Strangely About Fate

Determinism and Will in Bioshock

1. “Kill.”

You are playing a videogame. A man rendered in high-resolution splendour on your television or computer screen hands your videogame avatar a golf club, and you watch from behind your character’s eyes as you beat him to death with it at his request, until his face is a misshapen pulp of blood and bone, until the head of the club is wedged in his skull.

Developed by 2K Boston (formerly known as Irrational Games) and led in its design by company co-founder Ken Levine, Bioshock is a narrative-driven first person shooter set in a 1950s underwater dystopia called Rapture. That is to say, it is a videogame where your player’s character descends into a decadent city at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to participate in the final throes of a civil war. The game requires you to kill adversaries in increasingly inventive ways to progress, although for the greater part this killing is necessary self-defence: your enemies are subhuman mutant ‘splicers’, desperately seeking their next fix of ‘Adam’, the resource that fuels their addiction for genetic self-modification, and Rapture’s second currency behind the almighty dollar. These are typical videogame conceits, the kind that have relegated the medium to an escapist, fizzling, idle pursuit supposedly not worthy of the critical attention we devote to our books, our movies, our art.

The man you have just brutally – if virtually – murdered is Rapture’s kindly founding father, Andrew Ryan, an ex-Soviet disillusioned as much with Roosevelt’s New Deal during the American Depression as with the Communist revolution that ruined his family. Levine explains in a podcast on the official Bioshock fan site that Ryan is “an idealist ... [who believes] that man unfettered by government, unfettered by God, religion, unfettered by false altruism, can do incredible things”. Ryan’s name obviously echoes ‘Ayn Rand’, and his pseudo-Objectivism is reflected in every aspect of Rapture’s extravagant art deco style, in its citizenry’s fervent belief in great men advancing in every field, “unconstrained by the small”. Rapture is a truly ‘evolved’ society, isolated and independent, frozen in the lights and debauched self-celebration of New Year’s Eve, 1959. When the player’s character finally meets Ryan, the latter is cheerfully practicing his putting in the security of his high-ceilinged office, far removed from the madness that has ravaged his city. We are reminded of Nero fiddling as Rome burns. Earlier, Ryan scornfully compares the presence of the player’s character in Rapture to that of “a termite at Versailles”. The references are surely deliberate: Bioshock is a game obsessed with the bloody end of its own once-great society, with the heights (and the depths) that a man can attain before his humanity fails him. It is a game that argues – sometimes clumsily – for tolerance and sympathy, for acts of kindly selflessness, and above all against the ideological absolutes and self-indulgence (in the strongest sense of the phrase) that have led to the fall of Rapture.

The market for such videogames should be relatively niche, and the runaway success of Bioshock is refreshing but also understandable, because at its core it is simply a very fun game, albeit one that better rewards careful play. It is also a game whose higher concepts justify its superficially silly conceits, and the fun it finds in gruesome acts of violence. More than that, it is among the very rarest of videogames: one that manages, on its own terms, to tiptoe into the realm of art. It also fails to linger there. This article hopes to explain how, and why.

2. “Games are strangely about fate.”

The remark is Ken Levine’s, in an interview with ShackNews in August of 2007. The Internet communities that support the development of games like Bioshock are made frantic by notions of choice and ‘non-linearity’. They want their games to be increasingly complex and open-ended, the paths through them as freely chosen as possible. Levine seizes on the idea in another early podcast: “I think it’s clear where gamers want to go ... they don’t want to play the designer’s game”. Despite his background in the more authorial world of writing for stage or screen, he seems pleased with this direction, and is a regular champion of player choice. It would seem that for Levine, and for many gamers, non-linear games are inherently superior: our very human predilections for freedom of will endure even in virtual worlds. In spite of all this, Bioshock itself is a rigidly linear experience (indeed, the more tradition-minded community sites like Through the Looking Glass or RPGCodex have already lamented this fact). It is a game – for all Levine’s talk of the importance of choice – strangely about fate.

