The Reason BioShock Sucks

Calm yourselves, rabid legions of fanboys! I don’t actually hate BioShock —I just wanted to get your attention. That’s not to say this article’s title is mere fabrication: there is a glaring, omnipresent flaw in Rapture’s sub-aquatic architecture. While the game does deliver with its unnerving atmosphere and dour-yet-charismatic cast, something’s still missing from BioShock.

I’m talking about the element of choice, about players’ decisions altering the game’s outcome. I’m sure a lot of you are fuming in you desk chairs right now, thinking “No choice? Did this moron even play the game?”

Claiming BioShock doesn’t give players options is a weird thing to say; I’ll own up to that. After all, the crux of the game is choice. In BioShock, players need to decide between harvesting ADAM (a potent genetic material) by killing the little girls who collect it, or rescuing the girls from their positions as forced DNA collectors, which nets a warm fuzzy feeling, but less genetic payoff.

Back when the game was first announced, game designers promised muddled ethical dilemmas—even the mainstream media took note of the horrific choice players were forced to make. But in reality, your decision to be either heinous or heroic was inconsequential.

And that’s why BioShock sucks: player choices have almost zero consequence.

Sure, killing the girls gets you a different ending than if you save them, and becoming a violent sadist alters a few lines of the game’s script, but that’s about it. It really doesn’t matter if you’re a savior or a mass-murderer: you get care packages to make up for lost ADAM if you save the girls (handy dandy chart here), and their matriarchal figurehead, Dr. Tenenbaum—the woman who should despise you the most for harming her children—helps you out no matter what you do to them.

So why all this clamoring about choice? Well, for starters, it’s one of the few things games can emulate better than any other medium.

With a few exceptions, books and movies can only offer a one-sided presentation of choice. Either the protagonist does this or that, and their decision is followed to its 90-minute/300-page conclusion. Film and literature can’t tell us what would happen if James Bond hadn’t shot that bombmaker at the onset of Casino Royale, nor can it predict what would happen if Oliver Twist decided to sneak “some more” gruel when the cook wasn’t looking.

But video games recreate reality, so why stop with just one representation of it? Players are in control of the game’s protagonist. But if their in-game decisions don’t have any weight, then Master Chief, Solid Snake, and the entire pantheon of video game badasses may as well be in major motion pictures starring Keanu Reaves.

An overly simplistic image to represent an overly simplistic concept…

Of course, choice isn’t absent from games today, but all too often it manifests itself in the tired Good/Evil dichotomy. In games like Knights of the Old Republic and Fable, the only real choice boils down to being a goody-two-shoes pushover or a total dickwad. And more often than not, what alignment you become has little bearing on what missions you play, or even how you play them.

Plus, the option to toe the line between saint and ornery cuss is often absent or even penalized. For example, in The Suffering: Ties That Bind—where a player’s morality determines what powers they get—neutral players get shortchanged. Morality is determined by whether you rescue or kill innocents, so you’re forced to either become a Boy Scout or Ted Bundy.

Letting players choose to be good or evil is an artificial way of simulating freedom. It’s far too tempting to commit to a specific choice because we want a certain ending or some other reward, while doing nothing gives us exactly that: nada. We almost never make choices because we have an emotional investment in the outcome.

I realize asking for total freedom in a game is still a technical impossibility (and a logistical nightmare for developers.) I’m not saying a game needs to have a decision that could send the storyline branching out in 15 different directions. Honestly, just giving players two choices is enough if the decision has some gravity.

The ending to Fable II is the sort of choice I’m advocating. After a cataclysm claims countless lives, players have to choose between resurrecting their family or everybody else—they can’t pick both. There’s no clean cut lines of right and wrong or good and evil. Players actually have to think about their decision, instead of just toeing the party line.

There’s also a third option, which gives players a fat payday and keeps everybody dead. If that’s your thing, go for it. After all, it’s your choice…