How can I explain Bioshock to a parent?

[The-Epicly-Named-Man]

Don't tell her to read anything by Ayn Rand, her books just try to shove her personal beliefs down your throat, and that really won't help you with your mother. Maybe explain to her the links with objectivism (which Google doesn't think is a word), but most of all stress the fact that you don't have to kill them, that game doesn't in any way encourage you to kill real children, and that it rewards you for saving them.

 

[Use_Imagination_here]

Ok, but some movies are hailed as classics, while 50% of the time is spent on a battlefield, with death and guns, but its still culture because its a movie. So why can't games be the same?

Because the violence is related in some way to the story and is normally pivotal to it, it shows people changing under the pressures of war and how courageous people are under such stress.

Bioshock could have worked just as well with maybe a dozen Splicers in the game, maybe three dozen if you want to spice things up a bit. Nothing about the combat helped shape the story or show the background at all, but they put it in because at heart it's an FPS and it needs over nine thousand corpses. I forget who said it, someone on Cracked, but they pointed out that if a film had five minutes of philosophy and 85 minutes of shooting and explosions it would be classed as a dumb action film. Bioshock is reasonably fun but don't go thinking it's massively sophisticated.

EDIT: Here we go.

Now, within five minutes of this article's posting, somebody in the comments will mention Bioshock. I've played that one, too. And loved it. Still, 90 percent of what transpired on screen was me mowing down room after room of faceless bad guys. If you make a movie where 90 of the 100 minutes of runtime is people getting their faces blown off--even if you fill the other 10 minutes with speeches about objectivism--every critic will use the same word to describe it:

"Mindless."

Don't tell me it's unfair to compare games to movies, either. When even Mario games come with dialogue and cutscenes, it's crystal clear that gaming wants to be a storytelling medium. You can judge a culture by the stories it tells, and you can judge the maturity of video gaming and gamers the same way.


Read more: 5 Reasons It's Still Not Cool to Admit You're a Gamer | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_18571_5-reasons-its-still-not-cool-to-admit-youre-gamer.html#ixzz1UHXi2kQG

Yes it is completely unfair to compare video games to movies and the fact that video games can be a storytelling medium doesn't change that one bit. If I made a movie that was 15 hours long and 95 percent dialogue it would be pretty heavily crisized as well but that doesn't change the fact that lord of the rings is a terrific work of art.

And I'm tired of people trying to say bioshock was primarily about killing a bunch of guys. it's pathetic. Thats like saying sit coms are primarily about laugh tracks. Just like sit coms are primarily about humor, the gameplay in bioshock is primarily about survival.

Video games are about playing games. The stuff in movies like plot and dialogue and characters factor into that but unlike movies and books they're only a part of it. If a movie has a poor plot but mind blowing animations and great characters that it primarily focuses on it's a masterpiece. So why isn't a game with an excellent plot and characters and dialogue and setting with great innovatice excellent and fun much better?

Frankly the fact that a person who truely enjoys video games and isn't a complete retard can use an argument like that is just sad.

 

[llew]

well ask them "have you ever seen atlantis, with awesome tribal people living underwater with awesome statues and awesome technology with no crazy people and psychotic guys in suits of armour with drills for hands? well its nothing like that" and just look at the reaction to see if they understand, or uite simply make them play it

 

[teebeeohh]

tell them that if they can overcome their ignorant, limited comfort zone this is what they could be experiencing instead of watching [insert country]s next top model. Not to insult your mum but you can only a horse to water and i am tired of that, my mother and i spend 10 years in a war of attrition of her considering games and movies i like as garbage/violent/childish and made fun of what she likes. It's just not worth it for me anymore.

 

[Shirokurou]

Tell her "It's a game that explores the objectivist philosophy in a dystopian setting"

"So my question is how do you show beautiful video games (that takes time to play) to a parent?"
Sadly you can't, without investing much time into it.
i usually just go "It's complicated"

But one time I was playing FFVII and when Tifa is inside Cloud's psyche, my mom walked in and glanced over it and said "wow that's some pretty psychological stuff going on there." and i felt kind of proud.

 

[TheDist]

The reason why your mother was too concerned with BioShock letting you abuse and murder little-children is because she hailed from an era before video-games, where all she had to pass the time with were novels (or something, I don't know). It's like that with almost every parent in the world, as there's a generation-gap separating parents from their own children.

This may well indeed be part of it. Though as a counter example, my mother is old enough to be most people here's granny i'd wager. It was around 1999 I think, I found her sat playing some of my games and one of those games was Kingpin: life of crime. When asked what she thought of it, she outright said it was silly to her, but she could still see the fun in it.

