To celebrate Bioshock’s 15th birthday,we recently spoke with none other than its creator Ken Levine. To keep the feature tightly focused around Bioshock, its legacy, and all the other wonderful things related to the game, I editorialised and cut our chat down considerably, even though we covered plenty more topics.
It was all interesting stuff, but there was so much of it that we’ve decided be sensibly divvying it up into a few separate features, starting with this Q&A, where we talk about Bioshock, the plight of immersive sims, and whether or not genre matters when talking about games. There’ll be a tiny bit of overlap with our previous feature, but I tried to cut that where I could so that instead you have nice long chunks of one of gaming’s finest talents talking about, well, games. Enjoy!
Bioshock was heavily presented as an FPS, even though it was really much more than that. Was that a necessary evil back at a time when FPS games were king?
I think first-person shooters were a narrower field back then, right? When System Shock 2 came out, you didn’t really have narrative first-person shooter experiences. Even Half-Life was not as narrative as Bioshock was in the complexity and depth of the story. I’m not giving a negative comparison - Half-Life was genius - it was just different. Bioshock had a more textual world, you know, there’s a lot more characters and plot and subplots and things like that.
System Shock 2 did very poorly from a sales standpoint. I don’t know the exact numbers because I was too removed from that. It was an EA thing and I wasn’t even getting any royalties from it. I think it was 150,000 units or something at the time. We thought System Shock 2 might have bounced off people because they just couldn’t get their heads around it, and so we tried to find some way to communicate BioShock in ways that people understand.
First-person shooters were just a shorthand, and back then first-person experienceswerefirst-person shooters, so we thought ‘OK. How can we expand that vocabulary to do a little more?' I ended up looking at the marketing text for Bioshock the other day and it’s an ‘action-adventure first-person shooter.’ It was like ‘How do we explain this fucking thing to people?’
It seems you guys hit the right buzzwords, because Bioshock could’ve - like many brilliant but oft overlooked immersive sims - ended up fairly esoteric and obscure without them. Instead, it was both a critical and commercial success.
It makes me think of this experience I had once. We made this game called Tribes Vengeance, and I went to a store once right after it came out and I didn’t see it on the shelf at GameStop. I said to the guy behind the counter, “You guys have this game?” and he said “yeah but we don’t put it out.” I said ‘Well, why not?’ and he goes “well, we don’t want justanybodyto just buy it!” because he was a huge Tribes fan.
That’s sort of the opposite of my attitude. I got it, you know, he wanted to protect the game, but I always want to invite people in and I never want to say ‘well, you’re not cool enough to play this game or you’re not esoteric enough because you didn’t take the right classes in school.’ I think that you want to be inviting and ramp the thing so anybody can play it. You don’t need to have read Ayn Rand to play Bioshock.
On the topic of Rand and Bioshock’s exploration of her ideology, you seem to approach Objectivism with a fairly neutral stance in Bioshock - observation and critique rather than outright criticism. Do you as a designer feel it’s important to keep some emotional distance from the politics and ideas you’re exploring?
I haven’t had a lot of negative reaction from Objectivists in terms of the game. With how dark the story is and with how much Ryan is an analogue to Rand, you’d think they would hate it, but I think because I didn’t go in with a grudge I was able to treat it fairly and show the positive aspects of it, but also the real-world – I mean, who the hell knows? Maybe a real-life Rapture would be terrible, maybe it would be even 1000 times better. You never know. I just attempt to be fair to it. I try to be an umpire, I try to call balls and strikes.
The games I’m best known for, they’re generally about the intersection of ideology on the page and people in reality, and what happens when these very high-minded principles meet reality, because realities are messy and the mess of it is what I loved about it. I love the mess. I’m quite cynical about politics in general. Ideologues tend to forget how messy things are.
Ideologies are often presented in cold and high-minded ways that seem above and beyond human emotion, but of course humans can’t avoid their feelings!
Yeah, and traumas. Rand and Ryan were both traumatised when they were young by their experiences. Rand’s family was like a bourgeois family at the beginning of the Soviet Union. You know, they were not the favourites of the new bosses, and that experience informed her whole life and she lived in fear of having the knock on the door in the middle of the night again. That’s what Ryan had too. He was so afraid that he had to build the giant city at the bottom of the ocean because he thought that was the only way - it was a survival instinct for him.
It’s interesting you mention trauma, because even in the last 15 years there’s been so much more understanding of trauma in society, and its role in affecting our lives and the sometimes crazy decisions we make. It’s interesting looking at Bioshock through that lens - the trauma of those involved in Rapture.
Ryan had averytraumatic experience as a child - on a scale that we can’t really even imagine. And same with Tenenbaum - she was in the camps and Suchong was a Korean under Japanese occupation. They were all traumatised by war. Trauma with a capital ‘T’ - a serious trauma that we can’t even contemplate in the west right now. I think that these characters all get spun off by that - what happened to them - and they end up in Rapture.
Part of why Bioshock doesn’t feel like such an old game to me is that so few games have followed its blueprint. There are some similar games out there - and certainly in terms of environmental storytelling you see its influence in ‘walking sims’ like Gone Home [made by former Bioshock developer Steve Gaynor], SOMA, and the like - but many of its ideas still feel remarkable fresh.
I think you see it in games like Into the Breach, even though it’s a completely different type of game. The environment interactions… I don’t know if you played the expansion pack where they had a whole bunch of new stuff. It’s so rich in terms of environmental interaction and how they leverage it.
When I was at Looking Glass, I used to write these white papers on various topics, and one of them was on something I called Act-React. I was inspired by Ultima Underworld, where you could actually catch a fish, then you get a piece of it and put in a fire and it would cook and you get more hit points out of it. I thought to myself ‘What if we made that more broadly applicable?’ What if fire had certain primal effects and that would affect everything in the world, and you would tag everything with the effects it would have and then certain things would know how to respond based upon what it was and also wasn’t?
it was beyond the scope of what we could do then and it never really got off the ground, but then we moved onto Bioshock and we really tried to push on that stuff. That’s one of my favourite parts of the game and why it’s the kind of game I like to play - where I can experiment and improvise, which I love.
Bioshock is one of the few commercially successful immersive sims out there. Why do you think that the games in this rather vague genre - like Arkane’s games, Deus Ex, and so on - struggle to find success where Bioshock did? They’re often revered as great games, and yet don’t get the success they deserve.
I played all those games through. I love those games and I like Arkane games a lot. I think they’re now having to push in a different direction because I’m not sure if they found the market they wanted. I don’t know, I’m not even sure why Bioshock found the audience it did. Who knows? I think that maybe we have a focus on the emotional. Even the Big Daddy-Little Sister relationship - it tries to start from the emotion. Videogames can get quite clinical. Like, even the term – what’s the term you used for these games? Environmental sims?
Immersive sims.
Right, immersive sims alone. It just sounds so clinical, right? I’m very attracted to character and storytelling.
It’s probably indicative of a problem with the term ‘immersive sim’ when someone like you - widely seen as one of its founders - hasn’t heard of it! Like you say, it’s quite clinical and unappealing
I just forget it. I’ve always mixed and matched things with genre. If I make a game like Bioshock or what I’m working on now, I don’t go back and say ‘Well, we have to make sure we have these aspects of immersive sims.’ I just say ‘OK, what’s the story we’re trying to tell and how do we support that story?’ It doesn’t even need to follow the story really closely, it just means the vibe of the world and the emotions you’re feeling like you were getting from being in that space. That’s what matters to me.
