Simon T. Kaye

Okay, I know I’m a little behind the curve here. Everyone and their uncle have already completed Bioshock three times, one for each different ending (well… two-and-a-half endings, I suppose), and once on Hard so that they can get their final, shiny XBox 360 ‘achievement’. And a great deal of these people have taken the time to write about it.

It’s one of those games, where the disparate, hazy community of hobbyists seems to surge into debate as one. Where you don’t feel like you’re done with it until you’ve talked about it. Head over to RockPaperShotgun for a collection of excellent critiques and links to reviews, interviews etc.- including an encounter with Bioshock‘s creator, Ken Levine, that’s really a must-read.

All of this- and much of what shall follow here, to be sure- is riddled with spoilers. If you live on the moon or have no real interest in the medium, then you might be unaware of the fact that Bioshock includes one of the all-time-greatest-ever twists of anything ever, somewhere just after the middle of the game. If there’s ever any chance that you’ll pick it up to play for more than a few hours together, you DO NOT WANT TO HAVE THIS TWIST SPOILED FOR YOU. So stop reading, please. And stop reading comment threads, articles, reviews, walkthroughs or editorials from the gaming community until you’re done with Bioshock. Look, just play it, alright?

It’s unlikely that I’m going to have anything to say here that hasn’t already been mentioned by others already. All the same, and perhaps with an eye to my rant of a few weeks ago, here are some thoughts.

Firstly, I’m glad I took my time over the game. I got it the day after it was released, and have played it slowly ever since. This morning I finished, which is perfect because as of next week I’ll actually be a busy human being again. Now, the forums are stuffed with people bragging about how they completed the game in one or two sittings, with only ten or less hours of play. And there’s some strength to the argument that games, in general, are far shorter than they used to be, and whether or not this is a Good Thing. But I am very thankful that I had stuff to do, and so couldn’t follow my impulse to storm through the game in a couple of all-nighters. The richness of the environment, of the atmosphere- decaying, retrograde 1950s art-deco opulance- absolutely demands reflection.

And it’s this that leads to my first real criticism of the game. It’s too busy. I recognize that the tight, enclosed space of the game helps lend it much of its horror, and makes possible the kind of closed-circuit mechanic (gatherer/hunter/guardian) that makes the whole thing special. But it’s stuffed with action, and noise, and light, and movement (voluntary or otherwise). Momentum is one thing, yes- but there isn’t a spot in the game where you can simply observe your world without the loud buzz of a nearby camera, the maniacal shrieks of some splicer in the distance (boy do voices carry underwater), the thump, groan and miniature earthquakes of a Big Daddy that you haven’t got around to dealing with yet. There isn’t enough space to make the whole thing feel like a city, which is what it’s supposed to feel like. Horror and action work best where the breaks feel like breaks, where you can contrast the action and the fear with, erm, absence of action and fear. The game, on occasion, was simply too loud. The Thief series arguably does it far better-and freedom, too. But more of that later.

If I had created a soundtrack and effects as sumptuous as these, I’d probably play them loud as well. The voice-acting is simply the best I have ever encountered in a video game, as is the script. The game’s plot and twists are very script- and delivery- dependent, and a lesser game might have let you down on this.

It’s also these twists that make Bioshock, I suspect, the first game to contain a truly effective critique of the medium. After having my own poodleish antics thrown in my face as they were here, it’s actually going to be hard picking up another shooter anytime soon without seeing the lines, the joins, the places where all the bloody orders just stop making sense. In this sense, Bioshock is not just a great story- it’s a story that could only have been told as a computer game. This alone sets it on a plinth, in the company of very few others. That it also takes the time to say something we didn’t know we were all already thinking, to be truly reflexive, almost Brechtian in tearing down the third wall, showing us a mechanic for what it is… that’s just phenomenal.

Part of the strength here is in subverting a fundamental weakness. Compared to Deus Ex, Bioshock is practically a half-life-esque linear shooter. Slightly disappointingly, this doesn’t really alter after we have the essential nature of our hobby used as a major plot point. My initial excitement at realising I had to collect some elixir but that there were two batches of it in different parts of the game world was quickly quashed. I needed both, of course. What looked like a big decision turned into a minor one- not ‘what would you like to do?’ but ‘what order would you like to do it in?’.

