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?

The solution I propose is two-fold: (1) allow the player to think things through, and (2) remind the player of what s/he is capable of to encourage more of that sort of thing.

Maybe I’m getting old, but Bioshock is too fast for me to handle. It’s too fast to allow me to survey the environment. Too fast to give me time to think. Too fast for me to hatch a plan without being killed by the time I have my act together. When it all comes together it is quite remarkable, but much of the time it happens as I described earlier, in a spur of the moment, hacked together, inelegant manner. Which isn’t a bad thing per se. It’s just that it hardly scratches the surface of what Bioshock is capable of. I can’t help but wonder how differently Bioshock would have played had the Splicers been more zombie-esque.

Moving on to my second point, how do we encourage the player to do neat stuff more often? We need to do a better job of reminding them of their capabilities. The most effective way to go about this is through the UI. Even the simplest of UI modifications can make a world of difference. What if the plasmid icons were always on screen? What if when the crosshair was near (or hovering over) an object, the icons would scale or shrink depending on how relevant they were to that object? What if the most “recommended” plasmid was highlighted, and a flick of a button would switch to it? It would change the game dramatically.

Frankly, not only did I forget which plasmids I had armed most of the time, I also forgot what they were capable of. After carrying around “Winter Blast” for the longest time, a loading screen near the end of the game reminded me that I could freeze hackable objects to slow down the speed of the hacking mini-game. Excited by this tidbit of information, I froze and hacked a vending machine the minute my game loaded. All I needed was a bit of encouragement.

This problem is more pronounced during combat. Not only do I need to remember which plasmids I have armed, what they do, and what they work best against, I also have to make my decision QUICKY! Given all the pandemonium, it’s easy to forget even the basics. It would be invaluable to be reminded about using Telekinesis on an exploding barrel or the Electric Bolt plasmid on security cameras.

This culminates rather nicely into a case study on a single mechanism: Research.

I was an obsessive wildlife photographer in Beyond Good & Evil, so I really should have enjoyed researching enemies in Bioshock. This was not the case. Why? I forgot it existed for the most part. I forgot it existed because I was too busy shooting at things to remember. When I did remember, the enemies were zeroing in on me so quickly that I could either shoot them with ammo or with the camera. The choice was obvious. On the rare occasion that I did choose the latter, I often ended up with photos of enemies I had already researched. This was partially because the enemies were difficult to differentiate from one another (another problem I have with Bioshock) but also because I couldn’t remember which enemies I’d researched. So I didn’t enjoy the research mechanism, but with a little work on the UI and gameplay it could have been one of the highlights of the game.

To sum up, it’s not enough to write a sandbox game and just expect players to take advantage of it. Developers must actively encourage emergent gameplay. The player needs time to observe each situation in order to come up with a plan that takes advantage of the simulation. Building on this, if the game presents information to the player in a clear and concise manner via the UI, it will encourage them to play in a more emergent manner. While I’ve picked on Bioshock, the ideas presented above can (and should) be used in any games which intend on having emergent gameplay.