Bioshock Infinite, Ken
Levine's newest stab at bringing some life to the AAA gaming
landscape, has spent the last month enjoying impressive critical
and public acclaim.
As a game, it is a machine as
well-oiled as you could hope to ask for, a first-person shooter
etched from thoughtful gun combat and a Vigor system that complements
it stylistically and ludically in equal portions. There has been some
streamlining, but we're in a gaming climate that streamlines as a
matter of course, especially by a franchise's third iteration.
Narratively, Infinite hosts
a plague of discontents, ameliorated partially by the game's
insistence on exploring them through the story's subtext. To simplify
drastically, Levine claims through Infinite that
narrative video gaming will always be subject to a series of
technological restrictions. It's a wonderful idea for a game to
grapple with, but it doesn't always work out. Leigh Alexander has
done an excellent job at delineating some of the friction that
Infinite encounters as
a narrative-based game,
but some of her arguments are predicated on the notion that the
original Bioshock unified
narrative and gameplay seamlessly. It is unrealistic to expect every
act of brutality in a game of this genre to maintain a sense of
commodified mortality; for all that atmosphere and all those piquant
Objectivist flourishes and all the hullabaloo about “Would you
kindly?”, the first iteration is still a game where you mow down
underwater zombies in the hundreds.
Bioshock Infinite takes
on the enormously ambitious task of taking a diegetic stance on one
of the greatest challenges a game developer faces today. The mantle
fell on the series almost by default, as it has never been shy about
accepting and exploring its status as a video game. Bioshock
examined the business of being a
man without a choice, much like a player confronted with a static set
of outcomes, and Infinite further
posited choice as a universal mutation that nonetheless results in
one fixed point. The fixity in Infinite means
that Booker can't advance toward his fate until you accept that
baptism, rescue that girl, walk through that tear – Levine argues
that the meat in between is where we gamers are expected to get our
fill of “choice.” His viewpoint is not strictly compromised by
its adherence to standard video game mechanics, and though the
integrity of his thesis is occasionally undermined by frayed threads
(uncomfortable cinematic glitches, the incorporation of the Vigors,
the game's struggle to unify Columbia's political climate with its
subtextual commentary), Levine still accepts and essays his
limitations through a medium and genre that aren't exactly ideal for
hosting them. Bioshock titles
may have important things to say, but they're still games, something
that Levine makes no apologies for.
Assessing
the technical boundaries present in a creative mode calls to mind
1895's cinematic keystone Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,
a movie that historians claimed
caused audiences to “leap out of their seats in horror” as they
saw a train barreling toward them in robust 16 FPS motion. We have
the blessing of retrospection, and it seems much more likely that
these reactions were reflexes to the excitement of watching. No one
went to this movie thinking that a train was actually going to hit
them. With video gaming, we have yet to reach such a common point of
understanding; indeed, the promise of virtual interactivity has
apparently short-circuited the notion that this medium also has its
limits.
But
Bioshock Infinite, for
whatever reason, eludes the hatred that Mass Effect 3
received for its supposedly
choiceless ending. The Mass Effect saga
was a fully serialized collection narrative released in three
installments over the course of five years and scaffolded by DLC,
books, comics, and an animated film. Expectations quickly coalesced
around the release of the third and final title, and players were
disappointed to learn that apparently pivotal decisions made in the
first two games had a minimal impact on the third. Oftentimes these
decisions were translated into either War Assets, an abstract number
determining your success in the unplayable final battle, or
sidequests, which typically just gave you more War Assets.
Disappointing, to be sure, but it pales in comparison to how the game
handles its actual ending – three choices, marginally informed by
your moral standing but remaining the same except for a few extra
cinematic seconds. To many outraged fans, it became less about the
content (mostly satisfactory, though rushed), but rather a concrete
sense of entitlement to three vastly different endings based on
careful calculations of how they played through an 100-hour epic.
This is untenable for a multitude of reasons: budget, plot and story
consistency, perceived differences in ending quality, and so on. And
thus, as in Bioshock Infinite,
the pervasive specter of “choice” ultimately proves itself as a
means to an end rather than an end itself. I think Mass
Effect 3's ending is the closest
thing a widespread gaming audience has had to its Arrival
of a Train moment,
where the shortcomings of a new
mode of experience finally became apparent; the game
thereby fell on the sword for
the likes of Infinite,
an entry in a series similarly preoccupied with man's many paths but
offering even less conclusive variation.
Evaluated
through audience reaction or objective criticism, neither of these
games was entirely successful in reaching its goal. And because of
the myriad complications present in programming a game, let alone a
hundred-million dollar game, it's not likely in this generation that
developers will be able to bridge gamers' notions of agency with a
multi-forked preprogrammed narrative that molds itself to their
decisions. I have never been bothered by video games with only one
ending, as I feel this approach gives scenarists the greatest degree
of freedom to design the story they want to tell. In this regard I
think Deadly Premonition,
though certainly rife with flaws, offers a satisfying middle ground
between choice-driven story development and a focused creative
vision. Deadly Premonition
is essentially a Twin Peaks ripoff,
isolating one schizophrenic FBI agent in a town full of eccentrics
against the backdrop of a recent murder. But its scope is huge, much
more than Bioshock Infinite or
Mass Effect 3, and
nearly all of the content offers a fuller picture of the town of
Greenvale. Interacting with your surroundings beyond the most basic
parameters of the plot is typically left to sidequests, fifty in
number, generous in length, and every one offering some fragment of
insight about the game's fascinating universe. Deadly
Premonition encourages you to
take time and dig deep into this town's network of secrets not only
through world building, but also in-game rewards and explicit player
encouragement. Agent Francis York Morgan, in dialogue with his
alternate personality Zach (you), repeatedly stresses that you should
take as much time as you need to uncover the secrets of Greenvale and
its residents. Mass Effect 3 attempts
a similar system that is rendered less effective by sloppy
timekeeping (of course I'll retrieve your data disks from the cold
recesses of space! What are Reapers?), homogenized quest structure,
and that aforementioned sense of irrelevance when it all boils down
to the one number that determines your sort-of-ending. Deadly
Premonition's choices feel
vital, especially because it's next to impossible for a first time
player to discover them all; ME3's,
though livened by the water-tight gameplay, are an obligatory
vestige. 
Stellar
scenario design scaffolds Deadly Premonition's
conceits about choice and the player, perhaps not as gracefully as
Bioshock Infinite, but
with a much more cohesive presentation of its ideas. Game designer
SWERY is not shy about
assigning you a role in the incipient events, assimilating you with
Zach as soon as the game starts. The first scene is a black
screen, York's voice calling out for Zach to wake him up. You do this
by pressing the A button; York thanks you. From literally the first
action you take, an actor-avatar relationship is established, one
that progressively deepens with a series of insane one-sided
conversations between York and “you.” To say much more would
spoil the game, but SWERY has an equally salient point about player
control as Ken Levine without such a defeatist prognosis. Infinite
is birthed from a gallery of motifs, but one of its most prominent is
the cage, Levine's concession that the video game medium is finite.
SWERY views gaming as sprawling, sinister terrain, not without its
boundaries but confident enough to operate comfortably inside them.
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