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Ken Levine interview - Part 1

12-Sep-2008 OXM talks Bioshock with the team at 2K Boston...

Prior to Bioshock, not many 360 owners had heard of Ken Levine.

Post-Bioshock, everyone knows who he is, as the world of Rapture enraptured (sorry) gamers with its striking, confident design.

Ken Levine, the creative director at 2K Boston, was recently at the Develop conference in Brighton along with fellow Bioshockers and 2K men Chris Kline (technical director) and Bill Gardner (lead designer). OXM caught up with the three for a chat on Bioshock, the movie and the sequel...

Are you still negotiating your contract with 2K?
KL: I would not even respond to the word 'still' there because that would imply that I was having negotiations there. Look, the position at the company, whether it's the guys who work for me or myself, our personal contracts we can't talk about. I will say I always have good and healthy conversations with those guys about the direction of the team, and what the team needs to be successful. We have those conversations all the time, we go through a process, and shops have been talking about this a lot about product review and approval process. We're certainly doing that stuff and it's my job to convince them that this thing they're going to be spending all this money on is going to be worth it.

This team has more credibility than some others because of Bioshock but they don't just sign a cheque without knowing what they're going into, so that's just a process that everybody goes through. And I think it's a healthy process.

But obviously in these negotiations, you have this notoriety, you are known by name. How does that feel to you?
KL: I want to refute the word negotiations again. Look, figureheads are important because a broader audience can identify this guy standing up there talking about this product "oh, I recognise that ugly dude, he and his team did that other game." If you brought up somebody with a different face, even a handsomer face, than it'd be harder for them to make that connection between the products. One of the key reasons that Chris has been out on the road a bunch, and Bill and Chris and Nate are here today is because in a development environment it's very important to get out the word that it's not a single person. And from a marketing perspective it kind of makes more sense.

The thing I will say that is that at the end of the day, my role is to decide does that element work in the game or does it not work in the game. And I think it is fair to hate me if you don't like it. And say "okay, he has decent taste" if you do because I'm sure making those calls. But there's a huge team of people working to make all these things. And a lot of these calls don't even need me to look at the thing. If Chris says to me "I think this is important" then I don't even need to look at it because I can trust Chris. So it's not just my tastes, it's my judgement of these guys as well and my relationship with these guys. The same with all these key guys. You can kind of blame me if you hate the game, but I can't take credit for making the whole game because these guys they're right with me from day one and put their heart and soul into it.

You're working on your new game - do you have a consultancy function with Bioshock 2?
KL: I am, at best, sort of informally engaged in certain scenes, a couple of things in it. But I'm not really working on it at a material level.

You said at GDC how deeply involved you were with Bioshock. Do you think that Bioshock will be different without your involvement?
KL: It's really a different group of people. There's a bunch of guys who... JP, one of Bill's designers, Carlos, one of the programmers, Jordan who's a really smart guy who came on board for the last six months or so of Bioshock...

Was he the chap who designed the Cradle in Thief 3, and Fort Frolic?
KL: He took over Fort Frolic from Bill, when I needed Bill to really focus on the broader spectrum, so he was the guy and JP was the designer on Arcadia. So you know, these are smart guys and then this is a great opportunity for these guys to step into more senior roles on this project. And Melissa, who was the producer on Bioshock, is over there running that group now. It's going to be their thing, their project. I think they're cogniscent of the reaction and people's feelings on the first game. I'm not going to be substantially involved.

Bioshock spawned a sequel. Is the game you're working on now going to be another new IP you're setting in motion?
KL: We're not talking about that now. [laughs]

Is the movie going to feature some of your thinking about how you'd take it forward, as though you were on Bioshock 2?
KL: I can't speak for Gore. I've spoken to Gore and John but I think they're thinking about the story first and foremost.

So you're there to make sure it stays true to game?
KL: No, no. They're making a movie. My job there is to be a friend to Gore and John, be a resource for them and kick ideas around with them. At the end of the day John's the writer and Gore's the director. I'm not the traffic cop. They've been so respectful of the material and they're fans of the material - neither of these guys have to make any movie, they're both hugely successful in their fields, and for a guy like Gore Verbinski to go and make a Bioshock movie, that's a choice he makes. He's not in a place where he doesn't get to pick what assignments come to him. Same with John. So my job is not to watch over them, it's to say "hey guys, what can I do to help?" We've been talking some and it seems to me that these guys really are the right guys to be doing this.

