No Escape

Distance is going to be an impor­tant theme in this arti­cle, and so I’d sug­gest read­ing the arti­cle in which I intro­duce the con­cept, located here.

Low lev­els of dis­tance con­tribute to any nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ence in video games, but it is absolutely essen­tial to a hor­ror game. Because of the nature and aims of a hor­ror game, it is very easy to iden­tify games that fail to lessen dis­tance. Such games can be played with­out expe­ri­enc­ing fear, usu­ally because of fail­ure to prop­erly immerse the player in the avatar char­ac­ter. This means that, in order for a hor­ror game to suc­ceed, it must demon­strate less­ened dis­tance. This is never an easy thing to achieve, and cer­tain other tropes of video games make it excep­tion­ally dif­fi­cult to main­tain through­out a hor­ror game. I’m going to ana­lyze Dead Space, a game that does a lot to decrease dis­tance. It’s not a per­fect game, but its slip-ups are slip-ups because they increase dis­tance, and so this cri­tique will be use­ful for deep­en­ing our under­stand­ing of dis­tance and the neces­sity of main­tain­ing low dis­tance through­out a hor­ror game. Oh, and if you don’t hear spoil­ers creep­ing about in the vents of this arti­cle by now, Unitology help you.

Was That The Crew?

If you’re not famil­iar with the Dead Space story-line, here’s a short sum­mary. Isaac Clarke, space engi­neer, a pair of secu­rity offi­cers, Kendra Daniels, who is a com­mu­ni­ca­tions spe­cial­ist, and Zach Hammond, senior secu­rity offi­cer, are sent to a huge planet-cracker called the USG Ishimura, which has appar­ently lost its com­mu­ni­ca­tions out­put. Upon hit­ting a piece of debris and crash-landing their ship into the hangar bay of the Ishimura, the crew dis­cov­ers that the ship has lost more than com­mu­ni­ca­tions. There’s nobody to greet them, for one thing, and the ship has suf­fered exten­sive dam­ages in pretty much all of the core sys­tems. The team is then beset by gaunt and clawed crea­tures that looks like they were maybe once human, result­ing in the quick deaths of the secu­rity offi­cers and the frag­men­ta­tion of the repair crew.

Most of the rest of the game is lonely. You cor­re­spond with Hammond and Daniels through your suit’s audio and visual links, and they send you hither and yon to repair the fail­ing sys­tems and bring the ship to oper­a­tional sta­tus. However, it soon becomes obvi­ous that you’re mostly doing so for your own ben­e­fit, and the ben­e­fit of Hammond and Daniels. The ship is almost entirely devoid of sur­vivors. The new pop­u­la­tion of the Ishimura, indeed once the crew, are the result of an alien life­form that has spread through­out the ship in excit­ing and unfor­tu­nate ways. Its arrival cor­re­sponds with the removal of an ancient marker from the planet Aegis VII, which the Ishimura was har­vest­ing. This marker is the center-piece of a huge con­spir­acy involv­ing the Unitology cult and the gov­ern­ment, and Isaac even­tu­ally man­ages to place the marker back on Aegis VII and foil the secret plans of Kendra Daniels, who is revealed to be a gov­ern­ment agent sent to retrieve the marker. However, Isaac’s san­ity is in ques­tion; he sees his old flame walk­ing around and advis­ing him on courses of action, but as Daniels reveals in the end-game, she is quite dead. In the end, Isaac sur­vives. Nobody else does.

No, Hammond, This Changes Everything

One of the chief sell­ing points of Dead Space is the com­plete lack of exter­nal HUD. Look at this pic­ture below for an exam­ple:

The fel­low in the armor on the left is our avatar char­ac­ter, Isaac Clarke. The thing that he is aim­ing at is a necro­morph, appar­ently mutated from the body of an engi­neer who was wear­ing a gas mask. The blue bars on Isaac’s back rep­re­sent his health. The object in his hand is a plasma cut­ter, use­ful for fix­ing doors and other space-engineer pur­poses, but also, as Isaac dis­cov­ers, unpar­al­leled in sep­a­rat­ing limbs from tor­sos. When one aims a weapon in Dead Space, the holo­graphic equip­ment in Isaac’s suit gen­er­ates lines to indi­cate where the shot will fall. In addi­tion, the suit also dis­plays how much ammu­ni­tion is left in the weapon, as seen in the pic­ture (it’s the 10 float­ing above the cut­ter). What’s impor­tant to note here is that, while these nec­es­sary details are read­ily acces­si­ble to the player, none of them are obtru­sive and, in fact, con­tribute to the immer­sion of the game.What is even more impres­sive is the way that cor­re­spon­dence with sup­port­ing char­ac­ters fac­tors into the expe­ri­ence. When Daniels or Hammond con­tacts Isaac, a holo­graphic video dis­play of their face usu­ally appears in front of Isaac. It looks like this:

“Help me, Isaac Clarke; you’re my only hope.” Cool, right? It’s worth not­ing that video chat tech­nol­ogy in the future hasn’t got­ten much bet­ter. These sequences are well-implemented. The facial ani­ma­tion in Dead Space is pretty good, so the character’s expres­sions suc­cess­fully con­vey relief, fatigue and fear, some­times with­out or even in spite of match­ing dia­logue. These nar­ra­tive inter­rup­tions are impor­tant to the game, not only as an easy method of direct­ing a silent pro­tag­o­nist but also to show the player how other char­ac­ters are deal­ing with the sit­u­a­tion, since Isaac is mostly a blank slate. These videos assist the game, but it is the way they are pre­sented to the player that decreases dis­tance.

Instead of hous­ing these bits of dia­logue in cutsce­nes or mak­ing them non-interactive, you still retain con­trol of Isaac while the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters speak. This means that you are never taken out of the “skin” of Isaac, if you will. As Isaac, you are either tak­ing the time to focus on the face and words of these char­ac­ters, or you are march­ing along to go eject that pesky aster­oid from the min­ing deck. It’s worth not­ing that, if you ready your weapon/tool dur­ing one of these sce­nes, the holo­gram dis­ap­pears, which makes sense as a RIG safety fea­ture. It also means that you can defend your­self with­out Daniels’ face obstruct­ing your vision. Never remov­ing the player’s con­trol over Isaac is a strong asset of Dead Space; it means that the immer­sion never gets shat­tered. It also means that there is no safe haven from the ter­ri­fy­ing sit­u­a­tion.

An even more pow­er­ful expres­sion of this almost suf­fo­cat­ing immer­sion is that text logs, maps, and the inven­tory, as shown below, are also in real-time.

