Der bekannte Spieledesigner Ken Levine hielt sich in der vergangenen Woche anlässlich einer Art of Video Games Festivitäten im Smithsonian American Art Museum in Wahsington, DC auf, wo er einigen Journalisten und anderen Interessierten die eine oder andere Auskunft über Irrational Games’ großes kommendes Projekt BioShock Infinite gab.
Wir wissen schon einiges über die Bosse des Spiels und dass die Entscheidungen des Spielers den Ausgang des Spiels beeinflussen werden (hoffentlich mehr als bei Mass Effect 3). Nun aber äußerte sich Ken Levine ausführlicher dazu, wie die Welt von Columbia entstand.
Er erläuterte, dass er stets den Wunsch verspürt, Umgebungen zu schaffen, die natürliche Grenzen haben, um nicht auf unsichtbare Wände zurückgreifen zu müssen: „It's nice to make environments that have their own borders, so you don't feel like, 'Oh, I should be able to go beyond that.' When I play an open city game, I'm kind of like, 'Oh, why can't I go over there?'“ Rapture in BioShock funktionierte in dieser Hinsicht perfekt, da es sich um eine Unterewasserstadt handelte; die Wände waren nicht nur sichtbar, sondern machten auch im Kontext Sinn. Zu Columbia meint Levine: „You jump off the edge of there, you're gonna regret it." (Und ja, Sie können sich über den Rand ins Nichts stürzen.)
Aber warum eine schwebende Stadt an der Wende zum letzten Jahrhundert? Was faszinierte das Designteam gerade an diesem Zeitabschnitt? Ken Levine erläuterte den Gedankenprozess und die Recherchen hinter der Entwicklung:
We create these environments, and then we go: Why? Why would there be this thing? Rapture was one solution, which is this secret city for this guy who felt he couldn't live in America anymore, and then you have Columbia, which was a public spectacle, launched as a representation of America, that went rogue. So, when we come up with the reasons for the city, we tend to have this idea, this macro idea of the city, and then we say, well why is it there, that's when we sort of dig into... when I dig into history, usually, and things I'm interested in, and things the team are interested in, and we sort of … in BioShock 1, I was definitely bringing the Rand to it, that was me driving it.
This one, a bunch of my artists were reading this book called Devil in the White City, which was about the 1893 World's Fair. They turned me on to that, and that sort of became the beginning point of thinking about this period, and thinking about both American Exceptionalism and the emergence of technology, of American technology, at the same time. And [I] started thinking about making a game that centered around both a technology basis and the feeling in America at the time. And fortunately, I think that really supported what we were doing. The shining city on the hill — this is quite a hill that they have. Shining city on a cloud. Which is even more symbolic of what the viewpoint in America was. Sort of a new Eden for the people in the city. But there was a lot of thought [then], and there's still a lot of thought, that America was sort of touched by God in a special way. And it was fun to play with those notions.
Die Periode zwischen dem amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg und dem Ersten Weltkrieg wird wirklich gerne stiefmütterlich behandelt und gerade in der Schule zumeist nur schnell überflogen. An dieser Epoche faszinierte Levine und sein Team vor allem der U.S.-Präsident Theodore Roosevelt:
For me the interesting thing was... it's not a very well known period of American history. [You go from] the Civil War to World War I... it was probably... without a war, it was probably the most transformative period of history in America. Because America was basically still in this period of cocooning, because it was still part of an empire and the notion of being an empire was antithetical to what the American sort of way of thinking was. And then you have guys like Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt show up.
Roosevelt is a really hard figure to pin down because he doesn't fit the model of Republican or Democrat as we think of them today. Yes, he was a Republican, but he was incredibly progressive in terms of his social thinking. Anti-trust and all that other stuff. But also incredibly... essentially a neo-conservative in terms of how he thought about the world and geopolitics, which is almost completely antithetical to how American thinking was at the time. Panama Canal, Philippines and, you know...
