In recent interview with Games business.bizKen Levine discredited his most famous and popular game, Bioshockas “a very long passage.” He loosely uses this description to distinguish the 2007 first-person mystery game from his current project, a science fiction FPS Judasa game he says is being made “very, very differently.” He wants, as a result of this, for Judas to be “much more… reflective of a group of players.” But I want to step in and argue for the passage, for why their widespread contemporary abandonment has allowed some of the strongest aspects of games to be lost.
Before we get into the weeds, what does Levine, and indeed everyone else, mean by “passage”? The idea is that there is only one main path through a game, a predetermined path down which every player must walk, where we have no freedom to choose our own direction. So, looking back from our current era where open world games dominate the AAA landscape, this can remove the appearance of a design that removes or prevents player group to destruction result.
And to be perfectly clear, some corridors did just that. While first-person games were born in level-based rounds (Returning to Castle Wolfenstein, Doometc.). To name names, they were the worst of these call of duty initiatives from Black Ops forward – games that killed you if you wanted to walk left or right, rather than straight ahead, and pushed you to the back to see the NPCs playing the game for you.
But I would argue that almost no one played Bioshock in 2007 he responded by saying, “Damn, it was just a passage.” Because it was a game that, despite only having one main path, allowed players to have a great sense of freedom. You chose big amounts in Bioshockfrom how you actually played (run-and-gun shooter, machine-based capture and stealth, immersive sim), to how you interacted with the nature of the world around you, especially to the Little Sisters. People celebrated the game for the incredible amount of freedom it offered within such a tight scripted narrative, all while avoiding the game's prescriptive passage. the whole point.
Hard to spoil an 18-year-old game, but the fact that you had no choice but to follow the instructions you were given was a big reveal in the third act. That is why the game was set in an inevitable corridor Bioshock great, because if it had allowed players to visit anywhere in the underwater city of Rapture whenever they wanted, everything else about it would have fallen apart.
BioshockDrama is so often dependent on you being exactly where the game designer wants you to be, at the exact moment they want you there, and that kind of detailed narrative dance is the result of passage. By dismissing such game design as a failure, we are losing this kind of knowledge, and I truly believe it is something we should be fighting to save.
Of course corridors are, and should be, only part of games. I'm not stupid, I really like an open world game, and in fact I've been playing RPGs since the 1980s that offer players a lot of freedom when approaching the their world. I am not for a moment arguing for anything more than the desire to preserve the passageas an option among many others, and therefore not to underestimate it as having failed in the past gone. Because it is bad, it brought so much success.
I don't think I'm always as much of a maverick here. In fact, if you look at any number of “best games of all time” lists, and adjust for bias, there are certain names that come up again and again: Half life 2 new, Deus Ex, Quake 2, Hello, dishonor. They share a place on these lists with completely different games, the litany of wonderful RPGs that often avoid corridors altogether, but these games with direct paths undoubtedly dominate. In fact, they are great examples of how to hide the passage in the best ways.
But instead of getting into the nitty-gritty of how and why hiding the corridor was critical to their success, let's focus more on what is being lost without them. .
The world is open greatand I'm very happy to clear icons in the Ubisoft map or build my own unique path through acts Baldur's Gate 3. But what they also can't do is puppet the player, creating purposeful narrative moments along a purposeful narrative path. They cannot offer something more like movie scenes, where the effect of event B is much more meaningful because it came directly in response to the action of event A, and the outcome of this drives the emotional expression of event C .
I remember, in the early 00's, at the beginning of rejecting corridor gaming as a design option, responding with the only argument that comes to mind now: “Are you refusing to have read the pages of a book in order? Does the book fail if page 37 comes after page 36 every time?” The immediate counter is, “Games aren't books, that's why we call them something else,” and sure, but my point is: games can aims to be like books in some of the best ways. Because, when your game is set in a corridor, when the scenes are as inevitable as the pages of the book, it's how we interact with them that defines them. It emphasizes our own personal interpretation of what we offer, and instead of being a sandbox in which we can play God, we are instead within a story in which we have a way to to gain special knowledge.
(In fact, this is the basis for why I have argued the end Mass effect 3 not a failure to identify a player groupbut rather a uniquely realized scripted moment based on your personal experiences gathered over the course of the three games.)
Organization can be wonderful, but it often comes at a cost – the cost of an organized, directed, deliberate narrative experience. And yes, it wouldn't be a good thing if all games were like that, but it's not better to look down on it as an anachronistic deficiency in game design. Bioshock work alone because it was a passage, and indeed it was a thesis on the passagemaking it more unusual for a game to be thrown under the bus of history. There is value in experiencing a pre-set, pre-set story, enhanced by our unique approaches that come from how we turn those pages. I don't want it to get lost, in the name of a “larger player body.”
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