BioShock Interview

MTV Multiplayer has published an interview with 2K Boston designer Dorian Hart about the hacking mini-game in BioShock.

Multiplayer: What’s your view of a mini-game like this and the value it adds to a larger game like (BioShock)? Is it something where you feel that having mini-games within a larger game adds to the experience, because it gives the player extra modes of play? Do you find that it actually does something in terms of affecting the pacing of the game? Is it something that makes the game-world more believable? Somebody who knows nothing about (BioShock) and plays it might have wonder, why is this particular mini-game in here? Why would the designers think this is something worth having in at all? What’s your feeling on what it gives the game?

Hart: I suppose it certainly gives the game an extra dimension: something else to do other than shoot. In a shooter, even a shooter that has small variance in how the game plays out, the number of verbs that you actually use in a given 10 minutes, half an hour, an hour of gameplay is pretty limited: You have a gun; you shoot it.

Having a mini-game just gives the player a different thing to do, a way to break the player out of a rut they may be in, in how they’re thinking about what they’re playing. It engages a different part of their brain. As long as it’s not too onerous or forced upon the player too commonly. They say, (Variety is the spice of life,) and I think that applies in this case. As long as you don’t make it an essential, unavoidable, too-important part of the game, because people are expecting a shooter.

Multiplayer: What have you made of the feedback you guys have gotten regarding this mini-game?

Hart: I’m not too surprised by it. It’s pretty much what we expected. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from people who did it every chance they got and enjoyed doing it. And we’ve heard from people at the other end of the spectrum who bemoan the fact that here was this thing they had to do that wasn’t shooting and didn’t change enough from the beginning to the end.

I would admit that given even more development time than we had, one of the things we considered was different mini-games. But when you only have so many hours and so many dollars to throw at something, it wasn’t as high a priority as other things.