As the title suggests, this is the first in what will be a recurring series of posts. Every now and then I’ll play a game and be preoccupied by “what if” thoughts that present themselves when an interesting, but limited aspect of a game is encountered. 

The idea of these serialized posts is to select a game and push a mechanic, a conceit, or some other aspect of it farther, and hopefully, the community will contribute and help create this aggregated wish list of design ideas.

It’s not what should have been, it’s what could have been, technical, monetary, and time constraints be damned, along with publisher interest. Hypothetical retrospection about how the particular idea could have been realistically implemented into the game is not the point. The point is to create a design-conscious think tank centered on a particular title.

So, with that out of the way, I’ll move on to what will hopefully be the first, and not the only, suggestion for BioShock.

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BioShock is one of my favorite games, despite the fact that I believe many of the lofty promises and goals set by Ken Levine in his pre-release orations were not fully realized (moral relativism, non-linearity, integrated narrative, etc.). I have many wishes for elements that did not appear in the game, but I’ll limit it to one: water.

In the first public video demo of BioShock, creative director, Ken Levine said, “ We really wanted to give the player the feeling that the ocean is coming back in to claim the city of Rapture. Our goal was to make the player feel like the ocean is trying to drown him, and I think we really achieve that emotionally.”

I would agree that there is an emotional strength in these aquatic environmental effects, but it is purely cosmetic and wears off, washes away throughout the entirety of the game. After seeing countless puddles, trickles, drips, and waterfalls, what emotion or anxiety I felt toward them was diminished. You know that you can’t drown. Ultimately, it’s just some great window dressing and atmospheric mise-en-scène, fostering a strong visual presence, but not a gameplay presence.

If games could mate then BioShock and Hydrophobia would deliver one handsome baby into a water-filled tub. Though Rapture is undoubtedly an idiosyncratic and remarkable setting, submerging the player and keeping water infiltration at a distance is a giant tease.

What if the pressure sealed windows of Rapture could be shattered by either a stray or deliberately placed bullet? A small hole is created and then allows seawater to spew inside. With enough of these pockmarks, larger fragmentations could be created, resulting in a significant flood.

The player and other agents (NPCs and procedural environmental degradation) could influence flooding. As water invades after messy skirmishes or strategic fragmentation, the flooding would escalate if unattended. The player could potentially drown, NPCs could drown, and materials exposed to this water -- ammo, Eve, currency, audio logs, etc. -- may incur enough water damage to be rendered useless.

Vita-chambers may even be submerged in neglected areas, respawning players into a vulnerable state in which they must frantically swim to find pockets of air to avoid a death loop. Small, enclosed glass corridors and vestibules could burst, and the player would either have to use telekinesis to lift objects and cork large holes, or blast away obstacles and barricades standing in your way of making a quick escape.

To protect against this significant environmental threat, players have multiple recourses to cauterize any of these emergent wounds:

• There could be a unique gun that fires adhesive projectiles to caulk smaller cracks and holes, but the mortar material it requires would be relatively scarce.
• If a fragmentation becomes too large and unmanageable, or the player cannot find mortar, they possess the means to redirect the flow of water to other areas, such as blasting a hole in the floor to drain water down to the floor below (this could only be done on second and above floors, and certain floor materials could not be penetrated).
• Defunct, complicated water pumping systems could be hacked to purge large-scale flooding.
• Some environments and floods might call for the flooding room to be sealed off by shutting large pressure doors, condemning the room and all of its interactive resources to a watery burial. You stop the infectious spread of water to other rooms, but you do so knowing that the sealed room is sacrificed and there’s no reclaiming what’s inside of it.

The lazy river. Come on in, the water's fine!

Water wouldn’t simply be a threatening scourge designed to cultivate anxiety and better create the image of a tangible, crumbling utopia, it would also have some benefits. You could strategically create pools of water to use on aggressive NPCs with a well-placed Electro Bolt. Water could be used to destroy certain machinery or NPC resources. Some organic environmental obstacles, both emergent and scripted, could only be overcome by utilizing water: extinguishing fires, short-circuiting lock mechanisms and other machinery, collecting out of reach objects with controlled floods, etc.

One strategy toward defeating a boss like Steinman could be to strategically flood in an attempt to drown him in a sort of breathing contest and quest for air, or, to create enough potential hazards that it drives him into another room to avoid them, leading you into a new battleground with more resources available.

It might not only be water that’s invading, but if enough of it enters, some of those colorful ADAM-carrying sea slugs could flood in as well, providing supplemental ADAM for the player who collects these slugs and refines them. This is a precarious kind of mining, a dangerous risk to take to collect this lucrative resource.

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Of course there are foreseeable problems with such a robust system. For one, the environments featured in BioShock are fairly large and continuous, not often small and separate, thus, it would take an impossibly long time to flood these gigantic areas, to the point where there is no significant threat. Either the flooding and fragmentation values would have to be tuned just right to make a proper threat, or level design would have to be altered to accommodate significant flooding in smaller rooms, able to be partitioned and cauterized by the player.

There’s also the potential for this emergent outbreak to destroy progression-essential rooms, items, events, and characters. The programming nightmare this poses aside, the design remedy could be to set progression-sensitive materials and events in rooms that are impervious to flooding. But casting a magic circle around specific rooms and making them into dry safe havens would create a break in the illusion and strip some of the potent danger from water’s offensive. These progression events should incorporate this water mechanic in different ways, such as a time-sensitive task relative to flooding.

These are harebrained imaginings, but they find their root in a desire to see environment greater leveraged in games, as well as emergent, inhuman forces become larger threats than rabid NPCs. For a game where a central dialectical theme is man and industry against nature, a physical and interactive manifestation of this contention in-game could be a gripping, native way to deliver it, rather than countless audio diaries.