Stefan Schevelier
I’m standing in a poorly lit room. Across the room stands a large desk, covered with notes. A corkboard fills the wall, also covered with notes. Bloody letters run across the center. “Would you kindly” they read…
I am about to enter Andrew Ryan’s office, the office of a man who controls an entire city on the bottom of the ocean. After my plane crashed I found a hidden society where market capitalism reigns supreme, where I’ve used technology to alter my own genetic code, and where I’ve battled the city’s deranged citizens. I am about to step into the office of the man who has tried to kill me from the moment I arrived and who, as I’ve just discovered, is my father.
“In the end, what separates a man from a slave?” he asks me as I enter. “A man chooses… A slave obeys!” he answers. I am here because I want to kill this man, but my controller does not respond and my sense of immersion is gone. The illusion of freedom shatters, I have no choice in this matter. I am but a slave. “A man chooses… A slave obeys!” he repeats, and—proving that he’s a man and I’m but a slave—he orders me to kill him. Again my controller does not respond as I beat his head in. Andrew Ryan chooses his own death and is therefore a man, while I remain but a slave.
There is something very unsettling about this scene the first time you play it. In part, this has to do with the fact that you watch yourself bash Andrew Ryan’s head in with a golf club, but there’s more to it than that. It is also unsettling because it allows you to experience what it is like to lose your sense of freedom. Up until that point in the story, the player feels as if the story is his or her own. Note how often I used the word “I” to make the story mine. It would be pointless to refer to the protagonist with his name “Jack,” as if I could be separated from the protagonist of BioShock’s tale. There is no such difference when I’m completely immersed in Rapture. For all intents and purposes, BioShock feels as if it is my own story, it feels as if I experience the story of this man who travels to the bottom of the ocean. In every sense of the word, it feels as if I really am in Rapture. This explains why it is all the more shocking when the controller suddenly does not respond. My sense of immersion is shattered and I find myself playing a game, on a couch, behind a screen. When I no longer control the actions on screen, the game’s story is no longer mine, but returns to being Jack’s story. This rupture reveals a fundamental aspect of our experience; namely, that my actions have a sense of mineness.
Our experience of daily life is filled with—or really is only possible through—characteristics such as mineness. Phenomenology is a school of philosophy that is interested in these peculiar characteristics of experience. For example, it is interested in how experience always has a time and a place, how it is always experienced by a body, and how it is always an experience of something. In short, phenomenology is the study of the world as it appears to us.
I’ll assume that you’ve played BioShock or BioShock Infinite at least once. Now, suppose you want to tell someone what it was like to play those games—not just that you had a good time playing them, but really tell them what it is like. Imagine, if you will, that you are to review the game for a website or magazine.
You could start with the game’s technical details, since every game is made using specific software, requires certain hardware to run, uses textures of a certain resolution, has character models with a specific polygon count, and so on. These technical details are interesting, but mostly relevant for the visual aspect of the video game and they don’t tell you much about what it is like to play the game.
You could also enlist the help of science. For example, you could stick someone in a brain scanner and let him or her play the game, while you measure brain activity. Although that would certainly be interesting, it still wouldn’t tell you much about that person’s actual experience. In a famous paper, contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that science is rather useless when it comes to describing experiences.1 He used the following example to explain why. Suppose you know everything there is to know about a bat’s use of echolocation: you’ve read every book on the subject and have studied bats extensively. Would that give you any idea of what it is like for the bat actually to use echolocation? No, it wouldn’t. It would be like trying to describe color to a blind person. Similarly, if you knew everything there is to know about a person’s state while playing BioShock—if you could describe the exact neurons firing, the synapses responding, and so on—you still wouldn’t know what it is like to play BioShock, and that’s precisely what phenomenology is interested in.
What does phenomenology have to offer that science cannot? Phenomenology is well suited to dealing with problems that are subjective, have to do with our experience of the world around us, with our experience of ourselves, and with things that are only available to us through introspection. So, science might explain how to build a city on the ocean floor, but it would have a difficult time explaining what it feels like to lose your sense of mineness when you play BioShock.