What she did was tell me she knew I was aware of the diffrence between reality and a game, thus was totaly fine with any violence there may be in the games I play (and in the ones she bought me as a child). Also that whith this she could see the other parts of the games such as story, art, music are a big part of their draw and often more important and then times when it is just violence, that such can be seen as a cathartic release, as long as the people playing really do understand the diffrence between real and fake violence.

So one way to approach it would be to go on a parents "parenting" as it were. Explain that they have raised you well enough that you understand the diffrence between all forms of fantasy and reality. In this framework you can then point to apspects of a game that are what you wish to convay, be it artistic, political or issues of morality etc.

Sorry for the rambling post, might be worth a try though.

 

[Jumplion]

Ok, but some movies are hailed as classics, while 50% of the time is spent on a battlefield, with death and guns, but its still culture because its a movie. So why can't games be the same?

Because the violence is related in some way to the story and is normally pivotal to it, it shows people changing under the pressures of war and how courageous people are under such stress.

Bioshock could have worked just as well with maybe a dozen Splicers in the game, maybe three dozen if you want to spice things up a bit. Nothing about the combat helped shape the story or show the background at all, but they put it in because at heart it's an FPS and it needs over nine thousand corpses. I forget who said it, someone on Cracked, but they pointed out that if a film had five minutes of philosophy and 85 minutes of shooting and explosions it would be classed as a dumb action film. Bioshock is reasonably fun but don't go thinking it's massively sophisticated.

Only, you know, through the combat and gameplay of the game we learn more and more about the underwater dystopia of Rapture and as we continue on we become a part of the system of Rapture and it's objectivist philosophy. Though the choice of the Little Sisters could have been handled better, the basic principle it was trying to put out is the same.

And then, through the culmination of your gameplay, blindly following orders from Fontaine/Atlas/Ryan/Whoever, the whole question of willpower and choice comes in conflict with the simple phrase "Would you kindly...?", something that challenges the player to rethink everything they've been doing. It's a brilliant aspect of gameplay, I think. Players almost always just blindly do the quest, they pick up the quest item without thinking twice, just so they can get that extra XP. The "would you kindly" twist at the end basically makes the player question their actions, because through all of this most players probably didn't think twice about going here and doing that, effectively making Rapture even worse.

Okay, that may have all sounded pretentious, and I will admit that I could very well be reading too deeply into it (though I would argue I don't seeing as how everything I've said is more or less in the game itself, you just have to look at it a certain way) but I do not get your point at all. From what I'm getting from you, it seems that the game only "explores" the philosophy through specific scripted moments and not through the gameplay itself. But Bioshock explores this kind of stuff everywhere in its gameplay, environment, what have you. You've got the audiobooks giving out backstory, the environments show a time before all of this, the splicers, even after all hell has broken loose, are still greedy in their pursuit of ADAM, all sorts of stuff. I won't say that Bioshock addresses its themes in a completely thoughtful way, of course there are some aspects it could have expanded on, but I don't think you're giving it enough credit and just seeing it as "a game".

A movie with 5 minutes philosophy and 85 minutes of shooting and explosions could easily be considered a classic. You know how? By still exploring the philosophy during those action scenes. Saving Private Ryan gave us the whole "war is hell" thing through it's action scenes as well as it's slower moments. A Clockwork Orange was batshit nuts, and it gave us these themes of "who is really batshit nuts in this world?" Whether or not you liked those movies is irrelevant, they had some sort of influence on the world with those themes. Bioshock, I think, easily does this, with the player gradually becoming more a part of the Rapture system and resorting to desperate measures to gain ADAM.

 

[Not-here-anymore]

Do you have to explain it?
Meh. I happened to talk about it to my mother, but more as part of an overarching political conversation. Still, she seemed to find it thematically interesting

 

[CRRPGMykael]

Wait,what?!That's fucking absurd!It's like the protagonists of The Ring killed that creepy little ***** and then everybody thought it was 'prepostorous' that the main characters are killing a child.

 

[Neonit]

Tell her the tale of little red riding hood. In the version i read, they have ripped a wolf open to fill him with stones. you know, to slow him down....

You cant really expect to be able to explain this, i dunno, 20 hours game in a few minutes? You could always try to point out the psychological aspects of the game, and say that those little girls are a representation of choice between innocence and survival and could as well be something else, like puppies..... or some bs like that (puppies hardly make that better i know...), but.... i dunno, its YOUR mother, YOU should know her....

