k-ossuburb said:
This is a subject that I've thought of quite a bit as a of late, not only with regards to games, but narrative in general. The problem with depth and profundity is that what people find profound lies in how it examines ideas that they've already been introduced to. Back when I was twelve, the concept that people view things differently was incredibly deep, but now it's sort of just a given. Thus, whether or not a video game is profound or not is subjective. However, it is not subjective in the way one might think.
Whenever I see games that are brought up in discussions of games that have depth or mean something, it seems like people always want to point to games that simply say something that the audience already agrees with. It's why I get annoyed at the constant stream of pseudo intellectual "discussion" about whether or not it's better to be a jerk or a nice guy. Even if it weren't a fairly fluffy intellectual discourse, it's still stiffled by the fact that games often set this up as a purely superficial choice has no real affect on the plot, nor does it have any ludic drive.
Your hero is still a badass who (mostly) everyone still loves regardless of what they do, and the really big decisions (like who you are fighting or what your goal is) are pretty much made for you. Ultimately the biggest source of shallowness in video game stories is simply a matter of being "you good, villains bad," with the only subversions being more or less along the lines of "villains are really good and you are actually bad, so do good." Some writers will try to escape this by simply trying to say "this is good and this is bad, and this is why," but even that doesn't make something incredibly deep in the same way that an political candidate being asked questions in their own advertisements isn't a genuine inquiry into what makes them tick. And there is where the difference between being deep and being shallow lies: intention. A great number of works ask questions because that's what people expect a deep work to do. A deep work is one that asks questions because they need to be asked. There is no objective way to tell which is which, but I think it's actually easier that one might think. After all, when is the last time that you've honestly asked "is it better to save a kitten than to burn it?"
Well, at least, it's how to tell the difference between a work that lends itself to being deep vs. one that doesn't. In the end, what really matters is the audience experience. I would say that the problem of video games being shallow isn't the result of whether or not a work really is shallow. I think a bigger problem is that audiences naturally want to use what ever a narrative says to back up what they already believe, rather than trying to ask questions about how this looks in the face of their set of beliefs.
Thus, I would say that your friend was actually on to something when they said that Bioshock was deep, but not in the way that they might have thought. Many people seem to like Bioshock because it says all sorts of broad things about "greed is bad" and "don't trust irish dudes," but I liked it because it seemed to say that no matter how many little choices a game give you, you're still doing what the developer thinks is best, and that regardless of ideology, people are dicks. Whether this comes from me or from the game is another issue, because ideas are ultimately the product of everything and nothing.