A scientist hides in his laboratory, a poet retreats into the woods, and a writer resorts to cigarettes and alcohol. What is the phenomenologist’s method? Some philosophers would argue that there are a great number of phenomenological methods, but I think they basically fall into two categories:
Let’s start with Merleau-Ponty’s description of the art of painting. He gives two accounts of what a painter does when he paints, for example, a young woman like Elizabeth.3 On the first account, called naturalism, the artist understands the object of his painting, in this case Elizabeth. He must comprehend the way her muscles move beneath her skin, the properties and texture of her dress, and the characteristics of the light falling on her skin through the open window. This knowledge serves to produce the most precise representation of the painted object. On the second account, the phenomenological one, the artist aims to do something else entirely. Instead of focusing on the object of his painting, he pays attention to his own subjective experience. He notices how his eyes are focused on Elizabeth’s eyes, on the faint light that catches some of her hair, and he notices how he gets nervous as she moves around, unable to sit still for the duration of the session. His aim isn’t to represent her eyes very accurately, to catch precisely the right tone of the light, or her movements. Instead, the artist aims to capture his experience of the scene in his painting and, through the painting, tries to reproduce his focus and anxiety in whoever looks at the painting.
Just as Merleau-Ponty distinguishes two types of painters, we can distinguish two types of film directors. Analogous to naturalism in painting, a filmmaker can aim simply to capture a scene objectively. Just as the painter has his paintbrush, the director has a camera that allows her to capture an image of a particular object. What is more, the camera allows the director to encapsulate movement, change, and transformation. This allows her to portray a whole new dimension of her subjective experience. Whereas the painter has only one painting to capture his experience, the film director has 24 frames per second to do so. Not only is she now able to illustrate the way she focuses on Elizabeth’s eyes, the camera also allows her to demonstrate how her own eyes wander over time.
Now, let’s move on to games. Games add yet another dimension to the moving images of film: interaction. In Infinite, players have the ability to walk through a scene and interact with Elizabeth. This allows the game director to re-create the very familiar experience of interaction in a work of art. This enlarges the artist’s potential to capture and produce subjective experiences, but also requires a terribly complex game world. Surfaces must reflect light, objects must offer resistance, movement must produce sound, bricks must fall, birds must fly, and so on. It also requires a terribly complex Elizabeth. This game world, Elizabeth included, is a work of art in its own right, and Ken Levine and his team are its artists.
In order to create these worlds, they must have had certain scientific ideas about the reflective capacity of surfaces, the resistance of objects, and sound production. More importantly, though, they must have also had some, conscious or subconscious, phenomenological ideas about what it is like to be around a girl like Elizabeth. Only the synthesis of those two sets of ideas could have produced a work of art such as Infinite. The ideas that ground our experience of our time with Elizabeth are phenomenological in the sense that they are essentially ideas about the structure of our conscious experience. Infinite is defined by the artists’ and programmers’ ability to convey those ideas. So, Infinite is phenomenologically interesting because the game’s designers have poured phenomenological ideas into Columbia and Elizabeth, which we can then read as if they were books containing a phenomenological analysis of reality. Chris Kline, BioShock’s lead programmer, confirms this in the game’s “making of,” when he mentions the question that drove the game’s design process. The team continually asked themselves: “What is this experience we are trying to make?”4 This question is a testament to the phenomenological attitude of the game’s production team and is what makes them artistic phenomenologists.
“Cut to the chase,” you might say. “How do I conduct such a phenomenological investigation?” Should I be playing the game while I analyze it phenomenologically? What should I look for while I play the game? What type of questions should I ask myself when I analyze BioShock? When will I know that I’m done?
On the one hand, following Heidegger, we can assume that if you’ve played a good immersive game like BioShock once, you’re set for your analysis. Replaying the game is only necessary if you played the game superficially, or played it long ago. The mineness that the game evokes is enough to make the game feel a part of your life. Reflecting on your memories of BioShock should be enough to bring you to some phenomenological insights.
On the other hand, following Merleau-Ponty’s artistic method, one can argue that replaying the game is not such a bad idea. You should want to play the game as if you haven’t played it before, naively. Let yourself be immersed in the game’s story. You should look for moments when the “suspension of disbelief” breaks, when you’re aware that you’re playing a video game instead of living it.5 Ask yourself: What makes this experience so believable? Why does this strange world suck me in like it’s the real world? What are the things that break the immersion and certainly aren’t part of my everyday experience?
