Questions Of Morality is the ninth of the collectible Golden Film Reels, featuring director's commentary with Ken Levine and Shawn Robertson, hosted by Geoff Keighley. The Golden Film Reels are exclusive to the remastered version of BioShock, part of BioShock: The Collection.
Location[]
On one of the Little Sister beds in the Little Wonders Educational Facility in Point Prometheus.
Transcript[]
Finding the film reel in-game gives the following warning: SPOILER WARNING: The commentary contains in-depth discussion of plot details, including the ending. First-time players may wish to complete the game before viewing.
The host is Geoff Keighley.
Ken Levine's given credits are: Creative Director: System Shock 2, BioShock, BioShock, BioShock Infinite.
Shawn Robertson's given credits are: Animation Lead / Director: BioShock, BioShock Infinite.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player rescues the first Little Sister in the Surgery Lounge in the Medical Pavilion; player harvests a Little Sister on the Upper Wharf in Neptune's Bounty; player observes Little Sisters drawing and playing in Tenenbaum's Sanctuary in Olympus Heights; player with a Big Daddy helmet leads a Little Sister to the last vent in the Special Exhibit Entry in the Proving Grounds; player throws Security Bullseye at a Leadhead Splicer below at the entrance to the The Fighting McDonagh's Tavern and Jet-Postal Substation II in Neptune's Bounty]
KEIGHLEY: To kill, [cough], uh, excuse me. To harvest, or not to harvest: the moral dilemma that follows you throughout the BioShock experience and defines the fate of the player. This choice lays at the center of your BioShock story and has repercussions that can be felt in nearly every facet of the gameplay.
[TITLE SCREEN: IMAGINING BIOSHOCK - QUESTIONS OF MORALITY - HOSTED BY GEOFF KEIGHLEY]
KEIGHLEY: Part of BioShock's lasting legacy, of course, are the Little Sisters and this moral choice that presented itself to the player. Um, you know, everyone, it became water-cooler conversation about like, “Did you save them? Did harvest them?" That concept, Ken, was that something that came about early in development? Or that, that binary choice, when did that come into the game?
LEVINE: When did, I don't even remember when. I mean we had the concept of, of, of, of them being protected, but I can't remember when we actually changed...
ROBERTSON: Yeah, it certainly wasn't, when they were slugs it was not meaningful. I think there was, um, sp-
LEVINE: Do you salt it? Or do you not salt it?
KEIGHLEY: Squash. [laughs]
ROBERTSON: Yeah, yeah, there were resources that you could get but, uh, there was no choice there, right? It was, the choice was, do I want to fight the Big Daddy or not?
LEVINE: Yeah.
ROBERTSON: I think once we got into the realm of they have to be empathetic, the player has to have some feeling towards them, which you're not going to get from slugs.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
ROBERTSON: Then we start seeing that opportunity there of like okay, nobody is going to want to do harm to these girls or do they? Like and do we allow them to? It was, yeah, we weren't comfortable with it at first, when it first came out that we could, uh...
LEVINE: Ah well, I think it was important that we were, it was a way to reflect the sort of larger economic questions of a, of a world like Rapture where like you know, where the economy drives everything. Are there, you know, were, are there any limits to economic decision making versus moral decision making. 'Cause that's sort of what you, you know, Randian notion is that it's not the role, you don't sort of legislate morality. Let's try to take that to an extreme and see where that ends up.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player rescues the first Little Sister in the Surgery Lounge in the Medical Pavilion]
LEVINE: And Little Sisters sort of became that and in this world they became a commodity. And the question we have for the player, is are you willing, you know, they're a commodity to you as well potentially. Are you willing to participate in the commodification? There was I think a fair amount of nervousness internally at the publisher about it for a little while, but pretty quickly they were able to sort of say, "Look, we-we trust you guys" and "Go, you know, do this". So, I only had a few, the press, and this sort of happens over and over again. The games press worried a ton about it and like would wring their hands about it. They ever recognized it was a setting topic, but that it was done t-to a larger purpose. That it wasn't just sort of like, “Hey let's, this is the game where you kill children and..."
KEIGHLEY: Well, right that was a sensitivity. I know that like you guys wanted to call them Little Sisters not Little Girls and it was sort of, and it wasn't you know, it wasn't killing them, it was harvesting them. And I mean you did some things probably on purpose, right? To sort of explain that this, you know, you weren't, you know, you weren't doing anything vicious to them, right?
LEVINE: Well, I mean you are.
KEIGHLEY: [laughs]
LEVINE: You-you do sort of, they do sort of disappear out of you and a-a big slug out of their belly.
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
KEIGHLEY: [laughs]
LEVINE: You know, comes up that you, we-well, we didn't want that to be graphic.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: We want it to be very clear, you kn-, that you were ki-, that you were killing them.
KEIGHLEY: Yeah, it wasn't gruesome.
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
LEVINE: Yeah, but it was not, it was not intended to be a-a prurient in terms of "Hey let's, you know, this is a simulation of, of pulling a sea slug out of a little girl's belly", but we wanted you to understand that-that you were making a very diabolical mo-, pact, moral, economic pact there. And we think that came across, and I think it came across well enough. And I, and I think the test of how well it came across is, I think most people didn't really, thought of it as a "Am I willing to do this thing or not?"