This holds true throughout. Real divergences and areas not required by the main plot are few and far between. This is a retrospective qualm, however, as I felt constantly driven by the game’s plot- even in the final third. There was enough emotional investment to make me seriously want to push through to the end. Most games don’t offer you such a compulsive experience. If they do, you can be damn sure they won’t give you much of an option to ignore it. Bioshock does, in places, and that’s nearly a miracle.

And the key mechanic for the game’s compulsion is where Bioshock‘s ‘spiritual successor’ status comes in. Both of your key enemies in the game are essentially godlike, and this is a direct echo of System Shocks 1 and 2. Atlas/Fontaine (note the references to Rand’s books here in the monikers of our key nemesis) and Andrew Ryan all, inevitably, remind us of Shodan. And the best thing I can advise you to do here is read and enjoy Kieron Gillen’s essay on the queen of all game villains, here. Come back when you’re done.

Shodan, of course, was the real Deus Ex Machina – or Deus Est Machina. As a gameplay mechanic, she was a stroke of genius. We fear specific things- death, the unknown. More than these we fear a malevolent god. And Ryan, in the first part of the game, fulfils these same roles. As you progress, he mocks you, taunts you. He sets traps for you, punishes you for resisting him. When one god is felled- not because you defeated him but because the bastard ordered you to, to prove a point- our new, worse deity takes over. This one really is the devil, because he’s a trickster. Like any trickster, he gave you all the clues you needed- visual suggestions- the tattoos on your arms, the momentary flashbacks, the repetitions of that phrase.

This is why I don’t think the game’s finale- the much admonished Boss Fight- was a bad idea. In fact, I enjoyed it. I’m not a truly skilful gamer, and so found that the difficulty was pitched just right- frustration vs. excitement. The plasmid/tonic technologies even give a decent in-game excuse for such a titanic figure to struggle against, which is more than I can say for most games. Like every other part of Bioshock, this last section was self-aware. It was The Way Games End. It was a Boss. The removal of your regeneration system was important here. too. You fought, you died, you fought harder. Eventually you won, and you felt that familiar flush of victory- and then you hated yourself for it, because the game’s just told you that you’re playing a game. But critically, in an experience where you can’t die, not ever, where all your fear and anger stems from a sequence of gods- you are given the power and the opportunity to destroy one. Not because you were told to- but because you wanted to. That’s satisfaction.

Andrew Ryan’s ‘utopia’ of Rapture is an explicit and repeated homage to the works and philosophies of Ayn Rand. To what extent is it a critique of them? As the man himself intones: “It wasn’t impossible to build a Rapture at the bottom of the ocean. It was impossible to build it anywhere else.”

Levine has said that he is attacking absolutism- in that any absolute ideology is dangerous. But I believe that Ryan represents the impossible predicament of a totally anarchistic society. He betrays his own ideals in order to attempt to do away with Fontaine, nationalising assets, forming armies, even introducing state-led capital punishment. Bit of a departure for the ultimate libertarian. The destabilising element is, of course, a twisted side of human nature. Fontaine is a crook with ambitions. Within a super-capitalist society such as Rapture, he is free to become the biggest fish in the pond. The ultimate flaw with Objectivist ideology, as with any, is that there will always be someone willing to subvert it to their own ends (in this case, a nihilistic con-man).

There’s so much to be said about this great work. It neatly summarises everything a piece of interactive art should be. Embrace it, love it like a brother. Lose yourself to Rapture. I really feel that there’s no coming back. The only first-person games that appear remotely palatable after this are Half Life, Thief, the first Deus Ex and maybe sandbox games like Oblivion or GTA.

Rapture really has changed the world.

‘Game‘, noun.

1. An amusement or pastime, eg: children’s games, party games.
2. A scored, competitive activity or sport between two or more players, often played before spectators.
3. An activity which is played in strict accordance with a set of rules.

My name is Simon Kaye, and I am not a ‘gamer’.

I play many ‘computer games’, and ‘video games’; more often than not, on a PC with a microprocessing core. I have been playing these ‘games’ since I was twelve. Indeed, I often read a magazine entitled PC Gamer.

But I do not consider myself to be a ‘gamer’. Because the word ‘game’ in ‘video game’ or ‘computer game’ is desperately misapplied, inadequate in describing the sheer breadth of the industry.

Type ‘Game’ into an online thesaurus, and what do we get back? Amusement. Distraction. Diversion. Festivity. Frolic. Merriment. Piddly.

