Ignophobia – Nathan Mallory's Weblog

I was tempted to let the post title say it all, but I suppose I should write something as well. Bioshock, for both PC and Xbox 360, closes out my Summer of Adventure with a high explosive shotgun blast to the head, and after quite a mixed bag of games lately, reminds me of just how lofty the bar can go.

In some ways, it’s hard to review a game like Bioshock. The story revolves around an underwater city named Rapture and is based loosely on the concepts of objectivism and pure meritocracy of Ayn Rand (who even receives an in-game homage as the city’s creator, Andrew Ryan). Things begin as an airplane your character is flying in crash lands right in front of a Bathysphere — a Myst-esque transporter that whisks you into the depths. To say much more than that is to risk touching on plot points I’m certain some readers would prefer to discover for themselves. All I will safely say about the story is: it does not disappoint, right up until the end.

Virtually everything else in the game is nearly without peer. The visuals are beautifully varied and logically laid out (unlike so many games), yet for its relatively high PC system specs, runs rather well if you machine is in range. Aurally, Rapture is on par with other PC shooters’ extremely realistic sound effects, but features some harder-to-get-right, excellent voice acting, as well as haunting, period appropriate (if rare) music. As far as gameplay itself, it plays as a standard shooter with above average weapon choices — mostly the usual shooter staples fleshed out with several types of ammunition each and performance upgrades — and an equally realized “magic” system based on genetic modifications called Plasmids.

I could seriously go on for quite a bit longer singing Bioshock’s praises, but sadly the most compelling part, from the way everything from the first moment of dialogue to the Plasmids to the Big Daddies and Little Sisters, the game’s imaginitive and most recognizable inhabitants, ties into that most powerful element of the game: the story. A few fetch quests aside, the plot stays remarkably on track, and what kept me moving forward wasn’t the environments or the freedom to solve problems however I chose (though freezing enemies solid and letting the aerial machine gun sentries I had hacked blow them to bits became my favorite), it was a genuine interest in the outcome. It’s a personal feeling I haven’t felt in a game in a long time.

Maybe it was the first-person perspective. Maybe it was the feeling I got every time I rescued one of the Little Sisters, with Garry Schyman’s score stirring in the background. Whatever it was, it was a deeper level of enjoyment than I have been used to in my videogame hobby, and it comes highly recommended to anyone that reads this.

Score: 9.5 / 10

It was about two o’clock in the morning, mid February, with the snow sliding slowly down the windshield, illuminated by the street lamps of the parking lot. I was wearing my maroon dress shirt with dark slacks, black loafers, and my creased leather jacket, shivering in spite of my silver car’s steamy interior. It was time for me to be heading home, nothing more to be done here. She was out of my car, out of my life. Now I just had to pick up the pieces and say good-bye.

I had always wanted to go to Japan. Ever since I could remember, I somehow knew I’d find a life for myself there. So I learned to read, learned to write, all over again, and packed everything up my sophomore year. I flew out on September eleventh, and little did I know when I started that day that when I returned, my world would never be the same.

I went to live in Kyoto, Japan’s cultural capitol, a city bathed in the new age neon glow and old age cherry blossom. It takes some adjusting. She was there too, a kimono-clad beauty wasting her days away selling Star Wars merchandise in a tiny collector’s shop. I met her in a downstairs night club on Kawaramachi as she left behind drunken friends to bum a smoke on the club’s grimy steps before the last train home. She was twenty-one or so, small and gracefully put together. She didn’t speak much English and I didn’t speak much Japanese, but I was the only gaijin who’d give her a fix, and from that moment on, I was her gaijin.

We said our good-byes in the bustle of a hundred people in the center of Kyoto’s main station, a tearful embrace and a hunger to see the road ahead. We promised things that could never be. We wished for things that could have been, but were not. I left her that day for home, and I think my heart left with me. That was until she showed up here.

She closed her moist eyes and bit her lip, turning her head into the passenger window frame. Her world had changed and so had mine. The warm air of the interior fell silent as her fragmented voice died in her mouth, and I put my arm around her in a final, bittersweet embrace. She started to tell me if I ever came back again, but stopped. Squeezing my arm, she stepped out of the car and into the falling snow, a rush of cold air hitting my face like a castigation. You can never go back, I told myself, and started the engine.

