by Tom Bissell
For Hocking, this was only the beginning of BioShock’s dissonance: “Harvesting [Little Sisters] in pursuit of my own self-interest seems not only the best choice mechanically, but also the right choice. This is exactly what this game needed to do—make me experience—feel—what it means to embrace a social philosophy that I would not under normal circumstances consider.” But BioShock, Hocking argues, does not follow through with this, as it is designed in such a way as to force the gamer to help Atlas. This does not make sense “if I am opposed to the principle of helping someone else. In order to go forward in the game, I must do as Atlas says, because the game does not offer me the freedom to choose sides.” While the game’s mechanic offers the freedom to luxuriate in Objectivism’s enlightened selfishness, the game’s fiction denies the gamer that same freedom.
Because helping Atlas is “not a ludic constraint” but rather “a narrative one that is dictated to us,” Hocking claims to have felt mocked by BioShock, as though his contract of belief in the gameworld were torn up before his very eyes. The post concludes with Hocking’s acknowledgment that his concerns “may seem trivial or bizarre” and that he “only partially” understands his reaction to BioShock. “It is,” he writes, “the complaint of a semi-literate, half-blind Neanderthal, trying to comprehend the sandblasted hieroglyphic poetry of a one-armed Egyptian mason.”
When I asked Hocking about “Ludonarrative Dissonance in BioShock,” he said he did not have much to add. He admired BioShock and was ambivalent about BioShock. In the end, he said, “I excuse the fact that I don’t have agency in the story for real, because I know it’s a game and I know it is technologically impossible for me to have the kind of agency this game wants me to feel like I have. In a game today, it doesn’t exist.”
Perhaps, I said, that was the point? Rather than mock the gamer, BioShock could just as easily be commenting on itself, its game-ness, thereby allowing the gamer to feel what he or she wants to feel. When I played BioShock, I felt better emotionally rescuing the Little Sisters and would not have stopped doing so even if I was aware that my sacrifice was not a real one. When BioShock told me that I was, in fictional terms, being controlled, I thought hard about the last three days I had spent manipulating photons with a button-encrusted plastic brick. Was not the point that BioShock is rich enough to provoke such divergent interpretations? And was not Far Cry 2 guilty of a ludonarrative dissonance of omission by neglecting to populate its gameworld with civilians and other innocent people? If the theme of Far Cry 2 is the seductive and perverting power of learning how to navigate and prosper within a violent world, why is the gamer denied situations that would truly test the limits of that seduction?
Hocking immediately said, “I don’t know. We didn’t want to be muddying up our themes with a bunch of mass murder for laughs. That would have made it confusing. But more than that, there are social-responsibility issues involved in being able to butcher women and children.” I had read an interview with Hocking in which he had described the “numerous technical and production challenges” that eliminated Far Cry 2’s intended civilian and refugee populations, so I knew it was not only an issue of social responsibility. Here, then, was one of the great vexations of the video game: For games to mean something, they must engage with meaningful subject matter. The subject matter need not be death and slaughter, but if it is, you must ask yourself, as a game designer, how far you are willing to let the gamer go, and why. As technology improves, Hocking said, video-game characters “are going to be so real and believable that when you shoot them with a .556 round, their arms are going to pop off. And it’s going to be horrifying. No one wants that. I don’t want to play that game.” The place where game interactivity and visual fidelity intersect is a kind of moral crossroad at which any sane person would feel obliged to pause.
