When Stories in Games Work: Bioshock Infinite

I haven’t been playing a lot of games lately, mostly due to a lack of time but also because I’ve had a harder time finding things I’ve been interested in sinking a good amount of time into. At last, as far as narrative games go–the majority of “game time” I have these days ends up going towards online games where I can mostly tune out the narrative and just focus on having fun with friends.

I don’t know when it happened, but lately whenever I pick up a single player game, the cutscenes seem to drag on and I’m stuck sifting through text waiting for the actual game to start, feeling like I’m wasting time I could be doing other things.

So when I picked up Bioshock: Infinite on a whim and was immediately hooked, I started to wonder why. Why did the narrative immediately engage me, why was I able to just get involved in it without all of the usual rigmarole?

For starters, beyond a certain minimal set up, the game just drops you into the story in a way that I found instantly compelling. Secondly, everything in the game tells a story. From the visual trappings to the audio you hear around you–the people talking, the radios.

But the real reason that all works is because the game doesn’t stop you in your tracks and try to explain it to you. It lets that go on in the background and trusts you to pick up on it. The experience is as deep or as shallow as you want, which ends up making you want to hunt out the information to figure out exactly what’s going on.

It doesn’t hurt that Infinite develops one of the better secondary characters I’ve seen in games in a long time. Most of the time, companions in games either fade into the background or become a hindrance, needing your protection without giving much in return.

Elizabeth, your companion in the game, is not only able to completely take care of herself,

but she’s an interesting character with a strong personality. When she talks, you want to stop for a minute and here what she’s talking about. She’s been through a lot before you ever ran into her in the game, and it shows in the dialogue they’ve written for her.

That said, none of that information is forced on you. It never feels like you’re having to sift through a giant tome of information to get to the game. The setting and the characters are richly detailed, and you’re left with the freedom of exploring that as much as you like.

When I think about games as a medium to tell stories, I try to think of what advantage they have over something like a book or even a movie. The biggest boon to games as stories, in my opinion, is the ability to develop a world without forcing it on the person experiencing the story.

In a book and even in a movie, most of the time if the writer wants someone to know something, you have to try to find ways to weasel in the information or you end up dropping a huge information bomb. No one appreciates those from a storytelling element, even if they like the information being presented. It takes you out of the flow and reminds you that you’re just reading or watching something.

Games, on the other hand, have a better way of dealing with it. They can put the information out there and allow you to consume as much or as little of it as you like, whenever you like throughout the story. Infinite grabs hold of that concept and really puts it to good use.

There’s a whole host of other things I enjoy about the game, from the art to the setting, but the characters and the depth are the things that shine out the most to me. Other games may have had better stories, but Infinite makes a case for how well deep, rich stories in games can be conveyed, and reminded me of what the medium can do.