Player-Avatar Alignment in Bioshock
Continuing the 2007 theme, I went back to Bioshock a few months ago, working my way through Fort Frolic (absolutely beautiful) and past the twist. I liked that latter part quite a bit too, so I was interested to read this piece by Clint Hocking, giving it some pretty sharp criticism. Hopefully I can summarise it with some degree of accuracy: He argues that the story emphasised freedom and choice, whereas the gameplay did not match up to those themes (at least at a macro level - the little sisters provide a small-scoped choice). This created a loud conflict between game and story, which negatively affected his ability to stay immersed and emotionally invested in the game world. This reached a peak for him at the twist, where he felt insulted by the manner in which the relationship between game and story was radically altered.
He makes a powerful argument, but I’m unable to decide whether I agree with him. At the centre of the problem (or at least my reading of it) is a challenge that faces all games: The dual-instantiation of the player - they exist in two places at once, one the real person with gamepad in hand in front of the screen and the second their avatar inside the game world. Things work best when the two are brought into sync, so that the player can easily accept that they are their avatar, and then suspend disbelief and become emotionally invested.
One major way of doing this is to focus on invisibility of the player’s avatar. The poster-child here, of course, is Gordon Freeman, the mute cipher-protagonist of the Half-Life series. This has been very popular and influential. It clearly works, and it works especially well when coupled to a first-person viewpoint and game-cruft minimalism (simple, sparse HUDs, an absence of intrusive tutorials, etc).
However, a second way of accomplishing this is to create a narrative connection between player and their avatar. The subtle approach is to align the avatar’s choices with the player’s desires. The most direct, literal approach is to cast the avatar as a character behind a monitor and control device. The most prominent recent example would be Assassin’s Creed, where the player’s avatar was also interfacing with a machine to control an avatar. Another straightforward example would be a Command and Conquer game, where the player’s avatar, a general, would plausibly interact with his forces in a similar manner to the player. (As a side note, it would be fun to play a game where more was made of this - where the opposing forces would attack the general’s command facilities as well as his armies.) Here again, the two instantiations are in sync, but without the invisibility (of avatar or game-cruft). Again, these games suffer no lack of popularity, which I consider evidence of the technique’s success.
Returning to Bioshock, I thought the twist worked well - for me, at least. It established a narrative alignment between the absence of choice faced by the player and the absence of choice faced by the player’s avatar, one that I found wholly plausible and believable. And as I’ve discussed before, with regards the G-Man’s role in the Half-Life series, I think breaking the fourth wall can have a positive influence on the player’s suspension of disbelief.
My feeling is that the error Bioshock committed wasn’t to pull the rug from under the player, by forcing a bad alignment on them. Both the pre-twist (invisibility/cipher style) and the post-twist (narrative connection) alignments are valid. Rather, the error was to attempt to change alignments halfway through the game. This created a chasm in players’ suspension of disbelief, while they adapted to the new reality. I think 2K Boston were aware of this: The immediate aftermath of the twist plays on a feeling of dizzy disorientation and then restarts players in an environment somewhere between nursery and rehab. However, despite this, some players made it across the chasm, and others didn’t.
