M. Night Shyamalan knows how hard it can be to follow-up a twist.
The poor guy spent most of the last 20-odd years failing to live up to the revelation in the third act of The Sixth Sense that Bruce Willis is <SPOILERS> a dog.
Sadly, the same thing happened to the Bioshock series - Bioshock 2 and Bioshock Infinite arrive with the expectation that there would be some sort of twist. And there sort of was in the latter, but - much as there were lacklustre twists in M.Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable and The Village - it was nowhere near the level of bona-fide, rubber-limbed, genius that the original Bioshock displayed.
Rather than surprise players with a logical curveball that works on several levels simultaneously, Infinite drags its twist in from left-field, with some guff about parallel universes. It's always a cool sci-fi sort of idea, and rendered in Infinite in a visually engaging way, but it pales next to the way its predecessor pulled the rug out from beneath its players.
Prepare for spoilers.
The poor guy spent most of the last 20-odd years failing to live up to the revelation in the third act of The Sixth Sense that Bruce Willis is <SPOILERS> a dog.
Sadly, the same thing happened to the Bioshock series - Bioshock 2 and Bioshock Infinite arrive with the expectation that there would be some sort of twist. And there sort of was in the latter, but - much as there were lacklustre twists in M.Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable and The Village - it was nowhere near the level of bona-fide, rubber-limbed, genius that the original Bioshock displayed.
Rather than surprise players with a logical curveball that works on several levels simultaneously, Infinite drags its twist in from left-field, with some guff about parallel universes. It's always a cool sci-fi sort of idea, and rendered in Infinite in a visually engaging way, but it pales next to the way its predecessor pulled the rug out from beneath its players.
Prepare for spoilers.
KEN YOU DIG IT?
Bioshock creator Ken Levine has admitted that Bioshock's gameplay borrowed heavily from the seminal System Shock - Levine and his team created System Shock 2 - but its setting was an underwater dystopia, inspired by the likes of George Orwell and Ayn Rand. In and of itself the setting was evocative and unsettling. It was a utopian ideal which had decayed and fallen through the foibles of its inhabitants.
All of that was slick enough to secure the game a place in the hall of fame, but its third-act twist elevated it to a work of art. That's what narrative twists do: they take everything that has gone before, and shine new light upon it. They reflect backwards through the story, and make everything better. We love them in the same way we love magic tricks.
In the case of Bioshock, it's the revelation that your one ally in Rapture - a disembodied voice over your radio - has been using you all along, with the subliminal phrase "Would you kindly". You realise in a moment that the game has been playing you. Why would a game lie to you? It has never happened before. Of course you're going to do what the game asks, because it's a game, right?
It opens up questions about free will, and the inherently linear nature of video games themselves. Much as you're then able to go back through Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, playing through Bioshock a second time reveals that the clues are there all along - "Would you kindly" is seeded from almost the very start. You believe you're doing your own bidding, when in reality you're being controlled.
"A man chooses, and a slave obeys" the game damns you with. And ultimately, that's all we are as players: slaves to the rules of the game. Until the rise of huge open worlds, we were always on rails, the illusion of free will, of a go-anywhere/do-anything universe, was just that: there were always invisible doors in video games. We were always being funnelled through them. A grand illusion.
And then when you reflect that back at real life, at the world, the effect is genuinely chilling. How much free will do any of us have? Is society just one massive work of sleight-of-hand?
Bioshock creator Ken Levine has admitted that Bioshock's gameplay borrowed heavily from the seminal System Shock - Levine and his team created System Shock 2 - but its setting was an underwater dystopia, inspired by the likes of George Orwell and Ayn Rand. In and of itself the setting was evocative and unsettling. It was a utopian ideal which had decayed and fallen through the foibles of its inhabitants.
All of that was slick enough to secure the game a place in the hall of fame, but its third-act twist elevated it to a work of art. That's what narrative twists do: they take everything that has gone before, and shine new light upon it. They reflect backwards through the story, and make everything better. We love them in the same way we love magic tricks.
In the case of Bioshock, it's the revelation that your one ally in Rapture - a disembodied voice over your radio - has been using you all along, with the subliminal phrase "Would you kindly". You realise in a moment that the game has been playing you. Why would a game lie to you? It has never happened before. Of course you're going to do what the game asks, because it's a game, right?
It opens up questions about free will, and the inherently linear nature of video games themselves. Much as you're then able to go back through Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, playing through Bioshock a second time reveals that the clues are there all along - "Would you kindly" is seeded from almost the very start. You believe you're doing your own bidding, when in reality you're being controlled.
"A man chooses, and a slave obeys" the game damns you with. And ultimately, that's all we are as players: slaves to the rules of the game. Until the rise of huge open worlds, we were always on rails, the illusion of free will, of a go-anywhere/do-anything universe, was just that: there were always invisible doors in video games. We were always being funnelled through them. A grand illusion.
And then when you reflect that back at real life, at the world, the effect is genuinely chilling. How much free will do any of us have? Is society just one massive work of sleight-of-hand?
NO SUCCESS
Other games have tried to repeat the success of Bioshock's twist.
The Order, Modern Warfare 2, Heavy Rain... none have really come close, failing to get beyond the level of the most obvious sort of Hollywood cliche.
Only the underrated Spec Ops: The Line gets near to the meta subtext of what Levine and his team achieved - staying true to the context of the game, while also asking bigger questions about the nature of interactive storytelling, and what it is to be human.
And that's also why Bioshock's twist really works - because it can only be achieved within a video game.
It isn't trying to repeat the tricks you see in novels, or movies. It's a twist which doesn't just affect the player's character - but the player themselves. That's what's so clever about it - it reaches out of the screen, and messes directly with our heads.
Other games have tried to repeat the success of Bioshock's twist.
The Order, Modern Warfare 2, Heavy Rain... none have really come close, failing to get beyond the level of the most obvious sort of Hollywood cliche.
Only the underrated Spec Ops: The Line gets near to the meta subtext of what Levine and his team achieved - staying true to the context of the game, while also asking bigger questions about the nature of interactive storytelling, and what it is to be human.
And that's also why Bioshock's twist really works - because it can only be achieved within a video game.
It isn't trying to repeat the tricks you see in novels, or movies. It's a twist which doesn't just affect the player's character - but the player themselves. That's what's so clever about it - it reaches out of the screen, and messes directly with our heads.
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