There’s a section in Infinite that I think explains very well what kind of questions you should be asking. It’s when you help Elizabeth escape Monument Island and she asks you: “What am I?” Having just found out that she’s been held captive like a lab rat for years, she wonders what makes her special. Having spent her whole life in isolation on Monument Island, she’s read every book she could get her hands on, but she doesn’t know much about herself. Why can she open portals to other dimensions? Where does she come from? What makes her special? In short: What is she?
You actually spend a good amount of time finding an answer to her questions. It’s one of the things that drive the main storyline. You listen to Voxophones, talk to Elizabeth, study her behavior, and so on. About halfway through Infinite you even forget about bringing Elizabeth back to New York and fully commit yourself to her quest, helping her find the answers she’s looking for.
This changes radically in the game’s final hours, when Elizabeth regains full control over her tearing powers, and shows you a multitude of lighthouses, which represent alternate universes. As you walk from lighthouse to lighthouse, Elizabeth talks about the constants and variables across universes. She explains how behind each door lies a universe that contains a man, a woman, a city, and a lighthouse. Somehow, Booker is one of the multiverse’s constants. This raises the question: “What is Booker?” or better yet: “What is the player?” What makes you, the player, a constant across Booker’s, and your own, dimension? Infinite’s real question is: “What am I, that I can experience all these worlds?”
Everything is set for our actual investigation. At this point you might choose either to (re)play the BioShock games and (re)gain some familiarity with them, or read on, and see what I think is phenomenologically interesting about BioShock.
Let’s start with how we killed Andrew Ryan in the first BioShock game. I’ve briefly sketched what happens when you kill your father in the introduction to this chapter, in an attempt to explain what phenomenology is, but the scene is also a playful meditation on what it is like to be free.
The first important part of the passage is: “I am standing in a poorly lit room.” It explains where I am at the moment; a picture of a room should appear in your mind’s eye. “I have used technology to alter my own genetic code and I have battled the city’s deranged citizens.” This describes my history and paints the context of the actions. I am heading toward “the office of the man who has tried to kill me from the moment I arrived and, as I’ve just discovered, is my father.” I have come here to kill this man, Andrew Ryan. Ken Levine and his team have built a game—or maybe we should say that they’ve created a world—that draws me in and gives purpose to the choices I make. Nobody has forced me to play the game up to this point: I’ve moved freely through Rapture, chosen a specific set of Plasmids and tonics, and have spared or smothered Little Sisters. Those choices made sense at the time: I went in that direction to gather a key, that Plasmid helped me overcome a certain foe, and I’ve killed that Little Sister because…
Or so I thought. “The illusion of freedom shatters” as I enter the room. I can no longer control my actions on the screen. The bond between the protagonist and me is broken. Andrew Ryan explains why: I am but a slave, genetically altered to follow the commands of Atlas—a.k.a. Frank Fontaine—Ryan’s great rival. What seemed like acts of my own free will were actually orders of powers beyond my control. That little phrase “Would you kindly…” was not a sign of courtesy, but in fact a genetically encoded phrase that triggered me to follow Atlas’s commands. Ryan, in a twisted act of self-assertion, uses the phrase to order me to kill him, thereby proving that he is free and I am in chains. For the first time, my actions do not make any sense. I do not want to kill Andrew Ryan now that I know that I’m nothing more than a tool. Or perhaps I do want to kill him, but not this way. Anyway, the actions on screen are no longer my actions.
Now that I am thrown out of Rapture, and realize that I’m simply a man playing a game, the distinction between protagonist and player becomes clear again. I can now see that I am betrayed on the level of both the player and the protagonist. Both as player and as protagonist, I’ve done what I’ve done under false pretenses. Jack, the protagonist, confronted Ryan, believing that Atlas would provide him with a way out of Rapture on his defeat. We, as gamers, assumed, as Jack himself did, that we were real human beings with a history and a family, that our choices were in accordance with who Jack was. Ryan’s words reveal that our choices were not in accordance with the world we’ve constructed. As Robert Lutece writes in Barriers to Trans-Dimensional Travel: “The mind of the subject will desperately struggle to create memories where none exist…”6 Even more so than Booker and Elizabeth in Infinite, we, the players, are the ones doing the trans-dimensional traveling. On top of Levine’s Rapture, we create our own Rapture that gives meaning to the things we do. We constantly try to create a narrative, complete with past and future, that explains our actions. It is phenomenologically interesting that freedom requires such a narrative, and that it requires so little of it.
