The 2007 classic BioShock, which 2k Games recently remastered and re-released as part of BioShock: The Collection, explores a lot of heady themes and big ideas. It posits that individual agency is an illusion, both in games and in life, and that we are subject to manipulation by forces we may not even perceive. It suggests that our pursuit of our highest potential might turn us into monsters.
But it sadly pulls its biggest narrative and thematic punch.
Little Sisters
Bioshock takes place in the city of Rapture, a massive, leaking underwater boondoggle of a city founded by a lunatic millionaire named Andrew Ryan who took Atlas Shrugged way too seriously.
Within this objectivist paradise, unencumbered by laws or ethics, Ryan’s acolytes learned to hack their genes and give themselves superpowers using a substance called ADAM. The abuse of this technology eventually transformed most of the people of Rapture into mutant junkies, but before that happened, their uninhibited pursuit of power led the Rapturites to perform some truly barbaric experiments.
Foremost among these atrocities was the creation of the "Little Sisters." ADAM was produced by sea slugs, but the slugs weren’t making enough of it to satisfy the needs of Rapture’s power-mad gene splicers. They discovered they could exponentially increase a slug’s ADAM production by implanting it into the body of a child, at the cost of turning the children into creepy zombies.
Luckily, competition for scarce ADAM was already breaking down societal structures and creating a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, so there were plenty of orphans for Rapture’s scientists to round up.
The player encounters these implanted children, the Little Sisters, skittering around in the rusty, creaking underwater ruins. They’re extracting ADAM from the corpses of dead splicers with giant syringes under the constant supervision of their monstrous, technologically-enhanced protectors, the Big Daddies, who serve as the game’s minibosses.
Once the player defeats a Big Daddy and captures a Little Sister, they get a choice: They can destroy the sea slug and rescue the little girl, but this causes the player to lose the precious ADAM, which is a currency that they use to buy upgrades to health, energy and their plasmid powers. Or they can harvest the slug and claim all the ADAM for themselves, killing the child.
However, if the player chooses the rescue option, the Little Sisters leave a gift for every third child they save. Harvesting a Little Sister yields 160 ADAM, and saving her will only yield 80, but the gift contains 200. That means the difference between harvesting and saving Little Sisters only amounts to about 10 percent of the total amount of ADAM, and players who save the Little Sisters will still get all the upgrades they need as they play through the game.
Why is that a problem?
BioShock was released to universal acclaim, and reviewers did not zero in on the economics of saving Little Sisters as a problem at the time of release. But this mechanic came under harsh criticism from Braid designer Jonathan Blow in a presentation he gave at a conference in late 2007.
"It's supposed to be a big ethical dilemma," Blow said. "As it turns out, it doesn’t matter whether you do either — the game throttles the rewards either way."
Blow’s observation has since become viewed as conventional critical wisdom about BioShock, and writer Chris Suellentrop recently asked series creator Ken Levine about it in an interview for Rolling Stone.
Levine said he had initially wanted players who rescued the Little Sisters to "really feel" the impact of their constrained flow of ADAM, but he got pushback from his publishers, who argued that it was "design anathema" to have a branching narrative path that makes the game harder for the player.
Levine said he could not win that argument by providing counterexamples of a similar mechanic done well. I also tried to think of an example myself, and I really could not. There are some quests in games like Skyrim where choices you make can cost you access to a powerful weapon, a special ability or a companion character, but there are so many ways to ramp up your character’s power in those games that the loss of one opportunity for advancement is in no way analogous to having your supply of upgrade currency cut by half in BioShock.
This should have been different
In the Rolling Stone interview, Levine continues by saying that "there was also a lot of concern that people would always harvest. They would look at it from a numerical standpoint, an optimization standpoint. I actually think that people approach harvesting and saving almost entirely from an emotional standpoint."
BioShock’s publishers should have had the courage to let that happen. It would have been interesting to find out what players would have done in that situation, when doing the right thing came with an actual cost.
I’m an optimizer. It’s deeply embedded in the way I approach games, and I’ve written for Polygon about playing this way on several occasions. The fantasy of escalating power and the tantalizing allure of in-game rewards appeals to me on a very basic level, as I’m sure it does for many players.