He's the guy who, this wealthy rich guy who grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, he quits his job as Secretary of the Navy to go ride up San Juan Hill, you know? He was desperate to be part of that, and is there a politician today who's going to resign so they can be in the front line of combat? And he meant it, right? He believed in it. A fascinating figure, he was probably really motivated by the fact that his father bought his way out of being in the Civil War, he paid a substitute to go, and he was sort of shamed by that. A fascinating guy.
Faszinierend ja, aber nicht zuletzt ihm ist es zu verdanken, dass sich die USA bis heute immer und überall auf der Welt einmischen und jahrzehntelang die lateinamerikanischen Länder mit Hilfe von rechtsgerichteten Diktatoren unterjochten. Aber in den Jahren um 1900 änderte sich auch in Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft und Technologie einiges. Besonders der Einfluss der technischen Umwälzungen ist in BioShock Infinite mehr als deutlich zu erkennen:
The technology, these incredible, transformative technologies all coming in over a period of twenty years: electricity, and radios, and cars, and airplanes, and movies, and... everything just changing! And these two sort of things, these catalysts that would really be the foundation of modern America as we think of it. Really America coming out of its cocoon in a lot of ways, I think for good and for bad. But America was about to become what we think of it [as] now.
Technologie und Kunst der damaligen beeinflussten einander nachhaltig und inspirierten die Entwicklung der Welt von BioShock Infinite nachhaltig. Es gibt einen Film, sagte Levine, der San Francisco um 1905 zeigt und heute so etwas wie eine Zeitreise ermöglicht. „Just being in another time and being in another place is so fascinating“, sagte Levine. „For us to make this convincing, especially in our fantastical setting, there's just a ton of research we have to do."
Und diese Recherchen führten in die Musikgeschichte:
We go look at paintings … or musicians, or artists, the sort of, early, early sounds of jazz, and how transformative that was. That's another thing that was so transformative! You look at music prior to jazz, and it's like... [plinky sounds] and you want to kill yourself. And that's been a challenge on BioShock Infinite, because on BioShock 1, you had this amazing catalog of music to choose from. And you look at BioShock Infinite, and you look at 1912... and there was just the beginnings of what an ear today would think of as musically interesting. You have to dig really deep, and we've done that. You go into spirituals, and you go into hymns, and you go into gospel and ragtime and stuff like that, and you start seeing... if you go to the top of the catalog, to the obvious place in the catalog, the modern ear sort of rejects that as uninteresting.
Boy are we in debt to early blues and jazz, in terms of the music we listen to today. It was... it was pretty bad, prior to blues and jazz. Pretty predictable.
Die Kultur von Columbia spiegelt die Geschichte der USA wieder. Blues, Jazz, Ragtime und Spirituals entspringen der afroamerikanischen Musiktradition und es hat den Anschein, als sollten die Bewohner von Columbia mit den Rassenproblemen nicht besser umgehen als die Bürger der USA zu der Zeit, aus der die Musik stammt. Levine bestätigte, dass die Rassenfrage in Columbia ein Thema ist:
I don't want to do any spoilers here, but the music will tie into the macro story, to some degree. But we have a lot of little stories we tell. And what's interesting to me is that you have a city that is quite segregated, there is a sense of the minorities being looked down on, but the music that's coming out is quite... driven by, and the music that white people — this happened in the ‘20s — that white people were dancing to was coming out of the minds of people that they looked down upon. And it was an interesting tension, and eventually it gets co-opted, right? That music gets co-opted.
But that tradition, of where that music came from, is quite antithetical to the Founders' view of Columbia. But they have ears as well. So the question is, how do they reconcile what they enjoy listening to versus their views on the people who may be creating that, and how do they deal with that? That is something we want to pursue a little bit in the story.
Levine verspricht, dass BioShock Infinite aus einer Serie kleinerer Geschichten bestehen wird, die in die größere Geschichte von Booker, Elizabeth und Columbia eingebettet sind. Welche Geschichten das sind, werden wir am 19. Oktober wissen, wenn das Spiel weltweit erscheint.
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