Significant Zero

by Walt Williams

  Video games are kinetic. They are expressed through motion and sound, interaction and reaction. A screenshot is cold, dead, frozen. You’re taking a moment—one frame out of sixty; not even a full second—and presenting it as an accurate representation of a living, breathing interactive experience. It exists only to be seen; nothing more. And yet, when produced properly, a screenshot can embody the full spirit of the game.

  A bad screenshot is a blatant lie. It shows you a game that doesn’t exist, and sells you on a promise it will never fulfill. A good screenshot is art. It lies truthfully by capturing the emotional essence of playing the game. The image won’t be something you’ll see in-game because it will utilize common techniques such as dramatic lighting and framing. But when you look at it, you will know how it feels to be locked in deadly combat with an ironclad behemoth who has a drill instead of a hand. And yes, you read that correctly. Screenshots may be promotional assets, but they are still art. It’s called photography, and it’s a medium that happens to be older and more sophisticated than ours. It doesn’t matter if the photograph is being used to sell sixty dollars’ worth of first-person shooting; there is an art to capturing a single moment capable of conveying all that is unseen, unheard, and unknown.

  Ahead of our visit, I put together a screenshot portfolio for Irrational to review. My work had already been used for advertisements, retail boxes, and featured magazine articles. I wasn’t worried; my screenshots were solid.

  It wasn’t long after we arrived at Irrational that I was approached by someone I’d never met. “You’re Walt, right? The screenshot guy?”

  I nodded, unsure of where the conversation was going.

  “Your screenshots are . . .” he searched for the words. “Well, they’re not good.”

  “Oh. That’s . . . okay. Is there something specific you don’t like?”

  “Everything, really. Sorry, I know that’s not helpful.” He kept turning to look down the hallway. I got the impression he was supposed to have been somewhere five minutes ago.

  “No, that’s fine. Just let me know what you’re looking for, and I can do that.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to give feedback that might constrain your creativity.”

  “Ken!” shouted someone from down the hall.

  It dawned on me who this was.

  Ken Levine poked his head down the hall and shouted back, “Yeah, on my way.” I took the opportunity to vigorously rub my face. Had I been giving him the look? I had no idea. If I had been, maybe I could massage it away and he’d forget all about it.

  “Sorry.” Ken turned back to face me. “I have to go to a meeting. Just give it another shot. And whatever you did last time, don’t do that.” Then he was gone.

  Left alone to ponder our brief interaction, I started thinking about Ken’s feedback. Like he said, it wasn’t very helpful. Still, his blunt, honest response clicked with me. He hadn’t found the words to articulate his criticism, but he’d left me with a clear direction—do something different.

  My first round of screenshots had tried to capture BioShock’s first-person combat. That must have been my mistake. Combat was too frenetic; the particle effects caused by weapons looked unnatural in freeze-frame. For the second round, I chose to ignore gameplay entirely. I would pretend I was photographing a place instead of a game. My focus would be on framing, composition, lighting, and most of all, telling a story using a single image.

  A video game is more than a challenge; it’s an experience. The presence of gameplay is not the only appeal. Our digital worlds can feel as real as the one we inhabit. If we treat them as such, players will come. If all we do is present a game, then we’re just telling players what they already know.

  The next day, Ken hurried past my desk as he was being led to another meeting by Alyssa Finley, the project lead. He saw me and stopped.

  “The screenshots. They’re amazing; beautiful. I don’t understand. What did you do?”

  “You wanted me to do something different. I just did what you told me to.”

  “No, no. I’ve never given feedback that made someone go from terrible to genius. This . . . this is something else.”

  Alyssa put a hand on his shoulder. “Ken, we’re already late.”

  “I know, I know.” He turned back to me. “You’re my screenshot guy. Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s great. Amazing stuff.” And then he was gone.

