Derbonk - Playing With Narratives

DerBonk 1 Playing with narratives: Story in 2K Boston's Bioshock Many, probably even most computer games1 involve some sort of story. However, game studies scholars have been debating whether games are narratives or not, as Jan Simons recounts in his 2007 article “Narrative, Games, and Theory.” On the surface, the story of a game is told in many ways, through cut-scenes, texts, audio recordings or imagery, all of which are clearly narrative texts and can be interpreted with narrative theory (e.g. Chatman). These non-interactive elements make up the “discourse” part of a narrative, while the actual “story” traditionally is what the discourse elements express (Chatman 19). There is more to a game than its cut-scenes though and none of these textual elements are actually interactive in the sense that the player of a game can influence the “events and existents” (Chatman 21) of the story. So, the gameness of a game is not part of the narrative, at least that's what Jesper Juul (and others e.g. Eskelinen or Järvinen) argues in his 2001 article “Games Telling Stories? – A brief note on games and narratives.” Games may incorporate narrative elements (e.g. cut-scenes) and “[g]ames and narratives share some structural traits” (Juul 2001), but how a game may tell a story is fundamentally different from literature or film. If games do not fit the traditional definition of narratives, what is the unreliable narrator or narration that is often mentioned in the enthusiast press (e.g. Levine 2008, Croal or indirectly Francis)? Most people who have played Bioshock will argue that the game or, for lack of a better term, the “implied game designer” (as a parallel to the implied author described on page 31 of Chatman's “Story and Discourse”) tricks the player for roughly the first half of the game, culminating in an intricate plot twist. In this paper, I will describe how this deceit might work, bearing in mind the arguments set forth by Juul and others.

1 In this paper, I use “computer games” for both games on consoles and on PCs

DerBonk 2 What is Bioshock? Bioshock2 was developed by 2K Boston/Irrational Games under lead designer Ken Levine, it was released in 2007 and received mostly positive to very positive reviews (Metacritic). It is considered to be in the genre “first-person shooter” and is available for the Microsoft Xbox 360, the Sony Playstation 3 and PC (cf. Metacritic). The game starts with a cut-scene in the first-person perspective (as seen from the eyes of the player character (PC)) of the PC Jack3, who is sitting in an airplane that is flying over an ocean. The player sees photographs of the PC's family and seconds later the plane crashes. At this point the player gets control of the player character, who apparently is the only survivor. As the PC is enclosed by burning wreckage, the only way to go continue is swimming towards a lighthouse, which leads the PC and the player to the underwater city “Rapture.” The game remains in the first person perspective, featuring “interactive” cut-scenes, e.g. the decent to Rapture. During this scene the PC is stuck in a bathysphere which moves on a set track. The player can move the PC and look around, but it is impossible to change the events that occur. Through a short video shown in the bathysphere, the player is introduced to Rapture and its founder Andrew Ryan, who founded Rapture on the principles of Ayn Rand (although it is not explicitly mentioned, the game often alludes to Rand e.g. with banners proclaiming “No gods or kings. Only Man.” Cf. Crecente). However Ryan's utopia has failed after a rivalry between Ryan and the mobster Frank Fontaine and the city (or at least the parts the player gets to see) has been abandoned by most citizens. During the decent, the PC gets contacted via radio by a man identifying himself as Atlas (an allusion to Rand's Atlas Shrugged). In the first half of the game, Atlas helps the PC and explains the mechanics of the game to the player. The nonplayer character (NPC) Atlas doubles as a tutor for the player and a guide to Rapture.

2 As Bioshock is my primary source, I will not use proper citations when I refer to it. 3 I will not use the name of the PC in the rest of this paper, in order to emphasize the difference between the PC and the other characters.