This instantly makes a shift for the player. Whenever I played through Resident Evil 4, I remem­ber escap­ing to my inven­tory in tense moments to decide which weapon would be most effec­tive for the sit­u­a­tion at hand. In Dead Space, you can’t do that. If you run out of sta­sis (the lit­tle ring on Isaac’s right shoul­der rep­re­sents how much sta­sis he has left), then you can­not retreat back into your inven­tory to replen­ish it. There is a way to use med packs out­side of the inven­tory, but you don’t get to choose which med pack you use, so you may do some­thing tac­ti­cally disadvantageous.What this means is that you quickly learn to find a quiet, and in some cases defen­si­ble, loca­tion to hole up in order to check your map or inven­tory. If you’re caught unawares with your inven­tory hang­ing open, then it takes pre­cious mil­lisec­onds to close that inven­tory and bring your gun to bear, espe­cially since you were clearly not focus­ing on your sur­round­ings and will need time to get your bear­ings. It’s actu­ally a lit­tle suf­fo­cat­ing, and espe­cially at the begin­ning of the game there’s a tinge of fear every time you open up your inven­tory. If you start the game drink­ing from the river with your mouth, you’ll quickly learn to use your hands and to keep your eye on the sur­round­ing foliage. This suf­fo­cat­ing effect is really impor­tant for hor­ror games. It is the nature of fear to be unre­lent­ing, and if there are con­stant inter­rup­tions to the immer­sion of an expe­ri­ence, then it is impos­si­ble to main­tain that unre­lent­ing fear. Distance has to be kept as low as pos­si­ble for the best expe­ri­ence.

There are moments when Isaac is in a bad spot, and you still retain con­trol over him. These moments are tense, and are excel­lent ways of mix­ing up the core expe­ri­ence while still keep­ing the player embed­ded in the char­ac­ter. I won’t spend too much time on them, but here’s a pic­ture to illus­trate what I mean:

That Comms Array Is In Bad Shape… Let’s Get It Back On-Line

The verisimil­i­tude in Dead Space is pretty strong. Isaac’s tasks through­out the game are mostly focused on repair­ing the ship, which makes some sense. He is, after all, a space engi­neer. While the game doesn’t force you into any­thing too tech­ni­cal, and is usu­ally pretty clear about where you’re sup­posed to go and what you’re sup­posed to do next, the tasks of the game is pretty con­sis­tent with Isaac’s occu­pa­tion… with the major excep­tion of mon­ster killing. And that’s where the game proves to be pretty inter­est­ing.

The avatar char­ac­ter is well-chosen for Dead Space’s intended effect. Isaac is no sol­dier, and he does not behave like one. When Isaac takes a swing at a necro­morph, it’s a wide, untrained, and frankly inef­fec­tual swing. Even more telling are the weapons that Isaac uses to slay the necro­morphs. For the most part, his weapons are engi­neer­ing tools. There’s the con­tact laser, rip­per (remote saw blade… as awe­some as it sounds), force gun and flamethrower, all mod­i­fied from engi­neer­ing equip­ment. The only mil­i­tary weapon in the entire game is the pulse rifle, and you very quickly dis­cover that it isn’t really that good for dis­mem­ber­ing necro­morphs. Whether this is a func­tion of Isaac’s lack of train­ing is unclear, but I’d like to think thus.

In fact, Isaac Clarke isn’t really a “badass” sort of hero. The game doesn’t present him as a fel­low who over­comes all chal­lengers; in fact, there’s a num­ber of sit­u­a­tions where Isaac is being dragged about like a rag-doll or chewed on, and his escapes are always a lit­tle too close for com­fort. Isaac is a man who is barely sur­viv­ing the events of the game. He’s a lit­tle more every-man than most gam­ing heroes, and when he makes it off Aegis VII and flies away for good, you can’t help but root for the guy and feel a sense of accom­plish­ment your­self.

The game por­trays Isaac very con­sis­tently. Even if he doesn’t speak, there is plenty of per­son­al­ity to his some­what hunched form, his shouts of pain, his heavy breath­ing after hav­ing barely sur­vived a necro­morph attack. His move­ments con­vey a man who is tired, and frankly a lit­tle beaten down, but who plans to trudge through and sur­vive this hor­ri­ble expe­ri­ence. Because he is so sym­pa­thetic, it’s not dif­fi­cult to empathize with the engi­neer, and this most cer­tainly decreases dis­tance by mak­ing it less dif­fi­cult to immerse your­self in the char­ac­ter. His lack of dia­logue may actu­ally allow the player to put a lit­tle more of him or her­self into Isaac, and may work bet­ter than if Isaac were actu­ally voiced. Of course, Dead Space 2, which just came to me, gives a voice to Isaac, so I’ll have a chance to exper­i­ment and report back on whether that is actu­ally the case.

For What It’s Worth, Isaac, You Did A Great Job

Dead Space is a fan­tas­tic game, but it also loses a bit of its good qual­i­ties about two-thirds of the way through. In my expe­ri­ence, that’s when I had got­ten a really good han­dle on the behav­ior of the necro­morphs, upgraded my guns and armor quite a bit, and was basi­cally mas­ter­ing the skills nec­es­sary to play the game well. However, because I had started to play the game well, and knew roughly what to expect from sit­u­a­tions, I found the game increas­ingly less scary. And, while the game doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily have to be fright­en­ing in order to be fun and good, it was def­i­nitely less enjoy­able after I had got­ten over my fright. I began to play it less like I was Isaac, a man in a hor­ri­ble sit­u­a­tion, and more like a game. The dis­tance between Isaac and I had increased.

This is a prob­lem that all hor­ror games share. The fear comes eas­ily early on, when the player is still learn­ing the con­trols, how weapons and ene­mies behave, and so forth. Like the char­ac­ter in the game, the player is in a new and some­what uncom­fort­able posi­tion. However, a player becomes more and more com­fort­able with a game, improv­ing his or her skills so that the game becomes less dif­fi­cult. At the same time, there is the game trope that the char­ac­ter should become more pow­er­ful through­out the game by gain­ing access to bet­ter weapons or sim­ply by learn­ing new skills. Dead Space allows the player to pur­chase new weapons (that, while not exactly bet­ter, are more spe­cial­ized and are use­ful for cer­tain sit­u­a­tions), as well as upgrade weapons and armor. This makes the game less chal­leng­ing, and at this point the player can eas­ily place most of their focus on per­form­ing well instead of on expe­ri­enc­ing the nar­ra­tive and expe­ri­ences of the game. Unfortunately, and espe­cially for hor­ror games, this is at a detri­ment to the mood of the game.