And here was the other problem. In video games, the assignation of meaning has traditionally seesawed between the game’s author (or authors) and the gamer. Authors had their say in static moments such as cut scenes, and gamers had their say during play. There is no doubt that this method of game design has produced many fine and fun games but very few experiences that have emotionally startled anyone. For designers who want to change and startle gamers, they as authors must relinquish the impulse not only to declare meaning but also to suggest meaning. They have to think of themselves as shopkeepers of many possible meanings—some of which may be sick, nihilistic, and disturbing. Game designers will always have control over certain pivot points—they own the store, determine its hours, and stock its shelves—but once the gamer is inside, the designer cannot tell the gamer what meaning to pursue or purchase. The reason this happens so rarely in games—and struggles to happen even in games that attempt to follow this model—is because, as Hocking said, “The very nature of drama, as we understand it, is authored. Period. The problem is, once you give control of that to a player, authorial control gets broken. Things like pacing and flow and rhythm—all these things that are important to maintaining the emotional impact of narrative—go all willy-nilly. The player’s vision of what might be dramatic or interesting or compelling can be completely at odds with the author’s vision. The whole point of a game is that players have autonomy to do what they want. It might be that the player is motivated to do the opposite of what you want him to do. That’s a legitimate goal in gameplay.”
Hocking was perfectly aware that the social responsibility he felt in preventing the gamer from massacring civilians in Far Cry 2 was a contradictory riptide within his overall design philosophy. He brought up Jonathan Blow’s core criticism—games that do not attempt to harmonize meaning with gameplay cannot succeed as works of art—and said, “I think he’s right in the sense that a lot of people don’t understand dynamical meaning—meaning that arises out of mechanics—because no one really understands it. I don’t even know what that means and it’s my medium of expression! Most people don’t understand it because they can’t understand it, not because they haven’t taken the time to learn it. They’re grappling with it like everyone else. Some people grapple with it more seriously and recognize that it’s a central and fundamental flaw in what we do. I think Jon and I see eye-to-eye on that. Finding a way to make the mechanics of play our expression as creators and as artists—to me that’s the only question that matters.”
Where, I asked, did that leave the narrative game? And could narrative games ever reach a place that was artistically satisfying for their creators and emotionally significant for their players?
Hocking’s hand traffic-copped. “Whoa. I’m not committed to the idea of the authored narrative game. In fact, I’m totally against it. I’m committed to the idea of designing a system wherein you provide useful channels for the player to poke and prod, so that you’re kind of baiting him into narrative paths of his own choosing.” Call of Duty 4, he said, was an example of “a rigidly authored narrative game that has a fairly good story. It pushes some of your buttons and manipulates you and makes you feel stuff. And yet the story you experienced is exactly the same as the one I experienced, with very minor variations that are probably no more different from the minor variations you and I have in our subjective experience of reading a novel. The problem with that approach, in my opinion, is that we already know how good that can be. The best story Call of Duty can ever have is something either very close to or marginally better than the best war movie ever made. The best we can ever hope for, with a narrative game, is to get there. We can’t go beyond it using the tools of film or literature or any other authored narrative approach. The question is, can we go beyond it, way beyond it, to completely different realms, by using tools that are inherent to games? To let the player play the story, tell his own story, and have that story be deep and meaningful? We don’t know the limit to that problem. It could be that the limit to that problem is stories that aren’t nearly as good.”
“But you’ve got to find out,” I said.
“Yeah. I have to find out.”
; NINE
Once upon a time, I wrote in the morning, jogged in the late afternoon, and spent most of my evenings reading. Once upon a time, I wrote off as unproductive those days in which I had managed to put down “only” a thousand words. Once upon a time, I played video games almost exclusively with friends. Once upon a time, I did occasionally binge on games, but these binges rarely had less than a fortnight between them. Once upon a time, I was, more or less, content.
“Once upon a time” refers to relatively recent years (2001–2006) during which I wrote several books and published more than fifty pieces of magazine journalism and criticism—a total output of, give or take, forty-five hundred manuscript pages. I rarely felt very disciplined during this half decade, though I realize this admission invites accusations of disingenuousness or, failing that, a savage and justified beating. Obviously, I was disciplined. These days, however, I am lucky if I finish reading one book every fortnight. These days, I have read from start to finish exactly two works of fiction—excepting those I was not also reviewing—in the last year. These days, I play video games in the morning, play video games in the afternoon, and spend my evenings playing video games. These days, I still manage to write, but the times I am able to do so for more than three sustained hours have the temporal periodicity of comets with near-Earth trajectories.
