Don’t mistake me: plenty of Infinite’s clever bits discovered during the second pass are just that. The dialogue is absolutely overflowing with nods, irony, and cheeky in-jokes -once you know what to look for-, and even gameplay mechanics, like Booker reviving after death, suddenly have an in-universe explanation. My personal favorite trick pulled off by the finale is that it retroactively not just excuses, but makes it important that Bioshock: Infinite play almost identically like the original Bioshock did. It takes cojones of sterling silver for a developer to tell the player that, yeah, they’re basically playing the same game they did six years ago, and that’s the whole point. Talking in TV terms, Infinite is pretty much the anti-Lost: it’s got an answer for absolutely everything.
The bases of the plot are all well covered on a mechanical level, but therein lies the question: if video games are, at their core, a series of assembled mechanics, can their stories be anything more than that? It sounds nebulous, but there’s a world of difference between a good plot and a good story. Plot tells you why something happens; story tells you why you should care. There are plenty of game stories that pull off the low-impact enjoyment of an airport detective novel, drawing you into a Rube Goldberg machine of moving parts and happenstance that moves efficiently down a pre-determined path. But are there games out there that engage with the user on a more than purely mechanical level, where you’re not being given a story, but sharing it, allowing you to bring your own thoughts, opinions, and feelings to the table, and giving them an outlet through gameplay?
The answer: HELL YES. The Walking Dead, Portal, and Journey are just a few of the more recent examples of games that are a story, instead of just games with a story. And when you look beyond the medium-to-big developers, and into the ever-expanding world of independent development, you’ll find games like Bastion and To The Moon showing how interaction with a work of fiction can lead to unique, never-before-seen kinds of storytelling. But these games aren’t successful simply because they contain a greater percentage of the experience that’s story-related; Metal Gear Solid has enough plot and exposition to fill half the Library of Congress, but it’s only partially successful as storytelling. The difference between games that have great storytelling, and the overwhelmingly greater number of those that don’t, isn’t so much a problem of content, as it is medium.
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