An early Big Daddy sketch for BioShock by 2K Boston's Nate Wells

Does reading Level Up sometimes feel like drinking water from a fire hose? Or surfing a tsunami? Does it ever give you the sensation that you've been buried under an avalanche of words, words, words? Yes, we know that the dizzying length of certain Level Up posts can read more like a manifesto or a jeremiad than a blog entry. For you, we offer the occasional feature "Things You May Have Missed," which will cull compelling excerpts from our more voluminous posts.

Since yesterday's entry on "What Makes A Great Boss?" got such a strong response, we've decided to double dip on that topic. As before, today's extract comes from the September 17th-20th edition of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, wherein we discussed the games BioShock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. During our email conversation, we raised the question of how both games handled boss battles, as well as the limits and possibilities of BioShock's morality system. This prompted us to suggest a new type of Big Daddy, the Redeemer, as a boss that would challenge the player not only tactically, but also morally. How? Read on.

N'Gai Croal: Imagine that there was a third type of Big Daddy--let's call it the Predator the Punisher the Redeemer--that was activated every time I harvested a Little Sister. And rather than confront me directly, the Redeemer would emerge to steadily ratchet up the pressure on me within BioShock's already defined language. First, it would lay snares (trap bolts and proximity mines) for me, impeding my progress. Next, it would reprogram security cameras, bots and health stations that I'd hacked, undoing all of my hard work and turning them against me. Then it would start destroying the vending machines. And all the while, the Redeemer is broadcasting alternating recorded messages to my shortwave radio (the plaintive cries of the last Little Sister I'd harvested; snippets of Tenenbaum intake interview with that particular girl, in which the girl is addressed by her pre-conversion name) and over Rapture's public address system (an impassioned fire and brimstone sermons--in a voice as eerily rattling as the Circus of Values--that urges me to confess your sins and repent for what I have done.) And this would go on until I tracked it down and defeated it.

I haven't forgotten about you, by the way. You and your fellow bleeding-heart Rescuers would get The Siren. After every Little Sister you rescued, a Siren would softly, raspily sing ominous reminders (think Nina Simone's version of "Pirate Jenny") about your weakness for not harvesting the monstrous, corpse-defiling Little Sisters. Then, upon seeing you, the Siren would issue a high-pitched scream (think the pod people from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers") that attracted a pack of Hybrid Splicers--each one a blend of two existing traits from among Thuggish, Leadhead, Spider, Nitro and Houdini--to your current location.

If BioShock is about the player making his or her way through an ecosystem, the ecosystem should respond to the player's intrusions in increasingly interesting ways, of which difficulty is merely be a single element. The game could respond extrinsically, by reminding us periodically of our decisions--that's why I gave my proposed Redeemer his accusatory recordings and the Siren her taunts, and why I think the angel-on-one-shoulder, devil-on-the-other urgings of Tenenbaum and Atlas/Fontaine could have been employed more regularly. And it could also respond intrinsically, by making the gameplay more challenging after each Little Sister decision--hence the Redeemer and the Siren. As a Harvester, I'm dehumanizing the Little Sisters, so BioShock's systems should humanize them, making it harder for me to keep harvesting them. You, on the other hand, have been humanizing the Little Sisters, so BioShock should respond by dehumanizing them, making it more of a challenge for you to keep rescuing them. It's fine for the game's extrinsic narrative to make a moral judgement, to value one choice over the other, as BioShock does now with its "good" and "bad" endings. But when it comes to the intrinsic gameplay, that's where I think that BioShock should be amoral, to see whether we players will stick to our guns when under pressure, or rely on situational ethics to see us through.

Of course, it's easy for me to sit back and play armchair designer when I don't have to do the hard work of testing, balancing and iterating to make sure that the end result is actually fun to play. When we visited 2K's offices to play BioShock, associate producer Jason Bergman told us that this was the most extensively tested title in 2K's history, and that they made a number of judicious changes in response to the feedback they received and their observations of people playing the game. Perhaps the equivalent of fun in games is like laughter in movie comedies, which are also tested and re-tested before they're released. No matter how much a filmmaker may like a particular joke or gag, if it doesn't get a laugh, he or she is likely to cut it, because eliciting laughter is the point. So just as comedies have to be funny, games have to be fun. And by fun, I mean in that catchall way it's used when discussing that medium, not as a mental narcotic to pass the time. I mean that the systems have to cohere in a way that ultimately feels both challenging and rewarding, not simplistic or sadistic.

Here endeth our summary. To read the entire four-part exchange, click here.