For a while I hoped that my inability to concentrate on writing and reading was the result of a charred and overworked thalamus. I knew the pace I was on was not sustainable and figured my discipline was treating itself to a Rumspringa. I waited patiently for it to stroll back onto the farm, apologetic but invigorated. When this did not happen, I wondered if my intensified attraction to games, and my desensitized attraction to literature, was a reasonable response to how formally compelling games had quite suddenly become. Three years into my predicament, my discipline remains AWOL. Games, meanwhile, are even more formally compelling.
It has not helped that during the last three years I have, for what seemed like compelling reasons at the time, frequently upended my life, moving from New York City to Rome to Las Vegas to Tallinn, Estonia, and back, finally, to the United States. With every move, I resolved to leave behind my video-game consoles, counting on new surroundings, unfamiliar people, and different cultures to enable a rediscovery of the joy I once took in my work. Shortly after arriving in Rome, Las Vegas, and Tallinn, however, the lines of gameless resolve I had chalked across my mind were wiped clean. In Rome this took two months; in Vegas, two weeks; in Tallinn, two days. Thus I enjoy the spendthrift distinction of having purchased four Xbox 360 consoles in three years, having abandoned the first to the care of a friend in Brooklyn, left another floating around Europe with parties unknown, and stranded another with a pal in Tallinn (to the irritation of his girlfriend). The last Xbox 360 I bought has plenty of companions: a GameCube, a PlayStation 2, and a PlayStation 3.
Writing and reading allow one consciousness to find and take shelter in another. When the mind of the reader and writer perfectly and inimitably connect, objects, events, and emotions become doubly vivid—realer, somehow, than real things. I have spent most of my life seeking out these connections and attempting to create my own. Today, however, the pleasures of literary connection seem leftover and familiar. Today, the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games. Unfortunately, the least useful and financially solvent pursuit in my life is also playing video games. For instance, I woke up this morning at 8 a.m. fully intending to write this chapter. Instead, I played Left 4 Dead until 5 p.m. The rest of the day went up in a blaze of intermittent catnaps. It is now 10 p.m. and I have only started to work. I know how I will spend the late, frayed moments before I go to sleep tonight, because they are how I spent last night, and the night before that: walking the perimeter of my empty bed and carpet-bombing the equally empty bedroom with promises that tomorrow will not be squandered. I will fall asleep in a futureless, strangely peaceful panic, not really knowing what I will do the next morning and having no firm memory of who, or what, I once was.
The first video game I can recall having to force myself to stop playing was Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which was released in 2002 (though I did not play it until the following year). I managed to miss Vice City’s storied predecessor, Grand Theft Auto III, so I had only oblique notions of what I was getting into. A friend had lobbied me to buy Vice City, so I knew its basic premise: You are a cold-blooded jailbird looking to ascend the bloody social ladder of the fictional Vice City’s criminal under-and overworld. (I also knew that Vice City’s violent subject matter was said to have inspired crime sprees by a few of the game’s least stable fans. Other such sprees would horribly follow. Seven years later, Rockstar has spent more time in court than a playground-abutting pesticide manufactory.) I might have taken better note of the fact that my friend, when speaking of Vice City, admitted he had not slept more than four hours a night since purchasing it and had the ocular spasms and fuse-blown motor reflexes to prove it. Just what, I wanted to know, was so specifically compelling about Vice City? “Just get it and play it,” he answered. “You can do anything you want in the game. Anything.”
Before I played Vice City, the open-world games with which I was familiar had predictable restrictions. Ninety percent of most open gameworlds’ characters and objects were interactively off limits, and most game maps simply stopped. When, like a digital Columbus, you attempted to journey beyond the edge of these flat earths, onscreen text popped up: YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY! There were a few exceptions to this, such as the (still) impressively open-ended gameworld of Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which was released in 1998. As great as Ocarina was, however, it appealed to the most hairlessly innocent parts of my imagination. Ingenious, fun, and beautiful, Ocarina provided all I then expected from video games. (Its mini-game of rounding up a brood of fugitive chickens remains my all-time favorite.) Yet the biggest game of its time was still, for me, somehow too small. As a navigated experience, the currents that bore you along were suspiciously obliging. Whatever I did, and wherever I moved, I never felt as though I had escaped the game. When the game stopped, so did the world.
