Bioshock: Final Review

Earlier, I posted a pre-review of Bioshock. Well, I finished it, so here is my final review.

The game's last level (and the cutscene before the last level) are the best parts of the game. The imagery is very good, and this is the first game - ever - that I suspect may have played over the player's heads. I especially liked that they didn't shy away from images that a committee would have usually voted out. Even had the rest of the game sucked, it would have been worth playing simply for the imagery.

It was nice to see a classic "failing utopia": felt like I was watching old sci-fi movies like Logan's Run or Lost Planet (I know, I know...). Except, you know, upgraded with fifteen million dollars of technology.

Apparently I got the good ending, although it felt... rushed. What is it with games these days? Is a dénouement too expensive? It makes me cry. Still, I guess I can't hold it against Bioshock, as no game does dénouements.

The game's central theme - whether they wanted it to be or not - was "betrayal". I can't remember a single plot event - not ONE - that didn't revolve around someone betraying someone or something (their values). It got to the point that the only plot twists I didn't expect were when someone died before they could betray more.

Still, all my complaints remain. Especially gameplay: the gameplay turned to complete crap once I realized that it was more effective to bludgeon big daddies to death with a wrench than to shoot them with explosives or AP rounds. After that, I simply killed everything with my wrench.

Gunmen? Wrench. Grenadiers? Wrench. Rocket-launching turrets? Wrench. Boss fights? Wrench.

It wasn't even "die and wrench again". After I started using the wrench, I never died again. So it wasn't simply Vita-chambers screwing the gameplay. There were a lot of gameplay flaws.

Man, the gameplay made me cry.

Still, gameplay isn't everything, and I rate Bioshock very highly.

New Arcades

Ah, video arcades.

Video arcades work on a very specific principle: connectivity. In an arcade, you can play video games. You can even play video games with or against a small number of people (generally the games are either two or four player). That's connectivity, sure. But the real connectivity swirls around that.

There's asynchronous play - a high score table is the obvious example. You play with people (against people) without them even being there. The "line" is another example of connectivity: a dozen people crowded around the Street Fighter cabinet, lining up to fight the winner. While not playing - it happens a lot either because you're out of cash, not feeling that interested, or in a line - socializing is common. An arcade works on the principle of connecting you to other people while giving you an excuse: video games.

In America, the arcade went out of style in the eighties with the advent of home systems. The idea was that your children could come home and play games with their friends or family, instead of running off to the arcade to spend money with strangers far away from mommy's watchful eye. The crash of the home video game caused a revival in arcades for tolerably obvious reasons. Then the arcades crashed again as consoles revived...

In Japan, arcades remain popular even today, presumably because Japanese culture isn't really conducive to chummy family life. Legend has it that Space Invaders was so popular it caused a shortage of 100 yen coins, and even today weird new Japan-only arcade games are developed basically every year.

The arcade never died even in places where it seemed to. It simply mutated. There is always going to be a need for a place to connect while occasionally playing video games. In many places, the internet cafe has taken the spot that the arcade used to inhabit. Fundamentally, they're the same beast, except that the internet cafe uses computers that can play many games (and serve many purposes) instead of getting stuck with aging arcade cabinets. They also have a different atmosphere, of course.

Another example you might not guess is massively multiplayer games such as WoW. Fundamentally, these are games which use the exact same basic principles as arcades. You (and maybe a small group of friends) play games, often to compete asynchronously with others for status (rare equipment, level, rank...)

And, ask anyone, a MMOG is all about waiting. You'd think that a game you're running on your computer would let you play all the time, but that's not the case: you wait for travel, for spawns, for friends, for bids, for hundreds of things.

I bet if you compare play-to-wait times, you'll find that an MMOG has almost the exact same ratio as a popular arcade. And almost the same player reactions: some players will socialize, others will play secondary games, others will watch...

So, yes, fundamentally a MMOG is simply an arcade.

Can you think of anything else?

How about new cell phones?

Yeah, cell phones are fundamentally about chatting with your friends - frequently asynchronously using texting. But chances are, if you are the sort of person who texts, you also play with your phone. Not just games: music, photos, web surfing, all of these serve the same basic purpose as games, and are "asynchronous" in that you can share the results with people after you finish, rather than having to have them around while you do it. "Hey, look at this cool pic..."

Cell phones are evolving into arcades. Or, at least, a weird partial dispersed arcade...

I don't think it'll be long before phones evolve to fill this niche more perfectly. I can't predict exactly how this will happen, but I think it'll largely revolve around easier interfaces. Maybe cell phones that have touchscreens a'la the DS?

Can you think of anything else that is an arcade? Or maybe you have some thoughts on the future of cell phones?

Bioshock: Early Review

I haven't finished the game, yet: I think I'm 70-80% through it. Keeping that in mind... and keeping in mind the fact that System Shock II (SS2) is in my top three...

"Does it deserve a perfect score?"

