Or, better yet, a big rock. That's a much cheaper doorstop than Atlas Shrugged, and of about the same literary quality.winter2 said:
How can I explain Bioshock to a parent?
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Yeah, well don't start with little sisters euthanasia, that's for damn sure!fa_fallen_ye said:
Though to be honest, it is not so much "one negative thing" swayed them, most have a prejudice from the start and hearing of kids dying just tips them over the edge. Especially bad considering you describe how you REFUSE to kill the kids, but they hear what their prejudiced minds expect: the mere possibility of killing kids.
Bioshock has such an original concept I would really have no idea where to start and frankly the game defies explanation. Here is the game in a paragraph:
It only makes sense to experience it.
How else could I describe the ideal of Rapture other than the way Andrew Ryan does:
You can't just watch it, you have to actually play through it. And that is the problem for someone who lacks 'games literacy', it's like recommending someone to read a great book that is in a foreign language that they do not know.
its worse than that. Words can be translated to equivalents in each language (only grammatical puns are lost). It's a lot more like asking a blind man to appreciate a painting by having it described to them, that's what it's like just watching a video-recording of a game.
Face it buddy, if you can't get her to actually sit down and play the game with the necessary skills then it's paintings before the blind. The best you can do is insist it is very good and hope they take your word for it.
That's about right.Pandabearparade said:
You could say Ken Levine's Bioshock is the world biggest "fuck you" to Rand's writing and ideals. Think about all the death and horrors that can from this objectivist utopia, and just how everything utterly collapses it shows how flawed this idea is. Though it doesn't shy away from how alluring the idea is.
So basically, get someone to START reading Atlas Shrugged and when they get mad at it tell them
"weeell, there just happens to be a certain work that explores the same subject matter only without the ridiculous ideals that objectivism is in any way a good thing. It explores how disastrous such ideals would be. But it's not a book, though considering what you have just read books can't claim much inherent authority, really."
Seems some subtly was lost on you.Generic Gamer said:
You do not have two choices... you have three.
(1) Rescue
(2) Harvest
(3) Ignore
You are not forced to fight the big daddies. In fact even if you do you can just wander off and leave the little sisters. You do not "need" the extra Adam, plenty of
"a little girl...in a girly dress"
How is that un-subtle? What else should a little girl be wearing in 1960 but a dress for a girl? And they doesn't look that adorable:
that's no image mining, that is the first in-game picture i found searching for "Little Sister Bioshock". There is nothing adorable about them, they are creepy as fuck with their lullabies about drinking blood and callign dead bodies "angels". It's less about killing a puppy, more like considering euthanasia for Cujo.
There also is no correct choice, there is a "good" or "bad" ending which is different from correct/incorrect. I mean surprise-surprise - someone who kills little girls (rather than saving them) just to become a bit more powerful - that make you bit of an evil bastard.
That's a nice idea, but how do you get that to work as a game mechanic? Particularly the part of "tainting" the player so that they actually get addicted to consuming Adam. What, do you put an addictive peggle game for each corpse to harvest Adam, I don't see this working.
Also how would this make an INTERESTING game mechanic. It becomes a grind-fest to slowly collect a tiny amount of Adam at a time from each enemy (that reswapns as you move from area to area). Far more interesting to put single huge rewards of Adam behind the single big challenge of having to defeat a Big Daddy, then make a moral choice of greed vs kindness.
That's why I PREFER Bioshock to other RPGs. You level up by distinct significant battles, rather than a steady and continuous grind.
Funny, replace the word "bees" with "bullets" and you have REAL LIFE political philosophy.Generic Gamer said:
That's how the Russian Civil War was, ideology underpinned everything but 99% of the time it was people shooting each other in the face. See a movie about the Russian Civil War would just cut all that fighting out but isn't that disingenuous to a war where millions die?
That's why movie-game comparisons are unfair.
A movie is specifically designed to give a snapshot summary of events.
A game is specifically designed to IMMERSE you in events to show you it all.
Mortality is drama. You can have a dry academic analysis of objectivism but when you put it in the context of a personal life or death struggle with fantastic weapons and abilities, it all has a lot more weight.
You can sum up Objectivism on a Post-It note, but it takes an extraordinary conflict to give it any kind of meaning. I don't see the problem with it being bees instead of bullets, realism is for conservatives. Great artists embrace the bohemian and abstract.
PS: don't cite a cracked articles. Those guys are morons, funny but stupid. They STILL think that Clint Eastwood is a vegan when that is the oldest and dumbest myth on the internet. They search to be contrarian, not insightful.
underwater/underground. it doesn't matter.Buchholz101 said:
Your explanation isn't going to make sense to a layman like your mother. It will just seem arbitrary like you are playing mad-libs with story-telling.
The thing is it's really hard to explain what the hell Rapture actually is. And even WHY it would possibly be there.
I suppose it's a bit like the TV show Lost.
You can't explain that shit, not in one go. For both Bioshock and Lost the weird circumstances are slowly revealed and explained to you so you can actually accept and kind of understand them. In fact you can only accept them because they are presented authentically, like looking out of the glass windows into the ocean you have to say to yourself:
"well, I'm definitely in an underwater city, that means there MUST be an explanation for all this"
See if there is going to be any inter-media comparisons it should be between TV Series and Games. NOT between games and Movies. Movies have a run time of 2 hours or so. Bioshock took me 30 hours on my first playthrough. That's about the same time as the first 2 seasons of Lost. That isn't even an action series and they managed to kill a lot of people in that time.
Well Bioshock defies explanation in the same way the TV series Lost defies explanation.Generic Gamer said:
I.e. if you simply describe it then it sounds ridiculous, but actually experiencing it as intended then it mostly works and has an enthralling effect.
