Significant Zero

by Walt Williams

  D. T. and I were presenting BioShock to the PR team. They wanted to watch experienced players play the game, to get a better idea of what it was like.

  The demo proceeded as you’d expect. D. T. fought his way through hordes of Splicers, showing off the game’s variety of weapons, both traditional and fantastic. The PR team was impressed, but wanted more.

  “Can you show us a Big Daddy fight?” asked someone seated behind us.

  D. T. wandered the level until the screen began to shake with the sound of heavy, metallic footsteps. We heard a sad moan, like a cross between a whale and Frankenstein’s monster. A Big Daddy was near. Turning the corner, we saw it—a hulking brute sealed into an old diving suit. It lumbered behind a Little Sister as she skipped down the hallway toward a tasty-looking corpse.

  “Is that a Little Sister?”

  “Oh yeah,” said D. T. “Check this out.” He equipped a machine gun and opened fire on the girl. The Big Daddy roared to life. The ironclad beast was no longer slow and docile; it was gripped with a berserker rage. It charged D. T., unrelenting in its brutality. The Big Daddy would not let up until one of them was dead.

  When the battle was over, the Big Daddy’s body lay steaming on the ground. Its Little Sister stood over it, head in hands, crying tears for the protector she called “Mr. Bubbles.”

  “Whoa,” said faceless PR person number two.

  D. T. giggled to himself. He knew what was coming, and so did I. “If you think that was intense, wait until you get a load of this.”

  He switched weapons, this time choosing a large adjustable wrench. The Little Sister didn’t even look up as he approached. With the touch of a single button, D. T. struck the girl on the head, killing her. Instantly limp, her body fell to the floor.

  D. T. pressed another button. In the game, he lifted the girl’s body, cradling it close to the camera. Then, he took her ADAM-gathering syringe and plunged the needle into her chest. He sucked the ADAM from the corpse, then discarded her on the floor like an empty bottle.

  “Ka-ching!”

  Flush with cash, D. T. headed to the Gatherer’s Garden—a vending machine where he could buy new Plasmids. He selected Telekinesis, the ability to lift and throw objects using the power of your mind.

  With his new Plasmid, D. T. lifted the Little Sister’s corpse into the air.

  “Watch this.”

  He entered the next room, where a Splicer was waiting. D. T. flung the dead girl at the ADAM junkie’s head, killing him. D. T. giggled as both bodies collapsed on the floor in a heap.

  “If you think that’s cool, check this out.”

  For the next five minutes, D. T. made full use of that dead girl’s body. He juggled her, froze her, turned her into a bomb by covering her with sticky grenades, and lit her on fire to use as a torch for lighting other people on fire.

  D. T. was having a great time, and I’ll admit, so was I. One of the things I always admired about him was his ability to find his own fun within a game. What he was doing on-screen was terrible, but it was also just a game. None of it was real. On top of that, it was ridiculous. When you say, “I used the body of dead girl to bludgeon a man to death,” yeah, it’s a little messed up. But when you say, “I used the body of a dead girl to kill a teleporting fisherman while in an art deco city at the bottom of the Atlantic,” it’s hard to take seriously.

  We couldn’t hear the PR team over the sound of our laughter. But even if we’d been silent, we would not have heard a peep. They were mortified. Looking back, I can’t blame them.

  A few weeks later, the Fox gathered us together to see the new Little Sister design. Players would still acquire ADAM by way of a moral choice revolving around the Sisters. What changed was how the choice played out.

  The Fox approached a Little Sister and was presented with a choice. “Harvest” or “Rescue.” Selecting “Rescue” caused him to pick her up. The Little Sister struggled against his touch, but only until he laid a glowing hand on her head. A white light momentarily filled the screen. When it faded, the Little Sister had been healed, her deathly pallor replaced with the rosy cheeks of a living girl. The slug in her stomach had been dissolved, her mental conditioning undone. Finally free of her servitude, she scurried off into a dirty vent, as little girls are wont to do.