Well, putting aside the fact that there shouldn't be such a thing as a perfect score - or even a score - no, it doesn't. So far.

It is a very good game. The presentation is incredible, the gameplay is relatively deep, the balance feels pretty good...

But I can't ignore the flaws. Here are the ones I noticed so far, in ascending importance:

The level design is... mediocre. I mean, it looks good, but if you compare these levels to SS2, you'll see that they are inferior. SS2 used corridors, large chambers, and lots and lots of side rooms. This game uses all of these things as well, except it's linear. You don't walk down a hall and duck into all the side rooms. You move from point A to point B. Occasionally there will be a major side route to pick up a specific item, but it's not the same as having a dozen suites lining the corridor. In my opinion, this makes the game world feel very transparent.

The enemy is design is... mediocre. So far, their best enemy design is the big daddy, and in all honesty, he's not cool enough to hold the entire game up on his own. All the other enemies are zombies with various kinds of weapons. There's a really boring teleporting zombie, too. Ooh.

The game is not fucking scary. At all. I was a little worried initially, but then I fought my first big daddy and got my ass killed. There is absolutely zero penalty for death, which means the tension went away. I got in the habit of resigning myself to multiple deaths per big daddy - that's not the way a scary game works.

Lastly, the writing is mediocre. While the method of presenting the writing (journals) is excellent, and the voice acting is excellent, the writing itself is horrifyingly flabby. It slobbers its way through whatever the local plot is, painfully landing on every point that needs to be made, and never wandering. The first one or two journals I find in an area are interesting, but the next fifteen keep hitting the same plot at a positively slothlike pace, making sure nothing goes unexplained.

The actual radio communications are also rather clumsily timed. It's too pat, too unrealistic.

Compare this to SS2, where the journals were fragmentary snippets on a dozen different plot lines. Nothing was fully explained, nothing was labored upon, the writing was lean and sharp. SHODAN's radio communications went on and on in a realistic manner - it gave the impression she was really paying attention to you, unlike the characters in Bioshock, who apparently only pay attention to you when you're about to do something momentous.

I know that a lot of people are going to be irritated by my review, but so far I haven't found the game to be worth a perfect. It's good, definitely play it. The fiction is interesting (although a rather painful farce), the world is well-defined... but I was a little disappointed.

How do you like it?

Party

I am known for my party animal nature in much the same way a wombat is known for his berserker rages. That is to say, I don't do parties, and alcohol just makes the headaches start earlier and end worse.

Still, if I had passed up the Bioshock "Appreciation Party", I probably would have been stabbed to death by feral game design students, so I went. I didn't stay terribly long, as the post time indicates. As I mentioned: headaches.

Anyhow, it was a really nice party. It doesn't take "swankiest", that goes to Intel. But it certainly wins in "models dressed in blood and cancer pretending to be mannequins".

I got myself injected with apple tequila, shamelessly stole a glowing swizzle stick, admired the giant big daddy, avoided the consoles set up with the game (I'm'a gonna play it tomorrow), and convinced someone to send me pictures. It's hard to overstate the ambiance of the place: the whole club was redone to be Rapturous. Pictures will show that, I'm sure.

The big thing for me was a TARDIS in the corner. Yehaw! Apparently the club has one by default. Now that's one hell of a cool club.

Then I went home. I'm a party animal!




Edit: here are some pictures, although they aren't the ones I want. Those "mannequins" aren't.

"Virtual" Unequal Information

_{Yeah, okay, I'm really getting ivory tower in this one. It's so minute...}

Last post I talked about unequal information. Basically, I said that differences in what information various characters, factions, and players have is what brings context to a game and to a story. And context is something that computers are extremely poor at.

However, meta-context is very important as well. For example, in a tabletop RPG, players think - contextually - that they are uncovering a story with the help of a GM. If they begin to think that the GM is generating the story on the fly (rather than just adjusting it somewhat on the fly), this can change the context and render all their information worthless.

Sure, it can be argued that players are always just exploring the GM's mind. But there is a contextual difference: a scripted story exists on its own, largely separate from the GM, even if it was written by him. It's a different context, a world of "solid" information instead of "fluid" information.

Of course, players often like playing a generative game just as much. It's not that one is better than the other (although an (at least partially) scripted story is more efficient at luring players in), it's just that they have very different contexts, and the players will collect information in a very different way.

Context can completely change everything, even if viewed the same way. For example, the big reveal in Fight Club changed the entire movie, and watching it again with foreknowledge of that reveal makes it a completely different movie.

The context differences between characters, players, factions, and so forth are what drive games and stories. If you play Crackdown to leap from rooftop to rooftop, you're going to have a completely different game than if you play to kill bosses. You're in the same city, but experiencing it in another way.

Hey, I played killing bosses by kicking them in the face lots, and my office mate played by shooting them and grenading them. We had very different experiences.