In this, and in a host of other ways, Bioshock is dramatically Greek (let us not forget that Levine’s background is in theatre). The word ‘Rapture’ can be traced back first to the Latin raptura, meaning ‘abduction’ or ‘a carrying off’, and further to the Koine Greek word harpazo, which we might translate as ‘to claim for one’s self’, a turn of phrase easily bent to the Objectivist cause. The locations visited over the course of the game are named predominantly from Hellenist culture or myth: Arcadia, Olympus Heights, Apollo Square, Point Prometheus, Artemis Suites, Hestia Chambers, Hephaestus. The last, home to Ryan’s office and the scene of his inevitable murder, is the city’s main industrial centre, built on the slopes of a seething underwater volcano (it would appear Levine likes to laugh). Additionally, much of Rapture’s recent history is revealed to us through found audio diaries, in which a supporting cast of peripheral figures take on the role of the Chorus in a Greek play. They describe past events to us, make explicit present scenes, and even provide censure and conscience for the world’s living protagonists, who communicate more directly via short-wave radio. The majority of these radio transmissions are from a mysterious Irishman called ‘Atlas’, later revealed to be the much less Olympian thug and conman Frank Fontaine, who obviously shares with Rand an appreciation for the powerful symbolism in the superman propping up the world (it is likely he appropriated the icon from murals in Rapture depicting exactly that – there’s one in Ryan’s office). The key revelation in Bioshock is that Fontaine has implanted false memories in the player’s character, ‘Jack’, and genetically and socially programmed him from birth to unwittingly and unquestioningly obey directives associated with the simple phrase ‘Would you kindly...’. For the first two-thirds of the game the player obeys those same directives, never suspecting the repetition in Atlas’s words, never noticing the strings tied to every order.

Bioshock encourages repeat play in spite of its linearity, and on our return to Rapture the plot twist ahead seems so clearly signposted by diary clues and the startlingly frequent intrusion of the activation phrase ‘Would you kindly...’ that it is a wonder how we never noticed the threads of fate during our first play. That is to say, repeat performances of Bioshock are laden with dramatic irony, and we as player-audience are as aware of our character’s dogged steps toward the moment of his peripateia and humiliation as we are of those Oedipus takes toward the terrible revelation of his patricide and incest.

This plot device, as many have noted, has a sharper point to it. The player’s actions are no more freely chosen than Jack’s – guided, goaded, and exploited as they are by hard-coded (genetic) programming and skilled manipulation. Videogames are defined by their rules and limitations, the majority of which are made explicit in accompanying manuals and tutorials, some of which are discovered through play, and others inherently understood by anyone possessing even passing acquaintance with the medium. Bioshock begins in a decidedly linear fashion: we surface after the implied plane crash and accept the situation presented to us; we swim to the nearby lighthouse because all other routes are bounded by fire or water; we enter Rapture via bathysphere because there is no alternative. Furthermore, we do these things because they are expected of us, because performing this set of tasks is tacitly understood to be progress. Minutes after his arrival in a foreign, hostile environment we find our avatar shooting up with an alien hypodermic syringe that ‘rewrites’ his genetic structure. The more cynical among us may briefly question Jack’s willingness to go along with the radioed directives of ‘Atlas’, his unseen saviour and guide, but we shrug such concerns aside. After all, we are just as willing to suspend our disbelief.

The concerns we assume in the game world for the greater part obviously align with the orders we are given: we too want to see the surface again; we too want to put a stop to Ryan, who is harrying us with security bots and screeching splicers. When Atlas explains to us that we will need to commit murder to unlock passage to the nearby port area (which houses a submarine in which we can escape), we can see the logic in it. When a smuggler named Peachy Wilkins sends us on the first of the game’s numerous ‘fetch quests’ in exchange for passage to said submarine, we respond dutifully. We do what we are told because that is broadly how games work, even when stripped of the complex narrative sensibility that Bioshock gifts us. We accept that the red key card always unlocks the red door, and that the princess will not be in this first castle. We admire Bioshock in part because it makes a more concerted and considered effort to mask its linear structure (and in any case, the hoops are fun to jump through). Following instructions is as integral to playing games with narrative as turning pages is to reading a novel, but this game goes out of its way to give us at least part-ownership of our avatar’s intentions and actions. It does this so it can kindly bludgeon us with them later.

3. “[Videogames] by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.”