  Next, the Fox chose “Harvest,” and a similar scene played out. The Little Sister struggled against his grasp, this time with good reason. Instead of raising a safe, soothing hand, he raised one that appeared evil and clawlike. The Little Sister recoiled in horror as the hand lunged at her. The screen went black. The sound of a dying heartbeat played over the darkness. When it finally receded, the Little Sister was gone. In her place, the Fox now held a writhing sea slug, the implication being that he had ripped it from the girl’s body with his bare hands.

  “So, you killed her,” said D. T.

  The Fox shook his head. “I harvested her.”

  “You’re holding a slug that was inside her body. It stands to reason you killed her.”

  “You don’t know that. If she’s dead, where’s the body? I don’t see a body. Do you?”

  “You think the problem is we’re making a game that lets players kill little girls. The problem is we made a game where killing girls is so much fun, no one will want to save them.”

  “Except we don’t kill girls; we harvest them. It’s completely different.”

  “People aren’t that stupid.”

  “You’re right. They’re smart enough to understand the difference you refuse to grasp.”

  * * *

  D. T. DIDN’T GET out of the office much after that. The Fox kept him in New York, working on BioShock and any other game that needed an extra hand. Meanwhile, I was flying around the country with Ken, demoing the game for the press. BioShock never failed to excite, even outside of our scheduled meetings.

  One afternoon, I arrived in San Francisco, on the third leg of a multicity promotional tour. For whatever reason, Ken and I had ended up on different flights, so I arrived at the hotel before him. After settling into my room, I returned to the lobby to leave him a message at the check-in desk. “I’m in room blah-blah-blah, my number is one two three, etc . . .” That sort of thing.

  As I turned to walk away, a voice called out to me.

  “Excuse me?” It was the concierge. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but did you just leave a message for Ken Levine?” Strange, but not, like, creepy strange. Just unexpected. Maybe I was confused about the travel arrangements and Ken had already arrived.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “As in Ken Levine, creator of System Shock 2?”

  “Yessss?” Everything in my body clenched. My lips pulled back unnaturally and my eyes bulged outward as I tried to mimic the appearance of a happy, comfortable person. I’ve never been able to smile on cue; any attempt makes me look like a dehydrated corpse. No doubt it’s a defense mechanism left over from a more primal time, when my taut, terror-filled face might have discouraged predators from going to town on my scrumptious muscles and organs. Sadly, in our modern, civilized age, its effect is minimal.

  “Oh my God, what is he working on? Does he have a new game coming out? What’s it called? Can you even tell me? Oh my God!”

  “ItiscalledBioShockandiscomingoutinOctoberitisgreatyoushouldbuyitsorrygottagobye!” I scuttled away to the elevator, for some reason turning back to wave nervously at the man. It had finally happened—I’d run into a fan. It was off-putting, but also kind of invigorating. It was like being recognized, only one step removed. I got to experience the excitement of a fan and then go about my business, without any fear of being hounded or followed. Better than that, it showed me just how important BioShock would be. Knowing that made the endless hours and constant travel worth it. Even when I’d get worn down, I could fall back on that.

  I wish I could say the same for D. T. Whenever I was in New York, I could see the stress wearing on him. Normally loud and off-putting, he had begun suffering in silence
. After weeks of bottling up every ounce of stress, he was finally beginning to boil over.

  One day, as I was taking more screenshots in the 2K office, I heard D. T. sigh in pain. I turned to see him hunched over his keyboard. “Are you okay?”

  He pushed back his hair and looked at me with glazed, blinking eyes. “Yeah, why?”

  “You just sighed, and it sounded like a sad balloon committing suicide.”

  “Huh. Didn’t even notice.” It was the third time that day. He hadn’t noticed the other two, either.

  That evening, we left work early to grab a drink. It was a Monday. I know because that was the only night we ever went out. Friday-night drinking was for suckers. After a hard week, the last thing we wanted was to fight a crowd for the privilege of gulping down overpriced cocktails. If we drank on a Friday, we did it at home. In the dark. Alone. Just as God intended.

