, does not follow through with this, as it is designed in such a way as to force the gamer to help Atlas. This does not make sense “if I am opposed to the principle of helping someone else. In order to go forward in the game, I must do as Atlas says, because the game does not offer me the freedom to choose sides.” While the game’s mechanic offers the freedom to luxuriate in Objectivism’s enlightened selfishness, the game’s fiction denies the gamer that same freedom.

Because helping Atlas is “not a ludic constraint” but rather “a narrative one that is dictated to us,” Hocking claims to have felt mocked by
BioShock
, as though his contract of belief in the gameworld were torn up before his very eyes. The post concludes with Hocking’s acknowledgment that his concerns “may seem trivial or bizarre” and that he “only partially” understands his reaction to
BioShock
. “It is,” he writes, “the complaint of a semi-literate, half-blind Neanderthal, trying to comprehend the sandblasted hieroglyphic poetry of a one-armed Egyptian mason.”

When I asked Hocking about “Ludonarrative Dissonance in
BioShock,”
he said he did not have much to add. He admired
BioShock
and was ambivalent about
BioShock
. In the end, he said, “I excuse the fact that I don’t have agency in the story for real, because I know it’s a game and I know it is technologically impossible for me to have the kind of agency this game wants me to feel like I have. In a game today, it doesn’t exist.”

Perhaps, I said, that was the point? Rather than mock the gamer,
BioShock
could just as easily be commenting on itself, its
game-ness, thereby allowing the gamer to feel what he or she wants to feel. When I played
BioShock
, I felt better
emotionally
rescuing the Little Sisters and would not have stopped doing so even if I was aware that my sacrifice was not a real one. When
BioShock
told me that I was, in fictional terms, being controlled, I thought hard about the last three days I had spent manipulating photons with a button-encrusted plastic brick. Was not the point that
BioShock
is rich enough to provoke such divergent interpretations? And was not
Far Cry 2
guilty of a ludonarrative dissonance of omission by neglecting to populate its gameworld with civilians and other innocent people? If the theme of
Far Cry 2
is the seductive and perverting power of learning how to navigate and prosper within a violent world, why is the gamer denied situations that would truly test the limits of that seduction?

Hocking immediately said, “I don’t know. We didn’t want to be muddying up our themes with a bunch of mass murder for laughs. That would have made it confusing. But more than that, there are social-responsibility issues involved in being able to butcher women and children.” I had read an interview with Hocking in which he had described the “numerous technical and production challenges” that eliminated
Far Cry 2
’s intended civilian and refugee populations, so I knew it was not only an issue of social responsibility. Here, then, was one of the great vexations of the video game: For games to mean something, they must engage with meaningful subject matter. The subject matter need not be death and slaughter, but if it is, you must ask yourself, as a game designer, how far you are willing to let the gamer go, and why. As technology improves, Hocking said, video-game characters “are going to be so real and believable that when you shoot them with a .556 round, their arms are going to pop off. And it’s going to be horrifying. No one wants that. I don’t want to play that game.” The place where game interactivity and visual fidelity intersect is a
kind of moral crossroad at which any sane person would feel obliged to pause.

And here was the other problem. In video games, the assignation of meaning has traditionally seesawed between the game’s author (or authors) and the gamer. Authors had their say in static moments such as cut scenes, and gamers had their say during play. There is no doubt that this method of game design has produced many fine and fun games but very few experiences that have emotionally startled anyone. For designers who want to change and startle gamers, they as authors must relinquish the impulse not only to declare meaning but also to suggest meaning. They have to think of themselves as shopkeepers of many possible meanings—some of which may be sick, nihilistic, and disturbing. Game designers will always have control over certain pivot points—they own the store, determine its hours, and stock its shelves—but once the gamer is inside, the designer cannot tell the gamer what meaning to pursue or purchase. The reason this happens so rarely in games—and struggles to happen even in games that attempt to follow this model—is because, as Hocking said, “The very nature of drama, as we understand it, is authored. Period. The problem is, once you give control of that to a player, authorial control gets broken. Things like pacing and flow and rhythm—all these things that are important to maintaining the emotional impact of narrative—go all willy-nilly. The player’s vision of what might be dramatic or interesting or compelling can be completely at odds with the author’s vision. The whole point of a game is that players have autonomy to do what they want. It might be that the player is motivated to do the opposite of what you want him to do. That’s a legitimate goal in gameplay.”