Dead Space does not main­tain the mood that it estab­lishes early on, but that is par­tially due to the trope men­tioned above. Isaac feels less help­less, and the player real­izes that destroy­ing these necro­morphs doesn’t have to be as fright­en­ing an endeavor. The game is designed to be enjoy­able along that trans­for­ma­tion, as well; there are less attempts to frighten the player as the game nears its end. The game then becomes about dif­fi­culty and chal­lenge

This steady increase in dis­tance is the game’s weakest point. It’s still a com­mend­able expe­ri­ence; it accom­plishes what it sets out to for at least five hours or so. It’s just excep­tion­ally dif­fi­cult to cre­ate an expe­ri­ence that main­tains such an oppres­sive mood for such a long period of time. It seems to me that the game trope of ris­ing char­ac­ter pro­fi­ciency does not nec­es­sar­ily suit the hor­ror genre. Certainly, games that instill feel­ings of help­less­ness, such as Silent Hill 2, may be bet­ter exam­ples of how to cre­ate a last­ing mood of hor­ror. If the avatar char­ac­ter of a game is con­stantly becom­ing bet­ter equipped to deal with the ene­mies of the game, then the game becomes less hor­ri­fy­ing and more chal­leng­ing shoot­ing gallery.

Make Us Whole Again, Isaac

The first half of Dead Space is qual­ity art. It’s an adrenaline-fueled fight for sur­vival, in which the player is grad­u­ally intro­duced to the scope and hor­ror of this virus. The game pulls out all the stops in its attempts to frighten you and keep you alert and ner­vous. In the sec­ond half, though, the ten­sion eases, increas­ing dis­tance and encour­ag­ing the player to treat the expe­ri­ence as a game. The nar­ra­tive of the game also begins to weaken. This makes me won­der whether Dead Space would have been bet­ter were it shorter.

For that first half, though, Dead Space is a great exam­ple of the right way to decrease dis­tance. The mechan­ics and pre­sen­ta­tion of the game are designed to keep the player embed­ded in Isaac’s skin, and allows the player to expe­ri­ence the game with fear and anx­i­ety. Dead Space serves as a good model for the hor­ror genre in regards to dis­tance, and I sin­cerely hope that Dead Space 2 fol­lows suit.

Better Storytelling Through Loss of Self

In case you haven’t already read the intro­duc­tion to this week’s column, in which I dis­cuss how role-playing games can be con­sid­ered art, it’s here. You may find it use­ful. Also use­ful another column, in which I describe the term “dis­tance.” I’ll be throw­ing it around quite a bit, so I’d sug­gest read­ing it in full. In short, though, dis­tance refers to the level at which a player empathizes with his or her avatar char­ac­ter. Lessened dis­tance is accom­plished by cer­tain mechan­ics that allow the player more con­trol over their char­ac­ter, specif­i­cally in dra­matic moments. My pre­vi­ous dis­cus­sion of dis­tance was focused on video games, but I’d like to apply the same prin­ci­ple to role-playing games, specif­i­cally regard­ing ways that the sto­ry­teller can reduce dis­tance for play­ers.

How Role-playing Differs from Video Games

While dis­tance may well be a valid con­cept for role-playing the­ory, it oper­ates very dif­fer­ently in the con­fines of role-playing than it does in video games. Video games allow for a highly focused visual and audi­tory expe­ri­ence that dimin­ishes phys­i­cal dis­tance, whereas the lim­ited pro­gram­ming of video games means that men­tal dis­tance is still a sig­nif­i­cant bar­rier, since one’s avatar char­ac­ter can only per­form actions and expe­ri­ence things that the game designer planned for. Role-playing games, on the other hand, can­not offer the same visual and audi­tory stim­uli that video games do, since they are essen­tially ver­bal story-telling, and there­fore have a ten­dency toward greater phys­i­cal dis­tance than video games, but the player (and nar­ra­tor) have incred­i­ble con­trol over the actions of the char­ac­ters in the story, mak­ing men­tal dis­tance vir­tu­ally non-existent (though it is still there).

The respon­si­bil­ity of less­en­ing dis­tance in role-playing games falls most heav­ily on the GM. It is the GM who crafts sit­u­a­tions for the play­ers to respond to, and the GM who describes the loca­tions that play­ers have their adven­tures in. If the world does not respond to the play­ers in a log­i­cal way, for instance, then the GM has com­mit­ted error, and dis­tance will increase for the play­ers. Players do have a smaller respon­si­bil­ity to their fel­low play­ers and their GM; if a player char­ac­ter starts to act wildly dif­fer­ent, for instance, or the player demands that the story go one way when every other player wishes it to go another, it can alter the expe­ri­ence in a way that is harm­ful.

Maintaining a tight dis­tance is essen­tial to a role-playing ses­sion that attempts to cre­ate a qual­ity story. It’s worth not­ing that one doesn’t have to approach the game with such con­cerns in mind; it’s also a fun way to spend time with friends and let the imag­i­na­tion loose. That’s not an incor­rect way to play the game, but approach­ing a ses­sion with the mind-set of an artist can result in some incred­i­ble expe­ri­ences, and if that’s your goal, then keep­ing dis­tance is mind may be worth your while.

Lessening Mental Distance, or Siderodromophobia

Because of the great amount of char­ac­ter agency within most role-playing games, men­tal dis­tance is eas­ier to lessen. In fact, as long as the story-teller makes it such that player choice mat­ters to the fab­ric of the story, and thus that the play­ers have some con­trol over the des­tinies of their char­ac­ters, then achiev­ing empa­thy with a char­ac­ter is mostly the player’s job.

Giving that much con­trol to the play­ers in a game may seem easy enough at first glance, but it’s actu­ally a dif­fi­cult thing to main­tain, espe­cially if the story-teller plans ahead of time. If a story-teller gen­er­ates qual­ity com­po­nents of a story, then it is only nat­u­ral to want to steer the play­ers toward that story. Such steer­ing is ulti­mately okay, but there is a def­i­nite line that, if crossed, begins to harm dis­tance. That steer­ing, at its worst, is referred to as rail­road­ing, since no mat­ter how the play­ers might attempt to avoid the seeds of plot that the story-teller has sown, they can­not. At the worst, this can turn into an arms race in which the play­ers pull out all the stops in an attempt to de-rail them­selves from the story-teller’s plot, but the story-teller pulls in the King, the whole pan­theon of the Gods, and the laws of the nat­u­ral world to ensure that the party WILL be inter­ested in this kobold-hunting quest, despite the fact that there are a slew of better-qualified, better-looking, and cheaper adven­turer bands out there.

