Culture Clash

(September 2007)

Cogito, Ergo Ludo

A posse of nongamers recently thwarted my daring attempt to explain the nuances of Bioshock. We got through the Objectivism okay, though they rolled their eyes at the absurdity of games considering such things when everyone knows they are just Pong and murder simulators. We got through the visual style, and the themes of hubris and atheism and rivalry between powerful men. I even sold them on the game's examination of Ultimate Protectors, and their relationship with the object of their aegis.

Predictably, things fell apart during this latter item when I mentioned that you can – but are not required to – harm a child.

“Kill a little girl?! Shocking school violence should be ashamed straight to hell ought to get banned godlessheathensawfulcriminalcallingmyrepresentativeetcetcetcetc.”

I spill copious electrons repudiating such shrillness, and will spill more in this column's thrilling conclusion. For now, let's talk about what's under the hood instead. Games are increasingly about stuff. In Bioshock's case it's stem cells, economics, vainglorious science, religion, class, avarice, the protector/protected relationship, and, yes, the moral exchange rate of reprehensibility to power. It has many themes. It's also a game, and what makes it such a good one is that it doesn't abandon its core game-ness in a misguided struggle to become something else.

Games are literature, and needn't self-justify by emulating other forms. Because they are interactive, because they go on for hours, because fun is crucial, they must approach theme differently. They can't and shouldn't work like a novel or movie. But since audiences are used to novels and movies – and since interactive fun is more important in games – it's easy to disregard their inner themes. Even thematically luscious games tend to fall flat if they aren't games first, but there's meaning sardine-packed into plenty of them. It is misleading to assume that they're just vacant, repetitive blasting platforms. They are vacant, repetitive blasting platforms with symbol and allegory and substance and stuff… same as any other literary entertainment.

The inveterately sage Tom Chick recently satirized the opposition to meaningful games, skewering the assertion that there's no room for them. The arguments against – that games shouldn't have meaning because they're supposed to be fun, and that they can't have meaning because, well, they just can't – are both pretty flimsy. Something can be fun and meaningful too, and most narrative games are thematic beings at their core. I guess you could even say Prey is a meditation on the plight of Native Americans, exacting vindication for all the smallpox not on the “alien” white man, but actual from-space aliens. That… probably wasn't a central design scheme, but it's possible to see the game in that light. It is the vendee, not the vendor, who creates the meaning. A creator can guide the experience, as in Persona 3 or Eternal Sonata, but ultimately consumers discover import for themselves. Two people can find very different and equally valid meanings in the same work of art.

So what happens when the creator fails to effectively guide the audience? Nothing, really; as with the Prey example, it just means that the game's essence is a little more far-fetched. It doesn't hurt the product provided the game is good. STALKER was good. Had some problems, maybe didn't realize all its potential, but it was phenomenally innovative and very enjoyable. Thematically there was something there: something about greed and God and connection to the land, but it was hard to realize through the incoherence, like a heap of radioactive broken images. But since the game was fun, its allegorical opacity wasn't significant. If the game is bad, though, if it's a Global Conflicts: Palestine or Left Behind: Eternal Forces P.O.S. that depends on its “meaning” for everything, or that focuses on meaning over play, it's doomed out of the gate. This is why Irrational marketed Bioshock as an action shooter, not a dystopian Objectivist historiofictive submarine agnostic class conflict. Fun first, eggheadedness second, sacrificing neither.

Like cookies or cash or Scarlett Johansson, Bioshock has universal appeal. It works on every level, for everyone, because it is a masterwork of game design and it's about something. It challenges us, makes us think – but never, ever turns its back on the fact that it is a game , and games are meant to be fun.

Now.

Since opponents of gaming will ignore the preceding 722 words, I'll respond to the whole Bioshock-is-about-killing-little-girls thing.

First, we have to set aside the facts. You know, that it's made painfully clear that the Little Sisters are no longer human; that they talk in shiver-inducing Linda Blair voices; that they drink blood and defile corpses; that they have glowing red demon eyes. I propose we ignore all that because the opponents of gaming will ignore it.

I gather it's okay for young people to be victimized in other media. Children are slaughtered in Richard III. A 12-year-old girl is raped in Hounddog. Anakin Skywalker massacred all those “younglings,” along with my childhood. The Pied Piper drowned a whole village's minors. Is it that kids are off limits in a medium only different because it's new? The opposition would say no.

No, they'd fall back on the age-old argument: that (in games, at least) there are some lines we shouldn't cross, even if we can.

That is the final frontier of the weak, the “yeah, well, but… you're a stupidhead” of feeble contentions. It is not a debatable assertion but a conversation-ending mechanism unleashed only when opponents to a reasonable point have run short of cherry picked fallacious assumptions, a cretinous tool mired in hypocritical witch-huntery.

When crossing lines, there's a difference between doing it to advance the art and doing it because you're an asshole. Yes, the “right” to do something is not a mandate to do it, but when it's there for reasons of theme rather than exploitation, it has a place. Irrational didn't include the ability to kill Little Sisters to conceal mediocrity or as some gleefully pernicious sales booster; that's Rockstar's territory. Bioshock is selling on merit, not tawdry publicity stunts. Anyone who claims that it glorifies violence against children is either seriously disturbed or has never played the game.