How can I explain Bioshock to a parent?

[Jumplion]

It's more that gaming isn't something you can dip in to and pick up from a glance. Bioshock is 99% shooting people, someone leans in, do they see Objectivism? No, they see bee-hand. So when you ask someone to explain Bioshock and they say it's really cerebral it's basically a lie. Bioshock isn't deep particularly, it's about as deep as a well written sci-fi series (new 'V' say) or something like The Matrix.

You could easily say the same thing of someone walking in and seeing the rape scene of "A Clockerwork Orange". You can't look at one part of a whole piece and judge the whole piece on that one part.

Unfortunately people are trying to paint it as a great work of philosophy and something that people don't get when in fact it's basically equal to a moderately well designed film. It's realistically not all that complex, it's basically shooting dudes, but for a different and slightly better reason than usual. I mean, people say that stupid folk don't get it but you'd have to be rip-roaringly apocalyptically stupid, as in 'should not drive cars' stupid not to understand the idea.

Absolutely anything can be worn down to their basic premise. Saving Private Ryan is just another WWII movie. Citizen Kane is just an old fart angry with his life. Romeo and Juliet is just a story about two horny, suicidal teenagers. Nirvana were just a bunch of whiny hipsters. The Beatles were drugged up monkeys in a studio. Video games are just murder simulators. Video games are just wastes of time. Bioshock is just shooting dudes.

Anything sounds simple when broken down like that.

Bear in mind the thing the parents can't understand is why he can kill the little girls. Imagine an elevator pitch for the plot, probably said to you in a tone that mildly implies you're a bit dumb and really think about what they'll have thought.

I don't see why someone couldn't pitch the plot (for a movie, I'm guessing?) without being condescending. The mother is doing something similar that I think you're doing, which is just looking at one aspect out of context and just assuming the worst.

 

[Arbi Trax]

Bioshock is hardly the ideal 'First glance' at gaming if your mum isn't a gamer. My mum can't watch cookery shows because of the gore - watching me pulling a sea slug out of a mutated child's stomach is hardly going to endear her to the medium.

My advice: if she doesn't play games and has no intention of starting, don't push the issue. It'll only lead to you both getting irritated.

If she is open-minded but has never picked up a game, start her off on something that is purely about execution. Allow her to get into the problem-solving mindset of a gamer before you weave game mechanics into a narrative. Remember, your first game was probably not in a rich setting like Rapture.

 

[Captain Booyah]

snip

Oh I know what it's trying to do and yeah, all those aspects are kind of in there but imagine you were presented with the plot and told to make a film/game/book about it. Don't you think that Bioshock is basically the dumbest summer-blockbuster one you could've made? I mean, the OP wants to explain Bioshock to a parent and I'd go with 'the golden ratio as explained by Forrest Gump', a clever idea shown to you in an incredibly shallow, cursory and stupid way.

I disagree. The very concept of an underwater art deco city founded on Objectivist ideals is an interesting one and out of the norm in itself -- that already places it above a sizeable portion of fiction in general, given how every type of media is susceptible to a large amount of clones and general tripe.

The actual plot that plays out within the game isn't extraordinary or groundbreaking, but it is decent enough; if we did translate BioShock into another kind of media -- let's say, in the hands of an excellent writer or director -- with 95% of the bloody hack and slash cut out (which obviously wouldn't work in a book, film, etc.), then it's definitely got more than a leg to stand on and rather unfair to say otherwise. When you take into consideration the aforementioned concept itself, the themes, ideas like the Big Daddies, atmosphere, well-written dialogue, etc., you can't say it wouldn't work in another form of media if there were somebody competent enough to take it on. I think a lot of people also missed that the characters were exceptionally more well-drawn and had a lot more depth than most other things, nevermind games.

And I think the "dumbest summer-blockbuster" comment is only really valid when you think in terms of how every video game adaptation ever made has been mostly terrible, and again, because nobody's worked out how to translate them yet. A dumb summer blockbuster is the kind soulless, unfunny, trivial rom-com starring Jennifer Aniston that Hollywood churns out on a bi-monthly basis. You can't really say with a straight face that BioShock has no more potential than one of those, can you?