Hocking was perfectly aware that the social responsibility he felt in preventing the gamer from massacring civilians in
Far Cry 2
was a contradictory riptide within his overall design philosophy.
He brought up Jonathan Blow’s core criticism—games that do not attempt to harmonize meaning with gameplay cannot succeed as works of art—and said, “I think he’s right in the sense that a lot of people don’t understand dynamical meaning—meaning that arises out of mechanics—because no one really understands it.
I
don’t even know what that means and it’s my medium of expression! Most people don’t understand it because they can’t understand it, not because they haven’t taken the time to learn it. They’re grappling with it like everyone else. Some people grapple with it more seriously and recognize that it’s a central and fundamental flaw in what we do. I think Jon and I see eye-to-eye on that. Finding a way to make the mechanics of play our expression as creators and as artists—to me that’s the only question that matters.”

Where, I asked, did that leave the narrative game? And
could
narrative games ever reach a place that was artistically satisfying for their creators and emotionally significant for their players?

Hocking’s hand traffic-copped. “Whoa. I’m not committed to the idea of the authored narrative game. In fact, I’m totally against it. I’m committed to the idea of designing a system wherein you provide useful channels for the player to poke and prod, so that you’re kind of baiting him into narrative paths of his own choosing.”
Call of Duty 4
, he said, was an example of “a rigidly authored narrative game that has a fairly good story. It pushes some of your buttons and manipulates you and makes you feel stuff. And yet the story you experienced is exactly the same as the one I experienced, with very minor variations that are probably no more different from the minor variations you and I have in our subjective experience of reading a novel. The problem with that approach, in my opinion, is that we already know how good that can be. The best story
Call of Duty
can ever have is something either very close to or marginally better than the best war movie ever made. The
best we can ever hope for, with a narrative game, is to get there. We can’t go beyond it using the tools of film or literature or any other authored narrative approach. The question is, can we go beyond it, way beyond it, to completely different realms, by using tools that are inherent to games? To let the player play the story, tell his own story, and have that story be deep and meaningful? We don’t know the limit to that problem. It could be that the limit to that problem is stories that aren’t nearly as good.”

“But you’ve got to find out,” I said.

“Yeah. I have to find out.”

O
nce upon a time, I wrote in the morning, jogged in the late afternoon, and spent most of my evenings reading. Once upon a time, I wrote off as unproductive those days in which I had managed to put down “only” a thousand words. Once upon a time, I played video games almost exclusively with friends. Once upon a time, I did occasionally binge on games, but these binges rarely had less than a fortnight between them. Once upon a time, I was, more or less, content.

“Once upon a time” refers to relatively recent years (2001–2006) during which I wrote several books and published more than fifty pieces of magazine journalism and criticism—a total output of, give or take, forty-five hundred manuscript pages. I rarely felt very disciplined during this half decade, though I realize this admission invites accusations of disingenuousness or, failing that, a savage and justified beating. Obviously, I
was
disciplined. These days, however, I am lucky if I finish reading one book every fortnight. These days, I have read from start to finish exactly two works of fiction—excepting those I was not also reviewing—in the last year. These days, I play video games in the morning, play video games in the afternoon, and spend my
evenings playing video games. These days, I still manage to write, but the times I am able to do so for more than three sustained hours have the temporal periodicity of comets with near-Earth trajectories.

For a while I hoped that my inability to concentrate on writing and reading was the result of a charred and overworked thalamus. I knew the pace I was on was not sustainable and figured my discipline was treating itself to a
Rumspringa
. I waited patiently for it to stroll back onto the farm, apologetic but invigorated. When this did not happen, I wondered if my intensified attraction to games, and my desensitized attraction to literature, was a reasonable response to how formally compelling games had quite suddenly become. Three years into my predicament, my discipline remains AWOL. Games, meanwhile, are even more formally compelling.

It has not helped that during the last three years I have, for what seemed like compelling reasons at the time, frequently upended my life, moving from New York City to Rome to Las Vegas to Tallinn, Estonia, and back, finally, to the United States. With every move, I resolved to leave behind my video-game consoles, counting on new surroundings, unfamiliar people, and different cultures to enable a rediscovery of the joy I once took in my work. Shortly after arriving in Rome, Las Vegas, and Tallinn, however, the lines of gameless resolve I had chalked across my mind were wiped clean. In Rome this took two months; in Vegas, two weeks; in Tallinn, two days. Thus I enjoy the spendthrift distinction of having purchased four Xbox 360 consoles in three years, having abandoned the first to the care of a friend in Brooklyn, left another floating around Europe with parties unknown, and stranded another with a pal in Tallinn (to the irritation of his girlfriend). The last Xbox 360 I bought has plenty of companions: a GameCube, a PlayStation 2, and a PlayStation 3.