BioShock Interview

GameSpot had the chance to fire off some tough questions to 2K Games’ Ken Levine about the storyline and moral choices players are subjected to while playing BioShock.

Q: For a game built on a moral choice about harvesting or rescuing the Little Sisters, there’s very little consequence to the player’s actions. The moral decision about harvesting or saving Little Sisters winds up being relatively inconsequential since if you save them all, then in the end you do wind up with enough ADAM to purchase all the plasmids and upgrades you could need, and you get some free ones on top of that from their gifts. Do you think it’s important that all moral choices have clear rewards? Aren’t there things that we should do simply because it’s right?

A: I guess the question is sort of along two lines: How consequential is it from a gameplay standpoint, and how consequential is it from a story standpoint? A third level is how consequential it is from the actual gamer’s experience standpoint.

Harvest, rescue… Does it even matter?My favorite story about people saving and harvesting is when a journalist that told me he started harvesting and his fiancé saw him do it, and he slept on the couch for two days. She found it awful. Certainly I think that people who encounter the game think about it not just a [minimum and maximum benefit], Diablo-skill-tree kind of way, but they think about it in terms of what am I as a character or a person, a saver or a harvester. And I think you see a fair amount of consistency.

I heard a lot on threads about this, and I think that there are definitely some legitimate complaints that this story doesn’t reflect those choices enough. And I think it’s something that was pretty experimental for us in this game, and something we definitely want to explore further, and take to a deeper level. But my favorite notion–the thing I’m most happy about–is that people think about it generally outside of [minimum and maximum benefit], and from the actual moral choice aspect of it.