Gameplay Journal Entry #9

The game I chose to play this week was BioShock. I absolutely love this game. I never had the chance to play when the first one came out. The graphics still hold up to an impressive standard. The game starts out with the very basics, starts a story, and then shows the player what to do through the story’s progression. The mechanics are a first-person shooter with the mouse for controlling the camera, and using left click to attack and right click to switch weapons. The player picks up different weapons as they explore the underwater city. Different enemies muted by the underwater climate try to attack you and your job as the player is to survive. Playing the first two hours of the game is very intense and action and danger is thrown at you in almost every direction. As a game developer myself, I find that the designers did a lot of detailed play testing to make the game play as immersive as possible.

With the first introduction to the boss your underwater vessel is brutally attacked to kill you. As the player is looking forward through the vessel window, you can move your head and look around the cabin your riding in. This is awesome when the boss attacks because as you look above and around yourself you can see all around you is being destroyed. This created a very immersive scene and fear in the player’s mind. This made my think back to a quote in Zimmerman Eric, Play as Research: The Iterative Design Process, July 8th 2003.

To design a game is to construct a set of rules. But the point of game design is not to have players experience rules — it is to have players experience play. Game design is therefore a second-order design problem, in which designers craft play, but only indirectly, through the systems of rules that game designers create. Play arises out of the rules as they are inhabited and enacted by players, creating emergent patterns of behavior, sensation, social exchange, and meaning. Zimmerman. chapter.17

I find that this is exactly what the developers for BioShock followed when creating their intense and immersive game play.