‘Game’ is a dismissive word, and it allows others to be dismissive and condescending of our hobby. Some might point to Deus Ex, others to System Shock, again others to the simple beauty in certain arcade classics. Ours is a truly interactive medium, a collaborative art that is the first to involve the direct collaboration of its audience. It deserves, in cases of excellence, to be taken very seriously indeed.

‘Game’ is an immature word, and it allows others to assume that our hobby is completely immature, or played by the immature. Which, admittedly, it often is. LOL n00b headshot haX WTF? etc. But this is an age of 18-rated releases. It is an innate feature of our hobby- our ‘gaming’- that allows the Daily Mail to claim that it is destroying the ethical framework of a generation, or Hilary Clinton to take cheap shots at it on the campaign trail. If our hobby’s noun did not directly imply a youth audience, how could such ill-conceived, nannyish positions remain viable?

‘Game’ is a word that brings with it connotations of childishness, of unreality, of cops-and-robbers. Worse, it linguistically implies competition and scores, rather than experience and spectacle. Who, precisely, am I competing against in Bioshock? The computer itself isn’t an adversary, it’s a platform. Too often do I hear talk of someone ‘beating’ a new ‘game’. Yes, there is a competitive element: online, or multi-player, we are often vying to display the greatest skill or attain some vaunted position or score, and against other human beings. Yes, even single-player ‘games’ usually involve an element of tactical or physical conquest over ‘enemies’ which are controlled by the software’s AI. But this by no means covers the whole gamut of modern video-’gaming’.

And yes, I’ll say again: there’s a whole load of crap titles out there. And after that, there’s a lot of titles that are good, or even brilliant, but are still essentially ‘games’. But every time the word ‘game’ fits a new release, it fails to apply in another case. What about super-realistic simulations? What about strategy titles with many, many times the complexities of chess or Risk? What about plot and dialogue-based titles like Planescape or Dreamfall? And what about the masterpieces of emergent interaction - modern or ageing - like Deus Ex or Bioshock? 

In these cases, the word ‘game’, as a label, is simply wrong. Describing Half Life 2 as a game is like using the word ‘cartoon’ to describe the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Except more people worked on HL2, and arguably for longer.

It’d be very easy at this point to simply accuse me of linguistic snobbery. What does it matter, after all, right? It’s just a fucking word. A game by any other name would play as sweet.

If only this were true.

Firstly, ours is a hobby under siege. In Britain in particular, as the press and the politicians begin their latest frenzy over youth violence and gun/gang-culture, out hobby is clearly in the firing-line. And, for a moment, let’s be fair: computer games have been full of violence from near the very beginning. They are stuffed with killing. The problem here isn’t with simulated violence, it’s with a public assumption that the violence is designed for the consumption of children. Children who buy and play games.

Secondly, and more essentially, our words make our reality. Our labels are half of our perceptions. For a growing but still minority medium, video ‘games’, thus labelled, are set up for a fall. People cannot help but approach with a preconception of silliness, of lightness. God help anyone who picks up Bioshock expecting a ‘game for Windows’ and is given an intensive, horror-driven, beauty-filled art-deco romp instead. Along with a strong critique of Ayn Rand and absolutism in ideology.

Of course, all this leaves me without a new term for one of my favourite pastimes. Suggestions welcome.

But whatever we opt for- isn’t it high time we re-branded?

Thus spake our erstwhile Prime Minister of ten years, the Right Honourable Tony Blair (QC) MP, retorting a classic Conservative backbench attack on how rubbish the EU is with his customary style. And about five minutes later, he stood and exited the commons for the last time as Prime Minister; indeed, for the last time as any kind of minister at all. The applause continued long after he left the chamber, parliamentary protocol collapsing, all sides rising to see the man out.

I have been aware for some time now that I will really quite miss Blair. He got enough wrong, sure enough: extending and over-complicating the powers of the State, fighting to introduce prohibitively strong anti-terror legislation (incitement to religious hatred Bill, the 90-days detention fiasco) and, in similar terms, dangerously illibertarian ideas like biometric ID cards.

But he also got a great deal right. Constitutional reform has been slow and messy, but at least it’s happening; the devolution of Wales and Scotland and the granting of greater powers to local councils; the end in no uncertain terms to the concept of Britain as an uninvolved, isolationist nation; his commitment to internationalism and intervention abroad on a humanitarian basis… the list runs on. The cornerstone domestic issues of health and education have never looked more… erm… healthy, either, as the former Prime Minister never grew tired of reminding us.

