The failure of BioShock Infinite: Writing games like movies

As is my unhealthy obsession, I waited impatiently for BioShock Infinite to unlock on Steam—then I played the game through in a single sitting. It took about 11 hours (on normal difficulty), though I didn’t “complete” the game in the sense of finding all the secrets it contains. I left some doors locked, and I didn’t find all the codes, but I did fully experience the game’s main draw: its story.

While many first-person shooters have a story that’s incidental at best, either because it’s barely developed and irrelevant (see early titles such as Doom and Quake) or because it’s badly written and still irrelevant (see the Call of Duty series), that’s not the case with BioShock Infinite.

You play Call of Duty to see the next spectacular special-effects-laden set piece lifted from one Hollywood blockbuster or another. BioShock Infinite doesn’t really have these set pieces. What it has is an interesting universe (a probabilistic multiverse in which you can leap between timelines), at least one compelling character (the mysterious Elizabeth who you’re sent to rescue/kidnap/protect), and a bunch of unanswered questions. The whole point of the game is to find out the answers to those questions, and that means playing it for the story.

BioShock Infinite‘s Elizabeth is that rarest of things: an NPC who you don’t want to murder. When I played, she only got stuck on scenery (forcing me to reload my savegame) once! We are truly living in the 21st century.

Credit: Irrational Games

Because of this, we don’t want to just dip into the game, get a few hours of generic play time, and then do something else. Instead, we want to press forward and find out what happens next. We’re drawn into a binge play session just as we might be drawn into binging on a DVD box set. And it worked. I binged.

But as with so many binges, I felt dissatisfied afterward. Had I truly played a “game” in the fullest sense of the word, or had I watched a movie-like meditation on violence and America sprinkled with some less-than-innovative interactive ultraviolence thrown in to break up the narrative? As I’ve reflected on the game for the past few weeks, I increasingly lean toward the latter—and I’ve concluded that it’s a weakness in the game’s design. Here’s why.

Pure gameplay

BioShock Infinite is not the first or only game to try to tell a compelling story, of course. LucasArts’ various SCUMM titles, for example, had strong narratives more than twenty years ago. Nonetheless, I think there has been an evolution and maturation of games, with stories becoming more important to major game titles.

Most old games were a celebration of the purely mechanical. We marveled at their technology—even as primitive as games like Wolfenstein 3D now look—and found their basic “find key, open door, shoot bad guys” gameplay cathartic.

Sometimes the gameplay alone is enough. It’s not like anybody really cares why those stupid birds are so angry at the pigs. Nobody plays Angry Birds just to resolve the story. And I’ll gladly stack up those Tetris blocks for hours on end. Minor, if inconsequential, achievements can further extend the draw of the gameplay: you’ll play longer just to get 3 stars on every Cut The Rope level or to finish Doom with 100 percent secrets, 100 percent kills (which, back in the day, I totally did for the shareware Doom).

The speedrun subculture takes this to an extreme, constructing a whole metagame of its own that’s then applied to a wide range of games, both old and new.

This kind of simplicity doesn’t make these games bad. They can provide plenty of enjoyment, and they can be carefully honed, stripped down experiences that perfectly showcase a particular kind of gameplay. Many still admire, for example, Quake III Arena as the crowning achievement in the development of twitch shooters.

It does, however, mark the games as being in some ways primitive. We criticize movies when they appear to have no greater purpose than showing off some piece of technology, often dismissing things like 3D or shooting at 48 frames per second as mere gimmicks rather than tools that can be used to help convey a story or deliver a message. Yet many games are still stuck at this level of development, offering little more depth than L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, and they tend to be allowed to get away with it.

Just as I don’t want every film to be as simplistic as a Jason Statham masterpiece (cruelly overlooked by the Academy though he may be) I don’t want every game to be Doom. I want games that offer me more than gawping at a fancy engine and running around blasting people. I want something more than a train pulling into a station.

Story-driven

BioShock Infinite strives to be that something more. The technology and gameplay are not the raison d’être of BioShock Infinite. They’re simply an enabling backdrop, providing the tools to create characters and a narrative.

It’s just that it turns out to be really difficult to do well, and I’m not really sure that BioShock Infinite really does do it well. In fact, I think it does it really rather poorly. The way the game is created is not sympathetic to the story being told. It’s also not sympathetic to the medium being used.