Computers are really poor at handling context... but I wonder if that's just because nobody has really thought about it in those terms before? Is it possible to build a "context engine" that can manage this kind of thing? Not just to manage the player's context, but also the character contexts within the game?

Unequal Information

I've been talking about how computers aren't very good at context. It's really one of the biggest reasons that generated content is uninspiring: the computer doesn't know how to make a layered, subtle situation. Even the most basic first person shooter has remarkably complex contexts when you look at it in comparison to what a computer can do.

A huge part of context is unequal information. Not only between characters, but between the audience (player) and the characters or world. Sometimes the player might have more information, sometimes less. Both are common.

For example, in an RPG it is common to cut to the evil villains doing some nefarious thing - burning down a village or plotting to capture someone or something. The party members blithely waltz into the next town anyway. Although you know what's coming, the party members do not, creating a tension.

An opposite example is equally easy: in most decent FPS games, the main character has some kind of past... but you don't know much about it. It's revealed over the course of play, bit by bit, as it affects the world. The character knows things you don't know, and acts on those things.

For example, what is the Spartan's background? How about XIII? How about JC Denton? They often act in unusual ways or get in unusual situations due to their background...

Hell, even the old Super Mario Bros had this kind of information imbalance. It's a key part of making a story, and almost no story goes without it.

But there are no methods of plot generation which think in this way... at best, they think in terms of character goals. While a character goal is (often) hidden information, it's only a pale sliver of information imbalance. There are no algorithms that manage information imbalance.

I wonder if one could be built.

Component Plots

When you talk about "generative" or "adaptive" plots, you run into a lot of problems with implementation.

The common approach is to carefully script out every possible plot. I call this the "big atom" method - the "atomic" elements of your plot are chunks of plot that are often several levels long. This produces a massive "branching" problem, where the more influence you allow a player, the more scripting you have to do. Lots of games use this method, including the much-vaunted KOTOR and Deus Ex series. And they have it polished: they know a lot of tricks to keep the branching down and reuse script.

But the fact is that the method is limited because you have to specifically script out every element of the plot.

An approach a lot of people try is a "small atom" approach, where they create tiny, generic plot elements that are stapled together over the course of the game. This isn't used in real games, however, because context is a huge part of games and we don't really have an algorithm for that figured out. At best, the "small atom" approach creates a meandering, disconnected plot. Normally, it creates gibberish.

There is really no "medium atom" approach in common use. The closest we have is map generators in things like Diablo, where individual chunks of a dungeon are created, but they are arranged into a map somewhat randomly. This works decently for hack-and-slash games, but if you try to implement it for a plot, you end up with the worst elements of big and small atom approaches: although any given segment of the plot makes sense, over the long haul the plot is a meandering mess. And you have to carefully script every element. Although rare, this method has been used occasionally, usually by people like Chris Crawford.

Sure, there are steps you can take to make these systems a bit more palatable. For example, you can use a "big atom" approach for the base plot, but then use "medium atom" elements to determine how the player guides the "big atom" elements. You can even subdivide that to allow the "medium atom" elements to be guided by "small atom" events... Siboot uses small atoms with medium atoms to give some context.

Alternately, you can be vague, generic, or carefully insert the reasoning between plot elements, allowing players to think there is some mysterious force behind things or letting them come up with their own reasoning. This works best in games where you can hear the player thinking and then come up with actual reasons similar to (but not exactly equal to) the player's reasoning. A computer game could be built with this in mind, but it has yet to be done.

However, these are all dodges. The real problem with all of these approaches is that a computer doesn't know anything about context, and programming it to know something about context is, as of yet, unproven theory. The larger atoms basically let the writers create more context, to supplant the computer's lack of context. Of course, what causes the branching and the pain is the fact that context changes as the plot progresses differently... so the writers have to write more variants, and you end up with a huge amount script.

As far as I can tell, there are three ways to implement context that aren't simply changing the size of the "atomic" script or pretending to have a magic algorithm that "knows" context.

1) Player-generated context. If you supply tiny story atoms to players, they will be happy to assemble them into fully functional plots that make sense. Assuming some kind of massive player base, you would see something akin to the Sims' photo albums.

2) Level-generated context. Similar to having AI navigate a level by embedding pathing and waypoints, you can have a "map" of a plot and fill it in with chunks that are context-suited. If you know that there is going to be a lovecraftian demon as your end boss, you can focus on adding horrifying plot elements rather than adventuresome plot elements, and even have a pseudorandom beginning, middle, and end. This is similar to having "intelligent" atoms, but far more centralized.

3) "Long atoms". If you want context, why not build the context into the atom? If you have a lovecraftian demon as an end boss, you can make that plot element "cast back" a series of hints and foreshadowing, even call for suitable atoms to attach to those nodes. Similarly, if you accomplish a subplot early on in the game, it can "cast forward" the repercussions, injecting elements into the play at later moments without needing to "connect" to whatever elements are currently active. This is basically the reverse of level-generated context.

Thoughts?