But how far would I go to min-max my character? What horrors would I perpetrate? What happens when the fantasy of escalating power is set in conflict with the fantasy of being the hero? I rescued the Little Sisters when I played BioShock, but would I have played the good guy if doing so had meant being outmatched and outgunned throughout the campaign? Or would the frustration have eventually pressured me to do something unspeakable for a big stack of currency to spend at the upgrade machine?
Mechanics and narrative are intertwined in games. The splicers were driven to barbaric acts by their lust for ADAM. Will you, the player, succumb to the temptation of unbridled power that ADAM represents?
You never have to find out. If you don’t harvest the Little Sisters, you get a big teddy-bear filled with ADAM as a reward for being such a good person.
How does that mesh with the fiction? If everybody in Rapture had been rewarded with lots of ADAM for being nice, things probably would have turned out differently. The rules are different when you’re the hero, I guess.
Is scarce ADAM really a design nightmare?
BioShock has four selectable difficulty levels: the default mode, an easy mode, a hard mode and an extra-hard survivor mode.
Cranking the difficulty from normal to hard gives enemies 55 percent more health and causes them to do 50 percent more damage, while shooting more accurately. The hard difficulty also causes plasmids, or special abilities, to cost 30 percent more energy, or EVE.
You spend your ADAM on health upgrades, which allow you to take more damage; plasmid upgrades, which make your plasmids more powerful; and EVE upgrades, which allow you to cast more plasmid abilities.
The fact that all the combat stats ramp up so rapidly when you push the difficulty slider up suggests that the game has plenty of room for players to have given up some power for story reasons, all without making the default setting unreasonably difficult. Playing BioShock on normal difficulty while receiving only 50 percent ADAM is still a bit easier than playing the game on hard mode with full ADAM.
Playing the game on normal mode while rescuing all the Little Sisters without the ADAM gifts would have been quite a bit more difficult than a normal difficulty mode ordinarily is, but it wouldn’t have been an insurmountable task for most experienced gamers.
For players who couldn’t handle the challenge, but couldn’t stand to harvest the Little Sisters, lowering the difficulty to easy mode would have been an option. Enemies have 40-percent health and deal only 17.5 percent of the damage in easy mode, so even novice gamers could probably have handled the challenge without feeling a need to resort to cannibalizing little girls.
It actually seems that the game is already tuned to essentially solve the design problem, but that Irrational added the ADAM gifts anyway, when the publisher balked at the choice to rescue or harvest affecting game difficulty. We’re just not used to in-game decision that can impact a game’s difficulty on the fly.
Playing the game on hard while rescuing the Little Sisters would have been extremely difficult and frustrating. The survivor difficulty mode, which gives the enemies 240-percent health, is an extreme challenge even with the gifts, and it might be close to impossible with 50-percent ADAM.
But modes like that exist for players who like extreme challenges, and players still would have had the option to harvest the Little Sisters for more ADAM. The added pressure to do the "wrong" thing would be seen as an in-universe temptation, not an aesthetic choice or hope for a "better" ending.
This is a little thing, but it’s a big deal
The difference between games and other media is that the consumer of the narrative is actually participating in it, and that’s significant even if the things the player does are what Jonathan Blow calls "architecture," or actions that are predetermined by the developer.
BioShock introduces a conceit: Here is a tonic that grants people superpowers. Here is how the residents of what was supposed to be a utopian city descended into madness and barbarity while competing over this precious resource.
Then it poses the problem to the player: You can claim this power, but to do so, you’ll have to commit an act which shocks the conscience. What will you do?
Tempting a hero with great power that comes at a terrible cost is a pretty well-worn trick. It’s the snake in the Garden of Eden. It’s Dr. Faustus. It’s the One Ring. It’s the Dark Side. It’s the Deathly Hallows.
The choice posed by BioShock could have actually subjected the player to this kind of temptation, which is something books and film can’t replicate in such a meaningful way.
By stripping the choice of gameplay significance, Levine and company are instead left with a role-playing decision.
When we are given the option to rescue or harvest a Little Sister, we are deciding whether we want to play as a good guy or a bad guy. That should have meant something outside of the ending animations.