  In a minute and a half, Ken had given me more positive reinforcement than I’d received from the Fox in two years. The Fox thrives on creating conflict. He sees it as a catalyst for creation, like the heat of a kiln, melting iron so it can be crafted into something purposeful and strong. The Fox is no fool, though. He knows fire is hot, and prefers to keep his distance. If you asked, he’d say he’s more of a lover than a fighter. Really, he just wants you to do the fighting for him. That’s why he avoids positive reinforcement. He wants you uncertain, striving.

  As a management strategy, I almost buy it. Almost. As it were, all it took was a sincere “attaboy” from Ken, and I was ready to follow him to hell, snapping screenshots all the way down.

  * * *

  I WOKE UP EVERY morning around 7:00 a.m., when my floor began to vibrate. There was a laundromat directly beneath my apartment. The vibration caused by the washing machines would make my apartment tremble and hum well into the night. It was a small price to pay for living in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, a block away from Central Park and the D train. My room was large enough to hold a twin bed, a folding chair that doubled as a nightstand, and the plastic bin I used for a dresser. My lone window faced a brick wall five feet away. If my room ever saw sunlight, I was never around enough to know.

  The Fox had told me I should be at work by 9:00 a.m. Even though my bed was only a fifteen-minute subway ride from my desk, I wouldn’t arrive until sometime after eleven. I promised to try harder. It wasn’t a lie; I meant it. I just never did it. Those extra hours in the morning were my time. Eventually, the Fox stopped bringing it up. I think it helped that, on a slow day, I wouldn’t leave work until 8:00 p.m. Normally, I would be there well after midnight, taking screenshots and editing videos. Whatever it took to get the job done.

  I might enjoy taking screenshots more than I do writing. It gives me the chance to experience a game without having to hunt, survive, or kill. When I play a game at home, I’m interacting with it according to its design. Enemies fight me, and I fight back. I use the tools at my disposal to vanquish them, which in turn makes me feel clever and powerful. The problem is, not everyone shares the same power fantasy. Some of us find strength in going unnoticed, watching from the sidelines. That’s the fantasy I experienced as I searched the game for screenshots. Walking the halls of Rapture, BioShock’s underwater city, I was unseen and untouched. It allowed me to see a world most players never would.

  The residents—Splicers, as they’re called—were insane. They had been normal, once—as normal as you can be, living in a city at the bottom of the ocean. When you live a fantastical life, it’s hard not to view the world through a lens of your own hubris. Egged on by their mastery of the world around them, Rapture’s citizens turned their focus to personal perfection. Genetic splicing granted them extraordinary abilities, at the cost of their minds and bodies. The Splicers looked and acted like monsters, but in truth they were sick. ADAM, the miraculous substance used to alter their genetic makeup, was highly addictive. Once these people began splicing, they couldn’t stop. The need was so strong, they would literally rip people apart on the chance their organs might contain just a drop of ADAM. Left alone, the Splicers would stroll through their crumbling metropolis, whistling to themselves, twirling a pipe or pistol as if it were anything other than a murder weapon. They roamed where they pleased, choosing to dwell where they felt most comfortable—like the sprawling gardens of Arcadia, or Fort Frolic, the city’s entertainment district—locations tied to who they once were. These poor souls, robbed of humanity, were despera
tely trying to recapture what they could.

  I was the ghost in their midst. Using debug commands, I passed through walls and floors, flew through the air, and even became invisible. It was freedom, but it was also necessary. One glimpse of me, and the Splicers would explode into a murderous rage. Once that switch was flipped in their brains, there was no going back. No longer would I be a silent observer; instead I would become just another target.

  During my daily trips to Rapture, I would snap nearly one thousand photographs. Almost all of them were worthless. Relying on the godlike power of debug commands, I would slow down time to a snail’s pace. The game would creep into frame, exactly where I needed it to be. A defensive turret in the background, a Splicer in the foreground, a burning corpse just offscreen, its flame giving the room some proper mood lighting. When everything was in place, I’d spam the screen capture button on my desktop. I grabbed every frame available to me; freezing them, so I could pore over them later, in search of that one perfect shot.

