Previously on…

I finished Bioshock within about 2 months of getting it as a Christmas present. And I absolutely loved it. I’m not writing a review here so I won’t go into too many specifics, but it was one of those mind-blowing gaming experiences that had me consistently riveted from start to finish and I have almost no ill to speak of it. If I were to write a review, I’d be sure to give attention to the amazing story in the game, which (I’d say in the review) had me captivated throughout its many twists and turns, the emotions it stirred, and the psychological questions it raised.

But really, in all honesty, I wasn’t exactly sure of the details of what was happening a pretty good chunk of the time.    

I mean I could write a parapgraph that summed up the basic plot (and don’t worry, if you haven’t played the game or haven’t finished it yet you won’t see anything even close to a spoiler here). I know you play as some guy with a sort of mysterious past who finds himself in a decaying underwater metropolis called Rapture, which is now overrun by humanoid creatures with costume ball masks who speak and walk like perfectly normal human beings but, you know, flip out and try to kill you when they see you. And some guy name Atlas gets ahold of you over a radio and is trying to help you find his trapped family so that all of you can safely escape Rapture together. The man who built the place, Andrew Ryan, is a bad guy who had all these conformist rules laid out for the citizens of Rapture and now wants you dead for some reason. And then there’s these big dudes in oversize diving gear called Big Daddies, and they only seem to get upset when you attack one of the Children of the Corn little girls that walk around with them. Oh, and there’s this Umbrella Corporation-type drug that originally was distrubuted with apparently good intentions but is what caused all of the people of Rapture to turn into crazy, flame-throwing, teleporting monsters. And there’s these drugs called Plasmids that give you special powers like electric bolt attacks and the ability to turn invisible. Uh, yeah, that’s about how I remember it.

Now maybe you have played Bioshock, and you have a lot of problems with my description. It’s also very possible I’ll think a little more about it in the next few days and decide I want to change the description completely. But the point is, I only had the vaguest sense of the minutiae of the experience as I was having it, and even now as I reflect on it. However, I still loved the game. Now maybe that speaks to the incredible gameplay and overall atmosphere of the game, but let’s not get off topic. That’s not the point I’m getting at here. 

Certainly I won’t say the game was necessarily hard to follow, or that the plot was overwrought or overly complex. The fact of the matter is, and it pains me as a hardcore, lifelong gamer to admit this, but a pretty large chunk of the time, I don’t know truly what’s going in on the stories of the games I play. I usually only have an “idea” of what’s going on, and that’s especially true of adventure games, RPGs, or any game of a decent length. The reason behind this probably has less to do with my ability to follow complex stories as it does the very nature of video games themselves and the way they are played. When you watch a movie, you (usually) watch the entire thing from start to finish in a single sitting. When you read a book, you wouldn’t normally read two pages today, take a week off, read 3 pages next week, and then put the book down for a month before reading another chunk. And when it comes down to it, that’s how I (and I think many other adults) play video games.

Look, I’d love it if I was able to wake up one morning, boot up a Final Fantasy and play it non-stop until it was finished, breaking only for the consuming and releasing of food and beverages. But that just isn’t possible. Even “shorter” games like a Resident Evil or God of War will take me weeks, maybe months to play through. It’s just the way it is when you factor in work, relationships, friends, kids, pets, sleep, other hobbies, and the million other non-gaming facets of life. Not to mention the fact that it isn’t as if only one must-play game gets released each month, and you have that whole month to finish it before the next one comes out. So it is just plain impossible to stay as on top of a game as would be required for me to stay immersed enough in its story to never miss a beat.

What about television? Why is it that we’re able to watch a half hour- or hour-long show only once a week (sometimes longer) and still be able to “keep up” with it? The answer is simple: pre-show recaps. Before the new show starts, we get a little refresher on not only what happened on the previous show, but often the whole saga thus far. That way we’re always up to speed. And usually all it takes is for the key points of the previous shows to be touched upon, and suddenly our memories of the entire thing are instantly jogged. How hard would it be to do this in a video game? Driver 2 for the PlayStation had this feature. Every time you loaded your saved game, you were treated to a montage of the CG cutscenes you had watched up to that point before you started the game, and the montage was updated as you played the game and furthered the story. It seems to me that if a PS1 game can do it, any game can today do it.

It doesn’t even have to be as involved as the cutscenes, either. Even if it was just a paragraph or two of text, or better yet, a narrator filling you in on what’s going on (since today’s gamers complain whenever they have to actually read something in a game). The developer can go ahead and write out the game’s entire story in advance, and as you play it would slowly open up relative to the point you were at. Doesn’t seem like it’d be that hard to do. Even with the more open-ended games, there’s often still only a singular, largely unchanged overall plot running through it. Okay, so maybe games like Fable or Mass Effect wouldn’t be as easy to do. I still can’t imagine it’d take that much extra work to give us a “Previously on…” update every time we start even the most branching of game stories. You worked hard on those game stories, and you want us to believe that storytelling and character development in games has come so far and is either going to one day eclipse movies, or already has. So wouldn’t you want to do everything you could to make sure we are actually taking in all of this amazing storytelling, rather than just enjoying the action and only kinda-sorta knowing the reason behind it all?

With all that being said, I still want the option to skip any and all cutscenes if I want to