DerBonk 3 There are two scenes after the beginning, that are of importance for this paper and for reasons of economy, I will only discuss these two. I am aware, that there are more parts that are important for a full analysis of the game. However, the sequences I will discuss are key moments in the game's story, making the discussion of other, less important parts, unnecessary. The main goal for the PC (and therefor the player) is to get out of Rapture, which means that the PC has to get to Andrew Ryan, who is in control of the bathysphere transit system. Before helping the PC find a way to Ryan, Atlas asks for support in an effort to free his wife and child from a locked bathysphere. Although heavily scripted, this cut-scene is interactive and not set apart from the rest of the game, as the player retains full control of the PC. While the player fends off enemies in a locked control room above the bathysphere bay, Atlas tries to free his family and is attacked as well. The bathysphere gets destroyed and Atlas's family dies as the player looks on. While the fight with the Splicers can be influenced by the player, the actual story elements, the events and the existents, are beyond the player's reach. After this incident, Atlas is enraged and determined to kill Ryan, who he sees as the sole person responsible. At this point, the PC gets closer to Ryan, but has to take several detours, as machinery is damaged or paths are blocked. In these sequences, the player is directed by Atlas, who serves as the “quest-giver.” Only success in these missions (e.g. obtaining a certain object) advances the plot and opens up new areas. The final confrontation with Ryan is a climax of the story and reveals the main plot twist of Bioshock. The player actually loses control of the PC, and a first-person cut-scene is triggered. During the scene, Ryan reveals that the PC was conditioned to obey any order given with the words “Would you kindly...” in the same phrase (these are the exact words Atlas uses when giving directions). Now, the PC is unable to move, as Ryan orders him to stand still. Ryan gives a speech about freedom of choice, urging the PC to overcome the

DerBonk 4 conditioning and even orders the PC to kill him with a golf club (that Ryan himself hands to the PC). As the PC attacks, Ryan never tries to defend himself, but only repeats: “A man chooses, a slave obeys” in an attempt to break the conditioning. After Ryan is killed, Atlas reveals that he is Fontaine and now has full power over the city. The game then goes on, but as this turn of events is the main issue regarding the unreliability of the way the story in Bioshock is told, there is no need to discuss the rest of the game here.

How does story in games work? A proposition As described in the introduction, games are not narratives per se. If that is the case, how can the way a game tells a story be described and analyzed at all? I think we have to take the game apart, separate the narrative elements (like cut-scenes or dialog) from the game parts (like shooting enemies or picking up items) and interpret these aspects with different tools. Beginning with the narrative sequences, the ideas of narrative analysis (e.g. Chatman) are of course still valid. Taking only the narrative elements into account, the way the game's story is told might be called unreliable narration. However, Bioshock does not have a single narrator, but most events are either not narrated at all (e.g. the non-interactive part of the cutscene in the bathysphere bay) or narrated by a variety of characters. The player can, for example, listen to audio diaries and messages left by citizens of Rapture. These are narrated by a cast of characters and cover the events that lead to the current situation, often referring to characters that the PC encounters later on. A lot of the setting is revealed through these (optional) pieces of narrative and some of it is unreliable narration, as Fontaine's faked death is presented as real in some of these tapes. The main plot is driven by Atlas's monologues, as the PC remains mute except for a few sentences in the introductory cut-scene. These monologues serve as a narrative, but Atlas can hardly be described as a narrator. He is just another character, that lies about himself. Judging from the narrative parts of Bioshock, the

DerBonk 5 way the story is told could indeed be described with the term “unreliable narration,” however this is a stretch, as the deception is mainly aimed at the PC and not the implied player, as seen above. Leaving the narrative aspects means leaving widely accepted theory. There are a lot of ideas about what makes up what, according to Carr et al, Juul called the gameness of a game. For this paper, I will use the “elements of a game” system that Aki Järvinen outlines in his 2007 Ph.D. thesis Games without Frontiers. He separates nine elements in three categories: systemic elements, compound elements and behavioral elements (Järvinen 55). The last category deals with the players and cultural context of the physical game. As Bioshock is a single player game and these elements are not integral for this paper, I will not discuss them further. I do recognize however, that they are an important part of the reception of a game. Systemic elements are the core elements of a game: components and environment (Järvinen 55). These elements exist without player interaction and realize the compound elements. Furthermore, they are the most complex ones, as they exist between the behavioral elements (i.e. the player and the context) and the systemic elements. The compound elements are the conventions that govern the game (ruleset and game mechanics), the interface and information that connect the player to the game and the theme of the game (Järvinen 55). I will discuss the systemic elements first and move on to the compound elements later, referring to the description of the game above, as well as reiterating on arguments made above. The components are actual objects and characters in a game (Järvinen 64-7). They therefore often have a narrative function as well as a game function. The first function of Bioshock's components is explained above. The second function the components have in the game is representation of the player and to serve as obstacles, possessions (e.g. weapons) or resources (Järvinen 66-7). The PC represents the player in the game, which is further emphasized by the first person perspective. In the discussed parts of Bioshock, both Atlas and Ryan are not components in a narrow sense, as they never appear in an interactive scene, but

