Onyxmeth said:
You realize you're talking about a game where you inject yourself with needles full of chemicals that allow you to shoot fire, ice and bees out of your arm all in a city underwater. Why of all the things to pick on logically in Bioshock did you go for the tape recorders? That's actually possible. It's the rest of the game that isn't. I agree that Bioshock's method of storytelling was fantastic. I would just press A and listen to recorders while I continued exploring. It really gave a great sense of what Rapture was like once upon a time. |
The obvious answer would of course be, that the example I was replying to was talking about the taperecorders and not the plasmids 
But if we are going to discuss that, then I have a disclaimer first 
While BioShock was certainly a good game, I have no clue how the fuck it got as popular as it did. I certainly didn't play it for the story, and I did in fact never finish it. Towards what I think was the end, I was getting bored with it after having played it up to that point in one sitting. I got to a place where the game crashed, and I had been stuck for a while anyway. I only went back to the game once, but I got bored again, and I never bothered to come back and finish it.
Now! Bioshock, logic and boundaries 
Bioshock is based on the idea that humans are capable of creating magnificent things, in fact, Rapture is such a creation, a eutopia for all people shunned for their dreams, ideas and talents by the 40's and 50's society.
Since the game was released in 2007, the theme of genetic manipulation and other "crazy" ideas the game toys with, are not foreign to players. It isn't unreasonable to think that we would be able to create a city underwater at some point, nor that we would be able to create gene altering drugs, that will give us special powers of some sort. After all, comicbooks have fed people this idea for years now, so it's not surprising that it comes off as reasonable to many players.
Personally, stuff like shooting bees out of your arms had me scrathing my heads for what the fuck 2K was thinking, when they put the ability in the game. But stuff like shooting electricity and fire was much more acceptable, because these are created by simple chemical reactions after all, and are hardly on par with the complexity of creating bees at will.
But who goes around recording as much as the people of Rapture do, while the tapes end up in convinient locations relative to the players own location and objective? It really is beyond comprehension for me, why the developers chose to do it this way. Don't get me wrong though, it's not like Bioshock is the only culprit in this field. Personally, Dead Space is the first thing that comes to my mind, when I think of this form of storytelling in games.
But I think Dead Space did a better job at it, mostly because of fundamental differences though. The logs in Dead Space are for example stored on devices that fit into peoples pockets, and are not the size of a briefcase. This makes it more believable that people could have dropped them randomly, while fleeing from monsters, turning into monsters or something like that.
In Bioshock, I would have cut out the completely ridiculous plasmids (bees, creating small tornados etc.), and have let players run into a few archives to learn some of these stories. And instead of just letting people listen to them, I would have created small playable flashbacks, where the players enter the view of the person who is talking about the "event" or whatever.
Of course, this wouldn't fit well with all the things found in the logs, as they, directly translated into gameplay, would have been quite boring, but overall, I think it would have been a much better solution.