 

[Spitfire]

If any of the big videogame controversies have taught us anything, it's that a lot of people in that age group think of videogames as being kids stuff. Not to patronize your mother, but you should make it clear to her that this is an adult videogame, and not something meant for kids.
Then, try to explain to her the plot of the game and the philosophy of Rapture. Maybe even mention Atlas Shrugged, and the influence it had on the game, assuming she's familiar with the book.

Hope that helps.

 

[Guilherme Zoldan]

Give up, Im fairly convinced that most human beings loose most of their rational throught capacity when they become parents.
Seriously though, I would have a really hard time explaining Bioshock to my parents, they would just keep gabbing off about how the graphics look nice and have no idea what the game is about.

 

[Jumplion]

As I say, it's nothing personal but I come here to post. If it can't manage that then fuck it, I'm not doing this for the fun of hearing my keys click. if it behaves itself I'll reply but you know, don't hold your breath.

EDIT: Well that up there ^^^^ is SOME of it, nice job forum i guess...

EDIT 2: Ignore that then, I turned my 'not reply' into a reply. it's not as thorough as I'd like but if this is still going tomorrow I'll add points.

Yeah, the forums sometimes eat up the posts and then spit them back out minutes later. It's annoying at times.

 

[censorgrrl]

*sigh*

Do none of your parents game themselves?

I've been a gamer since Zork and Lode Runner and the side-scrolling Prince of Persia. I taught my sons how to hold a mouse, then a joystick, then a controller... I hid in the basement while I played Diablo because I thought it was too scary for the little ones. Later, I played with them, or watched them play. They're old teenagers now, and we do Left 4 Dead as stress release after a long day's work.

I play World of Warcraft, PvP and PvE, for about 25 hours a week, and have since the servers opened.

I am a 50 year-old woman.

I am not alone. It makes me crazy whenever I hear this 'generation gap' crap. Gamers didn't suddenly appear in 2002, or whenever it was you started playing. I wasn't interested in playing Bioshock, but I sure spectated all the way through both games. I was the one who got out my old copy of Atlas Shrugged and read a few passages to the progeny. It was a teachable moment.

Good luck to all who have family members who don't see the power, the escape, the complexity, of modern gaming. It will change, but we all have to give up our stereotypes!

 

[Pandabearparade]

Give her Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand to read.

Or, better yet, a big rock. That's a much cheaper doorstop than Atlas Shrugged, and of about the same literary quality.

 

[Treblaine]

Basically I was talking to my friend about bioshock and I was discussing the little sisters and how you could kill them but I could never bring myself to do it, my mum then got appalled that you could kill a child in a video game...not really understanding its a "choice" and that the video game doesn't make you do this, I've tried showing her the game but she won't see it (she's not like super strict on video games or anything like that, I just put her off it) but when a parent sees one negative thing in a game they can never seem to see the good side or...well I don't think I've ever shown her a video game that wasn't just "fun" but had a beautiful story and actually made you think.

So my question is how do you show beautiful video games (that takes time to play) to a parent?

Yeah, well don't start with little sisters euthanasia, that's for damn sure!

Though to be honest, it is not so much "one negative thing" swayed them, most have a prejudice from the start and hearing of kids dying just tips them over the edge. Especially bad considering you describe how you REFUSE to kill the kids, but they hear what their prejudiced minds expect: the mere possibility of killing kids.

Bioshock has such an original concept I would really have no idea where to start and frankly the game defies explanation. Here is the game in a paragraph:

A plane disaster in 1960 leaves you stranded in a secret underwater city, an art-deco utopia built by an idealistic industrialist that he calls Rapture. But 2 years earlier the city had descended into anarchy as biological augmentation schemes go out of control and society completely collapses. It is an utterly alien place, a society that diverged from the world 15 years earlier that seems to have now gone completley mad.

It only makes sense to experience it.

How else could I describe the ideal of Rapture other than the way Andrew Ryan does:


You can't just watch it, you have to actually play through it. And that is the problem for someone who lacks 'games literacy', it's like recommending someone to read a great book that is in a foreign language that they do not know.

its worse than that. Words can be translated to equivalents in each language (only grammatical puns are lost). It's a lot more like asking a blind man to appreciate a painting by having it described to them, that's what it's like just watching a video-recording of a game.

