Why wasn't Bioshock our Watchman?

[similar.squirrel]

When it comes down to it, Bioshock is still about shooting and incinerating screaming boogeymen, albeit in a slightly more interesting setting than usual. Like 90% of games made in the past 20 or so years. Watchmen [the comic] did something hitherto unseen with an art-form. I'm not sure why The Dark Knight Returns is so significant, though.

 

[Altorin]

because it's an FPS, and FPS games have a steep learning curve to the general public that hasn't been playing games for 20 years.

It didn't cause the market to expand. It wasn't the game that everyone needed to play even if they don't play video games. Honestly, if we're looking for something in gaming that gives video games mass market appeal, it's gotta be wii sports or the DS. There's never going to be a hardcore game that MUST BE PLAYED BY EVERYONE EVEN IF THEY'RE NOT GAMERS, because those games almost by definition are challenges. And noone wants to play through the beginning of bioshock to see when it finally gets good about a quarter into it if they get motion sick just moving down a corridor.

 

[Royta]

Because Metroid Prime came first.

 

[Twilight_guy]

Comics are more readily acceptable into the art canon because they resemble many items already in the art canon such as paintings and books. Games, and 3-D art in general are not really acknowledge into the canon because they are different. Funny things is that even though games aren't part of the art canon, they are part of their own canon. The games industry parallels in many ways the art-world in how it categorizes and evaluates certain objects and how certain objects are characterized. When you realize that art is a fancy word for something that only has notoriety because we think it does, it just becomes a sad sham really.

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

OP snip

Bioshock was, deep inside, a thought-provoking, intelligent game, with great writing, great plot and the ability to ask some VERY difficult questions.

However.......it was just a shooter. As Anthony Burch of DTOID once said: "Bioshock is the [most artistic game] We have, and yet it still revolves around Burning people, Electrocuting people, and Freezing THEN electrocuting people, interspaced with occasional high-brow existentialist metaphor."

I honestly wish Bioshock was a puzzle-type game sometimes, you know. I know that sounds retarded, but imagine if you had to do ALL of your combat using just the environment (A la, Portal), or if combat was fully optional; Splicers could have just been Junkie NPCs you could interact with in many ways (like helping them to get an ADAM fix in exchange for protection), instead of being forced to just mindlessly murder them to act as filler for a good plot.

 

[j0frenzy]

For me, Bioshock was far from perfect. It was several steps in the right direction and one of a handful of games I pick out to show people how video games can cover a topic deeply and maturely, but it still has its flaw.
The biggest flaw of Bioshock was that it was still a game. It tried to incorporate many aspect of game design that broke from the narrative. For example, the research camera. It was a great tool for people who used it, but its relevance to the narrative was limited and is sort of silly to continue carrying from a plot perspective. Another, more spoiler gameplay problem I had was the moral choice (you have been warned. Skip the rest of the paragraph if you don't want Bioshock spoiled for you). Realizing half-way through the game that free will did not exist for my character only frustrated the fact that I had been expressing my will for the entire game. I felt the game could have gone much deeper if I had not been able to chose to save the little sisters, mostly because then the game could have addressed the question of whether Jack was to blame over the little sisters dying. But the game sacrificed narrative again for the sake of making a strategic decision of rewards based on moral choice.
Bioshock was a good, deep game, but I feel it had a lot of problems that still made it hard to approach if you were not already a gamer.

 

[Hristo Tzonkov]

A more important question: How does it fucking matter to us whether or not people see gaming as an art form?

It's something it deserves basically.It will also allow us as gamers to stop being ashamed to say we play games(unless it's done in an excessive manner) and will stop the media from taking shots at us.Not more than usual anyway.

Also admittedly Bioshock told a great story.My jaw literally dropped at the certain spot which I won't name due to spoilers(like anyone doesn't know what that is).But all in all I picked the game an year later and it was already fucking dated.FEAR2 for all the bitching it got felt like a more fun game to play than Bioshock if you remove story and setting.It wasn't art,man. It was a good game at it's time.

