IndustryGamers continues with our ongoing series delving into the minds of creative leads at various studios. Our goal? To find what drives character design and development and look at how successful franchises have drawn consumers in.
While two studios have worked on the incredibly popular BioShock series, it was Irrational Games that brought the original title to the attention of gamers everywhere. Irrational hopes to return that sense of wonder and environment with BioShock Infinite sometime in 2012.
We talk with Studio boss Ken Levine on the importance of immersion and just how first-person can really help gamers get into the action. While BioShock gave us Jack, a character completely devoid of any real humanity, Levine hopes that Infinite will give us a companion type experience with Booker DeWitt. What is important though is that sense of immersion and how giving the game to the player, rather than the character, helps to bring us in.
Control Questions:
IndustryGamers: Developing a character is assuredly a major concern for a game; how important is it for the development of BioShock?
Ken Levine: I think the audience can answer that question better than I can. It was certainly important to me. You never know exactly what the impact of your work is going to be on the individual. What are people exactly responding too? The characters, the setting, the game settings? I think that we tried to innovate. We thought very much of the world of Rapture as a character – not just the human beings or creatures as characters. You wanted to make the world a character as well, and I hoped that’s what people responded too.
IG: What led to the design concept of the protagonist? Was this concept developed from the start, or did the characterization portrayal change over time?
KL: Our protagonist in BioShock is a weird one, as he is sort of a non-character by design. From a game design perspective rather than a character design perspective, we sort of wanted to make you an every-man in terms of what you were and how you defined what you were. I think we sort of saw that as you’ve been working on the story we saw an opportunity to leverage that, exploit that a little bit. And make that a story bead as well as just what you were as a character, as opposed to a target. When we played with BioShock, we saw an opportunity to use that to help the story along as well.
IG: Why did you decide to develop the character in the way you did?
KL: We were sort of not developing the character. It was about you experiencing things more than the character experiencing things. We really wanted to put you in the shoes of that character without saying who you were. I think a little later in the day we realized that we could really use that anonymity to our advantage in terms of making Jack a character that was by design in the world a cipher, which was by design an entity without an identity. We used that in telling the story... telling the story of Rapture, and telling the story of him and Andrew Ryan and of Fontaine and about how they all connected to each other.
BioShock Specific Questions:
IG: Are you attempting to let the player feel as though they are Jack, or have the player simply control Jack?
KL: I think BioShock is much more about you. The creation of Jack as an identity, well, he sort of has no identity by design. We wanted to put you in his shoes. I’ve always thought that the part of BioShock where you learn about who you are and how you got to Rapture was designed not just to be an insult to Jack, but also to be an insult to the player. To get him emotionally engaged in the betrayal with sort of the manipulation, to make him connect to that manipulation on a very personal level rather than “boy, am I upset for Jack.” I want him to be “boy, am I upset for me,” as a gamer. It was “I was tricked,” not Jack as much. Of course, Jack was tricked, but it is way more important that you have the gamer feel a connection to that emotional twist.
IG: Playing more on the notion of personal freedom, the first game plays heavily on the notion of individual freedom, with Ayn Rand, Atlus and all that. Jack is a character completely devoid of such luxury. What was your rationale in that, in relation to how the player progressed through the game?
KL: I’ve always had an interesting personal viewpoint on the notion of freedom in games. There is a sense of freedom, but at the end of the day, you are at some degree, playing in a box, that it is created. That is the nature of software. We give you a set of parameters, and those parameters are getting very, very, very wide, and that’s terrific. Our job is to make those parameters as wide as possible. But there is sort of that tension of the more high fidelity you want the experience to be, the narrower that box gets. The less high fidelity, like Minecraft, which, I don’t mean this in a negative way, is by design a low fidelity experience. It’s not supposed to be super-realistic graphics, but the box is super-wide there, it allows for you to make a broad range of experience. A triple-A console game tends to be more of a high-fidelity experience and a narrower box that you’re in. But I think we saw an opportunity to comment on the narrowness of that box – within the context of a storyline, without doing it from a Meta standpoint, but from within the actual context of the storyline and that tied into the notions of freedom, identity and Rapture itself. I think that it sort of woke up one day and we saw that potential connection and the challenge was to figure out, story wise, how to make that happen without making it feel like we were writing a term paper.
IG: On a broader thought, how important is choice in a game. How can choice play into a game, and how much should it be in there?
