B^U

And so on

in terms of Bioshock i think it’s talking about the same things but in a different way. to me it was saying: look at all the games where you’re X generic square jawed white male with an array of guns, killing wave after wave of X historically unpopular ethinicity with the assurance that it’s morally justifiable because you’re good and they are bad. Bioshick offers this justification as you arrive by accident and are luckily saved by the spire of Rapture.

when it is revealed that none of this is accidental, that you are a contructed entity, a personality that never existed, a brainwashed assassin sent to brutally murder your ‘father’ with a golf club it is imposible not to reconsider the ethical foundations of the holocaust you’ve wraught in your gaming life. from the goombahs jumped on to the nazis shot all you’ve ever done is what you were told. you might have goofed around shooting crates for a bit but essentially all you’ve ever done is walk in a straight line killing things. you’re no better than the monsters you’ve been killing up until then. the audio logs are a brilliant reminder that the splicers were once people too.

hit me like a ton of bricks at the time. by chance at the time it came out i’d just finished reading Atlas Shrugged so it all sort of knitted together. yeah the back half of the game veers of into slightly flat sci-fi tosh culminating in one of the laziest, least satifying final bosses in recent memory but even the devs have conceeded that they underestimated the impact ‘a man chooses, a slave obeys’ would have.

Can anyone think of a game outside this definition?

Also relevent perhaps is this guy, who creates strange and funny situations in games: http://www.it-he.org/

Another example of a game that achieves this, in my opinion, is the original Silent Hill on Playstation, where the apparently sentient town’s efforts to open physically impossible paths forward with the trade-off of darker, more surreal, and deadlier “versions” of the environment can be conflated with the whim (indeed: mandate) of the godlike game designer to simultaneously provide the player with the platform and the pitfall; with that useful new weapon and the horrible monster waiting around the next corner.

Bioshock did try the same but it was conceited in its approach. I was never confused about wether I did anything because I wanted to or whether I was told to because I could only ever do what I was told to. It pretended you had a choice when you clearly had none at all.

At least with Portal it never pretended to be anything more than it was. Portal you were only there to do what you could do there was no pretence at anything else, you were there to be played like a piper. Bioshocks approach would have worked if they had given you a choice to do something else, but most games arent about giving players choice, or meaningfull choices at least.

Sons of Liberty beats the message into the player over, and over, and over again, thus discouraging thought.

Portal is experienced. MGS is witnessed.

Or something.

Good article. I give it a 9/10. Could have been a bit longer, and some the final part was a bit too easy to read. However, it has great re-read value, so I’ll probably return to it later. Could also use multiplayer.

Another game that really played with the expectations of what it means to actually ‘play’ a game was 2007s BioShock. Though I was well aware of the meta nature of Portal, BioShock was the first game that had me really questioning the natured of the various tasks we go through in order to complete a game. For the last half of the game, I was constantly wondering if I was doing something because I wanted to or because the game was making me. It messed me up good.

In brief…fantastic piece, Guido. Welcome to Playtime!