Three is a trend, or so the saying goes among journalists. So what are we to make of the steady exodus of highly acclaimed developers from the warm embrace of Microsoft Game Studios into the arms of others? Last Thursday's news that Electronic Arts had acquired BioWare Pandemic from Elevation Partners for nearly $800 million marked the third time in just three weeks that a top developer of multiple Xbox games has jumped ship. First, on September 26th, Activision announced that it would be purchasing the previously-independent U.K. studio Bizarre Creations, which made four Project Gotham Racing games for MGS between 2001 and 2006. A week later, rumors began to mount that Bungie—the brightest light in the MGS firmament by virtue of its three best-selling Halo games and the only one of the three Killer B's actually owned by Microsoft—had repurchased its independence from the Redmond giant. The rumors proved true, and by the end of the week, both parties released statements attesting to that fact. When EA made its announcement not even a week later, that BioWare—makers of the MGS titles Jade Empire and the forthcoming Mass Effect—and Pandemic would be joining its Murderer's Row, much of the focus was on whether or not EA overpaid (we'll tackle that in a subsequent post) and was it good or bad that EA's already formidable power was spreading unchecked throughout the industry like the baleful Eye of Sauron. Left relatively unexamined, with the exception of a few message boards, fansites and podcasts, was this: what does it say about Microsoft Game Studios that three of the industry's most renowned developers have slipped through its fingers in less than a month's time?

We put that question and several others directly to Microsoft immediately following the announcement of Bungie's departure, which resulted in the following exchange:

With FASA being shut down, Bizarre being acquired by Activision and Bungie going independent, what does this turmoil say about the current state of Microsoft Game Studios?

MGS is in a great position. At MGS, our charter is to cultivate the best individual development relationships and to nurture creative freedom for each of our developers. In terms of Bizarre Creations, they have been a great partner for MGS. They've built an amazing franchise in PGR for Xbox and they continue to work on downloadable content for PGR 4.

Martin Sheen in "Apocalypse Now"

I've done questionable things.
--Roy Batty to Eldon Tyrell in "Blade Runner"

You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.
--Col. Kurtz to Capt. Willard in "Apocalypse Now"

Towards the end of our workday, as we scan the contents of our RSS newsreader for the next day's High Score, we make sure that from time to time we read the latest post on Clint Hocking's blog Click Nothing. Hocking, a creative director at Ubisoft, is among a growing number of developers who have taken to this medium in order to express their thoughts about videogames. Between a mainstream media which generally ignores games and an enthusiast press still largely stuck in the preview-feature-review model, the best developer blogs are carving out a space that can enrich our understanding of interactive entertainment and help establish a shared vocabulary for further discussion. It's not easy, because as Hocking rightfully says, "With the 'language of games' being as limited as it is, understanding what I am 'reading' is hard, and trying to articulate it back to people in a useful way is a full order of magnitude harder." So whenever someone steps up to the plate as Hocking is doing on a frequent basis, we are both grateful and thrilled.

Hocking's October 7th post, "Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock: The problem of what the game is about," caught our eye, and not just because of its lengthy Level Up-esque title. In it, Hocking takes a close look at the tension between BioShock's story ("an examination and a criticism of Randian Objectivism") and its gameplay ("seek power and you will progress"), then concludes:

To cut straight to the heart of it, Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all. The leveraging of the game's narrative structure against its ludic structure all but destroys the player's ability to feel connected to either, forcing the player to either abandon the game in protest (which I almost did) or simply accept that the game cannot be enjoyed as both a game and a story, and to then finish it for the mere sake of finishing it.

The source of Hocking's ire is his belief that while BioShock's gameplay mechanics are perfectly aligned with the theme of Randian objectivism...

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