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...

[T]he ludic contract works in the sense that I actually feel the themes of the game being expressed through mechanics. The game literally made me feel a cold detachment from the fate of the Little Sisters, who I assumed could not be saved (or even if they could, would suffer some worse fate at the hands of Tenenbaum). Harvesting them in pursuit of my own self-interest seems not only the best choice mechanically, but also the right choice. This is exactly what this game needed to do--make me experience--feel--what it means to embrace a social philosophy that I would not under normal circumstances consider.

...the story itself is not. Hocking correctly describes BioShock's central dialectic--thesis (the objectivist self-interest of harvesting the Little Sisters, as articulated by Atlas/Fontaine); antithesis (the humanitarian altruism of rescuing the Little Sisters, as articulated by Tenenbaum); and synthesis (the player's calculus as to which choice at any given moment will provide the biggest reward)--but finds himself wishing that dialectic had been extended to let players decide whether to side with Atlas/Fontaine or Ryan. As Hocking puts it:

[I]n the game's fiction on the other hand, I do not have that freedom to choose between helping Atlas or not. Under the ludic contract, if I accept to adopt an Objectivist approach, I can harvest Little Sisters. If I reject that approach, I can rescue them. Under the story, if I reject an Objectivist approach, I can help Atlas and oppose Ryan, and if I choose to adopt an Objectivist approach--well too bad... I can stop playing the game, but that's about it.

That's the dissonance I am talking about, and it is disturbing.

For the most part, we disagree. Hocking further states that by accepting the game's mechanics, "Ryan's philosophy is in fact the guiding principle of the mechanics that I am experiencing through play," but the overarching imperatives of the game are survival in and escape from the world that Ryan has, in part, created. The dilemma of the Little Sisters lets us explore the limits of what we're willing to do in order to survive and escape from Rapture. We can be purely self-interested, but that isn't the only way to survive in Rapture--it's merely the most expedient, because harvesting the Little Sisters is the fastest way to get the Adam that lets us boost our abilities. But not only is it possible to survive by walking the altruistic path--in rescuing the Little Sisters, we get less Adam--altruists also get the exclusive use of the game's coolest plasmid: Hypnotize Big Daddy. (We have our own objections to the way BioShock ultimately privileges Rescuers over Harvesters, which you can read here.) Since Ryan would presumably be a Harvester and not a Rescuer, our acceptance of the harvest-or-rescue mechanic can't be described as Ryan's philosophy. So if there is an uber-philosophy to which we may reasonably assume BioShock's makers subscribe, it is, as Ryan articulates, "A man chooses. A slave obeys." (This is in fact where BioShock falls down; more on this later.)

We would agree that BioShock's plot twist isn't entirely satisfactory; after all, if Atlas/Fontaine can use the phrase "Would you kindly?" to make us to do his bidding, why doesn't he force us to harvest the Little Sisters? So Hocking is again correct about the tension between the game's narrative and its gameplay. Nevertheless, we don't subscribe to his dogmatic assertion that...

[W]hen it is revealed that the rationale for why the player helps Atlas is not a ludic constraint that we graciously accept in order to enjoy the game, but rather is a narrative one that is dictated to us, what was once disturbing becomes insulting. The game openly mocks us for having willingly suspended our disbelief in order to enjoy it....The 'twist' in the plot is a dues [sic] ex machina built upon the very weaknesses of game stories that we--as players--agree to accept in order to have some sort of narrative framework to flavor our fiddling about with mechanics. To mock us for accepting the weaknesses of the medium not only insults the player, but it's really kind of 'out of bounds' (except as comedy or as a meta element--of which it appears to be neither).