Games might never be appreciated as art. I'm more glad that other art forms don't evolve as games.Even the transition to the sequel usually delivers a more solid gaming experience which a movie sequel for an example can't do.

 

[EvanJO]

Who the hell cares if "gaming is an art form" blah blah blah.

Lady Gaga is considered to be an "artist." I'm pretty sure the term has been so raped and destroyed that it no longer holds any water.

A more important question: How does it fucking matter to us whether or not people see gaming as an art form?

It's something it deserves basically.It will also allow us as gamers to stop being ashamed to say we play games(unless it's done in an excessive manner) and will stop the media from taking shots at us.Not more than usual anyway.

Oh, no, the media takes shots at the gaming industry.

Grow up, who cares. Besides, I can't think of any games that would be considered "art" anyways, even great storytelling isn't an "art."

 

[The Youth Counselor]

Watchman (and to a lesser degree the Dark Night Returns) was the turning point for comics, finally they were accepted as an ART FORM by the general public. Ok, comic books themselves quickly crashed within a decade because of an uncontrolled speculator market and the moving away of comic books from grochery stores to comic book stores (leaving the general public unable to easily get the things) and continutity made it impossible for them to get into comic books if they even got one. However, through thick and thin, Watchmen has itself endured, being the only comic book to land on Time's best books of the century for it's deep plot, great writing, and the deconstruction of the entire superhero genre.

Bioshock also was a great game, lauded with it's deep plot, great writing, and small deconstruction of the entire FPS genre. It did gain tons of awards and is beloved beyond reason by people that played it, it never reached out and convinced everybody that this was an art form. Why? It seamed the time was right, coming out in the year everybody from your little sister to your grandmother got themselves a Wii, and was easily the biggest year in gaming history. Yet, here we are, waiting with eagerness and dread over the Supreme Court's ruling on the California gaming law. Why didn't it change the industry?

Besides the Wii, the biggest change in the industry that came out of 2007 was CoD 4. Bioshock in comparison was barely a blip on the radar. So, I ask you my fellow Escapists, why wasn't Bioshock our Watchman?

TL;DR version:Bioshock isn't our Watchmen or Citizen Kane because those lauded examples of their medium transcended the attention of their niche audiences and did things in their medium that couldn't have been done before in another format.

When Watchmen came out in 1985 along with The Dark Knight Returns [footnote]Seriously your typos are killing us. If you're going to bring up works of art in a debate get their names right.[/footnote] and Maus, it was a watershed moment. Serious comics had been done before but these were three comics whose impact rose above their niche audience and brought critical praise outside of their bubble by "serious publications." They won awards that no comic had ever won before and suddenly comics were serious discussion in literature classes.

They also introduced storytelling techniques that could not be paralleled in another medium. Watchmen's fourth chapter Watchmaker presented Dr. Manhattan's life story in a way where every moment was simultaneous and could be read in any such way: mirroring how time is interpreted by him and how every panel exists simultaneously. Maus made a metaphor for racial and national identity by portrayal members of the different nations as different animals, as a serious parody on the kid friendly cartoons that Disney made himself famous for. When they hid their cultural identities, they wore masks of another animal. Both had intermissions of metafiction or stories within stories where comics were read inside the comics that tied into the plot. This can't be replicated with movies or games.[footnote] Zach Snyder couldn't possibly have done that chapter any justice. But he could've tried with the use of Mondorian split screens instead of telling it completely linearly. And as for the storytelling techniques in Maus, that's one of the reasons why Art Spiegelman never accepted any adaptations of his work.[/footnote]

Bioshock was a good game with great story, but it didn't do anything new nor did it transcend its medium. (Although I argue that it has one of the most innovative uses of a silent protagonist ever and this really can't be done in a movie.) There were games with just as good story and gameplay before. It came out in a great year with many other memorable peers, [footnote]I actually think of the 2007 releases Call of Duty 4 and Portal were more revolutionary. COD4 took the timed honored Black Mesa Commute [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackMesaCommute] and pushed it's impact to two other levels. It made player death not a boring chore [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/8753-Extra-Punctuation-Death-in-Videogames], but a storytelling device (made even more effective by the first person perspective). Portal used the idea of single-player isolation, game mechanic tutorials, and the chapter selection screens as a story telling device.[/footnote]