KL: I think choice is really important. I think that the challenge is given my options, “do I need to flip a switch to have infinite choices in our games?” I’d flip that switch because choice is specifically a good thing. The challenge again is that the more high fidelity you make the experience, the harder it is to give the player complete freedom and complete choice because you have to resolve all of those choices in ways that feel similar to the rest of the experience. You can’t just have a game like BioShock and then you have a choice, and you resolve that choice where you get a bunch of text on the screen. Text is really cheap to generate. That would jar with the rest of the experience. So your option is do you lower your fidelity of the whole experience or do you invest in making a lot of high fidelity, high resolutions to those choices? And I think that’s what we always struggled with. Trying to find the right balance there is, I’ll be very honest, is a very tough line to walk. It’s an interesting challenge. As we work on Bioshock Infinite, that’s one of those things where we try to push on in terms of how to walk that line better, how to give a player choice in an insistent high fidelity manner.
IG: Choice plays heavily into the game, especially from a morality standpoint. What did you want us to see in Big Daddy and why give players the choice on what to do against them?
KL: The Big Daddy as a concept was perhaps one of the first real concepts we had for BioShock.I was watching a nature show one day, and I think I’ve told this story before, so I apologize for anyone that’s read this. It occurred to me that you have these very natural stories being told, and you watched these shows about bugs and you’ve got worker ants and soldier ants and predators around the nest, like a wasp or something. It’s a natural dance to watch the protective class, the working class and the predator class and how they interact with each other. You don’t need any narrator to tell you what’s going on there. I was always interested with how you tell stories with as few words as possible, of how do you build relationships that are just sort of implicit? Watching that, we had this idea of what if we had these different classes in the game. The soldier doesn’t attack you unless you bother the worker ant. So the question was, how do we come up with an expression of that that is interesting and appropriate with BioShock? We did a lot of thinking on it, and the Big Daddy was something that happened relatively quickly. The evolution of the little sister took a little longer. I think the fact that she was a little girl, and that sort of perverted parent-child relationship was critical to really selling that. It’s even more primal than the soldier ant and the worker ant. For the human, it’s the parent and the child. Of course, in the world of Rapture, that gets perverted to the Big Daddy and Little Sister.
IG: Were you looking at a commentary on morality, or were you trying to just bring something into the game?
KL: To some degree, that is sort of the same. Anything we bring into the game is to bring something more meaningful, more entertaining. I don’t really have an agenda outside of making a great game and entertaining people and hopefully giving them something to think about, but I don’t have an agenda.
IG: As you have an upcoming title, what did you look at changing on characterization for Infinite? Was characterization more important to developing the title this time around?
KL: I think that we sort of had done the Jack, cipher character. That was something very comfortable for us. We’ve sort of done that for a bunch of games. You were sort of this non-entity. We started by saying we were not going to do that again. We were going to give the player a character that you could really inhabit. I think people like that, and I am certainly interested in that, and that presents a whole new slate of challenges for us. We’re interested in both challenging ourselves and giving the players a different kind of experience for their action in playing a different entity in this very interesting world, rather than just this cipher.
IG: Relating to the setting for Infinite, there is a clear play at American Exceptionalism. How is Booker DeWitt’s journey playing into that theme, given his background? And is that Exceptionalism meant to play into characterization for the gamer?
KL: I think that DeWitt is a guy that, well, I like to put people in the shoes of somebody that feels trapped in the middle. I’m sort of telling this story that I kind of feel is, well, not trapped in the middle like left, right and center kind of thing, but from a perspective that there are some very large forces at play in the world. The older you get the more you realize that you are a very, very, very small dot in the middle of these forces. The more I realize that personally, the more sort of cynical I get about anything anybody says about what my life should be, or what a vision for the world should be. So I don’t think that Booker’s got a horse in the race of what’s going in Columbia, save for a personal horse in his relationship with Elizabeth. I think that he’s observing it, taking it in and he’s going to make some judgments as the game goes on. More importantly, I think the player is going to make some judgments. That is my goal to sort of have all these voices that are stating their case. That’s sort of a BioShock theme, where you have this world where people are sort of expressing their vision of the world, and what does the player think of that vision. I think Booker is sort of along for the ride with the player for that, but he doesn’t really come with a horse in the race.
IG: Just how important should story and characterization be for gaming titles and is first person tantamount to immersion?
KL: I think it’s obviously, for me, the most direct way to engage. It’s one less barrier to the experience. I don’t know if it’s tantamount to immersion, but it’s the easiest way to get the player to transpose himself into the experience. That’s challenging. It’s a strange thing to be in someone else’s shoes. It’s something we do very naturally as children, but it’s something that is much more difficult for adults. I think that games gives us enough of a nudge in the right direction to have that childhood experience of play. Not just play from a fun standpoint, but transposing your identity onto somebody else’s, and that is something so powerful when you are a kid. You just lose that as an adult because you get so self-conscience. Games sort of allow us to break through that layer to let us go back to that space of play, which I think is really powerful.
IG: Thanks very much Ken!
