Looking back, I can safely say Bioshock is one of the best games I’ve played in recent memory. I could discuss the various aspects it gets right for days, but instead, I’m going to be a bit grumpier and talk about what it could have done better. For today, let’s focus on what it does with emergent gameplay.

Bioshock provides the player with a complex simulation to play around with. The opening act does a fantastic job of introducing you to Rapture as a living world which you can influence. The player is even rewarded for “thinking outside the box”, which is something a worrying number of sandbox games fail to do at all. But where Bioshock falls short is encouraging the player to think outside these bounds.

Some may argue that the reward is the encouragement. To an extent, it is. At the start of the game, players experiment to familiarize themselves with its mechanics. But once the player gets better, they get into a routine, and the encouragement is lost. This isn’t a gamer thing so much as it is a human nature thing. Once you figure out an effective way to kill Splicers, or a sure-fire way to take down Big Daddies, the rewards are irrelevant. The rewards only worked when the player needed them. Now that they don’t, the experimental aspect of Bioshock gives way to the repetitiveness of your standard-fare first person shooter. It’s a shame, and I’ll admit that I’m as guilty as the next person in this regard, but it’s to be expected.

How do we fix this?

(read on…)