This ties into another and more insid­i­ous mis­take that can increase dis­tance. Verisimilitude is prob­a­bly even more impor­tant in D&D et consortes than it is in other forms of art because mul­ti­ple peo­ple are involved in its pro­duc­tion, and if the story is sud­denly weak­ened for a player (usu­ally through a mis­step by the GM), then the player’s con­tri­bu­tions to the com­mu­nal work suf­fer. There are few things which shat­ter the immer­sion of a game more than the unjus­ti­fied rever­sal of a known fact of the game world. If a player has good rea­son to sus­pect that an orga­ni­za­tion that is known to pro­tect elves from the oppres­sive gov­ern­ment, and then that orga­ni­za­tion turns the player’s char­ac­ter over to said gov­ern­ment because it was the “right thing to do,” that player’s dis­tance will increase and he will find it harder to empathize with his char­ac­ter. This is because char­ac­ters do not exist in a vac­uum; rather, the fab­ric of the story as a whole main­tain that char­ac­ter, and if that fab­ric begins to weaken, then the char­ac­ters sup­ported within that set­ting begin to weaken as well. I have played in a game where the world wasn’t depend­able, and it squashed my desire to play a con­vinc­ing char­ac­ter instantly. If the world is not depend­able, then char­ac­ter deci­sions mean less, and the char­ac­ter means less.

Not a LARP

Now, obvi­ously, sit­ting around a table and talk­ing does lit­tle to lessen phys­i­cal dis­tance between a player’s char­ac­ter and the player. In the story, the char­ac­ter may be the stal­wart, hold­ing a gate from a horde of ice demons on a frozen tun­dra even though he’s bleed­ing from mul­ti­ple stab wounds and is stunned from a com­pul­sion spell launched on him by the lich who orches­trated this whole unlikely sce­nario, but the player is still seated at a table, and is no doubt warm, healthy, and fid­get­ing with dice. That’s a lot of dis­tance. There are things that the DM can do to decrease this dis­tance; the mind can imag­ine quite a lot given impe­tus. For instance, the DM can remind the player that his character’s lungs must be aching, and men­tion that the clouds of heated air that issue from his mouth with each ragged breath have a red tint to them. These meth­ods are effec­tive, but cer­tainly dif­fi­cult for an already over-taxed story-teller to gen­er­ate all the time. Ultimately, phys­i­cal empa­thy is much more dif­fi­cult to cre­ate in a role-playing game, espe­cially since it is so dif­fi­cult to manip­u­late the senses of sight, touch and smell for the player’s ben­e­fits. Sound is eas­ier, if you have a story-teller with cre­ativ­ity and the will­ing­ness to make a fool of him or her­self.

That said, light­ing and sound­tracks are use­ful tools to bring the player that much closer to the expe­ri­ence of their char­ac­ters. Lack of light can make cer­tain moments in a hor­ror game by allow­ing the imag­i­na­tion to run just a lit­tle more wild. Music can lend the proper mood to a scene. Props, used spar­ingly, can have a sim­i­lar effect. But at the same time, role-playing games aren’t live-action, and great phys­i­cal dis­tance is a qual­ity of the for­mat. I would sug­gest that play­ers are much more respon­si­ble for their own phys­i­cal dis­tance than their story-teller is, though an excel­lent story-teller won’t let that keep them from includ­ing choice phys­i­cal details. Attempting to include such expe­ri­ences in a game can only end well.

There You Have It

Distance in role-playing games is a topic worth fur­ther atten­tion, I think. I will def­i­nitely return at a later date to dis­cuss how play­ers can influ­ence their own dis­tance from their char­ac­ters, and how they can assist other play­ers in less­en­ing dis­tance. I also think it’s worth study­ing how dis­tance works between the story-teller and so-called non-player char­ac­ters, and whether the responses of play­ers affects that dis­tance. See you all next week!

Freedom and Failure in BioShock

Welcome to Rapture

Today, I want to ana­lyze two inter­re­lated themes found in 2007’s first-person-shooter BioShock.  BioShock is hands-down one of the best games (and cer­tainly one of the best FPSs) of the last nine or ten years, and if you have not already expe­ri­enced it, I would sug­gest rem­e­dy­ing this with some mea­sure of haste.  The game has its flaws (and its detrac­tors) but few would argue that its char­ac­ters, con­cepts, and atmos­phere are any­thing short of superb.

It’s the sort of game that has already had a fair amount writ­ten about it, espe­cially its mid-game plot twist, which is impor­tant not only to the story of the game, but calls into ques­tion the player’s psy­chol­ogy as he or she plays any lin­ear game.  (It cul­mi­nates in a cutscene with a bril­liant use of “dis­tance,” as dis­cussed by myself in one of my previous columns, but that’s a con­ver­sa­tion for another time.) That and the fact that it serves partly as a rebut­tal to a Randian notion of utopia have fueled the dis­cus­sions of BioShock for some time.

But I’m not par­tic­u­larly going to focus on either of those things today, though they will both undoubt­edly come up.  Instead, I wish to dis­cuss two par­tic­u­lar themes: that of free­dom, and that of fail­ure, by look­ing at three of the char­ac­ters in BioShock: Dr. J.S. Steinman,Sander Cohen, and Andrew Ryan him­self.

Note

I have not played BioShock 2 or read any of the sup­ple­men­tary mate­rial.  Thus, if I say some­thing that con­tra­dicts some­thing said in one of those sources, don’t point it out to me, because I don’t care.

Let’s Get This Paper Started

Ryan declares, in his open­ing mono­logue, that he built Rapture to be a city “where the great would not be  con­strained by the small.”  His pur­pose is to build a city far away from the “vul­tures” in Washington, Moscow, and the Vatican, a place where true geniuses in art, sci­ence and indus­try would not be con­strained by “the cen­sor” or “petty moral­ity.”  (Andrew Ryan, “Welcome to Rapture.”)

But in so doing, he has already become self-defeating, for the great do not need to run away from the real world.  Rapture does not attract those who are actu­ally great, but rather those who think they could become great, if only they could escape what­ever is hold­ing them back in the world on land.  As Sartre would say, one is not a great nov­el­ist until one has writ­ten a great novel, and I would posit that no one who has writ­ten a great novel is likely to run away from his or her suc­cess to an iso­lated utopia beneath the sea.