DerBonk 6 only as character portraits during radio contact and in cut-scenes, i.e. in the narrative parts. The “components-of-system,” components not controlled by players, are mainly weapons and health packs to be found and enemies of various kinds. The enemies attacking the PC are said to be controlled by Ryan and their actions emphasize that he is the main adversary, drawing attention away from Atlas/Fontaine. The environment is basically the geometry of a game, the spatial constraints it takes place in (Järvinen 66-8). In Bioshock's case Rapture's corridors are the environment. In most situations, there is no other way except back from where the player came, where nothing is happening and the game is standing still, or forward in the direction the environment leads the PC. This reveals Bioshock's linear nature. The player can only advance in the game, the way back is often blocked or simply empty. Ken Levine said in a Shacknews interview: "Games are strangely about fate. You can argue about fate in real life, but there's fate in games" (Levine 2007). The environment alone makes it impossible to escape Atlas's conditioning of the PC, as the game would not progress otherwise. So even a player who knows about the plot twist could not prevent the events from playing out. This shows that the way the story is told in Bioshock is predetermined by what I called the implied game designer above. To strengthen this claim, I will now look at the compound elements found in Bioshock. The compound elements of Bioshock have a broader scope than I will be able to discuss here. Suffice it to say that I will only mention the issues that are important for my argument, as I did in the description of the game itself. One of these elements, information, plays a vital role for the game part of Bioshock, as it represents the PCs status (e.g. health or ammunition) among other things. However, it is so detached from the story, that I will not discuss it further. On the surface, the interface is also rather unimportant for the way the story is told in Bioshock. The interface is the tool a player uses to influence a game (Järvinen 81-2). As with most computer games, Bioshock is controlled with a console game pad or mouse and

DerBonk 7 keyboard. The controls themselves are typical for a first-person console game, with optional vibrations that give haptic feedback of the events on the screen. During the pivotal scene in which the PC encounters Ryan, the interface does play an important role though. As soon as Ryan uses the conditioned control phrase, the player loses the ability to influence the game. As the narrative reveals that the PC only followed orders and, in Ryan's words, is a slave, not a man, the lack of control bluntly shows that the player had no real control as well. To further emphasize the passive role the player is in, the game pad still vibrates, but doesn't respond to any input. I will show that this issue of involuntarily obeying orders, which are not even conceived as orders, is an important part of the way Bioshock tells its story up to this point. The ruleset and the game mechanics contribute to this issue as well, though less overtly. The ruleset of a game is a rather abstract concept. It consists of the rules that actually make the game a game, it sets goals and offers procedures to reach those goals. The rules are “[...] embodied in other game elements, yet it is possible to extract rules as a specific, individual game element class. Rules produce each individual possibility and constraint that a game has to offer for its players.” (Järvinen 69) In Bioshock the player kills or evades enemies, dies if the health meter drops to zero or uses genetic engineering to gain special powers (e.g. throwing lightning bolts or fire balls). Bioshock basically has the standard shooter ruleset with a bit of PC improvement, which is typical for role-playing games. As it was inspired by the classics System Shock 1 and System Shock 2 (Looking Glass Studios 1994, 1999), Bioshock takes up a lot of the rules of the older games, like unlocking special powers and abilities. The most relevant rule for my argument however is that the player has to comply with Atlas's requests or the game does not work. Not following Atlas instructions (e.g. not flipping a switch or ceasing to fight enemies) will not necessarily end the game, but the story will not advance and the game basically stands still, similar to the argument mentioned above in the discussion of environment. This makes for a very strict ruleset, as the player is rarely free to choose a goal. There are situations in Bioshock that let the player

