Bioshock

As I predicted in my last post Bioshock totally kicked RE4 right out of my life. It's a fantastic game I'm really enjoying.

There is a debate raging on the Internet questioning whether games can be art or not. Roger Ebert basically started whole thing by saying that games would never be art comparable to cinema. Of course this ruffled the feathers of more than one gamer and it's lead to some interesting reading if nothing else.

The gist of Roger's argument is that because players have a choice in the outcome of the game, it destroys the artist's ability to craft a specific emotional experience. I kind of understood where he was coming from, but I had a really cool experience that lead me to think otherwise.

Bioshock is a game with a pretty significant backstory that would not only bore you to tears but would wear my fingers out if I were to type it all up. For this particular experience of mine to make sense you just need to know of 2 characters that show up in the game known as Big Daddy and Little Sister.

The Little Sisters are essentially resource harvesters. They wander around the city world of Bioshock taking raw genetic material from dead bodies and storing it. They look like 9 year old girls and if you leave them alone to do their thing, they'll act like 9 year old girls too. The sing little songs and skip from place to place. Of course, being a horror game, they're suitably creepy as well with glowing eyes and pasty skin. They're skipping and singing their way from body to body with a gigantic syringe which they poke into the various bodies to extract the genetic material.

The Little Sisters are always accompanied by a Big Daddy. The Big Daddy is essentially the guardian for the Little Sisters. They're hulking giants in old school diving suits that simply follow the sisters around and protect them.

Bioshock is a unique game in that you can choose to not interact with these and other characters and simply watch them do their thing if you want to. In the case of these two, the Little Sisters will hold the Big Daddies' hands, chatter at them and constantly refer to them as "Mr. Bubbles". They also cry over their guardian's bodies after you kill them.

There comes a point in the game where you have to make a choice about whether you're going to harvest the Little Sisters and kill them in the process, or release them from their situation unharmed. If you choose to harvest them you get the material they've been collecting. If you choose to release them you get some token compensation but mostly you just get to feel good about yourself. For me this was an easy decision, I harvest. They're creepy little girls anyway. Jeremiah is a releaser. Kind of cuts to the core of our differences I reckon.

You get to make this decision many times throughout the course of the game, but really once you've decided to go one way or the other, there isn't any reason to change your mind.

So, I'm over half way through the game and I've harvested many of these Little Sisters. At one point I was a little bit lost as to what to do next so I was just wandering around kind of enjoying the scenery and I come across a Big Daddy just lumbering around. He looks kind of lost, so I decide to just watch him for minute while I ponder my next action. He wanders around the room looking under things, banging on the walls and making frustrated crying like sounds. And then I realize what he's doing: he's trying to find the Little Sister I harvested! He's walking around actively checking places she could hide and whining and moaning about her absence.

And I felt guilty! You could probably lay the bodies of everything I've killed in video games over the last 20 years end to end and it would stretch to the Sun and back. And I've never felt guilty about any of it. And here I felt guilty about taking this lumbering diving dork's friend away. Pretty impressive emotional manipulation if you ask me.

Of course this only lasted a few minutes and then I went back to harvesting the little witches. But for a few short moments, I had reflected on my own selfish nature and felt bad about how it might hurt others. That's an experience not even a movie could have created.