In a current interview with Games Industry.bizKen Levine denigrated his most famous and popular game, BioShockas “a very, very long corridor”. He uses this description pejoratively to distinguish the 2007 first-person mystery game from his current project, the sci-fi FPS Judasa game that, in his opinion, is made “very, very differently.” As a consequence, he wants e.g Judas “much more…reflect the players’ freedom of choice.” But I want to step in and make the case for the corridor, for why today's widespread abandonment of them has resulted in some of the most compelling aspects of gaming being lost.
Before we get into the details: What does Levine, and indeed everyone else, mean by a “corridor”? It's about the idea that there is only one central path through a game, a predetermined path that all players must take, where we don't have the freedom to choose our own direction. Looking back at our current era, where open-world games dominate the AAA landscape, this can seem like a design that removes or limits player agency, leading to a harmful outcome.
And to be clear, some corridors have done just that. While first-person games were born in level-based mazes (Return to Wolfenstein Castle, Doometc.), there were a number of games that were almost literally corridors, so ridiculously restrictive that it felt like you were being dragged by your nose through the inevitable tunnel, your shoulders brushing against the claustrophobic walls the entire time. To name names, the very worst of them were these Call of duty campaigns by Black Ops forward – games that killed you if you dared to go left or right instead of straight, and pushed you into the background to watch the NPCs play the game.
But I would argue that almost no one played BioShock in 2007 reacted by saying, “Damn, that was just a corridor.” Because it was a game that gave players a tremendous sense of freedom despite only having one core path. You have chosen gigantic Amounts in BioShockFrom the way you actually played (run-and-gun shooter, device-based trapping and stealth, immersive simulation), to how you responded to the nature of the world around you, not least in the way it played , how you treated the Little Sisters. People celebrated the game for the amazing amount of freedom it offered within such a tightly written narrative, and all of this ignored that the game was a prescribed corridor The The whole point.
I'm sorry to spoil an 18 year old game, but the fact that you had no choice but to follow the instructions you were given was the huge reveal in the third act. That the game is in an inescapable corridor was located is one of the main reasons for this BioShock was brilliant because if it had allowed players to visit any point in the underwater city of Rapture whenever they wanted, everything else about it would have collapsed.
BioShock's drama so often depends on being exactly where the game designer wants you, at the exact moment he wants you there, and this kind of precise narrative choreography is the result of a corridor. By rejecting such game design as a failure, we lose that kind of experience, and I really believe we should fight to save it instead.
Of course, corridors are and should only be a part of games. I'm not silly, I love a fantastic open world game and of course I've been playing RPGs since the 1980s that offer players great freedom when approaching their world. I do not for a moment advocate anything other than the desire to preserve the corridor as one option among so many others and therefore not to disparage it as if it were a failure of the past. Because damn, it brought so much success.
I don't think I'm necessarily much of a loner here. In fact, if you look at any number of “best games of all time” lists and clean up the recency bias, certain names stand out again and again: Half-life 2, Deus Ex, Quake 2, halo, Dishonored. They share space on these lists with games that do just the opposite, the litany of wonderful RPGs that often forego corridors entirely, but the games with straight paths undeniably dominate. In fact, they are the shining example of how to hide the hallway in the best possible way.
But rather than delve into the details of how and why concealing the corridor was key to their success, let's focus more on what is lost without it.
Open worlds are Greatand I really enjoy tidying up symbols in a Ubisoft map or choosing my own unique route through the Acts of Baldur's Gate 3. But what they don't do so well is puppeteer the player and create deliberate, narrative moments in a deliberate, narrative path. They cannot offer anything similar to the scenes in a movie where the impact of Event B is so much more meaningful because it came directly in response to the action of Event A and the consequence of it drives the emotional resonance of Event C.
I remember in the early 2000s, at the beginning of the rejection of corridor games as a design choice, I responded with the same argument that comes to mind now: “Reject reading the pages of a book in order to have to?” Is the book a failure if page 37 comes every time after page 36?” The immediate retort is, “Games aren't books, so we call them something else,” and sure, but my point is: games may The aim is to be like books in the best sense. Because when your game is set in a corridor and the scenes are as inevitable as the pages of the book, it's the way we interact with them that defines them. The focus is on our personal interpretation of what is presented to us, and rather than being a sandbox in which we can play God, we are instead in a story that we can experience in a unique way.
(In fact, this is the basis of why I argued this the end of Mass Effect 3 is not a failure to recognize player agencybut a scripted moment understood in a unique way based on your personal experiences in all three games.)
Agency can be wonderful, but it often comes at a price – the price of a curated, targeted, and intentional storytelling experience. And yes, it wouldn't be good if all games were like that, but it's no better to dismiss it as an anachronistic flaw in the game's design. BioShock just worked Because It was a corridor and actually a thesis in the hallwaywhich makes it all the stranger to throw a game under the bus of history. There is value in experiencing a curated, predetermined story supported by our unique approaches that emerge from the way we turn these pages. I don’t want it to be lost under the guise of “bigger player agency.”
.
