The guys over at Evil Avatar have inter­viewed Ken Levine, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor at Irra­tional Games, and asked him some really inter­est­ing ques­tions. Yeah, they even talked about Thief, one of the best games that ever was. How­ever, the first part isn’t all that much about BioShock but you’ll get some inter­est­ing back­ground infor­ma­tion on Thief and Shock 2. Part 2 is more about the new game, so head there if it’s of inter­est to you.

Jonathan: Is clearly defined choices not dumb­ing down? That the out­come is of the cardboard-cut-out vari­ety, and that they’re predictable?

Ken: No. It’s mak­ing sure the player doesn’t fall out of the bot­tom of the game.

Hasn’t there even been a game you really wanted to get into but didn’t have the time and energy to under­stand it? I’ve had that expe­ri­ence with some hard core strat­egy games – Europa Uni­ver­salis, Domin­ions 2, etc. All I really wanted was a buddy to sit behind me and help me learn how to play it and when I got stuck to point me in the right direction.

While BioShock is cer­tainly noth­ing like those 2 games, the metaphor holds. Yes BioShock inno­vates in ways you won’t find in a tra­di­tional lin­ear shooter, but we’ve devel­oped a sys­tem called dynamic train­ing that sits back and watches the player. And if the player gets lost, or clearly is not get­ting the game sys­tems (for exam­ple, dif­fer­ent ammo types vs. dif­fer­ent foes), the sys­tem will speak up and lend the player a hand, point him or her in the right direction.

But it’s also how you design your mis­sions, how you moti­vate the player.

I absolutely love the direc­tion these peo­ple are tak­ing with the game. Even if it again is a first per­son shooter, there are some points that are very sat­is­fy­ing. Player-driven gam­ing, user-choice, non-linear nar­ra­tive. These are just some mech­a­nisms to immerse the player into the game. More infor­ma­tion on that topic, such as inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling or emo­tion­ally engag­ing game audio, is avail­able on the net. I’m so excited!