The contention above is Roger Ebert’s, from a Q&A session on his website. It is the thought that games are not art because interactivity and choice countermand artistic authorship, and that this is an a priori truth. It is not my intention to contest this thesis here, although I believe it to be contestable, but I do hold that videogames to date have rarely approached the realm of art, and have at best perhaps peeked through the gates.

What I share with Ebert is a rather narrow ‘definition’ of what it would mean for a videogame to be art above and beyond a measly amalgam of more traditional art forms (i.e. in its visual and audio elements, its animation, its writing, etc.). Where we differ is in our diagnoses of the failure of games to meet that definition. I affirm, against Ebert, that games are not art only a posteriori, and only because they do not aspire to it on their own terms, instead falling back into the familiar and recycled approaches and patterns of other media, most notably film, but in some cases even literary fiction (cf. Planescape: Torment). I also want to argue that Bioshock is briefly art, or at least that one thing it expresses is provocative and valuable, and yet utterly inexpressible in other more established art forms.

Where I feel Bioshock succeeds as art is not in championing the ‘player choices’, interactivity, or emergence of videogames (whatever Levine’s comments on the subject, beginning in a 2004 Gamespot preview), but in savaging them. It shows us that we have been systematically programmed as surely as our in-game avatar has by ridiculing our rote acceptance of each successive task. Atlas’s polite phrase ‘Would you kindly...’ exposes in a moment not only our unquestioning attitudes toward the games we play, and how we play them, but also the underlying conventions and linearity that lock us into the gaming ‘theme park ride’ that Levine regularly confesses he is wary of (listen, for example, to that early fan site podcast mentioned above regarding “the importance of player choice”). For a few minutes a videogame knowingly dangles its determinism in our face, expresses something significant and intelligent about its very nature, on its own terms, and we hold our breath. Control is wrested from the player, and we watch, stunned, as Andrew Ryan asserts his freedom, instructing us to kill. A mere videogame character chooses his end before our eyes, daring us to do anything but club him brutally to death, and we cannot even bring ourselves to look away.

If Roger Ebert were to read this he would probably believe there is reason to be jubilant: I seem to be arguing that a videogame becomes art – and not merely artful – precisely when it renounces its interactivity and forces the player to accept the developer’s ‘authorial control’, as well as the limitations of the medium. The argument is not that blunt however: it is the renunciation itself that is important. We have every reason to want to kill Andrew Ryan, until it is revealed exactly how that same want has been instilled and stirred by Frank Fontaine’s machinations – and then we want to spare him, just to prove to ourselves that we can. Irrational show us that we can’t, of course, but it is the sudden, stark contrast with the rest of the game’s illusory promise of freedom and ‘expressivity’ (Levine’s word, not mine) that gives the moment its force. The house sets the rules, changes them at a whim; the house always wins. The same twist transferred to film would be surprising, even revelatory, but it would not be art. Compare with that most famous of videogame identity twists in Bioware’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which would be well-suited to silver screen adaptation specifically because it apes filmic storytelling, because there is an absence of any link between the revelation that occurs and the player’s prior intentions and actions, and because there exists a farther gulf between the player’s world and that of their on-screen avatar (indeed, the developers at Bioware often refer to their games’ ‘digital actors’). By contrast, ‘Would you kindly...’ works just because it is as much directed at you the player as it is at Jack the character, because it is supported by ten or fifteen or more hours of your following a carefully-laid breadcrumb trail of audio diaries, radio instructions, and your own innate understanding of how to proceed in a videogame. The active involvement that gives ‘Would you kindly...’ its power, the systematic minimisation of distance between the real player and the artificial world through the use of a first person view, the investment of the player’s time and effort, and above all the very real rage we feel because we did all the things that led to this point, are impossible in any other art form. ‘Would you kindly...’ is every player’s betrayal. And it requires our participation.

4. “I think that it was really the ultimate insult to the player, that [Ryan] chooses to die but you can’t do anything. You have no will at all. The rest of the game after that is to establish your will in the world. Will is a very important thing in videogames. What will do you have?”

