BioShock Infinite just got unlocked on Steam, so I dropped everything and started playing it. After five minutes, I had to quit because the urge to write this post was stronger than the will to continue the adventure.
Dead Space art director Ian Milham delivered a great talk about – among other things – the magic of a game opening. He talks about how we formulate our opinion on a game in the first five to ten minutes, and how later on we tend to ignore the stuff that does not support our opinion, and exaggerate the importance of the stuff that does.
The funniest anecdote was about the time Ian asked the artists to add a few “perfectly round” objects on a table in the intro cinematic, just to trick the players into thinking that a game with such high visual quality assets must be the hottest thing ever. It worked.
Game openings are extremely important.
BioShock Infinite is also extremely important. It’s been one of the most anticipated games ever, its Metacritic score is 110%, and it’s a game we’re all going to be talking about for years.
What happens when a game designer pays attention to an extremely important opening to an extremely important game?
Here’s the first five minutes of the game. Don’t worry, no big spoilers, really, nothing will surprise you here:
Look, I don’t want to beat around the bush, so let me just say it and get it out of the way: BioShock Infinite does a lot of things in the opening I do not agree with. And I want to analyse it all and discover the reasons. But if you are looking for a drama, please look elsewhere. Even though I am using BioShock Infinite as an example, this post is not really about this particular game. It’s about a lot of games, including every single one I’ve done so far.
Anyway, here goes…
I am not a big fan of confusing openings in anything: games, movies, books. A famous writer – was it Lem? King? – once said that if you don’t understand what’s going on on the first page, then it’s not worth reading to the second one. That’s not always true, but most of the time I tend to agree with this statement.
BioShock Infinite’s opening is confusing. I cannot spoil it for you, because I have no idea what was going on. There was this guy, weird things in the lighthouse, and then I was in Columbia.
However, the dislike for confusing openings is obviously a highly subjective thing. I am sure that there are people out there who love this kind of a puzzle, and it is quite possible – or rather: certain – that I will figure this thing out myself sooner or later, and that I will then understand why the opening couldn’t have been any different.
So let’s not hold it against the game, and let’s move on to the first moment when I started to lose the immersion and the sense of presence.
In the opening scene, these two characters are talking to each other and, as you can see, the guy is not happy with the fact that the woman is not rowing with him.
But how could she? There’s only one pair of oars.
“I’m sure I am not seeing something. Or maybe he wanted her to take over,” I mutter to myself, and continue with the game.
The boat arrives at the destination. There is a first-person animation of me leaving the boat and getting on the pier. It ends with me looking at the top of the nearby lighthouse for no reason whatsoever.
“Oh, it’s one of those games,” I think. The thing is, I start to feel a little suffocated. I wasn’t given a chance to discover the lighthouse on my own. The designers felt like they had to show it to me, even at the cost of an awkward and unnatural ending to the ‘getting onto the pier’ animation.
But hey, maybe that’s just me. I have done the same trick so many times in my games that I basically notice it every single time when someone else does it. “Maybe players don’t see things in the same way, and maybe they love the fact that someone grabbed their head and twisted it towards the Important Part of the Environment”.
There is nothing too attractive on the pier except for this:
“Why are you doing this to me, game?” I ask, because how can I believe that people are leaving money – and in a form of big shiny coins, no less – in places like that? “Why, game? Why do you keep reminding me you’re just a game?”
Of course, I collect the coins.
Then I approach the lighthouse. There is a note on the wall, and a prompt to knock on the door. I look to the left. It seems like there is a path around the lighthouse. I decide to see if maybe there are any coins waiting to be found.
“I beg you, game, please do not reward me for not doing the right thing and for doing the silly thing of playing the game instead of behaving like I am in a different world”.
BioShock Infinite's first moments
BioShock Infinite Revealed
BioShock Infinite gallery
