In a recent interview with Games industry.bizKen Levine disparaged his most famous and popular game, BioShocklike “a very, very long corridor”. He uses this description pejoratively to distinguish the 2007 first-person mystery game from his current project, the sci-fi FPS Judasa game that is being made “very, very different,” he says. He wishes, as a result of this, for Judas be “much more… representative of the action of the players”. But I want to step in and argue for this corridor, to explain why the contemporary widespread abandonment of these elements has allowed some of the most compelling aspects of the game to be lost.
Before we get to the heart of the matter, what does Levine, and everyone else, mean by “corridor”? This is the idea that there is only one main path in a game, a predetermined path that all players must take, and on which we do not have the freedom to choose our own directions. So, looking back from our current era where open-world games dominate the AAA landscape, it can give the impression of a design that removes or limits player action to a deleterious outcome.
And to be incredibly clear, some corridors did just that. While first-person games originated in level-based mazes (Return to Wolfenstein Castle, Lossetc), there were a series of games that were almost literal corridors, so ridiculously restrictive that you felt like you were being dragged through their inevitable tunnel by your nostrils, shoulders scraping against the claustrophobic walls the whole way. To name names, the worst of them were the Call of Duty campaigns of Covert operations forward: games that killed you if you dared to walk left or right instead of straight ahead, and pushed you backwards to watch NPCs play the game for you.
But I would say that almost no one played BioShock in 2007 reacted by saying: “Damn, it was just a hallway. ” Because it was a game that, despite only having one main path, allowed players to feel a huge sense of freedom. You have chosen huge amounts in BioShockfrom the way you played (shooter and gunplay and device-based stealth, immersive simulation), to the way you reacted to the nature of the world that presented you surrounds, especially in the way you treated the Little Sisters. People celebrated the game for the incredible freedom it offered in such a tightly scripted narrative, and all of this is ignoring that the game being a required corridor was the whole point.
Sorry to spoil an 18 year old game, but the fact that you had no choice but to follow the instructions you were given was the major revelation of the third act. The fact that the game takes place in an unmissable corridor is a big part of why BioShock it was great, because if it had allowed players to visit any point in the underwater city of Rapture whenever they wanted, everything else would have fallen apart.
BioShockDrama often depends on you being exactly where the game designer wants you to be, at the exact moment they want you to be, and this type of precise narrative choreography is the result of a corridor. By dismissing such game design as a failure, we lose this type of experience, and I truly believe it's something we should instead fight to save.
Of course, hallways are, and should be, only part of the games. I'm not an idiot, I love open-world fantasy games and, of course, I've been playing RPGs since the 1980s that give players a lot of freedom as they approach their worlds. I am not for a moment advocating anything other than a desire to preserve the corridor as one option among many, and therefore not to denigrate it as if it were a failure of the past. Because damn, he brought so much success.
I don't think I'm necessarily a non-conformist at that point. In fact, if you look at any number of “best games of all time” lists and adjust for recency bias, some names keep coming up: Half-Life 2, Deus Ex, Earthquake 2, Halo, Dishonored. They share space on these lists with games that do just the opposite, the litany of wonderful RPGs that often avoid lanes entirely, but those games with straight paths undeniably dominate. Indeed, they are the shining examples of the best possible way to hide the hallway.
But rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of why and how hiding the hallway was the key to their success, let's instead focus on what's lost without them.
Open worlds are superand I'm very happy to clean up icons in a Ubisoft map or choose my own unique route through the acts of Baldur's Gate 3. But what they aren't capable of doing as well is manipulating the player by creating deliberate narrative moments along a deliberate narrative path. They cannot offer something more akin to scenes from a movie, where the impact of event B is much more significant because it occurred directly in response to the action of event A , and the consequence of this determines the emotional resonance of event C.
I remember, in the early 2000s, at the start of the rejection of lane play as a design choice, responding with the same argument that comes to mind today: “Do you reject having to read the pages of a book in order? Is the book a failure if page 37 comes after page 36 every time? » To which the immediate response is: “Games are not books, that's why we call them something else”, and sure, but my point is: games can aim to be like books in some of the best ways. Because when your game takes place in a hallway, when the scenes are as inevitable as the pages of the book, it's how we interact with them that defines them. It emphasizes our own personal interpretation of what is offered to us, and rather than being a sandbox in which we can play God, we are instead a story that we have the means to live in a unique way.
(In fact, this is why I argued that the end of Mass Effect 3 This is not a lack of recognition of player agencybut instead of this uniquely comprised scripted moment based on your personal experiences accumulated over the three games.)
Agency can be great, but it often comes at a price: that of an organized, directed, and deliberate storytelling experience. And yes, it wouldn't be a good thing if all games were like this, but it's not best viewed as an anachronistic shortcoming of game design. BioShock only worked because it was a corridor, and it was indeed a thesis in the hallwaywhich makes this game all the more strange to throw under the story bus. There is value in living a curated, predetermined story, enhanced by our unique approaches born from how we turn those pages. I don't want this to be lost, in the name of promoting “better player action”.
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