Face it buddy, if you can't get her to actually sit down and play the game with the necessary skills then it's paintings before the blind. The best you can do is insist it is very good and hope they take your word for it.

 

[Treblaine]

Give her Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand to read.

Or, better yet, a big rock. That's a much cheaper doorstop than Atlas Shrugged, and of about the same literary quality.

That's about right.

You could say Ken Levine's Bioshock is the world biggest "fuck you" to Rand's writing and ideals. Think about all the death and horrors that can from this objectivist utopia, and just how everything utterly collapses it shows how flawed this idea is. Though it doesn't shy away from how alluring the idea is.

So basically, get someone to START reading Atlas Shrugged and when they get mad at it tell them

"weeell, there just happens to be a certain work that explores the same subject matter only without the ridiculous ideals that objectivism is in any way a good thing. It explores how disastrous such ideals would be. But it's not a book, though considering what you have just read books can't claim much inherent authority, really."

 

[Treblaine]

Video games are like movies in which you can decide the ending.

In the year 1960, Jack is riding on an airplane that suddenly crashes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; swimming to a nearby lighthouse, Jack finds the remnants of a massive underground city. Jack must use hit wits and cunning to survive the city's crazed inhabitants, but at what cost to his humanity?

Momo: "Underground city? Why is there a city under ground? Why not go to a city on the surface? Why are they crazy? Games are weird nonsense, I'm probably right to fear and/or dismiss them."

 

[Treblaine]

Yeah, the forums sometimes eat up the posts and then spit them back out minutes later. It's annoying at times.

I wouldn't mind if it spat the whole thing back but that was about a third of it, the rest was addressed to the third person I quoted.

The final and pivotal thing I don't like about Bioshock is the lack of subtlety, I think that pretty much the central issue is that it's not subtle enough. Take the Little Sisters; the moral choice is to kill or save them. Kill or save a little girl...in a girly dress...with pigtails...wanna guess which the correct choice is? Why not just make it a puppy? Shit, why not break it's leg whilst we're at it?

Seems some subtly was lost on you.

You do not have two choices... you have three.

(1) Rescue
(2) Harvest
(3) Ignore

You are not forced to fight the big daddies. In fact even if you do you can just wander off and leave the little sisters. You do not "need" the extra Adam, plenty of

"a little girl...in a girly dress"

How is that un-subtle? What else should a little girl be wearing in 1960 but a dress for a girl? And they doesn't look that adorable:

that's no image mining, that is the first in-game picture i found searching for "Little Sister Bioshock". There is nothing adorable about them, they are creepy as fuck with their lullabies about drinking blood and callign dead bodies "angels". It's less about killing a puppy, more like considering euthanasia for Cujo.

There also is no correct choice, there is a "good" or "bad" ending which is different from correct/incorrect. I mean surprise-surprise - someone who kills little girls (rather than saving them) just to become a bit more powerful - that make you bit of an evil bastard.

I reckon it would have been more effective to get Adam off of dead splicers and to tone down their aggression a bit. That way you'd have a choice between going around relatively untainted or running around beating people to death for the Adam fix. That would have forced you to become a splicer!

That's a nice idea, but how do you get that to work as a game mechanic? Particularly the part of "tainting" the player so that they actually get addicted to consuming Adam. What, do you put an addictive peggle game for each corpse to harvest Adam, I don't see this working.

Also how would this make an INTERESTING game mechanic. It becomes a grind-fest to slowly collect a tiny amount of Adam at a time from each enemy (that reswapns as you move from area to area). Far more interesting to put single huge rewards of Adam behind the single big challenge of having to defeat a Big Daddy, then make a moral choice of greed vs kindness.

That's why I PREFER Bioshock to other RPGs. You level up by distinct significant battles, rather than a steady and continuous grind.

 

[astrav1]

Might not be very original but,
"Atlas Shrugged".

 

[Jake0fTrades]

Video games are like movies in which you can decide the ending.