The way Infinite is set up is, in some senses, contradictory.

It’s a story-driven game. Countering its story-driven nature is the superficially beautiful alternate reality that has been created for us. While BioShock Infinite is by no means an open world game, the various locales within the game are nonetheless large and generally exciting. Exploration is outright encouraged; there are secrets to find, powerups to pick up, and important pieces of backstory on tape recorders scattered hither and yon.

It’s not every day you get to tour a floating city, so it’s worth taking the time to look around, especially as there’s only a limited ability to backtrack and revisit. If you don’t fully explore an area the first time you see it, there’s a fair chance that you won’t be able to go back to it.

This stands in contrast to true open world titles such as Borderlands, where you can continue to explore Pandora’s mysteries (and even complete side quests) at your leisure, to the extent that you can even defer them until after the story missions have been completed. There’s a sense there that the game universe exists independently of the story within it.

When playing Infinite there’s an uneasy tension. You can either respect the pace and plotting of BioShock Infinite‘s story, or you can set the story to one side, killing any sense of urgency but giving you the time to explore.

You can’t really do both, however, without abrupt changes in tone and jarring changes of pace. For example, I discovered one minor secret “backwards”; I came across a locked chest after visiting the area in which its key could be found.

The first time I went through the location with the key, things were relatively quiet and peaceful—the perfect mood for hunting for items. However, between finding the chest and backtracking to retrieve the key, I unleashed hell in the service of advancing the plot. The result was that rather than hunting for the key in a quiet lull, I was opening boxes and searching the floor in the middle of all-out warfare.

It was incongruous. This was meant to be an exciting, action-packed part of the game, with significant implications for the game universe, and I was walking around looking for a key, completely disregarding the mayhem around me.

Additional gameplay elements such as Infinite‘s secret codes, which require even more searching, just make the pacing differences more profound. You can play the game with the completionist mindset, with a goal of finding every hidden room, every upgrade, and so on, but it will come at the expense of enjoying the story.

As such, a game like BioShock Infinite poses a big problem for someone wanting to tell a story. The writer or director is stripped of key narrative devices: he or she can’t control the speed at which events unfold, and all the work put into establishing a given mood can be undermined by players going off and doing their own thing.

I don’t think any narrative could withstand this kind of treatment.

BioShock Infinite then compounds this problem with a couple of things. First, the exploration is somewhat illusory; some of the maps are big, but they’re deeply non-interactive and you can’t actually explore as much as you’d like to. We see all sorts of parts of the floating city off in the distance; we just can’t visit any of them. Even if we spend our time hunting for the various secrets, it’s not particularly fulfilling, except for the second big issue.

Welcome to the city in the sky. So much to see and do, except you can’t, because most of it is off limits.

Credit: Irrational Games

Those damn audio recordings—if you don’t find them all, the story makes substantially less sense. Many of them are pretty dull, but plenty contain important snippets of information. So we have the worst of all worlds: in order to make sense of the story, we have to play a silly game of hide-and-seek, and in playing that game of hide-and-seek, we suck the life out of the story. (As an aside, this is the laziest backstory mechanic ever devised. Game developers, please stop making me pick up voice recordings to learn important details. It’s tired, it’s immersion-breaking, and it’s lazy. I’m playing an interactive audio-visual experience and the best you can do is make me listen to recordings?)

The war between “plot” and “freedom”

This troubled approach to storytelling is certainly not a problem unique to BioShock Infinite. Consider Borderlands 2. Borderlands 2 sits in an awkward space at the best of times. On the one hand, it’s written to be amusing, with heroes that are all larger-than-life caricatures, abundant pop culture allusions, and plenty of silly side plots such as photographing corpses in order to provide inspiration for a romantic poem. On the other, it attempts to have a serious storyline that’s more emotionally significant than the “find the treasure” story of the first game.

Borderlands 2‘s planet of Pandora is a colorful and dangerous place.

Credit: Gearbox Software

The problem is that these two are placed immediately side by side. You can lurch from one to the other within a matter of minutes. For example, during my first playthrough of the game, I went from witnessing the deaths of two important characters—one at my own hand, the other at the hands of the Big Bad—to resolving a 4-way dispute between a bunch of petulant teenagers who’d stolen some money.