Comments
I actually just played Bioshock for the first time this year. I bought it simply because the cover was cool, and didn’t do any research into the game mechanics or anything. Going in knowing nothing about the game, I found the decision to harvest or save the Little Sisters to be fairly wrenching. I saved one, then harvested the next and felt SO guilty about it that I ended up saving the rest of them.
I’m not a min/maxxer, and I don’t tend to dive into game mechanics. Now that I’ve played once through, I’ve dug out reviews and such from the ancient past (ah, 2007) and – I probably won’t play through again. I was going to at first, see what happened if I harvested all, but if it doesn’t make that much of a difference, then why bother.
tl;dr – on a first playthrough, the moral quandary was real. But knowing what I know now, I feel a little manipulated for no reason. (But it was still fun.)
By trulyscr on 09.19.16 2:14pm
This comment supports my argument against this writer’s point.
The first playthrough doesn’t give you the information to understand the economics behind the moral choices, so their effect is still intact. People who played Bioshock at release likely agonized over which option to go with. Some may have tried one and reloaded a save to try the other, and went ahead with whichever they felt comfortable with, but they had no way of knowing that the results would be relatively equal in result.
For me, morality won out. I couldn’t bring myself to just harvest the slugs with no care for the little girls they resided in. And the payoff wasn’t limited to the ending, but also had an impact in Tennenbaum’s (sp?) orphanage.
The choice still matters to me. The game still carries emotion for me. It’s more than just a Circus of Values.
By Boots_33 on 09.19.16 3:20pm
In total agreement. It might not matter now because we can see what was behind the curtain but that initial playthrough was without that knowledge and it worked.
By kariyanine on 09.19.16 3:28pm
This brings up a really good point that seems to be accidentally ignored in a lot of deep dives into games that have been out for a while. We tend to forget that first impression, and a lot of our analysis is so inherently retrospective that it forgets the perspective of consuming something for the first time.
I always see this happening when people talk about Telltale games—there’s a really common sentiment that most of the choices "don’t matter" because they don’t make a significant change to how the game plays out, as proven by either subsequent playthroughs or comparison to other people’s experience.
But as someone playing a Telltale game for the first time, the choices are super meaningful because you have no idea what the outcome will be. The possibilities and breadth of influence on the game’s outcome are essentially irrelevant, because the choices feel important in that moment.
By RobMyr on 09.20.16 3:40pm
And there goes any hope of ever buying a TellTale game in the dump. I thought they were story driven and had MEANINGFUL choices.
Thanks for helping me make that significant choice.
By rockykoston on 09.21.16 12:52pm
They do have meaningful choices. The definition of "meaningful" is wider than "changes the plot significantly". They’re meaningful because they determine who lives and dies, they’re meaningful because they say something about who you, the player, are, and they’re meaningful because they have an impact on how other characters feel and behave.
By RobMyr on 09.22.16 10:00am
Great point. My first experience with Bioshock was without any prior knowledge. At that time, the choices I had to make felt more significant and morality-based. Subsequent playthroughs were far less emotionally engaging, but that’s more the nature of video game campaigns in general rather than a fault of Bioshock.
Would greater rewards for being the bad guy ultimately have made the player’s choices more impactful and meaningful? Perhaps on repeat playthroughs. I don’t think it would have affected the initial experience, though.
By BucklingSwashes on 09.20.16 6:48pm
You had this game that was supposed to be about freedom (remember how hyped that part of the gameplay was), but you really didn’t have any. You couldn’t choose to not go to Rapture, or to not kill endless Rapture citizens. The game even undercuts the thought that you could tell yourself that you’re doing what your character would choose. The only choice you had was literally "kill little girls" or "not". And even that choice barely mattered, in terms of gameplay or story. I always thought this was kind’ve the point because Rapture was supposedly also about freedom, but the way it ended up was always treated, in story and tone, as inevitable.
By Emerszi on 09.19.16 2:14pm
That’s the thing. The Little Sisters weren’t the only narrative thread. The metanarrative of choice (or lack thereof) in game narrative was perhaps an even stronger one than the Little Sisters one.
By Kenogu Labz on 09.19.16 2:48pm
As Levine describes it in the Rolling Stone interview, Bioshock is a game about power. Levine believes the oppressed become oppressors, and the shit rolls downhill. So, Ryan, Tenenbaum and the other characters came to Rapture to escape the oppression they suffered in Europe, and Rapture becomes oppressive.
