How can I explain Bioshock to a parent?

[Jake0fTrades]

Video games are like movies in which you can decide the ending.

In the year 1960, Jack is riding on an airplane that suddenly crashes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; swimming to a nearby lighthouse, Jack finds the remnants of a massive underground city. Jack must use hit wits and cunning to survive the city's crazed inhabitants, but at what cost to his humanity?

 

[Jumplion]

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.

I'd say that I was being harsh but I don't think that being realistic about it's complexity when put in perspective is really unnecessarily so, especially when people think their parents are too limited to understand it. It'd be like saying someone doesn't understand Jurassic Park, in fact that's roughly where I'd peg Bioshock as far as complexity goes (and that's not a stab at either, I love that film). It's got some great ideas and some alright characters but it's not exactly difficult to grasp.

See, I get your criticism, I'm not trying to say that Bioshock is extremely clever/thoughtful without fault, it has it's weaknesses for sure.

But, at the same time, I think you are looking at bit too close between the lines when looking at Bioshock. One could easily claim that [name of movie]'s attempt at [whatever it's attempting] is shallow because it doesn't do this, this, or that. You can look too deeply into a piece in either extremes of praise or scorn.

 

[LaughingAtlas]

Tell them it'll turn their kids into psychotic sploicers, making them run around looking for little girls to rip open for magic ketchup, stick themselves with colorful syringes, wear big diving suits, and shoot bees out their hands. Might save some time.

Seriously, though, I'd call it something like "Objectivism featuring magic sea slugs gone horribly wrong," or "Undersea Philosphy Adventures."

 

[coolkirb]

sigh why must teenagers try to explain things to their parents, dont bother trying, sure they might understand but its like your parents explaining rock and role to their parents, its a generational thing that will just continue on forever as you will not understand why your kids enjoy certain things.

On a side note a video game is different from a movie or book in that it is not passive, you are the protagenist in a game and thus you do not just read or hear about the little sister dieing you have to be involved a actually make the decission yourself that she dies so it is differnt from a book in that a mental part of you must say I want this to happen.

 

[Simeon Ivanov]

Give her that book that everyone but me seems to know.

Other than that - Tell her that the game teaches you more about morality and stuff like that than school ever will.

 

[Kahunaburger]

The killing kids thing really is probably just in poor taste.

However, you could make a definite case it's part of their slam of Objectivism, which among its many other flaws doesn't provide any sort of special classification for children. The fact that splicers tend to dehumanize little sisters ("they only look like little girls") also demonstrates how human nature > human philosophies, which appears to be a big theme of Bioshock.

 

[Jumplion]

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.

Just because I love the sound of typing keyboards, and I love to run my mouth on about Shadow of the Collosus, I'll expand on that for anyone who doesn't understand.

WARNING: Pretty big spoilers for the game. Seriously, if you can, get the collection that's coming out;

Spoiler

Basically, in Shadow of the Collosus, you play as Wander, a, well, wanderer who goes to a forbidden land to bring a loved one back to death. Throughout the game, you have to kill 16 collosi by climbing onto them and attacking their weak points.

The entire game constantly drills into your head "Grab on for dear life!" You constantly have to hold R1 to grab on to things, only letting go momentarily to restore your grip meter. You climb the collosi, constantly holding R1, climbing for dear life, knowing that if you let go you will have to start over, or in the worst case die. You cannot let go otherwise you will have let Mono, the dead girl, down and you will never bring her back.

Finally, after the player has slain the last collosi, a group presumably from Wander's tribe come and try to destroy him. The priest of the group makes some sort of portal vortex thing in the fountain of the shrine Wander is in. And this is where everything you have been taught is thrown out the window.

In this last playable section of the game, you cannot win. Mono, your ultimate goal, lies on the altar at the end of the hallway while the vortex sucks you in on the other side. You still control Wander in this section, you can grab nearby cracks and ledges and slowly make your way to Mono. You can even make it to the bottom of the altar. But you can never reach her. You will simply stumble back, trying to reach her. You could theoretically stay in the hallway indefinitely, but it's futile.

You have to let go.

So, when all hope is lost, Wander (and subsequently, the player) lets go. Throughout the entire game, Wander could not let go. The theme of "letting go" could be interpreted as Wander refusing to let go of his grief for Mono, and at the final moments he learns that he just has to let go of it all. The player's desire to "get the princess" and have the happy ending, after slaying every obstacle in his way, is completely subverted when you can never get her.

It's fuckin' deep, yo.

 

[Cowabungaa]

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.

Oh you mean exactly like in BioShock? BioShock shows what lies beneath the thin veneer of culture and class, what even the most civilized person can degenerate to. What even the top of society, because that's what Rapture is supposed to represent, can fall into. The insane violence of the Splicer is a testimony to that.

BioShock's narrative is good and deep because it utilises the strengths of the videogame medium. It doesn't try to copy movies (*cough*Metalgear*cough*) or books, instead it utilises gameplay and world building to tell a large part it's story, to convey it's message.

It's got some great ideas and some alright characters but it's not exactly difficult to grasp.

Isn't that an extremely good thing? That it can still convey a relatively deep message yet at the same time is presented in such a way that it's not very difficult to grasp?

 

[Jumplion]

It's more that gaming isn't something you can dip in to and pick up from a glance. Bioshock is 99% shooting people, someone leans in, do they see Objectivism? No, they see bee-hand. So when you ask someone to explain Bioshock and they say it's really cerebral it's basically a lie. Bioshock isn't deep particularly, it's about as deep as a well written sci-fi series (new 'V' say) or something like The Matrix.