In the year 1960, Jack is riding on an airplane that suddenly crashes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; swimming to a nearby lighthouse, Jack finds the remnants of a massive underground city. Jack must use hit wits and cunning to survive the city's crazed inhabitants, but at what cost to his humanity?

Momo: "Underground city? Why is there a city under ground? Why not go to a city on the surface? Why are they crazy? Games are weird nonsense, I'm probably right to fear and/or dismiss them."

Sorry, I meant underwater.

 

[Treblaine]

The only problem is, parents refuse to imagine that perhaps their potrayal of video games is wrong.

Well the main problem with that is that Bioshock, a supposedly mature and thoughtful exploration of objectivism is actually 1% exploration. The other 99% is shooting guys in the face with bees. I mean, honestly, it's hardly all that mature is it?

Funny, replace the word "bees" with "bullets" and you have REAL LIFE political philosophy.

That's how the Russian Civil War was, ideology underpinned everything but 99% of the time it was people shooting each other in the face. See a movie about the Russian Civil War would just cut all that fighting out but isn't that disingenuous to a war where millions die?

That's why movie-game comparisons are unfair.

A movie is specifically designed to give a snapshot summary of events.

A game is specifically designed to IMMERSE you in events to show you it all.

Mortality is drama. You can have a dry academic analysis of objectivism but when you put it in the context of a personal life or death struggle with fantastic weapons and abilities, it all has a lot more weight.

You can sum up Objectivism on a Post-It note, but it takes an extraordinary conflict to give it any kind of meaning. I don't see the problem with it being bees instead of bullets, realism is for conservatives. Great artists embrace the bohemian and abstract.

PS: don't cite a cracked articles. Those guys are morons, funny but stupid. They STILL think that Clint Eastwood is a vegan when that is the oldest and dumbest myth on the internet. They search to be contrarian, not insightful.

 

[Treblaine]

Video games are like movies in which you can decide the ending.

In the year 1960, Jack is riding on an airplane that suddenly crashes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; swimming to a nearby lighthouse, Jack finds the remnants of a massive underground city. Jack must use hit wits and cunning to survive the city's crazed inhabitants, but at what cost to his humanity?

Momo: "Underground city? Why is there a city under ground? Why not go to a city on the surface? Why are they crazy? Games are weird nonsense, I'm probably right to fear and/or dismiss them."

Sorry, I meant underwater.

underwater/underground. it doesn't matter.

Your explanation isn't going to make sense to a layman like your mother. It will just seem arbitrary like you are playing mad-libs with story-telling.

The thing is it's really hard to explain what the hell Rapture actually is. And even WHY it would possibly be there.

I suppose it's a bit like the TV show Lost.

You can't explain that shit, not in one go. For both Bioshock and Lost the weird circumstances are slowly revealed and explained to you so you can actually accept and kind of understand them. In fact you can only accept them because they are presented authentically, like looking out of the glass windows into the ocean you have to say to yourself:

"well, I'm definitely in an underwater city, that means there MUST be an explanation for all this"

See if there is going to be any inter-media comparisons it should be between TV Series and Games. NOT between games and Movies. Movies have a run time of 2 hours or so. Bioshock took me 30 hours on my first playthrough. That's about the same time as the first 2 seasons of Lost. That isn't even an action series and they managed to kill a lot of people in that time.

 

[Treblaine]

I'd say that I was being harsh but I don't think that being realistic about it's complexity when put in perspective is really unnecessarily so, especially when people think their parents are too limited to understand it. It'd be like saying someone doesn't understand Jurassic Park,

Well Bioshock defies explanation in the same way the TV series Lost defies explanation.

I.e. if you simply describe it then it sounds ridiculous, but actually experiencing it as intended then it mostly works and has an enthralling effect.

I think the problem with parents "understanding" bioshock is that it is built on gaming conventions.

Imagine showing an adult a motion picture where they had NO CONCEPT of montage. That is for the camera to cut from one scene to another. Also no concept of the camera angle instantly changing. This seems silly but it is significant as it can be disorienting. Also other concepts like flashbacks, exposition and so many other elements of presentation we take for granted. Someone who can be highly intelligent but for some reason has NEVER watched a movie or film before would be thrown by these things.