Levine’s interview with ShackNews is perhaps the most valuable commentary on Bioshock to date, in part because it is post-release, and thus deals with the intricacies of the plot, but also because of the engaging depth of Chris Remo’s questions. Here he has drawn Levine into making a distinction between the earlier, Atlas-guided levels of Bioshock, and the game as it plays post-revelation. I want to argue that the latter systematically fails the former, and undoes much of the former’s good work. I want to say that Levine and Irrational fail not only to have the player establish their “will in the world”, or to provide a satisfying, player-driven ending, but even to remain thematically coherent. The question is not “What will do you have?” but “What will can you have?”, and Irrational’s answer is half-hearted, retreating into the creaking mechanics of older, less ambitious games. Faced with following the determinism of videogames to a consistent logical conclusion, or providing the player with a genuine moment of choice and self-assertion, Levine and his team do neither, and the game suffers for its lack of art. Let me explain.

In that podcast concerning ‘player choice’ Bioshock community manager Elizabeth Tobey asks Levine to explain notions such as ‘expressivity’, and the latter responds with a laundry list of the game’s features, highlighting the diversity of the actions available to the player, at least relative to other titles in the genre. This is true: when placed beside more conventional first person shooters like the popular Half-Life or Halo series, Bioshock grants us a greater degree of choice over how we will confront and kill our foes. In addition to the impressive range of weaponry available, we can also wield fantastical ‘plasmids’, turn our enemies against one another, plan ambushes, hack into security systems, customise our character with ‘gene tonics’, and so forth. At one point Levine uses the word ‘playground’; elsewhere he has described the game as a ‘sandbox’. If it is these things, it is sharply delineated on all sides: as mentioned, Rapture is necessarily little more than a series of corridors, a constrained environment littered with fetch quests and unavoidable combat, the conditions of which the player must fulfil to progress. Yes, there is considerable freedom in how the player can approach the game’s evident design, and in some cases the order in which tasks are undertaken is player-defined, but that is almost the utmost extent of the ‘will’ Bioshock affords us.

‘Almost’, because there is also a reportedly ‘moral’ choice that appears and reappears over the course of the game, which is whether to harvest or rescue the ‘Little Sisters’ who possess the genetic resource Adam that the game’s fiction maintains is key to your self-preservation. The Little Sisters are young girls who play host to a parasitic sea slug that secretes and stores Adam. Obtaining that Adam means removing the parasite, and killing the host in the process. Bioshock wants to put you in a position where you will consider committing an appalling act of violence against an innocent, ostensibly to further your chances of survival. Furthermore, the Little Sisters are protected by ordinarily docile ‘Big Daddies’, hulking mutants in diving suits who oddly rank among the game’s most endearing characters, despite also being the greatest threat to the player’s chances when roused. The Big Daddy must be disposed of before the player can harvest the Little Sister and then redeem the Adam gleaned for genetic upgrades and general improvements to game performance. Alternatively, you can choose to save the little girl by killing the parasite, at the cost of a decreased Adam haul. Levine succinctly outlined the choice in an interview with the Bioshock arm of Through the Looking Glass in July of 2006:

“... we put you in a terrible world that has exploited the weakest members of that world in horrible ways. Then we put you in a situation in which, in order to survive, it’s pretty damn tempting to exploit the weak yourself. And there’s no moral authority telling you what to do, what’s right and wrong.”

There are two things about this statement that do not ring true. Firstly, there is a moral authority: a reformed Rapture scientist named Tenenbaum makes it clear, in no uncertain terms, that rescuing the Little Sisters is the ‘good’ thing to do, that it will “free them from their torment”, that it is “the path of the righteous” [emphasis added]. Even as the voice of Atlas whines that the girls are no longer human, a device that will restore their humanity is literally thrown in the player’s face. Moreover, the actual choice as presented to the player is bluntly binary: the words ‘Harvest’ and ‘Rescue’ appear superimposed over the girl on screen, with function buttons attached to them. ‘Rescue’ is a word as far from morally neutral as is conceivable to a generation raised on rescuing Princesses Peach and Zelda, and the canned animation that results from jabbing that option is accompanied by a tender swell of strings. Tenenbaum even advises us that the decreased Adam haul from the rescue process will be offset in the future by some sort of reward scheme, and then makes good on her promise within the next hour or two of play.