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: And I, people would tell us stories how like their girlfriend saw them harvesting and then they sl-, they literally slept on the couch that night.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: And-and that's, you know, that's an interesting, um, you know that was, that was interesting.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player follows a Little Sister as she goes up the stairs to the second floor of Tenenbaum's Sanctuary in Olympus Heights; player leads a Little Sister to the Test Subject #1 corpse in the Proving Grounds]
LEVINE: How people connected to a 3D mesh that's really no different than any other 3D mesh in the world.
KEIGHLEY: Yeah.
LEVINE: Like it's a Little, Little Sister. She's not a person. She's a 3D asset, a virtual 3D asset, right? That has a voice actor connected to it, who was an adult woman. And nobody was actually getting harmed.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: But people still emotionally connected to them and made, and-and made an emotional connection.
KEIGHLEY: And also, you know, I think when you're playing you don't really know the impact of that choice is.
LEVINE: Yes.
KEIGHLEY: And that's sort of the, you know, the curiosity of like, what you know, you're a gamer, so it's like am I going to game the system which one should I pick? How does this impact things so as you go through the game? It's never, never really fully clear what that choice is going to lead to right and that, that ambiguousness of that was something that you wanted to sort of create mystery around throughout the game?
LEVINE: Yeah, um, we went back and forth a lot about what the rewards for harvesting versus saving would be and actually I think we actually should have really p-pushed further that the rewards for saving were much more, much more, should have been much more meager than the rewards for harvesting.
KEIGHLEY: Uh-huh.
LEVINE: It's to really sort of put you up against that wall push you up against that wall and say, you know, are you going to stick by your moral guns here? Because you're going to pay for it, because that's usually the way life is, right? It's always harder to take a moral path than it is to take an amoral path. Um, but there is incentives to take amoral paths because it's a, the easier path.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player harvests a Little Sister on the Upper Wharf in Neptune's Bounty, screen goes dark and reveals a writhing Sea Slug]
KEIGHLEY: As you play through the game, eventually you get to the ending and, um, as we know now there were sort of two endings that's a, you know, were affected by that choice. Uh, and that was something at the time I know you said publicly that you weren't in favor of sort of having two endings. Was that in part because, you know, the game is about not having choice or did you think that you know, the two endings were, I don't, like I'm interested for narratively like why you didn't want to go that path.
LEVINE: It seemed forced given that the game really sort of almost made a joke a m-, a m-, a meta ch- c-commentary joke about the lack of agency in games.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: The lack of meaning of those choices given that you had these two endings. I guess you could make an argument that well you are free you are given choice to be, you know, one-once Ryan's dead and that's really what it's about. But i-, I think we also had, didn't really have enough time to, um, to execute on those super well. I was pretty happy with how the, the happier one came out, you know with the, Li- the sort of Little Sister focus, but it's a much more subtle story than I would have time to tell about sort of your slow descent into, you know, moral chaos.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: And, and, and, and dissolute living and all the things that sort of come along with a life that is sort of separate from a moral structure. It's a long story.
KEIGHLEY: And that's fine, I mean, you were just, y-you were just switching a cut scene, it wasn't like you were doing sort of a whole other level that was different or something so the choice was...
LEVINE: No, no. There's two cutscenes with very tight time and economic restraints...
ROBERTSON: Or d-, or just start a nuclear war.
LEVINE: Yes. And that's not, you know, that's...
ROBERTSON: [laughs] You're a nice guy or you start a nuclear war.
LEVINE: Yeah, and, and, and because we had so many problems on our plate that was something I had to sort of do in my spare time. So I was pretty happy with one but not very happy with the other.
KEIGHLEY: I know you had said publicly before that there was a, another sort of more ambiguous ending than you had originally planned. Or, what-what would you have done?
LEVINE: Uh, t-there was a notion of an ambiguous ending, in which if I had, if I just wrote one I would have found a way that would just talk about the moral ambiguity of the world rather than the sort of you know, positive or negative because it is such a, look, I-I think we really tried with BioShock not to sort of make a game about good pe-, evil, good and evil. It was really about, uh, circumstances and what circumstances lead people to, and how they delude themselves with ideology to do things that they wouldn't think are evil but it's okay because it's for a good cause.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: And um, that's um, that's what I probably would have, if I had just one to write I'd probably focus more on that. And you know have, how difficult it is to sort of align to, what when I, when you start being driven by ideology rather than being in the moment and thinking about the impact of what you're doing.
KEIGHLEY: Shawn I, you've talked to gamers I'm sure over the years, did you ever get a sense of how many people harvested versus saved or was there any sort of data, I mean this was before the days where you get telemetry and data on like what people picked and whatnot.
ROBERTSON: Yeah, I mean anecdotally it seems like more people saving Little Sisters although yeah, I have a few friends that are you know, “I just harvested every single one, I wanted to see what happens.” So, I mean, I don't know if that was more, you know, the game developer in them trying to see, you know, what-what would happen. But certainly for the most part I-I think most people, which I guess is a good thing it means that maybe people are good at heart, you know. They-they kind of feel bad and they wanna, they wanna save the Little Sisters. So, yeah. I'll say that you know, the needle sways towards the green there.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player with a Big Daddy helmet leads a Little Sister to the last vent in the Special Exhibit Entry in the Proving Grounds, Little Sister: "Time for beddy-bye Mr. B. Hurry, hurry Mr. Bubbles."]