  Recently, whenever we did go drinking, D. T. would get sloshed within an hour and spend the rest of the night flicking peanuts into the faces of passing strangers. This led to us being banned from our usual haunt in favor of a bar that didn’t serve peanuts.

  “Are you doing okay?” I asked.

  “Honestly? I don’t think so.” He was picking through a bowl of standard bar mix in search of ammunition. The ratio of peanuts to other bits was low enough that I figured we could get a few rounds in before he caused any problems. “You know how I woke up this morning? I was on the couch—shirt and jacket on, pants off. Like a filthy animal. I don’t even remember how I got home. It was humiliating, Walter!”

  D. T. found a large wasabi pea buried in the bar mix and flicked it at some guy’s face. He was too drunk to make contact, but it got close.

  “What the hell, dude?”

  D. T. shrugged. “Do something.”

  Looking to me, the guy said, “Your friend needs to calm down.”

  “Thank you. Have a good night.” I waved. I don’t know why; I just did. It must have been another one of those primal survival instincts—a way to let a predator know I was not a threat to his virile manhood and should be allowed to live, if only out of pity.

  I punched D. T. in the shoulder. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  D. T. didn’t react; he just put his head down on the bar. “I’m tired.”

  “Then take a vacation. Call in sick and take a mental health day.”

  “No can do, Walter. There’s too much to do. A man chooses; a slave obeys.”

  He was quoting Andrew Ryan in BioShock. Those six words—“A man chooses; a slave obeys”—were the line from the game’s big twist, and D. T. had taken to saying it whenever he felt completely helpless.

  The twist occurs two-thirds of the way through BioShock. The player has fought through the underwater city of Rapture with the help of Atlas, a citizen seeking a way out. The player has been trying to reach Andrew Ryan, the city’s founder, in order to kill him and end the city’s lockdown. Ryan is no innocent man. He is a despot gone mad; a true antagonist. His death is warranted.

  When the player finally confronts Ryan, he’s behind a glass window, unreachable. “The assassin has overcome my final defense. And now, he’s come to murder me.”

  As Ryan speaks, the player watches him casually putt golf balls on a strip of green Astroturf. “In the end, what separates a man from a slave? Money? Power? No. A man chooses; a slave obeys.

  “You think you have memories: a farm, a family, an airplane, a crash, and then this place. Was there really a family? Did that airplane crash, or was it hijacked? Forced down by something less than a man, something bred to sleepwalk through life until activated by a simple phrase from their kindly master? Was a man sent to kill, or a slave?

  “A man chooses; a slave obeys.”

  Ryan opens the door to his sanctum. The player enters.

  “Stop, would you kindly?”

  The player stops; the controller ceases to respond. All power has been stripped away. The player now moves only at the whim of Andrew Ryan, who proceeds to reveal the game’s untold truth.

  The player is not the person they were led to believe they were. Instead of a being an unfortunate stranger from the outside world, they are actually a bioengineered slave created and artificially aged in Rapture, and then sent to live above the waves. It’s no accident the player has returned to the city of their birth; they were summoned back to complete their purpose—killing Andrew Ryan. To ensure the player complies, they have been programmed with the trigger phrase “Would you kindly.” It’s a phrase they’ve heard almost every time they’ve been given a goal to complete.

  As a final act of control, Andrew Ryan hands his golf putter to the player. “Kill.”

  The player can only watch as their hands beat Ryan to death. You can probably guess his final words: “A man chooses; a slave obeys.”

  This was D. T.’s point in quoting Andrew Ryan—he could no more control his own life than the player could control theirs.

  Everything Ryan says is true. Nothing you do in BioShock is of your own volition. Your goals, tools, and actions are all predetermined by the developer. Any sense of power and control you might have is just an illusion. Even the character you inhabit is a lie. What little you know of your character’s past only exists to support the illusion. As with every video-game character, the person you control in BioShock did not exist until you started playing.

