Irrational Games A character called the Motorized Patriot.Through a combination of obsessive hard work, an affable personality and marketing savvy, Ken Levine has become one of the most beloved creators of narratively fulfilling, big-budget video games. Not only do his BioShock games sell well (the first sold over five million copies), but they are also taught in colleges and parsed in the same way as, say, David Lynch’s film “Mulholland Drive†was analyzed by critics.
Gore Verbinski tried to bring the horror-themed BioShock (2007) to the big screen. But either because of budgetary constraints or creative disputes, the film was never made. It would not have been an easy movie to make. Within the 15 hours of BioShock story are layers of plot with twists and turns in a tale influenced by Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.†Though the game is its own movie, Mr. Levine would like to tackle the film script. He did, after all, begin his career as a screenwriter.
With the release this week of BioShock Infinite â€" among the most anticipated new games of 2013 â€" Mr. Levine spoke from the offices of his studio in Quincy, Mass., about his influences and the game. Following are edited excerpts from that conversation.
So what is a BioShock game
The most important thing is that it takes place in a world that is in a fantastical, exaggerated setting. It’s incredibly detailed, but also feels familiar and believable even though it’s crazy â€" a city in the ocean or a city in the sky.
But unlike traditional narrative, there’s something exclusive to video games.
The sense of player agency. You have this tool set. A player can express himself in the game in a way that’s different than another player can. You can solve the problems in the game in your own way.
Ken Levine brought his interest in pop culture and American history to BioShock Infinite.You’ve overseen the making of a stunning, floating world called Columbia. Do you want people to stand back and check things out as opposed to rushing through and shooting
You want them to check it out. But we work really hard to wear down the audience’s ability to even process. If players are immersed enough, they stop treating it as a piece of artifice and just start experiencing it.
Playing makes you feel as if you’re in an amusement park’s haunted house or at the midway.
I was always fascinated by amusement parks. The highlight of my year was when the fair came to town. I thought the guys who ran the rides had the best jobs imaginable, that they must be important figures in the fabric of society to be able to do this awesome thing.
Fans might find it hard to imagine that your Mature-rated games are influenced by Disney’s G-rated rides.
The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean tell you an experiential but unspecific story. It’s crude and rough, but there’s amazing artistry there, especially the Haunted Mansion. Those rides serve as prototypes for what we do. They were semi-interactive in the sense that you had control over where you looked. And your experience might be different from that of the person sitting next to you. There’s more to see than you could possibly take in.
Your character Elizabeth is a young woman kidnapped and trapped in a tower. She’s like an excited child after she’s freed by the somewhat cynical Booker. As seen through her eyes, Columbia is so bright and new. You need to give people a distinct, precise feeling about who Elizabeth and Booker are.
And if we don’t do that, we really fail. Unlike a lot of video games and even our games, it’s not a story of events; it’s about characters, and if you don’t buy into their stories, there is no game.
You’ve done voluminous research. Where does “The Devil in the White City†by Erik Larson come in
“The Devil in the White City†was a starting point for getting into the period. Our game starts about 20 years before that book begins. The bookends to that period to me are the World’s Fair and World War I.
It’s also an idealized environment, all built at one time. The World’s Fair was all fake, right But it allowed us to see a pure city. Both Rapture (the underwater city in BioShock) and Columbia were built in a very short period of time with a similar controlled aesthetic.
You have a cult of personality surrounding Comstock, a controlling, racist, religious fanatic. When you see a video of Comstock on a screen that must be stories tall, it’s so imposing like a â€"
Wizard of Oz kind of thing. Comstock believes he has all the answers. He believes he’s receiving God’s prophecies, and you can tell from the game that there’s a poster of a false shepherd coming to the city with a brand on his hand. And he’s right. That’s you and there you come! The question is, is he a prophetic figure and what does that mean for you in the context of this game
I don’t want this to sound too simplistic. But how is Columbia like what we are in the United States today
We’re not polemicizing about particular political scenes. I had some relatives who were upset. They thought the game was sort of an attack on the Tea Party. If you look at the Tea Party and you go back in history, you can see extreme versions like the John Birch Society and the No-Nothings, the Nativist Movement. And leftist movements are not new, either. They’re old as the hills â€" because the conflict is ancient: “I have it. You don’t. I want to keep it. And you want it.†Or “I earned it. No, you didn’t.â€
That conflict is to some degree more salient than the Randian one in Rapture. That’s a moral argument rather than a natural rights argument. There is a good for society in selfishness and I use the term as she used it, as a positive thing.
You spent over four years on the game. What was cut
The cutting-room floor is deep. It’s full of lots of strips of film, so to speak. We generally find our way by making mistakes.
As an artist, do you feel it’s finished
Trust me, I can work on this game for a hundred years and still be tweaking. You have to let it go. You can’t hide behind the idea that it’s not done.
