This “choice” has negligible effects on how a player ultimately can build their character. While the game implies that choices like this one will have consequences (Atlas tells the player that he will grow more powerful by destroying Little Sisters and that not doing so will result in the player having to get by on less of the “fuel” for their powers, ADAM), nevertheless, Tenenbaum always rewards the player with more ADAM if they save the Little Sisters. We are a unique snowflake, but… we aren’t.įrankly, a complaint that players had in the first game, that choosing to save Little Sisters or destroy them only created the illusion of choice in the game, speaks directly to this philosophy. This naturalistic philosophy, the championing of a deterministic view of the universe so prevalent in Levine’s two cracks at this franchise are inescapable (quite literally and quite deterministically). Yes, Grand Theft Auto offers thousands of options to play, but if I want to finish, it will end just like yours will. However, if we want to complete the game, if we want to resolve it, we can’t escape the scripting of solution, the sameness of an ending, the chains of rules to accomplish an externally defined objective.
And they are unique experiences that belong to us. Despite the countless different moves that I made, that they made, the countless different ways that I fought splicers, that they fought splicers, the countless different ways that I built my character, that they built theirs, it always ended the same way: with the scripted, programmed response of the single player game ending. There’s always a city” and then follow up by noting that despite the multitude of lighthouses, men, and cities, they always lead to the same ending, I found myself reflecting back on my daughter’s and her friend’s and my own playthroughs of Bioshock. When I heard Elizabeth’s declaration that “There’s always a lighthouse. Just before playing Bioshock Infinite, I spent the week before watching my daughter and a friend of hers taking turns playing through the original Bioshock. However, this statement is as true for the universe defined by multiple games as it is true for each individual game itself. In Levine’s iterations of the Bioshock universe, it seems there is indeed always a lighthouse, always a man, always a city. Indeed, Elizabeth seems to be defining the Bioshock universe, why Rapture exists, why Columbia exists, as variations on constant themes.
There’s always a city,” Bioshock Infinite admits to such variables. With Elizabeth’s declaration that “There’s always a lighthouse. There are after all a million variables that makes my playthrough of Grand Theft Auto unique, individual, my own. But to get to the end of most games in most instances, we find that we must jump through the predefined hoops that the developer deems essential to forward motion.īut, the player protests, when I play a Grand Theft Auto game, I choose what to do, where to go. Or else we give up in exhaustion to play something else. And even when we don’t, when we insist on attempting to ignore those prompts, we find that ultimately we are handcuffed (or chained as is the case in Bioshock, whose main character has chains tattooed on both wrists) to the elements necessary to drive the plot forward. We follow that disembodied tutorial voice without ever asking why. We follow the arrows that point us in the right direction in video games. Despite seemingly having chosen to aid Atlas or to aid Tenenbaum to save Little Sisters or to destroy them, ultimately we have been as programmed as the game itself. That is much of the point of the “Would you kindly?” twist in Bioshock. A slave obeys” in the original Bioshock, he declares that the player, despite all his seeming autonomy, is a slave. When Andrew Ryan declares that “A man chooses. In the medium in which the audience’s choices are supposed to matter because interactivity is key, Ken Levine just seems to keep coming back to the notion that, shucks, no choices really don’t - not even in video games. This post includes spoilers for Bioshock Infinite.
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