In this way, Rapture attracts those who have expe­ri­enced fail­ure in the reg­u­lar world, and desire Rapture for its free­dom, under the mis­taken impres­sion that free­dom will inevitably lead to suc­cess.  If only they can escape the gov­ern­ment, or their fam­i­lies, or reli­gion, or their eco­nomic struc­tures, or the fall­out from the Second World War, then they can come down to Rapture and make names for them­selves.  Rapture is thus full of failed “poets, artists, and ten­nis play­ers,” look­ing to find suc­cess in the free­dom Rapture offers.  (Sullivan, “Smuggling Ring.”)

Each of the three char­ac­ters I will here dis­cuss embod­ies dif­fer­ent aspects of the themes of fail­ure and free­dom, and from them, I believe I can deduce one of the major points that BioShock is try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate, that ulti­mate free­dom breeds only fail­ure.

Dr. J.S. Steinman

Steinman is a (pos­si­bly the) plas­tic sur­geon in Rapture, and is one of the first mad­men the player encoun­ters.  In game terms, he is a minor obsta­cle, as he owns a key to a locked door Jack needs to get past, but he serves in the game’s greater pur­pose as an illus­tra­tion of the sort of per­son who is attracted to Rapture.  He was not par­tic­u­larly impor­tant in Rapture’s rise or fall: he is one of the com­mon peo­ple of the city.

We never learn exactly what it is that attracts him to Rapture, but it is the com­bi­na­tion of ADAM and the free­dom offered by Ryan’s phi­los­o­phy that makes him stay.  Steinman rants that before ADAM and Ryan, he had spent his “entire sur­gi­cal career cre­at­ing the same tired shapes, over and over again,” and rejoices in the fact that ADAM gives him the means to cre­ate new shapes and new modes of beauty in the human form.  (Steinman, “Surgery’s Picasso.”)  With ADAM “the flesh becomes clay,” and with Ryan’s gift of free­dom from “phony ethics,” Steinman can “sculpt, and sculpt, and sculpt, until the job is done.”  (Steinman, “Higher Standards,” “ADAM’s Changes.”)

But when faced with this lim­it­less free­dom, Steinman finds he can­not mea­sure up to his own aes­thetic visions.  What he per­ceives as the unlim­ited power granted him by ADAM causes his imag­i­na­tion to run wild, giv­ing him visions of per­fect, abstract, Picasso-like shapes.  Eventually, how­ever, his skill fails him: while ADAM might the­o­ret­i­cally allow him to do any­thing he might imag­ine, his own fail­ures in skill and unrea­son­able expec­ta­tions cause him to rail against his aes­thetic imper­a­tive (anthro­po­mor­phized in the god­dess Aphrodite), scream­ing that his cre­ations (the corpses of women on whom he has oper­ated) are “too fat,” “too tall,” or “too sym­met­ri­cal.”  (Steinman, “Medical Pavilion.”)

Steinman thus rep­re­sents the fact that per­fect free­dom does not guar­an­tee per­fect results.  Before ADAM, Steinman was renowned as an incred­i­bly gifted plas­tic sur­geon, able to “turn a real cir­cus freak into some­thing you can show in the day­light.”  (Steinman, “Higher Standards.”)  But now, faced with the abil­ity to sculpt human flesh as clay, he comes up against the lim­its of his own abil­i­ties, and goes mad, forever able to see Aphrodite’s promises, but never able to ful­fill them.

Sander Cohen

One of BioShock’s most endur­ing char­ac­ters is Sander Cohen, the insane artist who func­tioned, while Rapture stood, sort of like Ryan’s Goebbels, cre­at­ing pro­pa­ganda (most notably the Rapture anthem).  Few of the details of Cohen’s life are made known to the player, but it is clear that he thinks of him­self as an artist of great tal­ent and impor­tance.  He has at least dab­bled in musi­cal com­po­si­tion, paint­ing, prose poetry (“I want to take the ears off!”) and play­writ­ing, as well as some truly bizarre “sculp­tures” (after he has gone insane) con­sist­ing of dead splicers cov­ered in plas­ter.

We don’t know much about Cohen’s life pre-Rapture, but a few things can be deduced from some of his com­ments.  His ref­er­ences to “the Doubters” in “the gal­leries in SoHo” and “the Lyceum” indi­cate that he had stud­ied art and attempted to show his work, but was received pri­mar­ily with skep­ti­cism and/or dis­dain.  (Sander Cohen, “The Doubters.”)  Furthermore, we may assume that he was not expe­ri­enc­ing suc­cess in the out­side world by the fact that he is in Rapture at all.  As men­tioned above, a suc­cess­ful artist or musi­cian has lit­tle rea­son to run away from the world in order to become a cel­e­brated artist under the sea.  He is seized by an almost parox­ys­mic fear of “the Doubters,” attribut­ing to them the down­fall of Rapture, and rant­ing, rav­ing and try­ing to mur­der Jack when he fears Jack dis­likes his ulti­mate “mas­ter­piece,” a ter­ri­fy­ing quad­tych com­posed of more “sculp­tures” and pho­tographs of corpses.

Cohen’s fear of fail­ure is exem­pli­fied in his var­i­ous “dis­ci­ples,” ex-students of his whom Jack must hunt down and kill to gain Cohen’s help.  The first of these, Kyle Fitzpatrick, is shown play­ing a com­po­si­tion of Cohen’s on a piano (rather well) in a the­ater while sur­rounded by dyna­mite.  While Cohen shouts instruc­tions to him over the radio and grows more and more furi­ous at what he per­ceives to be Fitzpatrick’s mis­takes, Fitzpatrick grows more and more upset until he stops play­ing and shouts that Cohen has no right to treat him thusly.  Cohen responds by det­o­nat­ing the dyna­mite.

Finally, his fear of fail­ure is shown in the incred­i­bly vio­lent response to the suc­cess of oth­ers.  Another well-reviewed Rapture artist, Anna Culpepper, pro­vokes first a vit­ri­olic let­ter to the edi­tor call­ing her “deriv­a­tive,” “bor­ing,” “obvi­ous,” “dan­ger­ous,” and her lat­est offer­ing a “musi­cal insult.”  (Sander Cohen, “Musical Insult.”)  Eventually, when her suc­cesses grow to be too much for him to bear, he has her mur­dered through his con­nec­tions with the Rapture police.  Similarly, while Cohen claims to kill Fitzpatrick for his fail­ures, there is noth­ing obvi­ously wrong with Fitzpatrick’s piano play­ing.  Indeed, if I ever play the piano half so well, I shall con­sider myself a suc­cess.  It is thus per­haps true that Cohen kills him not merely for not liv­ing up to his ide­als, but for being a threat to his own genius: when oth­ers suc­ceed, Cohen assumes he fails.

