Phils Story Corner: BioShock Infinites Overreliance on Audio Logs is Bad Storytelling

We may be in the golden age of storytelling in video games, but that doesn't mean very many games get the storytelling aspect of their productions right. I've previously discussed one instance of a very rampant lack of character setup in games today, but another issue I've seen pop up a few times already this year is a reliance on text and audio logs. BioShock Infinite, with its 80 (!) audio logs hidden throughout the game, is perhaps the most egregious offender I've seen in this area in a long time.

Now, audio logs aren't always bad. They are, in fact, quite useful in some settings, such as where you're traveling through an area after some major shit went down. Examples: BioShock 1 and Dead Space. In both of those games you are encountering the remainders of horrible fiascos that left most people dead and societies in ribbons. We learn about what happened through these logs, but it's not necessary to keep up with them to understand our present circumstances. Too, those games didn't not go to any great lengths to hide the logs, leaving most of them in plain sight, as if, you know, they wanted you to listen to them.

BioShock Infinite is not like that.

This game's logs are not about history. The purpose they serve in this game is to provide context for your current action and to fill you in on the things you are viewing now. Instead of providing an active storytelling method to do that, Irrational employed this awful passive method. In a world filled with living, breathing characters, none of them ever tell you anything. It's all in the logs. Were you confused when Daisy Fitzroy and her band of rebels show up and Booker acts like he knows who they are even though you don't? Well, you should have spent more time looking for hidden rooms to find audio logs that introduce the Vox Populi and set up their conflict with The Racist Prophet.

That the logs are such a painfully unengaging way to tell a story is only part of the problem, though. As I hinted in the above paragraph, a bigger issue, fundamentally, is that so many of these story bits are not put directly in your line of site. There are 80 of them, and once the game was over Steam told me I had found about 25 of them. That tells me those logs are not important to the game's storytelling, but that's not correct. I only later learned, after posing some questions about the resolution of the game to somebody who had found more logs than me, what exactly was the deal with the Luteces. I had found this pair of quirky interdimensional jokesters to be completely inscrutable, but their motivations are fleshed out in logs that I never saw because I don't want to spend my gaming time searching the beautiful world Irrational had constructed to search for bonus content. This is not LA Noire; searching for clues is not your mission. You are Booker DeWitt, and you have a job to do, and you need to try to get that job done instead of dicking around like a bored gamer.

This is the second game in a few months that has offered difficulties like this. I thought Halo 4 was impossible to follow, but people tell me that searching for hidden terminals clears things up nicely for those who haven't read the 343-published tie-in novels. BioShock Infinite, on the other hand, has not tie-in novels that I could have used for prep; instead, the developers are relying on the player to actively kill the momentum of the game in order to understand what the hell is going on.

That's the problem. After I finished the game, I watched my roommate play some of the game, and while she certainly found more audio logs than I did, My mind was all “oh my god can we just get on with this already? “ as I watched her go about her business. Everywhere she went she searched every lootable object and tried to open every door, and while that seemed to make her happy, I'm not much of a fan of side missions.

And that's what these audio logs are. Searching for them is a way for Irrational to artificially lengthen a game already bloated by a slog through endless firefights in the second half. No, they refused to present us with a tightly paced experience, instead opting for one that alternates between long fights, cool story bits and painful busywork.

But it's my fault I didn't get the whole picture, you see. If I really cared about the story, I would have put in the effort to explore it. Unfortunately, however, I did not know what I was missing. Nobody told me I would have to do anything other than make progress through the story to understand the story.

Of course, even if someone had, I wouldn't have done it. I don't, after all, like side quests. And you'll forgive me for not feeling as if the way I play the game is the problem.