Listen Up: How Bioshock Changed Videogames
“I am Andrew Ryan, and I’m here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? ‘No!’ says the man in Washington, ‘It belongs to the poor.’ ‘No!’ says the man in the Vatican, ‘It belongs to God.’ ‘No!’ says the man in Moscow, ‘It belongs to everyone.’ I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose… Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.”
― Andrew Ryan, Founder of Rapture
In August 2007, the video game Bioshock was released. Set in 1960, the protagonist finds themselves in the underwater city of Rapture. The city, once known as a man-made Utopia, has since been corrupted and dilapidated after a civil war. This leaves the player to fend for themselves through the city. The game itself did something different that broke the mold of what video games could do within their medium. For the entirety of the existence of videogames, narrative developments would only be reveled through cinematic cutscenes or dialogue box-based conversations. Previously, video game developers thought themselves to be beholden to the same story telling methods as books or movies. Within every level in the game, Bioshock hid 122 audio diaries. These were small tape players that could be collected that played recordings of those who used to inhabit Rapture. They each tell the player important stories about how the city was created and gives insight into how it eventually consumed itself. This is where Bioshock changed the way games were made. Videogames put the player in control of the space and time spent in the game, which leave it up to the player how they interact with the world. Bioshock made the most of its medium by using these audio diaries as a way to add details without being intrusive to the gameplay. These audio diaries didn’t stop gameplay but instead play in the background while the player still is in game, adding an extra layer of atmosphere to the game. The game broke new ground by showing that exposition or narrative depth could be employed in new ways because of the autonomous nature of video games. This new mechanism for story telling has since changed the way that stories are told today within video games.
Through the perspective of a first-person shooter style game, Bioshock pitches players into a linear based narrative. The game is incredibly deliberate in its design and makes sure that players fully experience Rapture. Games around this period typically explained their stories or dialogue in exposition-laden moments. These moments, limited by the hardware of their time, would break the immersion of the game to play a pre-rendered cutscene or text-based dialogue exchange. Famously, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of Patriots (2008) touts the record of having the record of the longest cutscene, an excruciating 27 minutes. When games break immersion to tell their stories, they don’t rely on their medium to be compelling, which undermines what makes them so enjoyable in the first place. A videogame is more interactive than other mediums, and cutscenes take away from that. While there is nothing wrong with cutscenes, games require a delicate balance between narrative and gameplay. A 27-minute cut scene means that the game doesn’t rely on its gameplay to effectively tell a story, and it also means that the player is unable to interact with the medium. For example, The Last of Us (2014) has the game’s protagonists passively talk during gameplay about their zombie-ridden and destroyed world. This gives only light hints at what has happened, and the player gets to be an active part of character interactions. This is similar what Bioshock gets so right in its design. It allows the player to find these small tokens that reveal the entirety of what happened to the city by stringing together these intriguing details of the lives of those once living in Rapture.
The audio diaries inform the player of a world that has crumbled due to the ideologies it was founded upon led to its own demise. The player finds Rapture in decay, its buildings increasingly in decline, and its remaining residents gone murderous. To design this unique setting the game’s writer, Ken Levine, sourced the art deco style of the 1920s & 1930s as his inspiration for rapture. The pure and enterprising city shines as a tribute to this, but also is more emblematic of the politics woven into the story. Levine studied the philosophy of objectivism, including the works of Ayn Rand, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. These philosophies suggest that humankind should be driven by selfishness, not altruism. In the game, the city is founded by business magnate Andrew Ryan. And the city wears these philosophies on its sleeve. Through the audio diaries within the game, we learn that Rapture was a city founded to escape the society above water. Rapture is not bound by governments, morality, or religion. The city ultimately is meant to be a libertarian haven for thinkers and scientists to thrive. As the player finds more audio logs, we find that this laissez-faire civilization has descended into class warfare, wealth inequality, and civil unrest. The city ultimately fails when competitors arise against Andrew Ryan and the city falls into a civil war, destroying its civilization. Levine leverages the city as a commentary on these ideologies, and the player would only ever find this part of the story through these audio diaries. If you were to play the game without ever finding these diaries, the secrets of Rapture would never be learned. The story in the game is about the protagonist the player inhabits and completing the game without the diaries is still a satisfying experience. However, the diaries inform the player about characters who are part of the story, and their roles Rapture’s decline. Without these diaries, the incredibly thought out world wouldn’t be completely understood, making the game lack the higher level of narrative complexity if the player did find them.
This game demonstrates that innovations can be made within the medium to differentiate itself from the traditional media used to tell a story. When someone watches a movie, they are restricted by the time that the story unfolds, and they only see whatever is in frame. The movie decides what is important to the audience and determines how much you learn within its runtime. In games, you get full control over these factors. Players are given the time to learn more within a setting, and autonomy with how they get to each beat in the story. Bioshock became the first to further their medium by providing more to the story without slowing down the player. Contrary to movies, Bioshock leaves it to the player to find out more about Rapture, and eventually find more about how the main character didn’t end up in the city by chance. This is how Bioshock is able to further distance videogames from movies because in a game you can spend time inhabiting a scene to find out more about what is contained within the level. Videogames ultimately change the way narratives are consumed because players can now determine how deep they want to dive into a world. Instead of being limited to a page in a book or a movie scene, players can search for more answers about the story and make more out of a medium than ever before.
Since its release, audio diaries have become a staple to modern video games. This entirely optional storytelling device was able to add a high brow narrative to a medium that was primarily regarded as a thing for kids and teens. The game went on to produce two sequels that expand on its original messaging of philosophies failing in practice. Most recently, audio diaries were used in Marvel’s Spider-Man (2018), the best-selling PlayStation 4 game of all time. The game uses them as a way to learn about the declining mental stability, which is clever way to add more to a game narratively. Ultimately, Bioshock still holds up today as the critically acclaimed game it was in 2007. By spending time developing an experience rich with themes and flawless gameplay, the game has become a milestone in videogame history.
