(no subject)

[egypturnash]

As a side note, since some people seem to want to convince me that Bioshock is actually a really good game - an opinion you're welcome to have; it's clearly a finely-crafted instance of an experience I simply don't care to have - I would like to note that so far, the only FPS I've actually enjoyed as a game is Thief, which I've been playing on and off the past week via Rik's machine. I had fun with System Shock 2 a couple years back but by the end, I was sick and tired of the basic game mechanics and just wanted to find out what happened to SHODAN. I really don't like FPSs.

As I've gotten older, I've slowly learnt how to see people as, well, people. I'm not very good at it; I never was. As video-game technology marches on, the creatures the games pit you against have gotten more like people. When I play some games made in the last decade or so, I can feel them training me to see people as just things. I'm still working out what factors make this happen; it's only a handful of games that do this so far.

I really think that the increasing drive for 'realism' in video games means that the game industry has a big moral quandry coming up. The forty-year-long focus on the hurt button as the core mechanic becomes creepier as the things you hurt become more and more like people. What happens when the project lead on a game focused on killing and blood plays his game and feels that weird sense that it's gnawing away at something in his soul? What happens when this is a regular occurrence?

A few major choice-points over, there's another me who went into video games. Is she (or he; I might never have transitioned in that life-path) getting ever more uncomfortable with these themes, or has it been completely burnt out of her by this point?

Comments

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

I really do enjoy first person sneakers more than first person shooters. Figuring out interesting ways to deceive an AI is usually a lot more fun than thinking up different ways to shoot an AI. I've been playing through Bioshock, and I am throughly enjoying the lovingly crafted art and art deco everythings, But even compared to system shock 2 I'm finding myself displeased at the way it's dumbed down.

As a PC gamer I reflexively think that any game on a console is going to be more geared to a beer swilling idiot than a borderline savant like myself. In both SS2 and Deus Ex (made by Ion Storm, who you forgot to include in your struck out list in that other post) forced you to make moral decisions, and also forced you to make strategic decisions favoring combat, engineering, or superpowers.

Despite having a potent and interesting story, the gameplay of Bioshock involves only one moral choice, kill little girls or do not kill little girls. It's not much of a conundrum. Also you advance in power with your supernatural abilities, engineering abilities and combat abilities all at the same time so there really is no strategic reason to choose between them.

The story and art are beautiful, but it's a mystery that involves shooting my way to the answers, which was never really my favorite kind of detective work. I do like some level of violence for exhilaration, as a penalty for a screw up, but combat is pretty much the only way to solve a given problem in Bioshock.

I *Love* the theif series. I've got 1, 2, and 3, and regularly replay them, just because they're so weird and moody and special.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

[...] forced you to make moral decisions, and also forced you to make strategic decisions favoring combat, engineering, or superpowers. Despite having a potent and interesting story, the gameplay of Bioshock involves only one moral choice, kill little girls or do not kill little girls.

And in a game so rich with potential for real exploration of philosophy and failings thereof, it really hurts to watch a roommate plow through along essentially a single path and be rewarded for it. She explained that whether you killed the little girls or not actually affected the ending because of your moral choices, and I was kind of impressed. Then I noted that she was hacking the vending machines for cheaper or free goods.

"How does that affect the ending?" I asked.

"Hunh? It doesn't," she said.

"But... you're stealing."

"Yeah, but it doesn't affect the ending."

". . . what about the moral decisions? You're stealing. You're what they call a Parasite."

"It's not like anybody's collecting the cash, and anyhow, it doesn't affect the ending."

Is this what people think I'm like when I explain that I'm an atheist and don't expect an afterlife? Just because nothing I do changes the ending, it's all just fine?

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Bioshock is an FPS first, front and center. There seem to be a lot of complatnts from people who wish that Ken Levine and co. had made a completely different game, which puzzles me. Because they're a FPS studio, they make FPSes primarily (Tribes: Vengeance, SWAT, SS2) and their most critically acclaimed game was an FPS where you blow mutants away with your guns and your gnarly powers.

The moral choice in it is significant, because honestly, I can't think of another FPS that actually has any moral choices at all. Unless you start to invoke Deus Ex and its sequel, which are primarly focused on being RPGs with a FP interface, at the expense of the action and balance of Bioshock and SS2. I can't even begin to comprehend how expensive the dev costs of Bioshock would be to build in tangible consequences for dozens of smaller moral decisions, 5, 6, or 7 endings and a Deus Ex RPG-like open-ended structure into a game with the level of production that Bioshock has.

The developers knew what they were doing, and a they were emphasizing the FPS nature of the game, and building some choices into that framework. For their intent, I think they made a game that people will still be talking about twenty years from nowT. he philosophies in the game are explored seriously. You don't have absolute control over decisions like you might in an RPG, but it's not what the designers wanted to emphasize. It's not the ultimate game for all people, it's a game for FPS fans who want something brilliant. You still, at your core, need to like the genre to enjoy Bioshock. If you're merely tolerating the act of running around spooky, dimly lit corridors shooting or hiding from bad guys, you're playing the wrong game.