These players exert power over the Rapturites and over the player character. And the player character has power over the Little Sisters, once he kills the Big Daddies and captures them.
A lot of choice in Bioshock is illusory, but I don’t think the choice to harvest or rescue the Little Sisters was meant to be. It’s supposed to be about what experience has shaped the characters into, and I think it should be about what the game shapes you into — specifically whether it can kick your ass hard enough to make you willing to murder a child for a health-bar upgrade.
By DanFriedman81 on 09.19.16 2:58pm
Yeah this. WYK was far more interesting than kill or not kill.
And the afterthought of choice was a letdown, but the first time playing it you had no idea how it really panned out with the little sisters. So it meant something then.
The only thing that bugged me is that i COULD choose.
By Menage on 09.19.16 2:58pm
And in the end, it didn’t really matter to you, the player.
In that sense, perhaps the final mechanic as we saw it ended up playing into the narrative better, if only by accident. The two narrative goals were kind of at odds to each other otherwise.
By Kenogu Labz on 09.19.16 3:14pm
Yeah, I agree, it’s all fake choice anyway, doesn’t really matter in the end. So why make it matter differently. That would have been my other choice next to having no choice at all.
By Menage on 09.19.16 3:18pm
I got a bit concerned on the first paragraph so as someone that has not played the games and plans to play them all in the collection: is this article full of spoilers?
By Miku on 09.19.16 2:14pm
Definitely major spoilers for the first Bioshock.
By Herald_of_Ceald on 09.19.16 2:16pm
Thanks.
By Miku on 09.19.16 2:17pm
We make enough difficult choices in our daily real life, that deeply affect us.
Why on Earth would people want the same trauma in their games, are their lives so comfortable and numb ?
No, let games be games, let them be entertainment and fantasy.
By Unsheep on 09.19.16 2:35pm
The thing is, ‘game’ doesn’t have a single unified definition as you describe. Just like ‘book’ or ‘story’ doesn’t either. It is merely a vessel for content.
By _Smiles on 09.19.16 3:23pm
Amen to that.
By Cobaltios on 09.19.16 4:15pm
What would it mean if I said ‘let TV Shows be TV Shows’?… ‘Let films be films’ or ‘let books be books’?
By MaxFisherman on 09.19.16 4:44pm
False dilemma. There are plenty of games that exist that are entertaining, fantastical, escapist power fantasies. That doesn’t mean there can’t be games that are, from an artistic standpoint, challenging and difficult and divisive and that present genuine quandaries. I’d argue there should be more games like that, since like 99% of games (rough estimate) are escapist power fantasies.
Besides, there’s plenty of art that has been challenging and has presented genuine human trauma and heartbreak and difficult choice, and the presentation of that conflict is exactly what makes those works so emotionally impactful for its recipient. Lots of people who talk about really emotionally bare works of art or storytelling that "helped me through a difficult time".
This comment is like saying "why should a film be sad? I’m plenty sad in my life; I don’t want to see more sad things. I want to see happy things." Except lots of people like sad films because the emotions presented in those works resonate with us. Why can’t games be the same way?
By jamonthelam on 09.19.16 4:57pm
If this is your position (and you are certainly entitled to it), might I humbly suggest that reading articles analyzing entertainment is not particularly good use of your time? No one’s making you dissect the frogs; you can leave if you’d rather just enjoy watching them hop around.
By No Capes on 09.20.16 4:46am
Have you never watched a heart wrenching drama?
The good things about games is, they put you into a position and force you to make active decisions, that passive mediums just can’t do.
By KayTannee on 09.20.16 5:39am
By Nemrex on 09.19.16 2:35pm
not exactly sure why you reference things Jonathan Blow said… he made one neat indie title (Braid) and one complete pile of crap (The Witness) whereas Ken Levine is a juggernaut in the industry. After playing and endless succession of totally boring line puzzles (The Witness) I’m not interested, AT ALL, in his ideas about "good game design"
That being said, I think the part that I love is that we CAN be the good guy hero in this sunken city of depravity and filth and not be so handicapped that the power fantasy element of the game is lost.
By lloydbeatz on 09.19.16 2:45pm