  Nothing you believe about video games is true.

  A traditional game is a challenge in which a player’s skill comes up against a rigid set of rules. Turn-based strategy, multiplayer death match, platformers—these are traditional. The modern, high-end, blockbuster AAA game is not a skill challenge. If it were, the player might fail and be disappointed, and then we wouldn’t sell as many copies. The rules are fluid. We change them to create tension, surprise, or excitement. Saying yes to the player only goes so far, and that distance is the exact length required to make you feel in control.

  Feel. That’s the key word. We can’t make you powerful, clever, or important, but we can design an experience that will make you feel that way. It’s a fantasy, though not a frivolous one. Our desires lead us to dream; our dreams lead us to create. If we can make you feel like the person you want to be, even just for a moment, then you might be inspired to go out and become that person. That’s the real strength behind what we do.

  Fantasy is good.

  * * *

  BIOSHOCK WAS RELEASED AUGUST 21, 2007, for Xbox 360 and PC. The reviews were phenomenal. On the review website Metacritic, the console and PC versions both received an average score of ninety-six out of one hundred. The response was so positive that the value of Take-Two’s stock jumped nearly 20 percent the following week. The Xbox 360 version sold almost five hundred thousand copies its first week, making it the third-best-selling game of August 2007.

  It was a great moment for everyone at Irrational. Their hard work had paid off. Those of us in publishing were just as excited. BioShock was the game we’d been looking for, something we could point to and say, “This is who we are. This is what we can give you.”

  In the following months, BioShock was nominated for awards all over the world, including an astounding twelve nominations by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, arguably the gaming equivalent of the Oscars. The award show was held at their annual summit, D.I.C.E., which stands for four pillars of game development—design, innovate, communicate, and entertain. As a thank-you for our hard work, 2K flew the publishing team to Las Vegas for the awards. Of its twelve nominations, BioShock won four—Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction, Story Development, Original Music Composition, and Sound Design. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I was a little disappointed we only won four out of twelve. The big award, Action Game of the Year, we lost to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. But it’s hard to be too upset when you lose to one of the most intense and visceral games of the last ten years. The open bar also didn’t hurt.

  After the awards, I tried to slink away to a r
oulette table, but Geekjock grabbed me by the arm. “Come on. I want to introduce you to a friend of mine.” Damn that manly grip and artificially tanned bicep! There would be no escape.

  He dragged me over to a circle of couches where a group of people was just ordering drinks. One man in particular looked up and smiled. Geekjock introduced us. “This is Walt, my game analyst. Walt, this is Mark Cerny.”

  Mark Cerny is a bit of legend in game development. He’s done it all—design, programming, production, even business. He was the lead architect for Sony’s PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation Vita. If that’s not enough, his body of work includes more successful, beloved franchises than that of anyone else I can think of: God of War, Resistance, Ratchet & Clank, Jak and Daxter, Uncharted, Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot. But all these accomplishments paled in comparison to one.

  “So, you’re the guy who made Marble Madness?”

  “Oh God . . .” Mark cringed. “Are you seriously going to bring that up?”

  Booze always loosens the tongue, but it has nothing on the freedom that comes in the aftermath of battle. And make no mistake, game development is a battle. Our universe is one of law and logic. To create is to shatter those laws, to reach inside yourself and produce a thing where once there was none. The universe doesn’t like that. It will set everything it has against you—time, space, and everything in between. When the fight is over, it’s easy to forget how hard it was. No one will fault you for speaking the truth. You’ve achieved the improbable, and they know how that feels.

  I gave Mark a drunken, shit-eating grin. “You misunderstand. I’m not geeking out. Marble Madness was the first game I ever rented as a kid. I never got past the second level. I just wanted to take this opportunity to say ‘Fuck you.’ ”

  Laughter. Clinked glasses. Cheers all around.

  These are the moments that make it all worthwhile.