Cohen is so afraid of fail­ure in his own life that he takes it out on him­self (see The Wild Bunny), his com­pe­ti­tion, or his stu­dents.  In short, Cohen came to Rapture hop­ing that its lack of cen­sor­ship or estab­lished artis­tic author­i­ties would allow him to truly blos­som into the genius he felt he could be.  Instead, he pro­duced pro­pa­ganda for Rapture’s leader, and a series of mediocre works (every other char­ac­ter who men­tions him calls him a fraud or a lunatic) and finally descends into a plasmid-fueled mad­ness.

Andrew Ryan

Last but not least, no dis­cus­sion of any­thing in BioShock is com­plete with­out a look at Rapture’s founder.  At first, it must be said that Ryan does not seem to have been a fail­ure on the sur­face world: he did, after all, make enough money through his indus­trial work to have been able to build a city on the bot­tom of the sea.  But clearly some­thing drove him away from the world of the sun.

Some clues may be found in an exchange he has with Jack when the lat­ter comes across Rapture’s under­wa­ter forest, Arcadia:

“On the sur­face, I once bought a forest. The par­a­sites claimed that the land belonged to God, and demanded that I estab­lish a pub­lic park there. Why? So the rab­ble could stand slack-jawed under the canopy and pre­tend that it was par­adise earned. When Congress moved to nation­al­ize my forest, I burnt it to the ground. God did not plant the seeds of this Arcadia– I did.”  (Andrew Ryan, “Arcadia.”)

Turning from a world where he was “con­strained by the small,” Ryan iso­lated him­self from the rest of the world with a com­mu­nity of what he hoped were like-minded peo­ple, in a grand attempt to plant the seeds of Utopia.  But it didn’t work.  His ide­ol­ogy was flawed, and he clung to it at the worst of times (refus­ing to reg­u­late plas­mids, the ADAM-in-a-can ton­ics that let peo­ple shoot fire from their fin­ger­tips) and com­pro­mised it when things became too des­per­ate (using mind-controlling plas­mids to direct the cit­i­zens of Rapture once things got bad.)  Ryan hoped that by cre­at­ing a land of per­fect free­dom, he would cre­ate a land of per­fect suc­cess, yet in the end, it was char­ac­ter­ized only by fail­ure and mad­ness.

It is worth men­tion­ing, how­ever, that Ryan’s life ends with per­haps his great­est tri­umph: faced with his own anni­hi­la­tion and a man he will not harm (as Jack is sort of his son), he sticks to his prin­ci­ples and chooses the man­ner of his own death.  (If any­one finds a bet­ter video of that, please let me know.)  As his utopia col­lapses around him, Andrew Ryan dies like a Man.

In Conclusion

BioShock is about many things: fear, gov­ern­ment, sci­ence, run­ning from large men in div­ing suits.  But one theme which runs through all of its many sto­ries is this rela­tion­ship between free­dom and fail­ure.  Steinman found that upon achiev­ing ulti­mate free­dom of power, he could no longer be sat­is­fied with the work his hands could cre­ate.  Cohen learned that even per­fect free­dom can­not make up for a lack of tal­ent.  And Ryan dis­cov­ered that per­fect free­dom with­out restric­tion leads only to chaos and death.  Though Ryan may have ended on a tri­umph, it is the kind of per­fect, unqual­i­fied tri­umph that only comes with self-destruction.

Make a Craft Check

This week, the column focuses on role-playing games, or, more specif­i­cally, role –play­ing games that aren’t video games. If you’re not famil­iar with the dis­tinc­tion, then allow me to break it down for you. Role-playing games are, in the truest sense, games like Dungeons & Dragons. They are story games in which (typ­i­cally) one per­son nar­rates and the other play­ers con­trol the main char­ac­ters of the story. A por­tion of this arti­cle is from an old piece that exam­i­nes what D&D does, and why it is impor­tant. Hopefully you will find it use­ful. Make note of this base-line, because it will serve as start­ing point for a lot of my arti­cles to come.

What Makes D&D Different 

Essentially, D&D is a small set of mechan­ics that arbi­trate the out­comes of imag­i­nary sit­u­a­tions. Whether the sit­u­a­tion be as sim­ple as con­vinc­ing a wary man-at-arms of your good inten­tions or as com­plex as fir­ing an arrow weighted down with alchemist’s fire between the plates of a bulette-riding umber hulk’s stony cara­pace, D&D is the set of rules that deter­mi­nes suc­cess, fail­ure, and the sever­ity of those suc­cesses or fail­ures. But it also does more than this. It builds the struc­tures of race and class upon that base mechanic, and fur­ther ham­mers the sys­tem into abil­ity scores, hun­dreds of feats, magic weapons, and abstract lev­els to describe a character’s aver­age level of skill, to men­tion the mer­est tip of the ice­berg. While these provide hard mechan­ics for the cus­tomiza­tion of char­ac­ters, they simul­ta­ne­ously con­tribute to theme and motif. A dwarf’s bonus to Constitution and Wisdom makes them suit­able or excel­lent for cer­tain classes, but it also reflects that the race is tough and has both a deep faith tra­di­tion and plenty of com­mon sense. While these assump­tions don’t gen­er­ate story or plot, they do gen­er­ate theme. A world begins to emerge from those num­bers. D&D man­u­als con­tain, first and fore­most, mechan­ics, but also assem­ble a hulk­ing mass of ideas that is yet help­less and inert, wait­ing for life to be breathed into it. And, thank­fully, the breath of life is given to it in base­ments, game shops and din­ing tables across the world. The sys­tem comes to life when it is played; oth­er­wise, it is pretty, but use­less.

Something unique hap­pens at that stage, too. As Dungeon Masters and, to a lesser extent, play­ers, encoun­ter this mass of ideas, it is inter­preted and mod­i­fied. The orig­i­nal idea, formed by an assem­bly of minds at Wizards of the Coast, has been trans­mit­ted as effec­tively as they know how to the homes of play­ers. However, since we haven’t devel­oped telepa­thy yet, it comes out all mud­dled. This is a good thing. In this way, the game is born anew at the begin­ning of each ses­sion of every game of D&D. It is a con­stantly evolv­ing crea­ture that is only directed by the hive-mind at Wizards of the Coast inso­far as peo­ple con­tinue to find their new releases inter­est­ing. Wizards hap­pens to be pretty good at updat­ing theme and pro­vid­ing inter­est­ing ideas to Dungeon Masters at home, so they con­tinue to be suc­cess­ful. There’s a good rea­son why the com­pany is still around.

