![]() In her writing The Fantasy Beyond Control, Lynn Hershman states that “a (pre) condition of a video dialogue is that it does not talk back. ![]() Over and over a player is face with the choices in the game but we always come back to a similar ending. Yet when we became confronted with the choice to fulfill a character’s wish to die and left him to live we became subjected to the connotations of our own subjectivity again. While we think that this will cause a new narrative path in the game it ultimately does not. We both interact with the choice with our own perceptions and subjective experiences, ones that we gained by interacting not only with the game play but with the cinematic sequences we watched before making that choice. In one instance of the game I can choose to pick the bird, my boyfriend can pick the cage. lighthouse.” No one person has the same reactions, choices and game play as another. This subjective experience becomes ones own “man. In the diagram by E.P Bucy a viewers own perceptions lead to a subjective experience of what becomes viewed. There may always be a man, city and lighthouse, but like all media each player-audience has its own relationship to choice. However this subversion the game wishes for does not truly come to fruition. No matter how much one plays the game they will always come upon the same ending Elizabeth drowning Booker to prevent Zachary Comstock from ever being. As Elizabeth, upon the aftermath of the climatic battle, states “there’s always a lighthouse. Much like the film Kinoautomat which has narrative branches but ultimately has a similar ending, Bioshock Infinite uses this to subvert the idea of choice itself. Yet none affect the seemingly one true ending that the game strives for. Yet other choices, ones that involve life or death, seem to haunt the future and cause different reactions from Elizabeth and Booker’s programming. This seems to lull a player into following the narrative and focus on shooting the swarms of enemies coming at you. Most choices, such as the infamous “bird or the cage” choice, only seem to affect the aesthetic values. Yet the choices that a player makes seems almost meaningless to the whole game. Within the narrative of the game a player is given both optional choices such as heads or tails and the choice to shoot the seemingly innocent citizens of Columbia as they travel and explore the world. Just as one would not see star Robert Montgomery, a play sees nothing more than Booker’s hands from reloading and cycled hand animations after one is given power-ups called “Vigors” and only sees Booker’s face once reflection in water. While the game is described as an FPS it still plays like a living film. One prime example is that the first-person film called Lady in the Lake from 1947. Franchise like Bioshock have not only remediation themselves from other gaming franchises but from cinema. While the process does not mean a shot for shot recreation but rather borrows from one medium to another. Remediation can be defined as the processes of taking one form of media and recycling it into another. In many ways Bioshock Infinite is a remediation of past cinematic tradition. ![]() Along the way you fight, FPS style, bosses and hoards while collecting narrative enriching voxophones and watching kinetscopes. You move through the floating city of Columbia with a companion in the form of Elizabeth Comstock in an attempts to, as the game explains, “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt” and to escape the religious zealot, Zachory Comstock. Booker is a former solider turned Pinkerton turned private detective. ![]() You, the player-audience, play as Booker DeWitt. By becoming a hybrid of FPS and interactive cinema, Bioshock Infinite plays and twists the idea of choice effecting narrative and the psychological impact it has on the player-audience.īiohock Infinite is the third in a series of games by Irrational Games and follows on the success of the first two games in the franchise. Irrational Game’s Bioshock Infinite lends itself to both the tradition of the first-person shooter, or FPS, genre as much as it lends itself to the cinema traditions of interactive cinema. More recently a focus has been made in the gaming industry to make this medium far more cinematic in both cut-scene graphics and general game play. Video games, as a form, have always lent themselves to being an interactive form and medium.
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