I’m not normally one to play video games with a storyline. I enjoy playing games where I play on a team and compete against other players and try to get the highest score or complete the map. I never had the patience to complete story-based games on my own. However, “Bioshock” has made me reimagine my appreciation for story-based games.
The one mechanic I loved the most in Bioshock was the ability to switch between using Plasmid abilities and weapons. Being able to snap my fingers and project fire wherever I desired made me feel like Roy Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist, and it was AWESOME. It was also useful to quickly switch in between the two options whenever you didn’t have the time when fighting to reload your weapon or inject more eve into your veins.
One key lesson you as a player discovers in the second half of the game is to not always expect the narrator of your game to be a trustworthy person. Throughout the first half of the game, the player follows what Atlas tells them to do. In the Rapture Central Control level, we find out from Andrew Ryan that Atlas had been controlling the player the entire game through what is similar to a Pavlovian conditioning technique, implemented as soon as you began the game.
Atlas’s true identity is revealed as Fontaine, a mobster who challenged all of Andrew Ryan’s beliefs and power over the city of Rapture. With Ryan dead, Fontaine had complete control over the fallen city, and you the player must now stop him in the second half of the game.
When thrown into a new world, a player’s natural instinct is to follow what the narrator/guide says, since it is a foreign world to you and you need some guidance. Thankfully, most story-based video games offer this guide for at least a portion of the game. Sometimes guides continue throughout the game, like in Bioshock, while in others they do not. Bioshock does a wonderful job at creating a character for this guide and using that character as an extremely vital player in the game’s overall story.
The lesson that can be taught through this is to not always believe the guide is helping in your best interest. It’s not something that will always happen in every video game, but it’s a fun thing to keep in the back of your mind as you play a video game.
Another lesson/theme of the story that occurred had to do with the Little Sisters. You as the player are given a choice to either “Harvest” the Little Sisters for all of their adam, or “Rescue” them and receive a smaller amount of adam. Adam is an important game element that allows you to create and add new and better upgrades in the game to help you become stronger, and help you play the game more practically and skillfully.
You could save every Little Sister in the game. However, as soon as you harvest one of them, the other Little Sisters in the game fear you, and Tenenbaum, the “mother” of the Little Sisters, looks at you in a different light. Of course, this would not be known unless you speak with other players about their experience in the game.
After the player confronts Andrew Ryan, Tenenbaum sends Little Sisters to rescue you and restore you back to health. Depending on how you choose to handle the Little Sisters after defeating the Big Daddies that guard them, the Little Sisters may fear or praise you. If you continuously harvest Little Sisters, they might say “He’s the one who hurts us,” but if you rescue Little Sisters, they’ll say “There he is! The one who will save us all.”
Honestly, if I had known the Little Sisters were going to say such nice things to me later in the game, I would’ve saved them all. But l also wanted cool new upgrades, so I chose that.
Overall, I very much enjoyed Bioshock’s game mechanics and their ability to tell a story through your surroundings and background dialogue. There were more and more story pieces to unlock if you just looked around, and I praise Bioshock for that.
Sources:
https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Atlas
https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Brigid_Tenenbaum
https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Little_Sister/Quotes
Image Sources:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Bioshock/comments/arutgk/oc_bioshock_1_2_inspired_posterdigital_print/?st=JSAI9XQ1&sh=0fbfd730
5. https://imgur.com/aXuiKUt