I never had this problem, my parents were very understanding, thing is, i never hid anything from them so they trusted me. Sure, they were shocked the first time i fell into lava in quake 2 (my speakers broke at the very same f time so the sound looped oO) but, "its just a game." its not like im going to say "whoa, thats cool! im going to jump into lava the first time i see some!"

 

[Jumplion]

snip

Oh I know what it's trying to do and yeah, all those aspects are kind of in there but imagine you were presented with the plot and told to make a film/game/book about it. Don't you think that Bioshock is basically the dumbest summer-blockbuster one you could've made? I mean, the OP wants to explain Bioshock to a parent and I'd go with 'the golden ratio as explained by Forrest Gump', a clever idea shown to you in an incredibly shallow, cursory and stupid way.

Underdeveloped? Yeah, I can see how some would think that, there are some aspects where it trips as many works do. Dumb blockbuster, shallow, and cursory? Now that, I think, is being unnecessarily harsh.

While I hate using this argument, Bioshock's story and development were much better than most video games. I hate using "good for a video game" because it should stand among itself with other mediums, but then again it also did so much better than most movies/books would do either, so, whatever.

 

[Truly-A-Lie]

Snip

Yes it is completely unfair to compare video games to movies and the fact that video games can be a storytelling medium doesn't change that one bit. If I made a movie that was 15 hours long and 95 percent dialogue it would be pretty heavily crisized as well but that doesn't change the fact that lord of the rings is a terrific work of art.

Length is one of two factors that differentiate games and movies (the other obviously being interactivity) and I don't think it gets stressed enough. When you put these two things together, you get aspects of a story that simply aren't told in film.

Taking the argument away from Bioshock for a second, there's an example that I feel makes the point more clearly. Rocky. Rocky has the classic "training montage" in which he performs a series of repetitive actions to gradually increase his skills. In order for this vital part of the story to fit with the conventions of filmmaking, it had to become a montage sequence, quickly cut together shots with a soundtrack in order to keep viewers entertained while effectively just watching someone exercise.

This is because films don't have the luxury to portray in real time scenes of repetition, especially if it's a scene that fills three hours of the movie's timeline. Videogames, however, do have this luxury and as such feature more repetition in their storytelling than films do. If Rocky was designed as a game, the training montage wouldn't exist. You would have a long series of tutorial stages, which could accurately show Rocky's improvement due to two things. Firstly, your skill as a player would improve as you got used to the controls, learned how to react. Secondly, the challenges themselves would become easier, your stamina bar or whatever wouldn't decrease as fast etc.

Interactivity makes repetitive actions more engaging, which allows them to take more length. Combine the two, and games feature more repetition. Which in Bioshock's case would be Jack fending off Splicers in Rapture on his way to Andrew Ryan. Bioshock as a film wouldn't feature 90% shooting because quite simply film as a storytelling medium doesn't allow that part of the story to be told in that way. Film is a poor medium for telling that part of a story, and would instead feature a couple of cuts, a few choice action scenes and maybe a voice over saying "As I fought my way through Rapture... [fade to black - new location]"

Games aren't a poor storytelling medium because they feature more of the core actions than film, games are the only medium in which this is possible.

 

[Jumplion]

Interactivity makes repetitive actions more engaging, which allows them to take more length. Combine the two, and games feature more repetition. Which in Bioshock's case would be Jack fending off Splicers in Rapture on his way to Andrew Ryan. Bioshock as a film wouldn't feature 90% shooting because quite simply film as a storytelling medium doesn't allow that part of the story to be told in that way. Film is a poor medium for telling that part of a story, and would instead feature a couple of cuts, a few choice action scenes and maybe a voice over saying "As I fought my way through Rapture... [fade to black - new location]"

Games aren't a poor storytelling medium because they feature more of the core actions than film, games are the only medium in which this is possible.

One only needs to look at "Shadow of the Collosus" to see the power of repetition.

 

[Sizzle Montyjing]

An interesting insight into the human condition, delving into topics such as morality, science and ethics.

Plus it's fucking awsome.
Seriously, massive diver men with drills!

 

[Truly-A-Lie]

One only needs to look at "Shadow of the Collosus" to see the power of repetition.

That makes my point even better than Rocky. Whole argument can be summed up with the phrase "Shadow of the Colossus: The Movie". Doesn't work.

 

[Fbuh]

Synonyms are you're friend. There is a subtle art to telling teh truth about something that could make it sound completely different, but still fall within the confines of its actual definition. I am quite good at doing this.

I believe the correct terminology is "bullshitting". It's quite fun.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Explanation is simple, Bioshock is rated M for mature, should be considered the same as any mature movie.