Video games are more extreme, they depend on the gamer more than understanding but following certain conventions.

Like the idea of actually moving on to advance the story. To immerse yourself with the controls to truly use your in game character as an avatar, to know where to look to see what is happening. To move naturally, not think "hmm I better move to the left, now what is the control to move left, uuuuh".

If they cannot totally immerse themselves in the controls and interact seamlessly with the world then the experience will fail.

 

[Treblaine]

snip

Oh I know what it's trying to do and yeah, all those aspects are kind of in there but imagine you were presented with the plot and told to make a film/game/book about it. Don't you think that Bioshock is basically the dumbest summer-blockbuster one you could've made? I mean, the OP wants to explain Bioshock to a parent and I'd go with 'the golden ratio as explained by Forrest Gump', a clever idea shown to you in an incredibly shallow, cursory and stupid way.

Yeah, except it's NOT a film or a book or any passive media.

It is mindless to WATCH a character on film constantly explore, evade and fight for hours at a time.

It is TOTALLY different when it is YOU doing the fighting. You are challenged, you control the pace, you get the rewards, and the choice is always with you what and where to go next.

For example, the film Die Hard doesn't follow John McClain search through every inch of the building, but it does cut right to him characteristically moaning about eating a "Prehistoric Twinkie" for a bit of dialogue between him and Powell then cuts away again to something else.

It's like the difference between watching someone playing a video game and actually playing it yourself. Casino Royale is much more interesting than any of those "Live Poker" shows you might see on TV, because they condense a long drawn out game into a montage and cut to pivotal scenes. Books do the same, they do NOT describe each hand as it is played, they skim over it. Because the audience is just and observer, they just want the events described not to EXPERIENCE them.

 

[Captain Booyah]

I'm not going to bother replying to this I don't think, not because I'm bored or annoyed but because I just wrote out a long reply that this broken pisspot of a forum promptly lost.

Yeah, that happened to me before. The forums are bitches sometimes.

Basically I just said that Bioshock isn't all that hard to understand, it's pulp sci-fi at it's purest and that there's no character development, no one ever devolves into a splicer or shows any ill effects from the Adam they didn't already have.

I can respect your opinion of the story and whatnot, but I'll have to disagree on the characters. I can't remember any other specific examples because it's been a while since I played it, but Dr. Steinman had a number of audio diaries that showed his gradual descent from a brilliant surgeon to a spliced-up psychopath. At first it was him talking about the potential of ADAM, then him complaining he was tired of performing the same surgeries over and over again, then wanting to become the "Picasso" of surgery and turn it into an art form, until eventually he's seeing visions of Aphrodite and cutting up patients mid-operation in an attempt to make them "beautiful".

I also remember Sander Cohen being something like that, although the splicing didn't so much give him any new problems as much as it did make pre-existing ones even worse. (Case in point, the confidence issues, what with the increasingly frequent run-ins with "doubters", and the rabbit analogy, and all those mocking Songbird advertisements in his bedroom, and other stuff I can't remember now.) What's more, he had another dimension to his character simply for the fact that he was constantly living between two worlds: one a fantasy where he thinks he can still become something, and another where he's bitterly aware that he's thrown his life down the drain.

Again, there'll be other examples, but it's been a long time since I played BioShock and those are two off the top of my head. It's a lot better than what is usually encountered in media.

 

[DataSnake]

The problem with the "get Adam from sploicers who only attack if you start it" model is there's no REASON for Adam in that scenario. Let's compare:

BIOSHOCK AS-IS:
Why do you need Adam?
To win fights.
Why are you in fights?
Splicers are lunatics who attack on sight.

BIOSHOCK, HYPOTHETICAL:
Why do you need Adam?
To win fights.
Why are you in fights?
To get more Adam.

In the first example, if you go without Adam, it's a major uphill battle, because enemies are getting tougher and you aren't. This provides an incentive to tangle with Big Daddies, as well as making the "evil" option a good deal more tempting.

In the second, if you go without Adam, it doesn't change things that much, because you only needed it for fights, and you're skipping them anyway.