DerBonk 8 decide (e.g. killing or freeing a certain type of NPC), but the rules, just like the environment, serve as a linear path that advances the story. This becomes even less apparent, when taking the narrative into account and looking at the realization of the ruleset within the narrative. The code-phrase that the PC is conditioned to obey is “would you kindly,” which makes it sound not like an order at all, but like a request, asking for a favor. Another element that is rather abstract in nature and closely related to the ruleset, are the game mechanics. They are the actions a player can use in a game (Järvinen 73-4). In Bioshock's case: running, looking around, shooting (not necessarily hitting anything though), using genetic modifications, hacking automatic turrets or using objects (like vending machines). These actions are rather typical for a first-person shooter and are very empowering for the player, as they grant a lot of freedom within the ruleset. Obstacles (components, e.g. enemies) actually have to get “in the way” to keep the player on track of the story. The game mechanics, just like the ruleset, only give an impression of freedom of choice, but the obstacles actually lead the player through the game. The question of choice versus obeying orders is also repeatedly mentioned, directly or indirectly, in the narrative, culminating in the death of Ryan. It is actually part of the theme of Bioshock. The theme of a game can be (in parts) a subset of the narrative, but goes beyond that as it defines “[...] the graphic style, or the audiovisual style, or the physical setting [...]” (Järvinen 80). Bioshock has a distinct art deco graphical and audiovisual style throughout the game, which is represented in the environment, the way information is presented as well as the narrative. This fits the theme of the game, which is Rapture as a Rand-esque utopia build and separated from the rest in the world in the 1940s. This theme does not play an important part for the issue at hand as such, but emphasizes the question of choice versus obeying or fate, which is also emphasized, as I have shown, in the ruleset, environment, game mechanics and even the interface.

DerBonk 9 Conclusion Finally, most of these elements contribute to the way the story of Bioshock is told. They establish a linear story, that the player cannot escape from, but give the impression of free choice. The player is free to choose on many levels, going as far as making some of the narrative and game elements optional (e.g. the audio diaries or the thematization of the environment). Additionally, a lot of first-person shooters show similar traits in their game elements. So, the surprising moment of the unreliable narration is even emphasized for players familiar with the genre, as they know the concept of the quest-giver/tutor role Atlas plays, for example. Combined with a narrative, that aims at sympathizing with Atlas through the death of his family, there is very little reason to doubt his claims. The way the game is told up to the point of the confrontation with Ryan can therefore be classified as unreliable. As it becomes clear that Atlas deceived the PC (and the player as well), every claim he made before has to be reevaluated.

Works Cited 2K Boston. Bioshock. New York: 2K Games, 2007. Carr, Diane, David Buckingham, Andrew Burn, and Gareth Schott. Computer Games. Text, Narrative and Play. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. Chatman, Seymour B. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Crecente, Brian. “No Gods or Kings: Objectivism in BioShock.” Kotaku. 15 Feb. 2008. 28 Mar. 2009 Croal, N'Gai. “Objection! A Look at Far Cry 2 Creative Director Clint Hocking's Critique of BioShock.” LevelUp. 15 Oct. 2007. Newsweek.com. 28 Mar. 2009

DerBonk 10 Eskelinen, Markku.“The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies. 1.1 (2001) Francis, Tom. “We can hardly Adam and Eve it.” Rev. of Bioshock, 2K Boston. Computerandvideogames.com 16 Aug. 2007. 28 Mar. 2009 Järvinen, Aki. Games without Frontiers. Diss. University of Tampere, 2008. Juul, Jesper. “Games Telling stories? – A brief note on games and narratives.” Game Studies. 1.1 (2001) Levine, Ken. “Ken Levine on BioShock: The Spoiler Interview.” Shacknews. 30 Aug. 2007. 28 Mar. 2009 ---. “Ken Levine on BioShock's Narrative Drive.” Gamasutra. 25 April 2008. 28 Mar. 2008 Looking Glass Studios. System Shock. Redwood City: Electronic Arts, 1994. ---. System Shock 2. Redwood City: Electronic Arts, 1999. Metacritic. “Bioshock.” Metacritic.com. 28 Mar. 2009 Simons, Jan. “Narrative, Games, and Theory.” Game Studies. 7.1 (2007)