More impor­tant to the uni­fied iden­tity of Dungeons and Dragons than fun, or even geek cul­ture, is story. The sys­tem is designed to facil­i­tate sto­ry­telling in a way that every­one, includ­ing the DM, is uncer­tain of the out­come of the sim­plest actions. Indeed, with a good DM, the game becomes an exer­cise in com­mu­nal sto­ry­telling. D&D’s most impor­tant role may be this: it inspires the telling of sto­ries. It is in this aspect that D&D becomes some­thing greater than your aver­age board game, con­nect­ing to the human expe­ri­ence in a way that may be clas­si­fied as art, or even as sacred.

Dungeons and Dragons facil­i­tates the fun­da­men­tal human endeavor of story-telling, which ele­vates it to a higher sta­tus than the word “game” would imply. To an out­sider, there may not seem to be any point in pre­tend­ing to be an elf. But the idea has quite the allure for role-players. In the midst of story, we are weigh­ing what it is to be some­one else. Whether that per­son is a right­eous hero, a mis­er­able jerk, a sadis­tic mad­man, or just a pretty nor­mal guy, we feel empa­thy for that char­ac­ter, exult­ing in his or her suc­cesses and feel­ing frus­tra­tion at the inevitable fail­ures. It is the same thing that human­ity has always done when it encoun­ters a story. It makes us think beyond our­selves. It allows us to expe­ri­ence a new sort of exis­tence. It is exis­ten­tially healthy.

D&D as Art 

Story-telling, writ­ten or oral, is one of the old­est forms of art. By virtue of these older forms, Dungeons and Dragons, and games like it, have the poten­tial to be art as well. While most role-playing ses­sions are not fan­tas­tic art, they still have the poten­tial to be, and the rare game does achieve that poten­tial. The art com­posed in a D&D game is par­tic­u­larly ephemeral, which is a trait shared with any per­for­mance art. After all, the expe­ri­ence is only momen­tary, and since it depends so heav­ily on so many peo­ple work­ing with­out the guide of a script, it really is a unique pro­duct. But D&D is not a per­for­mance art; the game is not built to enter­tain observers. The play­ers and the DM are fully involved in the pro­duc­tion and evo­lu­tion of the story. The col­lab­o­ra­tion between the main sto­ry­teller and the play­ers is essen­tial to the form, and is one of the traits that makes D&D totally unique. In an expe­ri­ence laugh­ably sim­i­lar to Ouija boards, no one per­son has their hands com­pletely on the reins, and the end pro­duct will be some­thing unique, unan­tic­i­pated, and ulti­mately impos­si­ble to repro­duce. (All three of those traits are also ascribed to play­ers of D&D, but that is nei­ther here nor there.)

In gen­eral, I would argue that the DM is more a per­former, or artist, than the play­ers are, since the DM is respon­si­ble for set­ting, sup­port­ing char­ac­ters, mood, and so on, and thus the play­ers who receive these details are mar­gin­ally more audience-like than the DM. But both roles exist on a spec­trum, and each per­son involved in the game is both pro­ducer and receiver of art. It’s a very com­plex and reward­ing exchange that is impos­si­ble to find out­side of role-playing games.

Narrative in Multiplayer

First of all, I’d like to thank myself for mak­ing that (hopefully) fine dis­tinc­tion between art and enter­tain­ment last week, and tak­ing care of a lot of grunt-work for this week’s column. I couldn’t have planned it bet­ter. And so, fair reader, it may help you to read that post if you haven’t already done so.

Multiplayer is Soulless

This week’s topic is the mul­ti­player phe­nom­e­non, and how it relates to nar­ra­tive. Games almost always involve the con­struc­tion of a nar­ra­tive, even if said nar­ra­tive is merely a paragraph-long excuse for killing num­ber­less crowds of Enemy Type A. However, sim­ple excuses have become blasé in most video games, rel­e­gated to Serious Sam, vicious old-school nostalgia-inducers, some indie games, and most of the puz­zle genre. Even games like Gears of War, which would prob­a­bly have been bet­ter off just telling the player to “kill the Horde while your char­ac­ters quip in man-like fash­ion,” (NSFW) make an attempt at seri­ous nar­ra­tive, even weav­ing theme and dra­matic sequences into its oth­er­wise unin­ter­rupted blood­bath. Why? One can only hope that they assumed that they had to, because if that isn’t the case, then some­body must have thought that the Gears of War story was worth telling. In the attempt at nar­ra­tive, all such game modes become can­di­dates for “art”; they are telling a story, and thus that story is sub­ject to estab­lished meth­ods of judg­ment built for that style of expe­ri­ence.

Constructed nar­ra­tives are much less com­mon in mul­ti­player expe­ri­ence. Multiplayer is more often inter­ested in mulching/beating/shooting/destroying other play­ers and/or the com­puter with or against one’s fel­low player, or in other words, achiev­ing usu­ally arbi­trary and abstract goals with min­i­mal story sig­nif­i­cance, and it typ­i­cally remains only enter­tain­ment, with lit­tle to no artis­tic aspi­ra­tion. It is not uncom­mon to see entire titles released for this pur­pose (Left 4 Dead is the obvi­ous cul­prit here, which is really not much fun to play on your lone­some, but there are plenty of other titles, mostly FPS, in which the sin­gle player cam­paign is there mostly because it helps sell units). Multiplayer modes are almost always devoid of cutsce­nes, mean­ing­ful story pro­gres­sion, char­ac­ter growth, and really any­thing that could be remotely con­sid­ered “sto­ry­telling.” That means that mul­ti­player is bank­rupt in the nar­ra­tive depart­ment, yes?

Maybe not. At this point, how­ever, it becomes nec­es­sary to split up mul­ti­player games into a few cat­e­gories. It’s a really wide net I’m cast­ing here, and a bit of dis­tinc­tion will help. Some games will prob­a­bly fit into mul­ti­ple cat­e­gories, or have a mode that fits into one, and another that fits else­where.