Secondly, the Adam yielded from harvesting the Little Sisters is not required in order to survive: the ‘rescue’ option provides quite enough to get by. Additionally, Tenenbaum’s reward scheme for rescuing the Little Sisters actually includes regular hefty doses of Adam, enough to make the difference between harvesting every girl and saving every girl fairly marginal, especially considering almost all of the upgrades purchasable with Adam in the game are eventually available with the latter approach. Some of the rewards granted are also unavailable through any other means, while in the Xbox 360 version of the game there is even a 100-point Achievement awarded to the player who rescues every Little Sister over the course of play. Levine tells us in an aforementioned interview that need is the “key component of what compels people to do nasty things”. An astute videogames player conditioned by the standards of the medium will rightly suspect that there is no need to harvest, and then come to recognise that good game theory dictates that rescuing the Little Sisters is the more prudent course in any case. In a Bioshock preview dated May of 2006, one Gamespot writer suggested that we would be faced with “difficult and ambiguous choices minute to minute”. But there is only one choice, repeated ad nauseum, and it is simple, and unambiguous. Levine has called the path to the ‘good’ ending a “leap of faith”, but it’s as easy as hopscotch.

Morality in Bioshock is thus initially introduced and thereafter presented as a brute dichotomy in which one of the outcomes is obviously ‘bad’, not just in terms of the tangible results it will yield for the game’s player, but in terms of how it will develop the game’s story. This same brute dichotomy of choice is reflected in the game’s ending cinematics: there is quite simply a ‘good’ ending, and a ‘bad’ ending, and you will see them referred to on message boards as such. Even without having viewed both, it will be clear to the first-time player which they have received, because the good ending plays out like the cheery conclusion of a long-running soap opera, while the bad ending is a comically overblown meditation on your character’s ‘blatant’ thirst for power. You are much more likely to witness the latter, however, because the game’s design enacts a zero tolerance policy on harvesting, and few casual players will fail to be tempted into at least one child-killing, if only to see what happens. This, as journalist Shawn Elliott observes in an edition of the Games for Windows podcast, leaves the player with no possibility for redemption, even after the crucial mid-game revelation. It is quite possible that we could have a change of heart upon learning that the advice received from Atlas to date has served only to systematically manipulate and control our actions, to pump us up for an inevitable showdown with Andrew Ryan, but the design of Bioshock does not acknowledge that possibility. Levine is wrong: the latter part of the game does not allow us to establish our will. The ‘moral’ choice Bioshock offers us, meagre as it is, has long since been made. It verges on the illusory.

Even more insultingly, the scripted endings as they appear are but drastically polarised caricatures of the player’s motivations to date (never mind that Levine has said to ShackNews that cutscenes are “the coward’s way out”). Bioshock dares to tell the player what it was they were thinking while they were playing, and the range of investment we might have had in the world of Rapture is shunted into two unsubtle videos that serve only to rudely divorce us from the first person perspective the rest of the game has strived ably to establish and maintain. For a game that cautions us against absolutes in ideology, Bioshock sees our one real decision only in white and black.

5. “A man chooses, a slave obeys.”

After as many as fifteen or twenty hours of relentlessly tense confrontations with masked freaks and shrieking mutants, Andrew Ryan’s appearance in Bioshock is disconcerting. He stands before us as nothing more than an ordinary if well-to-do man, with a clipped moustache and an imperious frown. Like most of the city he has built, Ryan bears all the hallmarks of success in a rampant free market, but crucially remains unsullied by the wild splicing and violence that has torn the former apart. As prim and proper and ramrod straight as the putter in his hands, Ryan stands as the ultimate advertisement for the Objectivist enclave he has built. He’s a great man, one who has achieved great things, but at a terrible cost. His beliefs define him, but he has failed them, and his tragedy is found in the compromises he has made: the introduction of capital punishment to combat smuggling, the regulation of Fontaine Futuristics, the interfering tugs at his ‘Great Chain’. He’s a great man, but just a man.

