Quarterlies 2007
TomChick - Features - Comments - 12/20/07
1. BioShock
 Narrative is not the same as story. Everyone knows story. Story is simply what happened. A, then B, then C, then finis. For example, this dude's wife gets murdered and he gets knocked on the head and can't make any new memories, so he goes looking for the killer and finally convinces himself he's found him, and he shoots the guy in the head. That's story. But narrative is how you're told the story. No exposition, flashbacks, flash forwards, and a story that moves backwards. That's narrative, and it's what sets Memento apart from, say, Death Wish.
Here's another one: a guy builds a utopia and, oops!, it falls apart. That's story. But the brilliance of BioShock is that it understands – and almost flawlessly executes – the art of narrative. For most games, narrative is simply alternating gameplay with exposition. In far too many cases, they have fuck-all to do with each other.
But what sets BioShock apart -- this from my review on Yahoo -- is how it flows from a story. There is virtually nothing about this game that doesn’t feel like it grew from the narrative, which is the rise and mysterious fall of Andrew Ryan, a man who got fed up with the world and built his own undersea utopia. His ideas and the people who joined him are a constant part of the game. The technology he created, the aesthetic of his time, and the natural progression of his philosophy are BioShock’s game bible.
Take for instance, Andrew Ryan, the man who created Rapture. Most of what you know about him you know from exploring Rapture:
The fallen city of Rapture, crumbling and leaking, is as grand and memorable a place as you’ll ever go in a videogame. You literally come crashing into this drowning Shangri-La, adorned with the trappings of the 40s and 50s: music, architecture, clothes, advertisements, transportation, dialogue, and even the weapons. Nearly every square inch of BioShock feels as if it’s been lovingly crafted by a storyteller with a keen keen eye for production design. Everything feels like it was put there for a reason. There are almost no instances of something there because it would look cool. If you take the time to look -- and in a place such as this, how could you not take the time to look? -- you’ll find a hundred vignettes, told through tableau, recordings, invisible narrators, or even written in blood.
But the place is simply a way of telling a story – narrative! – about Andrew Ryan. For instance, you hear at one point that a forest owned by Ryan was seized by the government to be turned into a National Park. Rather than let that happen, he burned it down. Easy enough. That's just exposition. Any game could tell you that by inserting a convenient bit of text, like the audio diary you hear in BioShock. But this is a game that takes it further by building gameplay around it. In BioShock, you directly experience this aspect of Ryan's character when he destroys the oxygen producing forest in Arcadia. You're not just chasing a McGuffin called the Lazarus Vector. You're being told a story.
This is an important step in videogames moving from mere diversions to whatever it is people grasp for when they want to call games "art". And this is one of the several reasons that BioShock was easily my favorite game of 2007. It's also worth nothing that of all the great games this year – and there were plenty – BioShock is the only one that took me someplace new, told me a story I'd never heard, and showed me something I'd never seen.
And that's the list for 2007. Jump into the thread and post your own Quarterlies, but only if you'll explain your choices rather than write a list. What are your most disappointing, your most surprising, and your favorites games from 2007?
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