Having said all that, I was nevertheless surprised to find myself surprised by the way that 2K Marin chose to open BioShock 2. From a narrative perspective, the setup is masterful: a mostly unbroken POV shot of a Big Daddy walking over to an access tunnel and banging on it until his Little Sister emerges; walking behind her as she extracts ADAM from the corpse of a Splicer and consumes it; following her into a room where a party is taking place, then chasing after the sound of her screams; confronting a group of Splicers who are menacing her and killing two of them, only to have the last one hit him with a Hypnotize Big Daddy Plasmid; and finally, obeying the orders of Dr Sophia Lamb as she orders him to take off his helmet, take a pistol, put it to his head and pull the trigger. All as his Little Sister – Lamb’s biological daughter – looks on.
The sequence is moving, enabling a viewer to identify with the events not only from the Big Daddy’s perspective, but also from Lamb’s. It’s also efficient; from beginning to end, the entire scene lasts about three minutes. And it cleverly encapsulates some of the key themes from the first game. But the reason I was surprised is that even though the level of detail of the assets and the nature of the events depicted suggested that the opening could have been presented interactively, the only interactive option was to press a button to skip the cutscene entirely. For a franchise that was built around, among other things, the concepts of choice and free will, I couldn’t believe that the 2K Marin team had chosen to open their sequel by taking that choice away.
There are any number of perfectly valid reasons why they made this decision, not the least of which would be that this actual opening could have been settled on late in the process. But it points up one of the necessary tensions between cutscenes and gameplay: unless the studio is Kojima Productions, the moment developers a cutscene begins, the developer almost certainly feels as though the clock is ticking towards the inevitable boredom of the player. And what do you do when you feel the clock ticking? You rush. Had this been an interactive sequence – say, the first half of the tutorial – 2K Marin’s designers might have felt at liberty to give the opening more than the three minutes they gave it.
In my opinion, that sequence merits the extra time. With a mere three minutes, all the writers and director of this sequence can do is deliver a premise, exposition, context, and the broad strokes of emotion. But as the scene drew to a close, I already knew that wasn’t what I wanted from it. What I wanted was the opportunity to form an emotional bond with my Little Sister; to guide her and follow her through a couple of parts of Rapture; to attempt to defend her from the Splicers who would do her harm; and to struggle helplessly as her mother forced me to kill myself. I didn’t want to watch it. I wanted to take control of the Big Daddy until Dr Lamb wrested control of me from me. I wanted more time than the three minutes that 2K Marin was willing to grant me, because I believe that in that period of time – even if it was just the two of us walking hand in hand, Ico-style, as the Little Sister called out various sights and sounds of Rapture – I could have forged a tighter connection with her before the game proper began.
Actually, that concept of ‘the game proper’ might be equally to blame. One thing I’ve found during my first year as a consultant is that many developers don’t really believe that their game begins where it begins. It’s often some point two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes into the experience. But rather than start at that point, they start somewhere else and dash madly towards the starting line. And I’m thinking to myself: I’ve already paid my $60, so there’s no need to rush. Take your time. Trust in your environments, your characters, your mechanics. And if you don’t trust that, trust me – I will find the appropriate pace with which to begin my adventure in your world.
N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com.