...because we don't see why this should be considered out of bounds. To play a game is to submit to its rules, to follow its orders and to stay within its boundaries. Yet even when so many games force us to do questionable things, a lot of us never question the things we're being asked to do. BioShock takes that implicit understanding between the developer and the player and makes it explicit, both as an explanation of why the player could only side with Atlas/Fontaine and as a critique of our unquestioning willingness to obey the directives and orders we're given within the context of a game, like a nation of good Germans circa World War II or Willard's "errand boy" in "Apocalypse Now." Hocking says that this isn't meta, but it most certainly is, a cross between the explicit obey-to-survive setup of Manhunt and the player's-guide-who-is-not-what-he-seems revelation in BioShock's spiritual predecessor, System Shock 2. And just as one wouldn't suggest that an unreliable narrator is out of bounds for a novel (e.g. "The Canterbury Tales," "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" or "Lolita") or film (e.g. "The Usual Suspects" "The Sixth Sense" or "Fight Club"), we don't see why videogames should automatically declare such a device off limits.

Had the developers given us the ability to choose between helping Ryan or helping Atlas, the developers themselves would have been forced to choose between a) spending much more money to truly differentiate the "Choose Ryan" critical path from the "Choose Atlas" critical path for the entire length of the game, or b) risk alienating the player by dressing up a single critical path in Ryan or Atlas clothing depending on the player's choice. In place of giving us a high level choice between siding with Ryan or Atlas, Levine and his team substituted a "smaller" moral choice between Atlas (harvest the Little Sisters) and Tenenbaum (rescue the Little Sisters), then revealed to us at the two-thirds mark that Atlas/Fontaine has been controlling our actions all along. Our free will, it seems, was nothing more than an illusion.

It's at this point in the game, however, that BioShock does in fact betray its just-revealed theme. Once we've learned that we had been under Atlas/Fontaine's control, once we've killed Ryan at Ryan's own command, the game again locks us into a single choice: kill Fontaine before he kills us. Here's how we described this missed opportunity in our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News' Stephen Totilo:

[A]nother criticism I'd make of is BioShock that while it gave me a great deal of moment to moment choice and freedom, the only high level choice it offered me was whether to harvest or rescue the Little Sisters. That's understandable, because for a developer to create a proliferating series of choices that truly pay off is often prohibitive. But there was a perfect place in the game for a terrific choice or set of choices to happen: after the player kills Ryan. "A man chooses, a slave obeys," the game has just told us through Andrew Ryan's mid-martyrdom mantra.Yet from that moment forward, BioShock still gives us just one path to follow: hunt down and kill Fontaine. We don't have a choice. We're given no alternatives. How can we become men when the game continues to enslave us? In other words, BioShock's structure betrays its theme at a critical juncture, and while there are still high points to come, it never quite recovers sufficiently to properly fulfill the promise of its late-game revelation.

2K Bostralia disguises this lack of choice by presenting the game's final act as a fight for self-determination (free yourself from Fontaine's control) and survival (if you don't kill Fontaine, he'll kill you.) But what if, after Ryan's death, we had instead been presented with a reprise of the angel-on-one-shoulder, devil-on-the-other moment from earlier in the game? Only now, rather than deciding whether to rescue or harvest that first Little Sister, we were given the choice between siding with Tenenbaum or Fontaine? Side with Tenenbaum, and the game plays out largely as it does now. Side with Fontaine, and the game culminates with you leading an assault on the creche/orphanage where Tenenbaum keeps the rescued Little Sisters. (There could even be a final choice--just as with Sander Cohen, whom you can either kill or allow to live after completing Fort Frolic--where you could remain loyal to the last Rapture leader standing or betray them to claim Rapture for yourself.)

As I've outlined it, this high-level choice would take place late enough that it would have kept the amount of extra content--levels, voice over, cutscenes, encounters--to a manageable size, compared to making a choice like this earlier in the game. It would have been in keeping with both our earlier high-level decision crossroads and the let-the-gamer-choose-the-time-and-place Big Daddy boss battles, but it would have been much more meaningful given all the time we've spent in the interim absorbing the tragic history of Rapture and experiencing its aftermath. It would have paid off the theme of choice and consequence much better. Finally, for those of us who'd been walking on the dark side it would have properly paved the way for the bad ending.

Will 2K Boston/Australia address these criticisms in BioShock 2? We shall see.