BioShock

Well I just finished a video game called Bioshock. Not really coincidentally, it is actually heavily influenced by Ayn Rand, unfortunately it doesn't live up to the source material. The reasons for this I hope to explain.

To begin with, I will explain what makes Bioshock a good game. It is fundamentally a first person shooter. The underlying structure is that of a FPS such as Halo, Half-Life or Portals. The structure that underlies these games is always the same, go from A to B, don't get killed on the way. Generally these games feel as though they are a tunnel down which you are running. Portals made the tunnel very clear as it was delineated into actual rooms. Games such as Halo and Bioshocks have tunnels that expand into larger spaces, but you will always be force back into a bottle neck (I don't mean always physically, but sometimes through objectives etc, you will always reach a certain point which allows you to continue). The best first person shooters have a tunnel design that you never get lost in, yet never notice.

In terms of being a tunnel Bioshock did a very good job. I rarely had to backtrack, almost never got lost, and generally wasn't distracted by the tunnel. The reasons for this was a few things. Firstly the game was well enough designed to prevent the player from getting lost. There are hundreds of ways that designers achieve this, I won't even start to get into them, but the makers of Bioshock did a good job.

What they did especially good was hiding the tunnel. They did so by deeply developing a new and interesting premise and world for the entire game to take place in. The brief descriptions is a utopic 1920-30 underwater New York/Antlantis that has fallen into civil war and decay. This setting and world is fleshed out to an amazing depth (pun intended). The time that went into figuring out this world overcame most cliches of videogames and is the reason this game got a very good rating from all critics.

In the middle of the game they even were developping the story and plot well enough that I thought they really understood the concepts of Ayn Rand and were using the "tunnel" context of the video game to really drive home a very important point about freedom.

However, the ending of the game was a sad disappointment. The plot that was being well developed in the middle, fell on it's face. No good point was made. Ayn Rand was ignored.

And I think the biggest flaw in the game was right at the very end. For some reason the developper thought it would be a good idea to remove the player from their "tunnel" after the entire game for the first time. A game where this didn't happen was Half-Life 2. I wish they could rework the last 2 minutes of the game into a longer 10 minute finale.

The game community needs to start understanding their media. They believe they are making video game "movie" things, but they really aren't, and it is a detriment to any attempt to be taken seriously as an art form.

Kyler