The plot itself, not really. What exactly is the meaning and value behind spending a few hours saving the trees in Arcadia or assembling a Big Daddy suit? There isn't any, it's just entertainment. Filler, if you're feeling bitter. Toying with the issue of player agency is the only thing for which Bioshock needs an interactive medium, otherwise the plot would just as well fit a book. And that book would probably be labelled "young-adult pulp-adventure" like thousands of other books.Fieldy409 said:
But pretty much all games are like this. Classical narrative theory falls apart disastrously when forced into an interactive environment. JRPGs are a good example - their stories are often long and complex (actual depth... varies wildly), but they usually have zero interactivity. Playing through them is an entirely separated addition, like a novel with an exploration and stat micromanagement meta-game. And then you compare them to HL2, which is similarly linear but less abstract and with a few more freedoms (seamless transition, no interruptions, no cutscenes, first-person only), and a complex dramatic story becomes completely impossible through conventional exposition. Players gain palpable interactivity, and won't be held down before walls of exposition - they jump around the room and click on stuff while NPCs chat in the background and give the bare-minimum of story, most of which ends up being told through optional interactions with the environment.
Shooters will always have these problems when trying to force the player to care for their story, whether it's a typical juvenile power-fantasy or a masterpiece of literature. Traditional storytelling largely doesn't work, cannot support the drama, and isn't at the centre of attention. Games have other ways of shining.