The world of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was also a fantasy—a filthy, brutal, hilarious, contemporary fantasy. My friend’s promise that you could do anything you wanted in Vice City proved to be an exaggeration, but not by very much. You control a young man named Tommy, who has been recently released from prison. He arrives in Vice City—an oceanside metropolis obviously modeled on the Miami of 1986 or so—only to be double-crossed during a coke deal. A few minutes into the game, you watch a cut scene in which Tommy and his lawyer (an anti-Semitic parody of an anti-Semitic parody) decide that revenge must be taken and the coke recovered. Once the cut scene ends, you step outside your lawyer’s office. A car is waiting for you. You climb in and begin your drive to the mission destination (a clothing store) clearly marked on your map. The first thing you notice is that your car’s radio can be tuned to a number of different radio stations. What is playing on these stations is not a loop of caffeinatedly upbeat MIDI video-game songs or some bombastic score written for the game but Michael Jackson, Hall and Oates, Cutting Crew, and Luther Vandross. While you are wondering at this, you hop a curb, run over some pedestrians, and slam into a parked car, all of which a nearby police officer sees. He promptly gives chase. And for the first time you are off, speeding through Vice City’s various neighborhoods. You are still getting accustomed to the driving controls and come into frequent contact with jaywalkers, oncoming traffic, streetlights, fire hydrants. Soon your pummeled car (you shed your driver’s-side door two blocks ago) is smoking. The police, meanwhile, are still in pursuit. You dump the dying car and start to run. How do you get another car? As it happens, a sleek little sporty number called the Stinger is idling beneath a stoplight right in front of you. This game is called Grand Theft Auto, is it not? You approach the car, hit the assigned button, and watch Tommy rip the owner from the ve
hicle, throw him to the street, and drive off. Wait—look there! A motorcycle. Can you drive motorcycles, too? After another brutal vehicular jacking, you fly off an angled ramp in cinematic slow-motion while ELO’s “Four Little Diamonds” strains the limits of your television’s half-dollar-sized speakers. You have now lost the cops and swing around to head back to your mission, the purpose of which you have forgotten. It gradually dawns on you that this mission is waiting for you to reach it. You do not have to go if you do not want to. Feeling liberated, you drive around Vice City as day gives way to night. When you finally hop off the bike, the citizens of Vice City mumble and yell insults. You approach a man in a construction worker’s outfit. He stops, looks at you, and waits. The game does not give you any way to interact with this man other than through physical violence, so you take a swing. The fight ends with you stomping the last remaining vitality from the hapless construction worker’s blood-squirting body. When you finally decide to return to the mission point, the rhythm of the game is established. Exploration, mission, cut scene, driving, mayhem, success, exploration, mission, cut scene, driving, mayhem, success. Never has a game felt so open. Never has a game felt so generationally relevant. Never has a game felt so awesomely gratuitous. Never has a game felt so narcotic. When you stopped playing Vice City, its leash-snapped world somehow seemed to go on without you.
Vice City’s sequel, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, was several magnitudes larger—so large, in fact, I never finished the game. San Andreas gave gamers not one city to explore but three, all of them set in the hip-hop demimonde of California in the early 1990s (though one of the cities is a Vegas clone). It also added dozens of diversions, the most needless of which was the ability of your controlled character, a young man named C.J., to get fat from eating health-restoring pizza and burgers—fat that could be burned off only by hauling C.J.’s porky ass down to the gym to ride a stationary bike and lift weights. This resulted in a lot of soul-scouring questions as to why (a) it even mattered to me that C.J. was fat and why (b) C.J. was getting more physical exercise than I was. Because I could not answer either question satisfactorily, I stopped playing.