  At the end of the day, I’d send fifteen to twenty screenshots to the PR department. Maybe a fourth of them would be approved.

  This was my life from morning until night, five days a week, for more months than I can remember. I never ran out of things to photograph.

  By the time I would finally head home, my train would have switched from local to express, meaning I had to get off at Seventy-Second and Broadway and walk seventeen more blocks to my apartment. Just outside the station was Gray’s Papaya, a twenty-four-hour restaurant known for cheap hot dogs, which are three words I find irresistible. I rolled into Gray’s every weeknight around 2:00 a.m. and bought as many dogs as I could carry. Munching happily, I’d head north, walking straight down the middle of Amsterdam Avenue. At that time of night, there was no one to bother me, no cars to run me down. Those seventeen blocks were mine. I passed through them like a ghost, unseen and untouched.

  But with hot dogs.

  * * *

  TAKING SCREENSHOTS FORCED ME to play BioShock using every possible weapon, tactic, and Plasmid. Plasmids were like super powers. The Electro Bolt Plasmid gave players the ability to fire electricity from their hands. Sonic Boom would create a powerful gust of wind to knock back enemies. Cyclone Trap spawned a miniature tornado that would fling Splicers into the air. There were eleven Plasmids in all. Irrational thought that might be too many. Designers were reporting that they didn’t use all the Plasmids, because they just weren’t useful.

  I had to agree. During my daily excursions to Rapture, I’d perfected the one-two punch—stunning a Splicer with Electro Bolt, then killing them with a quick shot to the head with my revolver. I only used other Plasmids if I needed them for a screenshot. My familiarity with the gameplay made me a valuable resource, so when Irrational called a design meeting to review the Plasmids, the Fox wanted me involved.

  “I think we should cut Cyclone Trap,” said one designer. “It’s just Sonic Boom, but it throws Splicers in the air instead of shoving them backwards.”

  “No way,” said another. “I use Cyclone Trap all the time. I’ll lure Splicers down a hallway, use Inferno to set a fire on the ceiling, then launch them into it with Cyclone Trap.”

  A third designer leaned forward. “Really? I just use Inferno to light Splicers on fire, and then when they jump into water to put themselves out, I fry them with Electro Bolt.”

  If one designer thought a Plasmid was useless, at least two others thought it was indispensable. There wasn’t a problem with the Plasmids; they had been perfectly designed to give players a choice in how they played the game. This was brilliant design.

  After that meeting, the Fox had D. T. and me review BioShock for opportunities to “say yes to the player.” Saying yes to the player is a design mantra, built on the idea that every action the player takes is a question—“Do my actions affect this world?”

  A lot of our feedback was focused on the question “What can I do with a dead cat?”

  In the fiction of BioShock, cats were smuggled into Rapture as a means of pest control. When the game starts, the cats are all dead. Their corpses can be found lying throughout the city.

  “Can I pick up a dead cat using Telekinesis and use it to kill a Splicer by throwing the dead cat at its head?”

  A bit obvious, but yes. You can do that.

  “Could I set a dead cat on fire and use it to light a bunch of other things on fire?”

  Hah! That’s more like it. The only better torch than a dead cat is an actual torch, and we don’t have those in the game.

  “Would it be possible for me to cover every inch of a dead cat with highly explosive adhesive grenades, thereby turning said kitty’s corpse into a pressure-detonated weapon of mass destruction?”

  Yes, you beautiful bastard! A thousand times yes!

  “If I freeze the dead cat using the Winter Blast Plasmid, will it shatter into a cloud of blinding ice dust when I throw it?”

  No.

  “Well, why the hell not?”

  Ice doesn’t work that way in the game.

  “Splicers shatter if I freeze them and then smack ’em with my wrench.”

  Right, but that’s because the enemy AI has a frozen state which is triggered by the use of the Winter Blast Plasmid, allowing for the AI model to be replaced with the shattering ice particle effect when you hit it. Since the dead cat isn’t an AI, it doesn’t have a frozen state. You can hit it with Winter Blast, and it will appear to be frozen due to a temporary texture layover, but it won’t actually be frozen in the way you want it to be. Does that make sense?