I think the problem with parents "understanding" bioshock is that it is built on gaming conventions.
Imagine showing an adult a motion picture where they had NO CONCEPT of montage. That is for the camera to cut from one scene to another. Also no concept of the camera angle instantly changing. This seems silly but it is significant as it can be disorienting. Also other concepts like flashbacks, exposition and so many other elements of presentation we take for granted. Someone who can be highly intelligent but for some reason has NEVER watched a movie or film before would be thrown by these things.
Video games are more extreme, they depend on the gamer more than understanding but following certain conventions.
Like the idea of actually moving on to advance the story. To immerse yourself with the controls to truly use your in game character as an avatar, to know where to look to see what is happening. To move naturally, not think "hmm I better move to the left, now what is the control to move left, uuuuh".
If they cannot totally immerse themselves in the controls and interact seamlessly with the world then the experience will fail.
Yeah, except it's NOT a film or a book or any passive media.Generic Gamer said:
It is mindless to WATCH a character on film constantly explore, evade and fight for hours at a time.
It is TOTALLY different when it is YOU doing the fighting. You are challenged, you control the pace, you get the rewards, and the choice is always with you what and where to go next.
For example, the film Die Hard doesn't follow John McClain search through every inch of the building, but it does cut right to him characteristically moaning about eating a "Prehistoric Twinkie" for a bit of dialogue between him and Powell then cuts away again to something else.
It's like the difference between watching someone playing a video game and actually playing it yourself. Casino Royale is much more interesting than any of those "Live Poker" shows you might see on TV, because they condense a long drawn out game into a montage and cut to pivotal scenes. Books do the same, they do NOT describe each hand as it is played, they skim over it. Because the audience is just and observer, they just want the events described not to EXPERIENCE them.
Yeah, that happened to me before. The forums are bitches sometimes.Generic Gamer said:
I can respect your opinion of the story and whatnot, but I'll have to disagree on the characters. I can't remember any other specific examples because it's been a while since I played it, but Dr. Steinman had a number of audio diaries that showed his gradual descent from a brilliant surgeon to a spliced-up psychopath. At first it was him talking about the potential of ADAM, then him complaining he was tired of performing the same surgeries over and over again, then wanting to become the "Picasso" of surgery and turn it into an art form, until eventually he's seeing visions of Aphrodite and cutting up patients mid-operation in an attempt to make them "beautiful".
I also remember Sander Cohen being something like that, although the splicing didn't so much give him any new problems as much as it did make pre-existing ones even worse. (Case in point, the confidence issues, what with the increasingly frequent run-ins with "doubters", and the rabbit analogy, and all those mocking Songbird advertisements in his bedroom, and other stuff I can't remember now.) What's more, he had another dimension to his character simply for the fact that he was constantly living between two worlds: one a fantasy where he thinks he can still become something, and another where he's bitterly aware that he's thrown his life down the drain.
Again, there'll be other examples, but it's been a long time since I played BioShock and those are two off the top of my head. It's a lot better than what is usually encountered in media.
The problem with the "get Adam from sploicers who only attack if you start it" model is there's no REASON for Adam in that scenario. Let's compare:
BIOSHOCK AS-IS:
Why do you need Adam?
To win fights.
Why are you in fights?
Splicers are lunatics who attack on sight.
BIOSHOCK, HYPOTHETICAL:
Why do you need Adam?
To win fights.
Why are you in fights?
To get more Adam.
In the first example, if you go without Adam, it's a major uphill battle, because enemies are getting tougher and you aren't. This provides an incentive to tangle with Big Daddies, as well as making the "evil" option a good deal more tempting.
In the second, if you go without Adam, it doesn't change things that much, because you only needed it for fights, and you're skipping them anyway.
BIOSHOCK AS-IS:
Why do you need Adam?
To win fights.
Why are you in fights?
Splicers are lunatics who attack on sight.
BIOSHOCK, HYPOTHETICAL:
Why do you need Adam?
To win fights.
Why are you in fights?
To get more Adam.
In the first example, if you go without Adam, it's a major uphill battle, because enemies are getting tougher and you aren't. This provides an incentive to tangle with Big Daddies, as well as making the "evil" option a good deal more tempting.
In the second, if you go without Adam, it doesn't change things that much, because you only needed it for fights, and you're skipping them anyway.
You played Bioshock? Do you not remember the part where Ryan accuses you of being a KGB or CIA spy and then puts a huge bounty on your head of 1000-Adam? Throughout the game you are hunted for your bounty that stands until the big-bad is finally defeated.DataSnake said:
You ARE an intruder in a secret city that is in the middle of an extremely bloody civil war. You can't just walk right up to Ryan's office and shoot him in the head. He's the guvna', he has an army protecting him.
I've slowly but surely taught my parents about games as a whole. They have now more or less accepted it as a new form of storytelling rather than a toy so I guess the best way to get your parents to understand that games are more than games is to educate them about games. After lots of doing this my parents understand it. In fact now every once in a while my dad will come and watch me play a game because he's actually interested in the story of said game, most notably Red Dead Redemption. It's funny because he was actually against mature games when I first started playing as a kid.
Does the gay rape scene in The Shawshank Redemption give an accurate portrayal of the entirety of the film?
Does the use of the word "******" make To Kill a Mockingbird a heinous book?
Is Moon just about a lonely man on the moon?
In other words: remind your mum of a certain key skill she should have learnt before she left first school.
Should be easy enough from there.
Does the use of the word "******" make To Kill a Mockingbird a heinous book?
Is Moon just about a lonely man on the moon?
In other words: remind your mum of a certain key skill she should have learnt before she left first school.
Should be easy enough from there.