N'Gai Croal
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Sep 17, 2007 12:03 AM
Bioshock, from 2K Boston/Australia and 2K Games
Even though we sang the praises of short session games in our previous exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, late summer and early fall bring with them the interactive entertainment industry's heavy hitters, and Vs. Mode is always prepared to serve when duty calls. In this installment, which is also being posted on Totilo's blog MTV News: Multiplayer, we take aim at two of this year's most anticipated games: BioShock, developed by 2K Boston/Australia and published by 2K Games, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo. Both games put a spin on the first-person shooter--BioShock with its role-playing game elements; Metroid Prime 3 with its emphasis on exploration and environmental navigation--so we thought it appropriate to compare and contrast as Totilo and Level Up combat one another. Some excerpts:
Stephen Totilo: It turns out there really weren't any other moral dilemmas in BioShock besides the choice to rescue or kill the Little Sisters. I was right to think Levine wasn't going to pose any other ethical challenges to the player. But I was wrong to think that would be a problem. Those big, hulking, lumbering, Big Daddies--the protectors of the Little Sisters that appear about two or three times per level--are the games' best characters. Garnett Lee on the 1Up Yours podcast even called them the best enemies ever in a videogame, a judgment we should probably weigh in on. Their rage is impressive, but so too is their interplay with the spooky little girls that beckon and guide them as if they're the family dog. To repeatedly witness those interactions and to, early on, know the calming influence a Little Sister has over the locomotive might of Big Daddy, makes the player's interaction with each Daddy-Sister pair feel not just like interaction but intrusion. To simply interfere with their walks and their scavenging feels like a moral choice. They weren't bothering me, and if not for the voice in my ear telling me to proceed through the game by attacking, I wouldn't be bothering them. That I will then kill the Big Daddy no matter what feels somewhat heinous. It is always unprovoked--a pre-emptive strike, at best. The fact that once I've caused one death (the Big Daddy's) I have to decide whether to cause a second (the Little Sister's) feels like a mock-moral choice. For the record, I always chose to save the Little Sisters.
N'Gai Croal: My finger was hovering over the X button, ready to harvest...and all of a sudden, I couldn't do it. There was a little girl, albeit virtual, cowering in front of my avatar, and I couldn't bring myself to harvest her, as she'd been presented far too sympathetically. At the same time, I couldn't bring myself to rescue her either, because I wanted that Adam. Yet there was another complicating factor, one which is the true mark of the brilliance of BioShock's fiendish conundrum: the promise of an unspecified reward from Tenenbaum for rescuing the Little Sister. What was puzzling me was the nature of Levine's game. He was pitting my basic humanity against my greedy self-interest and against my curiosity--a cruel hybrid of a moral dilemma fused with the Trust Game. This was a far more devilish problem than had it been a simple binary either/or, and it had completely paralyzed me. Should I treat this game as a Rorschach blot and do what I would do in real life: rescue the Little Sister? Or should I treat it solely as a fantasy and do precisely the opposite, explore the road I'd never take in the real world. I didn't know what to do.
To read Round 1 of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.
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