Levine is right to say to ShackNews that Fontaine is “truer to his philosophy than Ryan is to his”, but Fontaine’s philosophy is empty nihilism, an absolute nothing. In this regard, he is diametrically opposed to Ryan; the two antagonists are as far apart on the ideological scale as can be. As Levine admits to Through the Looking Glass, this opposition is a familiar theme in his games:

“I’m afraid of ideology, and the dangers of extreme ideology. In a lot of the games I’ve worked on, I’ve tried to put the player in the role of the guy stuck in the middle.” [emphasis added]

Fontaine is in Rapture for the long con, over a decade in the making: he establishes ‘poorhouses’ to recruit his own army of splicers, sets up ‘orphanages’ to find Little Sisters for Tenenbaum’s experiments, even buys a fertilised egg from Ryan’s stripper mistress to raise and reprogram as his very own assassin-puppet. To the people of Rapture he is a predator and a phantasm, a spook-story, but the few glimpses we catch of him before the game’s end reveal that he too is just a man, and an ugly, mangy, soulless one concerned only with getting ahead in whichever game currently holds his attention.

Bioshock wants to say that men are only ever just men, and that no ideology pursued absolutely can be preserved in the face of that fact. In an interview with Kieron Gillen in Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Levine dismisses the characters in Ayn Rand’s novels as ‘idealised supermen’:

“They don’t have doubts, they don’t have fears ... they don’t make mistakes. ... I think Rapture is a place where there’s a very powerful ideology put into play by actual people. And when people get into the mix, things get complicated.”

For much of the time we spend playing it, Bioshock successfully argues as much as this, and more, and intelligently. But everything goes downhill after its climactic revelation, because nothing changes. I have tried to argue that ‘Would you kindly...’ is one of the most powerful plot points in the history of the medium, but it ultimately has no great influence on the game as a whole. The mechanics remain the same, the level design actually falters, and we are still fed a steady diet of fetch quests and combat, with no meaningful choices in sight. In these later levels we even continue to blindly follow radioed instructions, this time from Tenenbaum, and Fontaine mocks us for our readiness to exchange one puppet-master for another (“You can knock Ryan all you want, but the old man was bingo on one point: you won’t even walk till somebody says ‘go’!”). Things are briefly excited by the prospect of becoming a Big Daddy, but despite the suggestion from Fontaine that the process is not “a two-way street”, the development is handled perfunctorily (it amounts to little more than a helmeted field of view and a damage modifier), and then tossed aside for the final encounter. The last two levels of the game consist of two tired videogame clichés. The first is a poorly-implemented escort mission with no consequences for failure (Hogarth de la Plante, senior artist for Bioshock, has conceded on an episode of Gametrailers’ Bonus Round that this sequence could have used some more work – ironically it is staged in a museum). The second is the age-old end boss fight, a curiously typical shooter sequence for a game that has staked its name on being atypical, and one that feels jarringly at odds with the rest of the game world. The player’s character finally battles Fontaine, who has overdosed on Adam and been reborn as a living Atlas, bearing no small resemblance to the statue in New York’s Rockefeller Centre. At its conclusion, Bioshock gives us an idealised superman after all, lapsing into the trappings of less interesting games: lightning, megalomaniac taunting, crucifixion poses. A game that has told us all along that men are just men, argued that self-betterment without an ethical component is impossible, and confronted us with enemies who are fearsome precisely because they have retained a broken humanity, finishes with our overcoming a mere comic-book monster.

We have no choice. Games are strangely about fate after all, even if Bioshock, and Levine, seem strangely conflicted on this point. Bar the aforementioned ‘cowardly’ cutscenes, Bioshock always ends the same regardless of our actions – regardless of our purported ‘player choice’ – unless we choose to turn it off before that end is reached. Irrational artfully draw back the curtain on the determinism of this experience, and that in itself is Art, but they have nothing further to say about it. Worse still, they seem convinced they are offering an alternative to the brute truth of the matter, when in fact Bioshock proceeds as just another theme park ride, albeit one of the best in the business. Everything that follows ‘Would you kindly...’ is thematically schizophrenic and short of greatness, because Irrational cannot commit to the idea that the player is a puppet and a slave, and fail to provide any genuine choices that would prove otherwise. There is no radical experience in the final hours of Bioshock that answers the question of “What will can you have in videogames?”, only a slow retreat into the same old standards of the shooter genre. Levine confesses he likes to make games where the player is ‘stuck in the middle’. He’s right.