I am not a natural Labour voter. I believe far more in Liberal Democracy than I do in its Social counterpart. But Blair’s economic and political globalism shall, in time, be recognised as his proudest legacy; moreover, it is part of the reason why I can imagine myself supporting Labour in the future. The other reason comes in the form of a gruffly intellectual boulder of a Scotsman, a man with only one working eye and, seemingly, only half a working jaw.

Blair’s successor, the former Chancellor Gordon Brown, has already said lots of things that I personally am quite liable to find exciting. He keep uses the phrase “government of all the talents”, cementing the implications of the cabinet position offered last week to Liberal Democrat peer and political powerhouse Paddy Ashdown. This is what I would call a Very Good Thing: a careful undermining of stubborn current LibDem leader Sir Menzies Campbell, a willingness to escape the partisan absolutes which can tie the wings of smaller governments (particularly in a system, such as our own, designed for nothing so much as a house of independents), and laying the foundations for the overtures that would be required should the bookies be proven right and the next general election (whenever it is) results in a hung parliament.

Brown could do far worse than call such an election straight away. There is no historical precedent for seeking to renew a party’s mandate upon the appointment of a new Prime Minister, but then again, there has never been a stronger case for it, either. Brown has by-passed both a general election to office and a Labour party election; he has arrived in office, effectively, with no personal democratic mandate whatsoever. This would be easy enough to remedy; Brown has, for the time being, a lead in the polls over Cameron and a great deal of national goodwill behind him. He must capitalize upon this brief period of being the face of the new before everyone wakes up and realises that he was, and is, the second greatest architect of the New Labour project. A snap election would generate a good turn-out, almost certainly result in a strong Labour victory (particularly dominating the Liberal Democrats in battleground seats) and then give the new cabinet a fair amount of time to set some new policy in motion.

About that cabinet: Alastair Darling appears to be a shoe-in for the Chancellorship, which probably relegates Brown’s secondary economics guru Ed Balls (whose constituency has just been Gerrymandered out of existence but who shall surely be parachuted into a safe seat soon- perhaps even Sedgefield in County Durham?) into Trade and Industry. The rest is really up for grabs: latest news has it that both Patricia Hewitt and Margaret Beckett shall be leaving their current roles when the cabinet is recalled. Tipped to rise: one (if not both) of the Miliband brothers; Jack Straw; and I should personally be very surprised if Alan Johnson, pipped-at-the-post for Deputy Labour Leader, wouldn’t get a strong brief: perhaps a return to Education.

All change in Westminster. The economists are coming.

‘The twentieth century saw an average global temperature rise of a little over half a degree centigrade, which doesn’t sound like much- but it is, as the summary explains, likely to be responsible for “decreases of about 10 percent in the extent of snow cover since the 1960s,” and “a reduction of about two weeks in the annual duration of lake and river ice cover… in the northern hemisphere.” Winter, in other words, is now two weeks shorter than it used to be.‘

 I just rediscovered this piece, written by a slightly younger and considerably more earnest yours-truly. It was officially published by a higher-education website that nobody ever reads. So here’s a nice link.

 Stuart Parkinson was actually a great guy to interview, and a man of no small importance in the battle over hearts and minds in the great Global Warming debate.

‘HERO’ is a website designed to benefit students, and often contributed to by students. Which is all well and good, but I’m not mad about some of the little grammatical stretches and typos that have been engineered into this piece between my emailing it off and it appearing, all pretty, on the website. C’est la vie, I suppose.

The five-part BBC documentary, closely associated with the similarly themed, titled and authored book, ended last night. And, by all that is holy, it’s the first documentary in some years not mainly involving whales that I’ve felt driven to watch every last minute of.

In attempting to tackle a broad-brush history of the years since the war in a primarily political way, the most obvious comparison is with fellow ex-journo Peter Hennessy’s The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945, a slightly older book. The bearing is similar, even if Marr’s work is more ostensibly a popular history than Hennessy’s. Even the political alignment is identically portrayed (in that it is hardly portrayed at all- good to see), both histories littered with semi-personal anecdotes (Hennessy’s constant references to events that simply must have been disclosed to him in some shady curry-house just off parliament square, tie still loose from the struggles of the lobby; Marr’s mentioning last night of his own immediate- and flawed- reaction to the swift “victory” in Iraq).

