Ei-Nyung brought up a good point, re: A_B’s blog post about Bioshock, that what’s important in this discussion is *who* is raising a particular question, and *why*?
And in that regard, I agree with A_B, that having someone who’s driven by a philosophy I don’t agree with raise a point, even if the choice is there, should make me question why they’re raising a point, what the context is, and what point they’re trying to make, as an artist.
Ken Levine’s a very, very capable game developer. Historically, Irrational’s games have been very focused – I think that’s why you can say Irrational, as a developer, has a *character*. Their games are a certain way, and that’s because you have someone with a vision guiding the company. That doesn’t mean that the games aren’t developed in a collaborative environment, and that other people bring their own views to the mix, but the *best* games are often guided by someone who can marshall that collaborative energy and focus it at something.
So, yeah, I think if Levine has an agenda, it’s in the game, simply because he’s one of the few developers that actually is capable enough to develop an agenda, and place it in an interactive environment with enough depth that it’ll actually get someone to *think* about what it all means.
So, again in that regard, I agree with A_B that if you were to have someone of a particular view – let’s say, a Republican, who’s created a political simulator that allows for meaningful decisions and choices – even if it allows me to make substantial decisions about my character (let’s make him a Democrat), I have to question why the whole process is framed in a certain way, and what the creator wants me to think. If it’s someone who’s a Bush Republican, I also make my purchasing decision based on whether or not I want to give that person money, which I most certainly do not.
But, to me, I think the reason I’m willing to give Bioshock a shot, despite all that, is that I’ve played almost all of Irrational’s previous games, and the thing that sets them apart, for me, is the amount of control I have over *who I am* in the game.
This is something that most games simply don’t do. Whether I’m cast as a hero, and I’m working for the good of all, or whether I’m cast as a selfish asshole, most games define my character for me, and then center all of the interaction in the world around me. While Ei-Nyung makes a distinction between characters that do heroic things, and those that don’t, I’d say that a lot of games, even where you’re cast as the hero, because they’re centered around *your* story, and you’re the only one that matters, I am the sole driving force of all action in the entire game universe, and I basically don’t need to consider anything else, except in any way that someone else may be of benefit to me.
In a game, if I help someone, I’ve been trained to almost universally expect that I will get something in return. I help them *because* I know I’ll be rewarded. Yes, the narrative reward may also be that my character is altruistic, but as a player, it’s still in service of *me*.
But, I’ll concede that there are some games where your character isn’t purely selfish. Even something like Half Life 2, I think, succeeds where other games fall down because they create characters that you feel altrusim/empathy/whatever towards. You wouldn’t shoot Alyx Vance in the face to get a health powerup. At least, *I* wouldn’t.
But in almost every other FPS, you’ll shoot anything that moves. If you weren’t trained to be such a selfish asshole, you couldn’t play an FPS, because you’d empathize with the people you’re shooting, or you’d weigh their lives vs. your progress in the game.
I think that’s one of the reasons that I have a hard time framing Bioshock as Objectivist propaganda, because it’s from one of the few companies that actually considers that the player wants the ability to define their avatar’s *character*, and give them meaningful choices in the world relating to those decisions.
I would like to see someone interview Ken Levine very specifically on the point of his views on Objectivism, and whether he believes the philosophy a good one, and what his intentions were with the creation of Bioshock. I don’t think it’ll happen, but it would be nice. I think current game reviewers haven’t done it because game reviewers almost universally completely infantile (several particulars excepted, but we’re talking 2-3 people, maybe, total).
I don’t really know. I think Ei-Nyung’s right, in part, that one of the reasons I’m spending so much time on this is that I feel like A_B would be *great* to talk about this game with, if he’d play it. But I can see his objections, and I can see how I’d react similarly under different circumstances. Hell, I didn’t play GTA 3 at all, because I found it morally reprehensible. I played VC & San Andreas later, and I was able to play them in such a way that I never had to do the things I felt were particularly egregious. In that regard, I think the GTA games succeeded, despite the fact that you still had to basically become a mass murderer to progress through the game. Again, given what I know about their games historically, I think Bioshock’s going to be really interesting, and I’m hoping they’ll give me the ability to play through it in the way that I want.
An aside: I never finished Shadow of the Colossus, because I didn’t feel like I could actually make the decision to do the right thing, and I felt strongly enough about it to actually put the game down and not play it again. People tell me I should finish the game, but I think I *have* finished it. I got to a point where I couldn’t justify playing any further, even though it’s entirely fiction. Because it’s *interactive* fiction, *I* didn’t want to continue, and I made the decision to stop. To me, that’s an incredibly powerful statement on the part of the game, that it could elicit a response like that.
To me, if Bioshock does end up as essentially Objectivist propaganda, I’m sure I’ll put it aside as well. I’m hoping it’ll be as interesting a philosophical engagement.