You could easily say the same thing of someone walking in and seeing the rape scene of "A Clockerwork Orange". You can't look at one part of a whole piece and judge the whole piece on that one part.

Unfortunately people are trying to paint it as a great work of philosophy and something that people don't get when in fact it's basically equal to a moderately well designed film. It's realistically not all that complex, it's basically shooting dudes, but for a different and slightly better reason than usual. I mean, people say that stupid folk don't get it but you'd have to be rip-roaringly apocalyptically stupid, as in 'should not drive cars' stupid not to understand the idea.

Absolutely anything can be worn down to their basic premise. Saving Private Ryan is just another WWII movie. Citizen Kane is just an old fart angry with his life. Romeo and Juliet is just a story about two horny, suicidal teenagers. Nirvana were just a bunch of whiny hipsters. The Beatles were drugged up monkeys in a studio. Video games are just murder simulators. Video games are just wastes of time. Bioshock is just shooting dudes.

Anything sounds simple when broken down like that.

Bear in mind the thing the parents can't understand is why he can kill the little girls. Imagine an elevator pitch for the plot, probably said to you in a tone that mildly implies you're a bit dumb and really think about what they'll have thought.

I don't see why someone couldn't pitch the plot (for a movie, I'm guessing?) without being condescending. The mother is doing something similar that I think you're doing, which is just looking at one aspect out of context and just assuming the worst.

 

[Arbi Trax]

Bioshock is hardly the ideal 'First glance' at gaming if your mum isn't a gamer. My mum can't watch cookery shows because of the gore - watching me pulling a sea slug out of a mutated child's stomach is hardly going to endear her to the medium.

My advice: if she doesn't play games and has no intention of starting, don't push the issue. It'll only lead to you both getting irritated.

If she is open-minded but has never picked up a game, start her off on something that is purely about execution. Allow her to get into the problem-solving mindset of a gamer before you weave game mechanics into a narrative. Remember, your first game was probably not in a rich setting like Rapture.

 

[Captain Booyah]

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.

I disagree. The very concept of an underwater art deco city founded on Objectivist ideals is an interesting one and out of the norm in itself -- that already places it above a sizeable portion of fiction in general, given how every type of media is susceptible to a large amount of clones and general tripe.

The actual plot that plays out within the game isn't extraordinary or groundbreaking, but it is decent enough; if we did translate BioShock into another kind of media -- let's say, in the hands of an excellent writer or director -- with 95% of the bloody hack and slash cut out (which obviously wouldn't work in a book, film, etc.), then it's definitely got more than a leg to stand on and rather unfair to say otherwise. When you take into consideration the aforementioned concept itself, the themes, ideas like the Big Daddies, atmosphere, well-written dialogue, etc., you can't say it wouldn't work in another form of media if there were somebody competent enough to take it on. I think a lot of people also missed that the characters were exceptionally more well-drawn and had a lot more depth than most other things, nevermind games.

And I think the "dumbest summer-blockbuster" comment is only really valid when you think in terms of how every video game adaptation ever made has been mostly terrible, and again, because nobody's worked out how to translate them yet. A dumb summer blockbuster is the kind soulless, unfunny, trivial rom-com starring Jennifer Aniston that Hollywood churns out on a bi-monthly basis. You can't really say with a straight face that BioShock has no more potential than one of those, can you?

 

[Spitfire]

If any of the big videogame controversies have taught us anything, it's that a lot of people in that age group think of videogames as being kids stuff. Not to patronize your mother, but you should make it clear to her that this is an adult videogame, and not something meant for kids.
Then, try to explain to her the plot of the game and the philosophy of Rapture. Maybe even mention Atlas Shrugged, and the influence it had on the game, assuming she's familiar with the book.

Hope that helps.

 

[Guilherme Zoldan]

Give up, Im fairly convinced that most human beings loose most of their rational throught capacity when they become parents.
Seriously though, I would have a really hard time explaining Bioshock to my parents, they would just keep gabbing off about how the graphics look nice and have no idea what the game is about.

 

[Jumplion]

As I say, it's nothing personal but I come here to post. If it can't manage that then fuck it, I'm not doing this for the fun of hearing my keys click. if it behaves itself I'll reply but you know, don't hold your breath.

EDIT: Well that up there ^^^^ is SOME of it, nice job forum i guess...

EDIT 2: Ignore that then, I turned my 'not reply' into a reply. it's not as thorough as I'd like but if this is still going tomorrow I'll add points.

Yeah, the forums sometimes eat up the posts and then spit them back out minutes later. It's annoying at times.

 

[censorgrrl]

*sigh*

Do none of your parents game themselves?

I've been a gamer since Zork and Lode Runner and the side-scrolling Prince of Persia. I taught my sons how to hold a mouse, then a joystick, then a controller... I hid in the basement while I played Diablo because I thought it was too scary for the little ones. Later, I played with them, or watched them play. They're old teenagers now, and we do Left 4 Dead as stress release after a long day's work.

I play World of Warcraft, PvP and PvE, for about 25 hours a week, and have since the servers opened.

I am a 50 year-old woman.

I am not alone. It makes me crazy whenever I hear this 'generation gap' crap. Gamers didn't suddenly appear in 2002, or whenever it was you started playing. I wasn't interested in playing Bioshock, but I sure spectated all the way through both games. I was the one who got out my old copy of Atlas Shrugged and read a few passages to the progeny. It was a teachable moment.

Good luck to all who have family members who don't see the power, the escape, the complexity, of modern gaming. It will change, but we all have to give up our stereotypes!