Meaningful Mechanics - Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design - page 295

Games are not different from other media in this respect: They can also create dif-
ferent layers of meaning. They have a natural capacity for this, because games
communicate through the signals they produce but also through the mechanics
that produce the signals. There are many games that make good use of these differ-
ent layers of meaning. In the following sections, we'll discuss a few examples.
Unrelated Meanings
Shakespeare's plays appealed to different levels of his highly class-stratified society
by offering them different forms of entertainment suited to their interests, even if
they were unrelated to one another. He included political satire for the élite and
dirty jokes and puns for the peasants (though the élite may have enjoyed them
as well). The fact that he was able to do this in a single play, while still preserving
its harmony, is a measure of his genius. For example, Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy
about love and feuding families, but it begins with an extended riff of silly wordplay
intended to set even the least educated in the audience giggling. The wordplay then
evolves into swordplay and becomes more serious.
One of the best recent examples of a game that offers multiple unrelated layers of
meaning is Bioshock. On the surface, Bioshock is a survival horror first-person shooter
with some role-playing game elements. The player can, if he wants to, ignore
everything else and concentrate on surviving, amorally killing his opponents, and
optimizing his attributes. We might call this the physical layer of Bioshock.
At another level, the player can take the game's moral choices seriously and try to
play the game without harming innocent characters known as Little Sisters. He is
not obliged to do so. It is riskier, and the game offers larger short-term rewards if the
player simply kills them. But he experiences different gameplay, and gets a different
ending, if he does avoid killing them. This is the moral layer of Bioshock.
At another level still, and unrelated to gameplay, the player can appreciate the
extraordinary Art Deco landscape of the game . Bioshock's art is so stunning that it
has been printed and sold as a coffee-table book, a rare achievement for a video
game. Neither the physical nor the moral aspects of the game depend on the art-
work; it is simply another part of the entertainment in its own right. We call it the
aesthetic layer of Bioshock.
Finally, and only noticeable by those who are familiar with political theory, Bioshock
is a satire on Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. (The founder of the game's
world is named Andrew Ryan, an intentional reference—in fact, an indexical sign—
to Ayn Rand.) Objectivism is a variant of Libertarianism that argues (among many
other things) for “uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism” (Rand 1964,
p. 37). Bioshock offers a vision of what might happen if an Objectivist society were
to engage in uncontrolled, unregulated biological experimentation: disaster and
destruction. This is the political layer of Bioshock.