Competitive Multiplayer

 

Street Fighter through Starcraft. These games are designed to be a test of met­tle in which the more pro­fi­cient (or lucky) player emerges vic­to­ri­ous. The goal is to defeat all com­ers and to stand atop the pile of their corpses with ban­ner held high. Team ver­sions of such game­play also exist in this realm, though Deathmatch is really the pure form. These modes are high on enter­tain­ment and low on art, and tend to empha­size the skill of the player over and above all else. Some play­ers approach these titles more casu­ally, seek­ing an expe­ri­ence of fun and not of dom­i­na­tion.

Cooperative Multiplayer

Gears of War 2’s Horde Mode is the iconic coop­er­a­tive model. Generally, the goal is not to be declared the “best,” but rather to work alongside other human beings to accom­plish a shared goal. Most of these tend to be much higher in enter­tain­ment than in art. The dif­fer­ences between com­pet­i­tive and coop­er­a­tive mul­ti­player modes are, per­haps, minor, but I want to make the dis­tinc­tion because I, at least, have a notably dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence between the two styles. Cooperative styles of play force a player to think of the other mem­bers of his team con­stantly and that state of mind does change the expe­ri­ence of play.

Cooperative Story

Resident Evil 5 and Left 4 Dead 2 are good exam­ples of the coop­er­a­tive story. The player expe­ri­ences a nar­ra­tive alongside other human beings. By virtue of its nar­ra­tive, Cooperative Story games offer an expe­ri­ence of art, even if that isn’t nec­es­sar­ily the “point” of the game. Left 4 Dead is not about the story of the sur­vivors; it is about team­work and shoot­ing zom­bies. If any­thing, the story pro­vides a set­ting for that sub­ject, but by virtue of that set­ting, Left 4 Dead has nar­ra­tive qual­i­ties. What’s more, the char­ac­ters are gen­er­ally inter­est­ing, con­sis­tently por­trayed, and easy to empathize with. In addi­tion, the atmos­phere is appro­pri­ately bleak and moody, with some inter­est­ing (albeit entirely envi­ron­men­tal and optional) asides to the sto­ries of other sur­vivors, giv­ing a slightly wider scope to the apoc­a­lypse story being told. What lit­tle bit of art there is to be found in the nar­ra­tive of Left 4 Dead is qual­ity stuff. And, since it’s not try­ing to be any­thing else, we can’t fault them for amount of con­tent; in fact, the game prob­a­bly works best with the lit­tle traces that we do see, since its pri­mar­ily a sur­vival expe­ri­ence, not a story about the ori­gins of the zom­bie plague.

Where There Is No Story… 

So far, I haven’t exactly cov­ered any­thing new. But this is where things get crazy, folks.

I want to argue that, while no nar­ra­tive is nec­es­sar­ily intended in mul­ti­player modes out­side of the coop­er­a­tive story umbrella, sim­ple nar­ra­tives DO exist for the player. The player cre­ates these nar­ra­tives with the images and sounds that the game pro­vides because it is the nat­u­ral way of inter­act­ing with a series of syn­chro­nous events. Though empa­thy with one’s avatar char­ac­ter is cer­tainly less­ened in most mul­ti­player expe­ri­ences (even in L4D, I rarely feel all that con­nected to Ellis or Zoey), but it’s def­i­nitely still there, even if it’s just a desire to sur­vive and suc­ceed. In mul­ti­player, empa­thy is more sit­u­a­tional than per­sonal.

For exam­ple, one of the rea­sons Gears of War’s Horde mode suc­ceeds so well is because of the sen­sa­tion of hold­ing out against a supe­rior force. That story is firmly planted in our his­tory, and has thus become a story arche­type. Horde mode allows us to expe­ri­ence that arche­type first-hand. We can see the mon­strous hordes advanc­ing on our posi­tion, and we are cer­tain that death has come to claim us. This makes the breath­less com­bat of Horde all the more sat­is­fy­ing. While this is a fan­tas­tic exam­ple, not all mul­ti­player modes con­tain such an arche­typal sit­u­a­tion to empathize with. However, play­ers will STILL cre­ate nar­ra­tive for them, even if the game does lit­tle to rein­force that nar­ra­tive.

For this pur­pose, we will look at Starcraft’s mul­ti­player. On the sur­face, Starcraft is all about the mas­tery of abstract resource man­age­ment and suc­cess­ful micro-management which, essen­tially, aims to get the most dam­age out­put and take the least amount of dam­age for each indi­vid­ual unit, or to uti­lize a unit’s spe­cial abil­i­ties in the most effec­tive way pos­si­ble. That sounds really cold, but the actual expe­ri­ence is a lit­tle more inti­mate than that. This is espe­cially true in games with mul­ti­ple oppo­nents, since shift­ing loy­alties and strate­gies require you to con­stantly re-assess oppo­nents’ stances against you and their force make-up. I argue that the player is build­ing a nar­ra­tive as the game pro­gresses. It is a sim­ple nar­ra­tive, per­haps expressed in some­thing like, “I am win­ning, and I am press­ing the offen­sive, but he is a strong defen­sive player, so I need to be care­ful or I’m going to lose too many of my ground troops.” This is per­haps most obvi­ous post-game, when, in con­ver­sa­tions with one’s oppo­nents, one nat­u­rally grav­i­tates toward the moments in the game when a loser came back to win big. Moments like these also exist in the social con­scious­ness (all the big foot­ball upsets, for instance, ride on this same arche­type). If the game only existed as resource man­age­ment and micro-management to the play­ers, there would be no such thrill. Obvious, per­haps, but hey, who actu­ally thinks about these things?

So What?

Good ques­tion. Just because we build a nar­ra­tive for our mul­ti­player expe­ri­ences doesn’t mean that the modes are art. We do, after all, tend to build nar­ra­tives about lots of things that aren’t art, like foot­ball, as men­tioned above. But that does mean that we have the same basic response to mul­ti­player modes as to story modes; the story modes sim­ply provide addi­tional and more ele­gant tools for the build­ing of nar­ra­tive. This also means that mul­ti­player modes have the poten­tial to become art, if the nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ence evoked by a mul­ti­player mode does allow for reflec­tion and rev­e­la­tion. Such a game would be dif­fi­cult to build, par­tic­u­larly if you want player con­trol to mat­ter, sim­ply because allow­ing the play­ers to have con­trol and also reli­ably cre­at­ing a sat­is­fy­ing and rev­e­la­tory expe­ri­ence is tough as hell to accom­plish. But it is pos­si­ble. Roleplaying games accom­plish it all the time, and with a greater degree of player con­trol.