Games Thirst – Amazing Life
BioShock Infinite has just gone gold. It’s February 19, and outside it’s a frigidly cold morning on America’s East Coast. Sheltered from the elements, we’re speaking with Ken Levine in a dimly lit meeting room deep inside his studio’s Boston HQ. Rather than bask in the satisfying knowledge that five years of developmental graft are finally at an end, the Irrational Games co-founder and creative director is focused on the future. “If we have a mission,” he explains, “it’s to figure out how to integrate gameplay and narrative so it’s one consistent experience, and to make the player a participant in the narrative and not an observer.”
A quick glance at Levine’s CV will tell you this is a philosophy he has carried throughout his career. And if you’ve played Thief, System Shock 2 or the original BioShock, you’ll have experienced that storytelling bent first-hand. Speaking with his colleagues, it’s an ethos that seems to have bled into the very foundations of Irrational’s working process, too. For starters, it has forced an intense level of communication within the studio.
“There’s a lot of collaboration,” says writer Drew Holmes. “Everything tends to start with the script, and then we bring in the other departments, make sure their feedback is heard and that they are a part of this creative process. There’s a sense of narrative being just as much a part of the design as everything else. It’s not all about writing through dialogue. We put a lot of work into telling stories in the environment – making sure a store is telling a story, a character doing a simple animation is telling a story.”
This level of departmental collaboration can be traced back to early development work on the first BioShock. The results are evident in the game, where the visuals and audio play as large a role in the storytelling as the dialogue itself. What’s more, its setting – the now infamously twisted subterranean dystopia of Rapture – is, in a sense, as much of a lead character as the game’s silent protagonist, Jack. BioShock’s storytelling focus had ramifications beyond the game world, however: it physically altered the layout of Irrational’s studio and affected its working practices.
“Early on in BioShock,” recalls animation director Shawn Robertson, “all the artists sat together, all the animators sat together and we realised you’re just creating these fiefdoms where everybody is worried about what they’re working on. You’ve got to promote the idea that games are a collaborative effort, and one of the early experiments we did was to take an animator, a designer and a programmer and put them all next to each other. You have this environment where if you have an idea – you want an AI to do something – you have the designer who can start working on that system, you have the programmer who can enable it and you have the animator who can represent it, and they can all bang out something in a day and see if it’s going to work or not.”
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