  “ . . .”

  You still want exploding catcicles, don’t you?

  “You’re goddamn right I do.”

  D. T. was adamant. Every list we presented to the Fox had those cats right at the top—FROZEN CATS SHOULD SHATTER WHEN HIT.

  After one week, the Fox had had enough. He demanded frozen cats be removed from any future lists. When D. T. refused, it sparked a shouting match.

  “Why do you care so much about these damn cats?”

  “I don’t!” said D. T. “But you told us to make a list of ways we can say yes to the player, and some players will want to shatter a dead, frozen cat!”

  “Why, huh? Why should they be able to do that? What is the point?”

  “The point is that we’re selling this game on the premise that players can do whatever they want!”

  The Fox scoffed. “We have never said such a thing! Not once!”

  “Really? Because I’m pretty damn sure we just released a bunch of T-shirts that say ‘BioShock: What Would You Do?’ across the back in big, bold letters!” He was right. We were gearing up for E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, one of our industry’s largest, most visible trade shows. We’d produced a lot of new swag for the event. That shirt was a fan favorite.

  “Oh shit. We did, didn’t we?” The Fox sat down, the fight having completely left him. “We need to look into what it would take to freeze those cats.”

  D. T. and I continued thinking of ways we could ask the game, “Can I do this?” We strove to answer that question in the affirmative as often as possible. We’d finish a list and send it to the Fox, and he’d forward it to Irrational. It was a thrill to see our ideas manifest in later versions of the game, but some never appeared. Sadly, shattering catcicles was an idea too pure for this world.

  Where saying yes to the player got tricky was in BioShock’s moral choices. If you say players should be able to shoot out a light bulb, people might think that’s kind of cool. If you say players should be able to murder kids in order to gain superpowers, those same people will probably stare at you in horrified silence while slowly backing out of the room.

  Stick with me, okay? This part’s going to get weird.

  In the world of BioShock, ADAM is the chief currency of power. According to the game’s fiction, it is excreted by rare sea slugs found on the ocean floor. However, the sea slugs are incapable of producing enough ADAM to meet the demand of R
apture’s citizens. The only way to increase the slugs’ output is for them to be surgically implanted into the digestive tract of a young girl between the ages of five and eight. Unsurprisingly, not many families were willing to fork over their daughters for the purpose of slug bonding. So, the necessary girls were either kidnapped or bought from orphanages, so they could undergo unspeakable medical procedures, transforming them into brainwashed slaves known as Little Sisters.

  When BioShock opens, Rapture lies in ruin. ADAM addiction has turned its population of cultural elites into murderous junkies. Little Sisters roam the halls in search of corpses. The dead still carry ADAM-rich fluids capable of being harvested; they simply need to be extracted. To this end, the Little Sisters carry an oversize syringe which they use to draw fluid from a corpse—fluid they then drink, passing it through the sea slug in their stomach. The process is effective, but it turns the Little Sisters into walking treasure chests filled with liquid gold. That’s why everyone in Rapture, including the player, is dying to get their hands on a Little Sister. With her ADAM, the player can buy Plasmids—special genetic enhancements granting fantastical power. The question is, how far is the player willing to go in the name of power and survival?

  If that was too confusing, let me break it down for you. In BioShock, there are special weapons that can only be purchased with special money, which can only be found inside the bodies of special brainwashed girls (ages five to eight).

  The player acquires ADAM by way of a moral choice. They can “Rescue” a Little Sister, which sets her free but awards an insignificant amount of ADAM. However, for every three Little Sisters rescued, the player receives a gift containing a very substantial amount of ADAM. The player’s other option is to “Harvest” a Little Sister and rip the ADAM-rich sea slug from her body, earning a large amount of ADAM in the process. So, you know, it’s a trade-off.