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GREAT MOMENTS IN GAMING: THE TWIST IN BIOSHOCK (2007)

16/9/2016

17 Comments

 
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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. 
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?
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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.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
GREAT MOMENTS IN GAMING: THE AMPHITHEATRE IN TOMB RAIDER (1996)​
A TRIBUTE TO THE PENNY FALLS
BLOCK PARTY 2016: HERE'S WHAT'S HAPPENING
17 Comments
snids
16/9/2016 12:50:34 pm

I never quite understood this twist.
I was going to play through the game anyway. I had no other way of gathering the information needed to progress through the game other than listening to the Irish bloke so the revelation just felt a bit hollow to me.

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combat_honey
16/9/2016 03:54:50 pm

I don't think the point is that Atlas was actually controlling the player. Atlas was controlling Jack (the player character), which is a metaphor for how linear games like Bioshock 'control' the player by presenting them with an extremely narrow range of options.

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Professor Toblerone
16/9/2016 09:12:18 pm

The twist didn't do a lot for me either. I get where it's coming from, but it only worked for me in the sense of being 'clever, clever'. Narratively, it didn't work because there was never any sense of Jack (as the player's avatar) having free will - he's doing what I tell him to do, and I'm doing what the game allows me to do. After the twist occurs, the player remains stuck on the predestined path, while the character is free. When the game ended with a rote boss battle, it felt like the game was saying "Look at me! I'm a cliched videogame and you're an idiot!".

Although it would be somewhat missing the point, I always thought it would work better on film, where you might have felt some empathy for Jack. As it is, it's all oddly discordant and unsatisfying.

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Aaron345
13/10/2016 04:43:29 am

IMO the twist is best appreciated as a small part of the overall Rapture/Ryan/Fontaine narrative, and not as a "big twist" about Jack himself. When it comes down to it, Jack isn't the main character of this story. He isn't the hero. He's equivalent to an archaeologist digging up a city that is long since destroyed. The main characters are Ryan and Fontaine, and Jack's manipulation (and eventual killing of Ryan) is nothing more than the climax of the Fontaine/Ryan rivalry. In the end, you aren't just a pawn, but a bit-part in a story that was almost over when you arrived. Even if Jack had never existed, either Ryan or Fontaine (or both) would have eventually wound up dead. Though it's much more poetic that it was Ryan's own son who ended up doing Fontaine's dirty work.

Rory
16/9/2016 01:06:12 pm

I particularly liked how Portal deployed a similar tactic, where you effectively have to break the rules of the game imposed on you to progress, and you get a peek behind the curtain to see the mechanics of the tasks you were (not exactly willingly) performing.

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Retro Resolution link
16/9/2016 01:19:25 pm

Absolutely splendid article Mr. Biffo - it is crying out to be expanded. Please, sir, can I have some more?

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T-Wigs
16/9/2016 03:02:49 pm

I remember absolutely loving this twist. In my excitement I texted a friend, who had just finished the game the weekend before. He replied asking what the hell I was talking about, obviously didn't have as much an impact on him. He did actually complete the whole game from start to finish in that one weekend so probably didn't have time to notice!

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Panda
16/9/2016 03:06:00 pm

I enjoyed the twist but I also thought Infinite's was done very well. I thought it was just going to be "it's a parallel world to Rapture's" which was obvious from the trailers and previews but it was more than that. The gameplay didn't impress me quite as much, mind.

I haven't played it but based on the end of your article, The Stanley Parable might be the sort of thing you'd want to check out if you haven't already.

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Mrtankthreat
16/9/2016 04:29:49 pm

The twist wasn't as good but I preferred Unbreakable to The Sixth Sense. The best film twists I've seen were in the original Saw, Dead Mans Curve and of course the Chubby Checker biopic.

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Picston Shottle
16/9/2016 06:21:05 pm

I liked the bit in the Bioshock games where I got to shoot splicers in the face.

Yeah...I'm shallow. I couldn't really care less about the story and narrative arcs; I play games to pretty much switch off my brain - running around mindlessly is what I like about games. I like the mechanics and the gameplay. But the story...nah. I've put countless hours into the Fallout games, and the Elder Scrolls games, and Destiny, and I haven't a clue what the stories are, other than some bloke who likes to shout at dragons, another bloke who lost his kid, and some other blokes who're annoyed at aliens for being real bad guys. What I like about all of these games, though, is that I can just run around and do the shoots. And find stuff in containers. Occasionally I'll scratch my head when a puzzle comes along. And that's enough for me. For stories I've got books, Netflix and HBO, and they tend to do it better than games. At least I remember the story they are telling.

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Kelvin Green link
17/9/2016 12:12:28 am

It's not a twist as such but I've always liked the way that Silent Hill 2 explains away the weird geography and unrealistic gamey stuff endemic to the survival horror genre. Trials and puzzles and impossible staircases are jarring when a game is presenting a world that's supposed to be realistic but if it's presenting what is (SPOILER) more or less purgatory, then that kind of stuff fits right in.

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Toaster
17/9/2016 02:19:24 pm

I didn't really like the twist. The fact that a 1940s American gangster can do a flawless Irish accent for hours and hours just beggared belief. In reality it's two different voice actors. Fontaine is an American actor, Atlas is an Irish actor.

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Aaron345
13/10/2016 04:36:08 am

It wasn't flawless though. He uses American phrases that an Irishman wouldn't use, and the accent occasionally slips every now and then.

Fontaine isn't a gangster. He's a professional conman, and the irony is that Rapture was built to house the "best of the best" talents of the world, and Fontaine ended up being "the best of the best" conman. Him pretending to be an Irishman for a few months is far more believable than his stint as a "chinaman for six months".

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Jenuall
18/9/2016 05:37:02 pm

It was quite a well put together twist, and the room shortly before the Ryan confrontation that actually reveals the fact that the player had been manipulated is a far better moment than the actual cutscene as it is still all achieved by the player rather than taking control away from them to Make A Point.

However, the fact that it was almost an exact repeat of the same trick played in System Shock 2 seriously reduced the impact. That and the fact that SS2 is simply a much better game didn't help either.

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Tee Aitch
18/9/2016 10:59:38 pm

You spelled sleight correctamundaly.

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Prox
19/9/2016 12:03:08 pm

I'd say Spec Ops: The Line did a twist well.

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Dave
19/9/2016 10:34:40 pm

This twist was probably one of the greatest in any game and i totally agree with Biff on this one.on par with the first time watch Fight Club.

Spent a good while thinking if any game ive played past and present has had similar effect and i genuinely haven't come up with anything.

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