This takes us to the second phenomenological theme: the worlds that BioShock and Infinite present. When I look at games phenomenologically, I try to take them seriously. This is not difficult. A good game makes it easy for the player to identify with its protagonist. The player determines the character’s movement and actions. When the protagonist is addressed, by other characters for example, the player feels that he or she is addressed. The distinction, then, between the player and the protagonist fades and the player is the protagonist.
Once you are comfortable in the role of protagonist, you are easily absorbed by the worlds of Rapture and Columbia. They present you with an underwater, capitalist utopia and a city in the clouds. “What if…,” BioShock asks, “the world is not ruled by petty morality, but by the invisible hand of the marketplace,” a world that the player soon finds to be a dystopia rather than a utopia. “What if…,” Infinite asks, “a racist prophet builds a city in the clouds.” In interviews and talks, Ken Levine hints at the design philosophy behind this world: immersion.7
Heidegger famously argued that a hammer shows itself best in one of two moments, when it is used or when it breaks. We could ask the same thing about the BioShock games. What makes and breaks our sense of immersion in these games?
What had me immersed the most while playing the BioShock games were the parts when you simply scour Rapture and Columbia for goods and bits of storytelling. These are the moments when the lines between player and protagonist blur most. Take one of the first scenes of BioShock, when you visit a trashed New Year’s Eve party at Kashmir’s restaurant. You stumble on a couple of Splicers, take them out, and start looking for supplies before you find an audio diary by Diane McClintock. While you wade through the water, empty bottles, and the ruins of the restaurant, you hear Diane murmuring about being lonely, before being attacked by other Splicers. It’s the little details in this place that really suck you in: the pay phones by the entrance, the argument between the Splicer couple on the lower floor, the sign by the entrance saying “Happy New Year 1959,” or the party hat by Diane’s audio diary.
Infinite has similarly immersive scenes: the game’s lighthouse intro is a fine example, as is the final hour of the game. When we think about what makes these scenes immersive, there are a couple of things that come to mind. First, they present the player with a coherent world. The restaurant’s got a closed-off kitchen, a men’s and a ladies’ room, enough seats to accommodate a sizable New Year’s Eve party, enough booze to last till morning, and so on. You’ll never stop to question whether this is a credible restaurant. Objectives also create a sense of immersion. In some of the most immersive scenes the player’s got a sense of urgency. For example, “I must find supplies,” “I must get out of this tower, it’s falling apart,” or simply, “What the hell is going on?” We can only focus on so many things, and if something urgent requires our attention we can’t stop to question the credibility of Rapture.
At other times BioShock fails to suspend your disbelief, reminding you that Rapture isn’t real or that Columbia is a fiction. First off, a bug in the game is guaranteed to make you lose your sense of immersion: it might be a character stuck in a corner, a disappearing item, or a texture that doesn’t load properly (or maybe you’ve just got a shitty computer). Drugs and mental disorders aside, the world around us isn’t buggy. Secondly, appreciating a work of art requires a certain setting. The first and second BioShock games in particular, rocking more of a horror vibe than Infinite, are best played in a dark environment on a decent display, with a nice set of speakers so you can hear that Splicer behind you. Playing the game on an old TV or PC, in broad daylight, in a noisy room, brings in outside interference and wrecks our sense of immersion. Thirdly, some details are very important. For instance, Jack is always silent, while Booker tends to shout quite a bit. Not having a voice is a particularly immersive quality, because everything your character says is an opportunity to wonder “Would I have said that?” or “That’s not what my voice sounds like,” and so on.
The phenomenological relevance of these insights is that they reveal something about ourselves. Through these exercises we come to know about the constants and variables of our existence. This short introduction should enable you to perform your very own phenomenological investigation. If you haven’t already done so, you might want to replay the first BioShock or revisit Infinite. See if you can uncover what makes these games reflective of our everyday experience. Try to uncover what the constants and variables are between our world and that of video games. When you feel that you’ve got a good grasp on the phenomenology of BioShock, you can try to extend your analysis to other games, and other works of art. Or, if you feel really comfortable, you can delve into your everyday experience.