It made me angry when I played. It felt disrespectful. This event, so significant from a story perspective, was so completely ignored by other aspects of the game’s writing. Now certainly, part of this was self-inflicted. I could have just stuck with story missions and ignored optional side quests on my first playthrough. But this was a newly offered side quest, and the side quests are there for you to, you know, do, so why wouldn’t I go through it?

And while I never played it myself, I’m led to believe that some people put dozens of hours into Skyrim without ever fighting a dragon because they were too busy doing side quests. In a game that’s all about killing dragons, that’s just weird.

The most extreme case of gameplay detracting from the story I’ve seen was in response to the Grand Theft Auto V trailer. A number of colleagues said that they’d be interested in the game, just as long as one minor modification was made to it: remove the game. They were confident that the story would be enjoyable from their experiences with Grand Theft Auto IV, and they were interested in V for that reason—the cameos introducing Michael, Franklin, and Trevor certainly looked promising—but they didn’t actually enjoy the series’ gameplay. Unfortunately, there’s no way to decouple the one from the other.

Tight, compelling plotting is at odds with exploration and open worlds.

Attempts at a hybrid

Some developers have responded to this by reducing the amount of exploration and making the game more directed and constrained to protect the story. The strongly story-driven psychological thriller Alan Wake did this; early in the game’s development, it was constructed as a sandbox game, but that aspect was discarded to ensure that the pacing was preserved.

The most extreme example of this is the technique showcased most famously by the Call of Duty series: simply create a game that’s so constrained that the player has little ability to subvert the director’s pace, short of simply standing still and refusing to advance. Put the player on rails.

While this plainly keeps the story tighter, it’s not exactly uncontroversial, because it so diminishes the game aspect of the game. The constraints mean that there’s little way in which we can make each playthrough of the game our own. We’re just following the path set for us, and one player’s experience will be substantially the same as any other’s because all the game cares about is getting us into the right spot so that it can deliver its next explosive set piece. Sure, the shooting can be entertaining in its own right, but the result is not so much a game as it is a semi-interactive sub-Michael Bay movie.

BioShock Infinite is not just figuratively on rails; in many parts of the game you literally swoop around on an overhead rail system.

Obviously, in any story-structured game there’s a limit to just how much influence the player can have. Each story outcome has to be written and programmed individually, and this naturally limits the possible outcomes. To be truly open-ended requires the sacrifice of story, and the player-directed gameplay of titles such as SimCity or Minecraft are examples.

Nonetheless, there are games where the developer does not know ahead of time how players will experience their game. The endings and paths within the game may have a set of predetermined options, but the choices and paths through the game will vary depending on what you do. I would argue that this is how games should be designed: games are an interactive medium, and that interaction should not merely be incidental to the experience, but essential to it.

Of course, that meaningful interaction is often done in a manner that can be at best described as clumsy. Many first-person shooters break up sections of thoroughly linear first-person shooter gameplay with the much-hated quick time events (QTEs), yanking you out of normal play and forcing you to mash random keys against the clock.

While these are interactions, they’re extraordinarily artificial. They break the flow of the game and tell us unambiguously, “Hey, pay attention: this is a choice. You can kill this guy, or not kill him, and that choice matters.” But true, substantive, meaningful player agency doesn’t have to be so so crudely grafted on. When done effectively, it uses the same gameplay mechanics as the rest of the game.

For example, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (surprisingly) did this in a number of places. As a first-person shooter, the main thing you do is shoot stuff. The story will unfold differently depending on who you shoot and when you shoot them. For example, there’s a point at which you’re chasing a bad guy through a hotel complex; if you manage to catch up with him and kill him, the story develops one way. If you don’t, it goes on a slight detour.

Within the game itself, there’s no overt indication that this has happened. If the guy escapes, the story proceeds as if he were meant to escape (as bad guys have an annoying habit of doing). If he doesn’t, it’s as if it were always written that you’d blow him away. The different paths through the game also lead to substantively different endings.

Black Ops 2 doesn’t exclusively use this system, and there are decision points that use quick time events instead, but it’s nonetheless a step in the right direction, seamlessly integrating player agency into the first-person shooter. The Black Ops 2 system is more advanced than good/evil reputational systems where the game’s ending is determined by how murderous you are or some similar metric. The outcome-altering interactions you have cause specific repercussions later in the game.