But Marr’s vision is clearer, if more vague; his hypothesis more interesting, and his presentation more charismatic. Based upon the documentary along, Andrew Marr’s is the better history.

I like Andrew Marr. I think many people do. He has a gift for images, for easily relatable metaphors which somehow always stop short of being patronising- comparing the British-Scottish union to a pizza being pulled apart, but still connected by molten cheese, or describing the heady, commercial ‘loadsamoney!’ days of the 80s as ‘like being properly drunk for the first time’.

And of course, Marr has a pretty interesting perspective on the last fifty years or so. He has served as a newsroom hack, a lobby correspondent, the editor of a broadsheet (back when the Independent was a broadsheet), the BBC’s political editor, and now a roving, quasi-historian with a penchant for accessibly intellectual radio and television programming and friendly interviews with VIPS on sunday mornings. His Scottish origins and very English current existence come into play as well; with the Scottish Nationalists in power and talk of a referendum on Union membership, Andrew Marr speaks of cheese stretched between two slices of pizza with a degree of personal certainty. Andrew Marr, you see, is the Mozzarella.

This documentary was also an attempt at mythologisation; at crafting a popular, unitary narrative from the thousands of strands of an increasingly complex national history. Marr sticks his fingers into all sorts of pies, discussing the fortunes of British cinema as if it has a real, causal bearing on the flow of the story of the British People. And usually- usually- he pulls it off.

There is the feeling that Andrew Marr desperately wants to understand the changes this country’s been through for himself; the way that the economy was changed, the opening of the gates to globalisation, even the threat of the greenhouse effect. This is a journalist’s personal attempt to come up with some sort of unified field theory for his own recent history.

The transition from career journalist to historian is frequently attempted, if commonly failed. Someone once wrote that the newspapers are the first draft of history; to Marr, as to so many others, it must seem the most natural thing in the world to have a crack at the second draft, as well. Or even the third. Marr chose wisely in writing first about himself, and then the history of his own profession in My Trade, which is excellent reading for anyone.

Complaints? The series was too short. Covering six decades of history in a total of five hours is a tall order for anyone. That’s about one year of history for every five minutes of screen-time; clearly inadequate. The problem with this approach is that the emphasis has to become about what is ommitted rather than what is included. For example, the last programme was full of implicit criticism of Blair’s foreign record, but it never once mentioned Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, or Bosnia. Picking the quote that matches the story is a journalistic, rather than historical, practice.

Nevertheless, this was some of the most compelling documentary work that I’ve seen for some time. Not enough is done to catalogue the years following World War 2- especially given the hours upon hours of documentaries devoted to that conflict. Andrew Marr’s excellent new series was a good first step in addressing this deficiency.

“To suggest that this might not be a good way of finding a missing child is clearly spitting in the wind … Journalists may have cooked the McCann story to a burnt crisp.”

Thanks for that, Simon Jenkins (in his Guardian column). He’s commenting above about the media circus (yes, when someone uses that phrase around me, I too fail to see anything other than a bear in a fez driving a miniature car around a big-top with a camera around its neck) surrounding the disappearance of poor four-year-old Madeleine McCann.

Of course, it probably wasn’t advisable for Mr Jenkins to turn this into a pun based around a popular brand of frozen oven-chips. I mean, yes, we all saw the McCann-McCain potential. But sometimes a line has to be drawn.

In general, Simon Jenkins isn’t wrong. I encountered an interesting debate on all this at John Walker’s Bothererblog (if you haven’t visited, you should- it’s more or less the only blog I regularly read). I won’t reiterate the discussion here, but it all stemmed from a list of all the UK children currently listed as missing, with McCann, the most recent, right at the bottom.

You can read any level of hypocrisy that you like. How come nobody’s heard of Muzamil Hussein? Is it as simple as his name and race? How do we get off pretending that we all have a personal connection with one little girl and her family while the rest of mankind is lucky to get mentioned at all? And to what extent is this all the fault of the media?

Well, at least I can answer that last question, or attempt to. They just screened a two-minute appeal at the frickin’ FA Cup Final, for crying out loud. There’s a reason I’m quitting journalism. Actually, there’s about a dozen reasons, but this is a biggy.
Even the columnist who actually detects the hypocrisy and ridiculousness of stuff like Halo 3 Beta campaigns to find Madeleine McCann- who sees that this is the easiest quick-sale a paper can make right now- makes a pun about chips as he does so.

I give up.