If you haven't played or watched Bioshock, but plan to, go ahead and skip this blog entry.  Also, this is pretty much a love letter to the game, so I'm not going to be nuanced about it.  While there were tons of things that bothered me about what I saw, what's below is what I keep coming back to when I think about the game, so I thought I'd share it.

I'm not sure what I want to say here, other than I've completed Bioshock vicariously, by watching one of the few playthroughs I found online.  Watched it from beginning to endings, and I have to say even though I wasn't immersed as much as I would have been had I played, that I still enjoyed watching it, and I find myself thinking "you know, if I ever do get a machine that can play that game, I'd probably want to own it."  This after all the plot was revealed.

And yet the plot, the atmosphere, the surprises, were all what made me like the game in the first place.  There's a bit of magic in the way things sometimes combine, as our own Jeff Gerstmann said in his review of Bioshock back in the Gamespot days, to be more than the sum of their parts.

It sets up a theme, an interesting, original setting, and runs with it.  I think this is one of the games that convinced me that gaming had entered some sort of renaissance.  I have to remind myself that if Bioshock hadn't been an accessible shooter that it might not have achieved the success it did, but I'm glad that aesthetic and depth of concept could be successful at all.  More hope for the rest of us.

I watched the whole thing so I could catch up on all the stuff surrounding Bioshock that I'd pretty much been avoiding back when I decided that I wanted the game, before it was even released.  I did watch a review or two, although I don't think I managed to remember a whole lot as most of the things I saw still surprised me. 

What I still love about it is that its theme is both relatively original AND internally consistent.  There aren't more familiar tropes lurking just out of sight, ready to hop on the player to provide the twists.  Every element in the game seems rather plausible within this strange world that's given.  No mean feat, that.

I also found myself emotionally invested in the story, even if the story wasn't terribly deep or complex it was deep and complex enough for what it was trying to accomplish, and that's what really matters.  Depth and complexity for their own sakes is sort of hollow.  The proof to me that they had hit the right note, both literally and metaphorically, was in a certain sequence with the Little Sisters, as well as in a few other moments involving them.  It's an easy target to hit, using our own instincts against us, but I think that sort of illustrates one of the undercurrents of the story: certainly in the reveal at the game's midpoint, but also in the player's own decision to rescue these victims of Rapture's excesses.

There is by no means a huge decision tree; the game has maybe three endings total, two of them almost identical, and the choice you have is similarly structured two-and-a-half choices.  It's not an involved decision to make, but like I said about the depth and complexity of the plot, the choice is involved enough to get the point across.  Some games with more choices don't have nearly the same impact that Bioshock's choice did for me.  And hey, some games that were completely on rails still had an impact on me; interactivity is about serving the game.

Not sure what Bioshock 2 will do for Rapture.  Maybe they should have left it alone, but I feel like there's still potential for more in this world they've created.  As for raising the bar, if they do I'll be thrilled; if they don't, at least I hope they tell a good story worthy of being remembered alongside its predecessor. 


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