 

[KafkaOffTheBeach]

Just putting this out there, but videogames will never have a "Watchmen" in the same way that comics/graphic novels/whateveryouwanttocallitwithoutsoundinglikeyouaretalkingdowntoavalidartisticmedium-s will never have their "Citizen Kane" or in the way that cinema will never have its "Hundred Years of Solitude".
It just doesn't work that way.
When a game comes out that completely ass-fucks the medium - then we will have whatever it is we will have, the only problem is in actually noticing, well....what we have.
Case and point - those in the thread laying the biblical smaketh down on Bioshock and CoD4 while mentioning Deus Ex, System Shock 2 et al. Bioshock is an extraordinary achievement in storytelling that surpasses its near identical spiritual predecessor because of one thing: atmosphere. Rapture feels incredible, yet somehow possible, from the leaks to the audio logs, the attire of the splicers, the relatively benign presence of the Big Daddies and their eerily miniature charges....not to mention the truly incredible audio. Yeah, you can wank about it all you like with wonderful phrases such as "multi-layered meta-narrative", but Bioshock lives and dies in its setting.
Also, CoD4 proved to us that war shooters could be something so much more. It proved to us that having strong, addictive multiplayer did not mean that you had to sacrifice real emotion and tension in a story set, for once, in a reality that the target audience could identify as their own.
That is, of course, before it became the most profitable franchise of anything ever - spawning shovelware like I spawn bad similes.

We miss quite a lot of truly incredible stuff in this medium, which is quite a shame, really...
Take Crysis. Fucking silly story. Average characters. Yet, on a good rig, you can witness one of the greatest pieces of virtual architecture ever made.

Anyway, on topic, the closest we have come to a true 'breakthrough' game has probably been Flower. Flower makes us look at the fledgling medium and say "back the fuck up...where is the story, what am I playing as, why am I doing this?" It drip feeds us not what we need to do, but what we could do...in a chilled out, kinda stoned way, combined with a slow reveal of a pretty solid narrative and one of the most interesting concepts of the 'player character' ever seen in gaming.
Also something, something Braid king of all postmodern meta narratives that relies on everything in the game to tell a story that the main character doesn't want to tell himself - let alone tell a stranger something something too fucking tired too fucking hungry, you get the point though, yes? Nothing has fully broken the medium in the way that Watchmen or Citizen Kane or Ulysses or even The Sopranos have all respectively done, and this is probably because of the nature of games as an interactive medium - everything is at the mercy of the player, how can the developer tell a story that they, really, have no control over without taking away what makes games, games - that interactivity?

N.B - Fucking hell this is an unnecessarily long and slightly retarded post.

 

[kingkongmfg]

I think that this could be proven by saying that Watchmen only became popular after it was turned into a movie (a more accepted form of media).

Might wanna rephrase that before pissing off a lot of Watchmen fans, since it's one of the most popular story arcs in comics and has been since long before the mediocre adaptation. While maybe a few more people may have read it after the film, most read it before. As for Bioshock, no, just no. Games as an art form can be represented by many better and more artistically done games, such as Shadows of the Colossus(Artistically done, deliberately paced), Psychonauts(Innovative story, rich and vibrant imagery), or even looking forward towards what looks to be an amazingly rich and complex world in ES5:Skyrim with an amazing story(if its predecessors are an indication), or Brink with it's constantly changing mission structure and massive customization, extreme art style and awesomely detailed world. Games are art whether or not mainstream culture recognizes it, so it doesn't really matter, but just like any art, if you want it noticed, pick a better piece.

 

[EvanJO]

The movie was terrible. We are talking about the awesomeness that is Watchmen [http://www.amazon.com/Watchmen-Alan-Moore/dp/0930289234].