Is it encouraging to see positive response to something like The Dark Knight? To see that comic book movies getting better? Is it encouraging given game movies have previously sucked?
KL: I think comics cracked that a while ago though. I mean Spider-man 2 and X-Men 2 were very strong films, Iron Man was a very strong film. They cracked out because they found out the strength of the material. I mean, Spider-Man 2 isn't about any one Spider-man comic but it's a sort of gestalt of the very spirit of what Spider-man is about. And they managed to do a very good job of that. It wasn't like "oh, this is the panel from issue 15."

It gives me encouragement that Hollywood understands that there's a benefit to honouring material and making a great film. I think 300 is a great example of that where you take something that really tries to honour. That's super close to the comic. But comics and games are different things. Comics are storyboards, games are interactive experience, you're not going to make that as close to the comic as 300 was. And Watchmen looks to be another film where visually they completely get how to translate it. That's not about shooting in a backyard or shooting in a real environment because comics aren't real. And games live in a strange space between comic books and movies in terms of how real they are. I mean, Bioshock doesn't reflect reality, it's extremely heightened reality, visually.

Bioshock was a success and praised for its story, and now most new games are playing up their storylines. Do you see Bioshock as an influence, or were you just ahead of the curve?
KL: It's hard to say. I think that we had some games last year that had a focus on that and certainly the reviews focused on that, like Portal and Bioshock, Mass Effect, and I think that to some degree they're about games embracing what they are, particularly with Portal and Bioshock. They're not movies, they're not things to be watched, they're things to be played, and the story has to bow down to that. And I think that sort of counter-intuitive thing about making it less about story - I got a lot of heat after giving that talk at GDC.

To some degree, counter-intuitively, the fact that we weren't wanting to tell this story god dammit, and the viewer better see every second of it, and hear every audio diary was one of the strengths of the story-telling. And I think... different strokes for different folks. Some people like their long cutscenes. They aren't to my tastes, or the team so much, so I feel there are lots of ways to go. But I couldn't tell you why there's a new focus, it's a combination of things. It's a combination of the attention of Hollywood, our ability to tell - we couldn't tell the story of Bioshock in our earlier games because we didn't have the polygons to render all the visual stuff we told the story with. All those amazing scenes are still - you couldn't tell the story back in the System Shock 2 days, you didn't have the tools.

System Shock 2 was one of those games that the critics adored but nobody bought. I think with Bioshock you set out to make something more commercial. Is that fair?
KL: If you can call game about an objectivist underwater utopia commercial. [Laughs].

Well, you did sell two million copies...
KL: It's commercial in retrospect, I would say. There was nobody in the world who said to us "oh my god, you guys are going to sell millions of this." People said "oh, it's going to be another great-reviewed game". My brother used to joke at me, "you going to get really good reviews, enjoy that." I get to make fun of him now. Nobody looked at Bioshock and thought it was going to be a huge seller. It took a lot of work on our part and on the publisher's part to get the word out on it.

I found it interesting in your talk when you said the whole concept of the moral choice and the two endings came late in the production process. And yet it was something that people really picked up on and they really liked the idea. You said that moral choices aren't usually binary. In the number of times you get to make a decision and with the Little Sisters, there are some shades of grey...
KL: I was acknowledging a failing - games want to be binary, and that's a challenge.

Not necessarily a criticism. I just wondered if that's something you're interested in exploring further, given the reaction.
KL: I'm interested - I never woke up and said "Oh my God, I gotta to make a game about moral choice." We had a game where moral choice sort of presented itself, and we had to act on that, to honour that thread or it just would have been exploitive I thought. Once we had that, we said what do we do with it. Now that we have to have this, what do we do with it.

CK: Our primary objective was to make a transition from sea slug to Little Sister, to go from a little thing you want to swat down and step on to something where you're like, my god what happened to this girl, what am I going to do, do I help her? The emotional attachment to it...

KL: When it was a slug it was strictly mechanical decision and it was a really hard decision to get across - do I kill the slug, do I hug it, what's better, I'm confused. But with Little Sister it was much clearer.

Were you surprised at how people latched on to that? You didn't even get a lot of flak for killing children, which you must have been mindful of.
KL: We were worried about that and there was a decision made internally about how we would talk about it. There would be no cause to think that we're selling this game as being about hurting little kids. We deliberately made choices - a lot of people got furious that you didn't see the little sister get harvested. And I'm like, why on earth would you want or need to see that? Because it happens, you know it happens, we don't need to show what happens. We always had our eye on how do we make sure this doesn't veer into exploitation. I mean, it's a very violent game but kids are a different line and you have to be very careful how you walk there. And we wanted to get an emotional impact without any kind of voyeuristic impact.

Jon Hicks