I felt like I should post something here but there’s really not been too much happening with me lately. Work has been busy for a few weeks now and I’ve been putting in quite a bit of overtime to help get things out of the way. The last few days have been rather hectic and draining too due to something bad happening in the family but it’s not really my news to talk about.

I’ve played and beat Bioshock getting the “good” ending. I don’t have any motivation to play for the bad ending, it’s well known what happens and it’s not especially different. Overall I think it’s a great game. The reviews have all been glowing and most of what they praise is justified but I couldn’t help feel a little disappointed in that it does not succeed in ways it is widely considered to have done so.

A lots of noise has been made by the gaming press on the “moral choices” the player has to make in this game but really this is just hype, by and large there isn’t effectively any such choices from a cost/benefit standpoint. There are places in the game where you get the choice to gain lots of an item that makes you powerful very quickly which kills a “little sister” as a side effect. You can also choose to save them and get half the amount of the item and receive an unspecified benefit later. The problem is that in practice the game is easy and you can become powerful without much effort by following either path and there are limits as to how powerful you can get which aren’t really that different at the end of the day. You also find out pretty quickly what the “unspecified benefits” to following the “good” path are and it’s made pretty clear that you get more overall benefits by going that way. Like so many games that try to implement these moral choices there’s just no real reason or benefit to following the bad path. It’s not that I expect them to favour the bad path, but in real life there are times when doing the right thing is the harder option with no tangible benefit other than to our conscience. Jade Empire is currently my benchmark in this regard and that game didn’t even handle moral choices especially well either but there were genuine pros and cons to many decisions. Disappointing.

The other aspect of Bioshock that has been heavily talked about was the driving concept of a society who have driven themselves insane through excess and quest for perfection. They are in effect shells of the people they used to be and only glimpses of their humanity show through on occasions. Now the implementation of this idea is not itself 100% convincing but reviewers have tended to talk of how this concept helps immerse the player into the game by allowing us to relate to the characters and perhaps see how we could end up the same way if we were in their shoes. Well perhaps I may be taking an optimistic view of society but I just don’t find this plausible any more than William Golding’s novel “Lord of the Flies”. As much as we may like to pessimistically generalise about society at large we are all driven by different things and the idea of such a society is to me no more believable than a society where everyone is a saint.