Sorry, I never read the source material, I only saw the movie on a whim and didn't like it. I'm not really into comics, but if I ever happen on a copy I'll be sure to read it.

Comics are awful as a general rule but Watchmen was actually a good read.

I think that this could be proven by saying that Watchmen only became popular after it was turned into a movie (a more accepted form of media).

Might wanna rephrase that before pissing off a lot of Watchmen fans, since it's one of the most popular story arcs in comics and has been since long before the mediocre adaptation. While maybe a few more people may have read it after the film, most read it before. As for Bioshock, no, just no. Games as an art form can be represented by many better and more artistically done games, such as Shadows of the Colossus(Artistically done, deliberately paced), Psychonauts(Innovative story, rich and vibrant imagery), or even looking forward towards what looks to be an amazingly rich and complex world in ES5:Skyrim with an amazing story(if its predecessors are an indication), or Brink with it's constantly changing mission structure and massive customization, extreme art style and awesomely detailed world. Games are art whether or not mainstream culture recognizes it, so it doesn't really matter, but just like any art, if you want it noticed, pick a better piece.

If Shadow of the Colossus is the posterchild for gaming as an art form then I want nothing to do with the medium anymore.

 

[omegawyrm]

So large amounts of the Escapist community do not think that Bioshock or either version of Watchmen were good?

Well I guess my illusion of dealing with a community of fans and enthusiasts has finally been destroyed. I will no longer be surprised that the community of a supposedly nerdy hobby hates the best examples of the things they supposedly enjoy.

 

[Captain Pirate]

Bioshock is a great game made by a great studio. I'm glad so many people come together on this.

But it's no Watchmen.

This.

Quite simply put, it's brilliant, but not as brilliant.
For example, on a philosophical level, Bioshock had a neat concept of what humanity could achieve with no ethical boundaries or laws. It just showed how destructive mankind is.

Watchmen, however, involved more than one point, such as (On top of mankind's self-destructiveness) time, and how it's all simultaneous: It's all happening at once, which is why Dr. Manhatten can see into everyone's future and past at the same time. Because it's all happened/happening.
There is also the whole thing about:

Spoiler: Watchmen spoilerz

Ozymandias, and his idea on world peace, and how it was implemented. His plan questions morals and ethics in seeing how far man should go to achieve peace: Is it truly great to kill millions, to save billions? Would he, on a spiritual level, go to hell for the mass murder, or heaven for the infinitely greater good of a unified, peaceful world?

Also, Bioshock was mainly great because it was a fun game. Meaning, as great as it actually was, nearly all blockbuster games are fun to play, making Bioshock a little obsolete in that area. You could go back to playing it to collect achievements, see how fast you can kill a Big Daddy, etc. Watchmen has no[/n] other way of keeping you turning the page bar how interesting and encapturing it was. Which I think is the greater achievement.

So yeah, in closing both are fantastic, but Watchmen's just.. better.
Just my opinion, anyway.

 

[Trolldor]

Bioshock told the best story for a while... but not ever.

The problem is that videogames are much harder to learn just reading comics.

Actually not. A comic like Watchmen is infinitely more complex then any game ever released because it relies on all sorts of bloody subtleties, from font choice, to accentuation, to colour, to even the shape of the characters, to the scenery and background, to 'symbolism'. Everything a book uses, and everything a painting uses, at the same time.

Bioshock came close, very close, though.

And also, games are already art. They evoke emotion, quite deliberately and in a fashion not to dissimilar to movies. The interactivity just lets them take unique approaches to old methods.
Anyone who says otherwise is speaking out their arse.

 

[purf]

Man, I really must have played, despised, quit and desinstalled a different game called Bioshock.

 

[Mr Somewhere]

I very much doubt comics are fully accepted, yet. It is generally a more open medium now. But, what Watchmen did was draw interest to the medium, so as a result we're seeing a lot of great works these days, thanks to Alan Moore's influence.
I think the same could really be said for Bioshock and many other games, so hopefully down the line we'll see greater works inspired by Bioshock or such, but mainstream acceptance is a long ways away.