I’m a pretty ordinary gamer, not dissimilar from most anyone who might read this site. I’m in graduate school, I have a job in IT, and like many twenty-something Gen X-ers out there, find my precious time to actually enjoy games fast dwindling in the midst of real world obligations. So I was delighted when I was offered a job at a major gaming blog (or, to be honest, a satellite of a major gaming blog). It sounded great – the chance to write about videogames, as I frequently do in my own blog, but now to get paid for it! Sure, it would be a lot of work, but I’m so immersed in their content already, making the jump from blog reader to blog writer couldn’t be that bad, could it?

Actually, it felt a little like a bait and switch… when I was hired, they did tell me that they wanted 50-60 posts per month, so I could say I had been warned. But they failed to mention how little help they would give me in learning where to get news, or how little they would be willing to work with other, real world priorities. I cautioned them I was only accustomed to getting my gaming news from big sites like Joystiq and Kotaku – I didn’t have any resources to bring in news by myself. They assured me it would be no problem. Yet when I finally came on, finding news consisted just of crawling message boards and RSS feeds for anything related to the console we covered, and trying to decide if anyone actually cared about it enough to post.

The pay was a set amount per post, which at first sounded nice. I’m sure I’d have gotten better at the process, but the final post I did took over two hours, from finding the news to writing it up, gleaning game details from Japanese magazine scans, editing the images, and getting a slew of technical corrections from the lead blogger. Ultimately, by my math, it means I worked for less than minimum wage today.

Another problem I had was understanding their method of “You must have x many posts or else!” They were paying a set amount per post, so if I post their “minimum” I get that amount; if I post ten posts in a month, I’d get the post amount times ten. Any deficiency doesn’t actually cost them money. But the corporate blogging world doesn’t work like that, it seems. The whole enterprise suckles off a massive corporation’s largesse – and for the full time people for whom that’s their only job, good for them. However, forcing people to post artificially large quantities, even when there’s no real news, just serves to dilute the quality of what they’re covering.

Why not bring on as many bloggers as you need to get the number of posts you want in a day, and let them post as they see fit? You’ll get perspective out the wazoo, and all the stories will be things someone cares about, and you don’t pay any more for the trouble since you pay by the post. Of course, increasing the number of bloggers will by necessity increase the turnover rate, and unless you’re very careful you risk diluting the writing quality, but it can be done, unless your goal is creating quantity of content, not quality.

In the blog’s chat room prior to resigning, I approached the topic by asking what they do on slow news days, since your post requirements remain the same. Almost predictably, the lead blogger went off on how she hates this “myth” of the slow news day – there’s always news. Alright, I’ll bite… there’s always news items out there that fall within the scope of the site that can be put written about, but how many people care about them? Is it really worth the dough to the corporate overlord to post about obscure Japanese games when maybe only a tiny handful of people give a flip?? The same goes for site-created features, which pay more per feature. By focusing on post quantity rather than asking whether what they are making means anything to anyone, you get a lot of well-written, filler sludge.

I like to write about videogames, but this was something different. It was writing about the topic of games, but with complete disregard to what made any of us play them in the first place: love of the games themselves. In the world of corporate blogging, it doesn’t matter whether you care for what you’re writing about – it’s whether someone who’ll read it and generate ad revenue might care for it.

My life’s not getting any less filled with obligations, and soiling the pasttime I cherish by keeping my nose to an artificial, quantity-driven grindstone is not what I want to spend my only bits of free time doing. At the end of the day, that was the final straw. A really telling warning that I should have picked up on was that a friend and fellow blogger mentioned at one point how infrequently he got the opportunity to actually play games anymore… he just writes about them now.

By the end, the lead blogger had lost all pretense of friendliness, and it felt like she was just being critical of me for its own sake. The seeming powertrip applied to every question and minor mistake was on top of the hard time given for not posting often enough, despite my real world moving from one city to another, preparing for a graduate level law exam, and applying for a job post-graduation. It made me wonder if this was the reality of paid blogging shining through – quotas and deadlines and a façade of professionalism.

For my part, I’m content to be back on the other side of the fence, able to focus on more career-oriented (and hopefully higher paying) priorities, and grinding my nose on videogames because I actually enjoy them.