And with regard to vending machines, you're stealing from a maniac who's trying to kill you, and from companies in the game who have probably long since jacked themselves and their employees up with plasmids into raving lunatics that roam the city trying to chop you into pizza toppings... morally, I'm square with that. You CAN get zapped if you fail at hacking a vending machine. And you do have to expend valuable adam to beef up your hacking skills. It does injure you, so there is a consequence there! Not a plot consequence, but man, on Hard, those first aid hypos start getting scarce...

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know Bioshock is an FPS. I watched my roommate play it... sat and watched for a couple good hour-plus sessions, I think. I've played plenty of FPSes – DOOM II, Duke 3D, the first couple Quakes, the Half-Lifes (Half-lives?), the Metroid Primes, a few more, and my favourite, TRON 2.0 – so I know that there can be story and pretty and music and action but the last is really what makes the game worth playing. (It's why Halo sucked. I kept getting bored by the level design.)

My point is entirely that the "moral choices" that keep coming up as a selling point for the game are really thin at best, a curiosity but not nearly strong enough to even bear mention. I suppose it's frustration from two angles: on one hand, there are so many games which had so much opportunity for interesting philosophical play that instead were quite happily plowed through with some sort of projectile weapon. On the other, I've heard so much tell of the richness of morality in the Ultima series and a few other things that I know it can indeed be done, and done well. I know they're different genres, and that's why I don't want anyone mistaking Bioshock for the latter, so the next person who says, "It's great, you even have moral choices!" gets stabbed in the face with my death ray.

Oh, and I certainly would consider it moral to plunder a vending machine for something to help me take on a threat to my well-being. I'm quite cpable of role-play, however, and it's a point of pride that I can consistently play characters with whom I vehemently disagree. So I do ask them whether it was right for them to steal that weapon or hit that person or upload that virus or whatever. I put the RP back in the single MMORPG I play.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

I would say the plight of the Little Sisters bear mention as an artistic statement (people seem to react viscerally to the notion of killing them) but the selling point of the game is the presentation, and freedom to use the environment against your enemies, and your enemies against each other.

Real moral choices are done well in Ultima, and done excellently in Planescape Torment and Jade Empire, but like ultraken said, the more freedom you have, the thinner the resources of the developers are spread.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I got Deus Ex used and gave it up about three missions in. Largely because the PS(X|2? I can't remember.) port had hideous load time issues, but also because the whole thing kept frustrating my instinctive urge to sneak around - IIRC, it seemed to dole out a lot more of the tools you needed for shooting everything in sight than for sneaking around and not killing anyone.

(Plus, it was really, really, ugly compared to everything else I had on that machine.)

Oh, and as someone who took the console path back at the console/PC split, I think of PC gamers as either withered old fogeys with no reflexes who get off on tedious, fiddly simulations of running a convenience store chain or something, or as emotionally-retarded twelve-year-olds whose entire library is nothing but ugly FPSs. And both sets react with puzzlement or hostility to games with any sense of whimsey.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Your image of PC gamers doesn't even begin to touch on the way we get our asses kicked online by Koreans who are willing to do mathematical analasies of the best possible moves to make in any one of the endless crappy Real Time Strategy titles available to us!

Also, one time I was playing Convenience Store Tycoon and the chip rack in one of my stores totally ran out of chips, but the clerk I had hired was totally bugged and he wouldn't re-stock it, he just got stuck in one of the freezer cases, so I fired him but he still wouldn't leave the store, so I had the new guy I hired call the police on him, but even they couldn't get him out, so like I had this perpetual standoff going on and no one ever bought beer or other quenching beverages from that location because it was always surrounded by cops trying to talk this guy out of the freezer case!


The most recent Console system I owned was a Sega CD, though recently I've had the opportunity to play the Xbox 360 some, and as I've mentioned in my journal a few times, my sister's boyfriend sometimes brings over and leaves his PS2 over here, so I get to play with that. I'm stunned by how as the technology advances PC gaming and Console gaming are starting to converge, I mean, we're starting to get very meticulously well thought out, polished, and bug free PC games, and consoles are starting to lock up unexpectedly from overheating, or dropping frames that are hard to render, or even needing to download game patches from the internet! Quite amusing.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Er, the middle paragraph is supposed to be encased in the html tag: okIamAFiddlyEmotional-Retard

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

YOU need to play Planescape Torment. :) it's exactly the sort of whimsical, brainy, plot heavy, incredibly rich dialogue-driven RPG that would never work on a console.

I took the PC path because whatever consoles I had at the time, I was always drawn to PC games (well, at first, Atari ST) because they were deeper, they were riskier, they were taking chances with design. I have yet to see a console game as good as Planescape Torment. The only console RPGs I like were PC games first (Morrowind) and RTS/civ games don't really "work" on consoles. There's no console equivalent of Star Control 2, no console equivalent of X-Com, or Alpha Centauri. I do like plenty of console games, but if someone held a gun to my head and told me I had to pick one or the other, I'd pick PC in a heartbeat. There are so many game genres that will never be represented on consoles because they simply will not move hundreds of thousands of units.

[ysabel.livejournal.com]

I solve this split by having a PS3, a PS2 (waiting to be chipped), a Wii, a Dreamcast and a gaming-capable PC. And playing whatever games I like on whatever platform makes the most sense.

Deus Ex is much saner on the PC, and it gives you tools for shooting rather than sneaking on purpose. It's a temptation, and it's supposed to be.