Eff Seven

Today’s post comes from an early-in-the-year piece I did to fill out space while the new editor found some writers. It’s funny, because since writing that post I kind of fell out of love with Bioshock, and in fact I wrote this without having seen its rather lacklustre finish. I still stand by what I said of it though - its earlier levels were extremely intimidating. More to come later in the week.

Reprogramming - alright, hacking - is something of a joy for me in Bioshock. It’s simple why - no matter what flavour of hell is breaking loose around me, hacking brings everything to a standstill, and propels the players into something reminiscent of the Amiga classic PipeMania. You move some tiles around, the flow of electricity is rerouted around the machine, and the puzzle gets solved. Deep breaths. You’re back in the room.

So I leave from hacking my latest conquest beaming, the soft green light and gentle whirring being roughly as close as I can get to an actual friend out here in the godforsaken medical asylumn I’m wading through. I notice some bandages lying on the floor, and my health’s a little low. Instinctively, I’m down on the ground scratching for them. But there’s a second packet just on from that - maybe someone dropped it. Or… dropped it.

It doesn’t matter, it’s all useful - I’m pciking it up as I see the third packet. Somewhere in the space between the monitor and my left hand, I remember every episode of Tom and Jerry I ever watched. But by the time I remember what happens to the hapless cat, the door slams behind me, and there’s a burst of frothy, white steam. Everything goes pale, I’m blind, and on both sides of the game something screams.

I don’t play a lot of ‘scary’ games. I played the FEAR demo and enjoyed the atmosphere enough, but Half-Life 2’s Ravenholm section was mostly charged through, shouting loudly, and the less said about my progress through Doom III, the better. That’s partly because I like to think, and I like to shoot, and the aforementioned screaming tends to distract me from these things. But it’s also because horror has become manufactured in a lot of ‘scary’ games. Ravenholm was a city of zombies. That was about as clever as the fear got. And Doom’s ingenuity stops short of the main menu screen.

Bioshock’s slickness of presentation, and brightness of concept, drew me to purchase it. But in truth, I knew nothing about the game. It’s setting sounded dark enough, but I was completely unprepared for how much it tried to scare the player. Somewhere between the brutal murders and drug abuse, I realised this wasn’t going to be all sunshine and frolicking. It was going to be the other thing. Tortured botox patients and demonic little girls with hypodermic needles.

But Bioshock’s horror is different. It’s more natural. It’s more subtle. After the steam clears, only two things have changed in the room - which turns out to be a dentist’s office - that I notice from before. The first is that a small red box has been placed on a desk. It’s a diary entry, and it’s next to the genetic power-up I came for. The diary entries - a trademark of Ken Levine, who designed both Thief and System Shock 2 - are left by many of Bioshock’s inhabitants. My favourite - Tenenbaum - records her discovery of the technology that now powers both mine and others’ amazing ‘gift’. Other diary entries show you the slow degradation of life in the underwater metropolis of Rapture. Some even chart the destruction of lives. Failed experiments, broken dreams, and then the occasional flashes of gory fates. They keep you alert, make sure you’re never fully settled. The white noise of terror. The background hum of pant-wetting. Even when I’m hacking, they’re still playing on.

The second item that’s appeared in the room is a corpse on the dentist’s chair. It’s charred, bloody, and looking a little depressed. Instinctively, I set it alight, leaping around and shouting. But whoever it was, they weren’t in a position to complain. And being burnt alive was probably a preferable fate to the death they received anyhow.

I rush over and play the recording. Some doctor is discussing the ethics of his work - something of a thorny discussion, and I later find “First, do no harm” written in blood on the floor. Just as he gets around to talking about art, or flesh, or something, there’s a hiss of gas and suddenly I’m sucking white again.

But this time, nothing happens. So when the mist clears, I pick up the Plasmid cannister - a powerup for my crazed abilities - and turn around, flexing my muscles and fingering the trigger to my shotgun. As it turned out, I chose the right weapon.

The key is the setting. We’re in a city. Admittedly, it’s an underwater city populated by crazed, pipe-wielding psychopaths, genetic freaks and Irishmen. And its moral code read likes Beezlebub’s own suggestion box. But it’s still a working city, with real people that have desires and needs, mostly revolving around getting out or surviving. You’re all trapped in Rapture - the will to survive grips the player just as tightly as any of the AI, and so the fear you have of the shadows is twinned with your own exploitation of them. The horror of gene harvesting is mirrored by your own quest for the fuel that powers you.

It’s clever, and it’s exciting - the fear is a two-way construct. For the first time I can remember, I’m not being put onto a fairground ghost ride. I’m not being told there’s scary things ahead. My level of control over the situation determines the balance of the fear. Sometimes it’s in my favour. As I spin around to come face to face with a scalpel-wielding surgeon three inches from my face, I realise that now is not one of those times. The trigger snaps close, and the crazed knife jockey gives the room a much needed splash of colour. I try to think of a quip, but nothing comes - no-one’s going to hear it but the turrets anyway.

I have high hopes for the future of Horror in videogames, and Bioshock is one of the reasons for it. It doesn’t need to jump out at you, but it will. It will do a lot of things, if they’re necessary to scare the crap out you. But these things are always - always - secondary to what the player wants to do. He wants to play. The game builds itself around me, and that’s the way it should be. Long after the Orange Box is released, soon now, we’ll get a chance to play Valve’s Left 4 Dead, a co-op ‘Zombie Sim’ with a director that tweaks the level to keep the players on their toes.

That’s the source of truly terrifying gaming. Not from forcing the player to crawl along the floor, whacking on some violins, and setting off a jack-in-the-box in their face. But from giving the player free rein, and having them know that, however they play, the game will come. And the game will find a way to frighten.
Now there’s a scary thought.