BioShock Infinite's Columbia is one of the best-realized gaming worlds I've ever played.Shops and stores dot every street corner, looking functional and lived-in. Average citizens talk amongst themselves, and eavesdropping on their conversations helps give the city a further sense of identity. Even its restricted areas feel like a natural part of the world, rather than an artificial way to keep players on the critical path. When all of BioShock Infinite's many world-building parts gel together with its character work and story elements, I start to lose myself in the idea of Columbia and surrender my disbelief in order to better invest myself in Booker and Elizabeth's journey together.
Then I see a Voxophone blinking under an end table, and I remember that I'm playing a video game.
Despite a small army of artists carefully working to make Columbia a fleshed-out, believable place over the course of five years, BioShock Infinite's world-building comes apart almost the moment that it introduces collectibles into the mix. It's hardly the only game this generation to have this problem. Developers are making great strides towards conveying emotional, cinematic experiences in their games, and it's a shame when incongruous, game-y elements like collectibles threaten to pull players out of such carefully crafted efforts.
Story-focused games like BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider bet on players investing themselves in their characters, sharing emotional victories and identifying with the characters' well-being. Strong settings help establish the game's sense of reality and can add to the stakes set against characters, creating further dramatic tension and possible attachment. Collectibles, on the other hand, trigger a response predicated on the urge to collect, shifting away from emotional engagement and towards a rote mechanical experience. These two elements rarely exist together well, and the narrative conceits used to make them intersect are often flimsy at best. In scripted, emotional games like BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider, the impulse to find every shiny bit comes at odds with the desire to live through the experience with the protagonist, distracting from the game's ability to tell its own story and sabotaging the illusion of the setting as an actual location.
Tomb Raider, for instance, strands Lara Croft on a remote island off the coast of Japan. Lara begins the game cold, isolated, and in need of medical supplies. One of her first objectives is to hunt for food so that she doesn't starve. It's a desperate situation, aided by gorgeous and naturalistic level design, and one of Tomb Raider's greatest strengths is watching Lara grow from an unsure, scared college grad to the confident, empowered icon we know her as today. It feels counterproductive, then, when Lara takes a break from her struggle for survival to look for small bejeweled trinkets, even after something as traumatic as surviving an extended fall from a cliff face. Mourn after losing a teammate to one of the fanatical cultists that stalk her and the rest of her crew during their every waking moment? Nope, sorry, she's got a jade hairpin to find.
