IN recent interview with Game industry.bizKen Levine discredited his most eminent and popular game, BioShockas “a very, very long corridor”. He uses this description in a pejorative sense to distinguish the 2007 first-person puzzle game from his current project, a science fiction FPS Peepholethe game, he says, is being made “very, very differently.” As a result, he wants for Peephole to be “much more…reflective of player agency.” But I want to step in and advocate for the corridor, explaining why today’s widespread abandonment of them has allowed some of the most fascinating aspects of gaming to be lost.
Before we get into the weeds, what do Levine and everyone else mean when they say “corridor”? This is the idea that there is only one basic route in the game, a predetermined path that all players must follow, during which we have no freedom to choose our own direction. As such, when looking back at our current era where open world games dominate the AAA landscape, it can feel like a design that removes or limits player freedom, resulting in removal.
And to be incredibly clear, some corridors did just that. While first-person games were born in level-based mazes (Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Mooseetc.), there has indeed been a wave of games that were almost literal corridors, so absurdly restrictive that it felt like one was being dragged by the nostrils into an inescapable tunnel, with one’s arms constantly scratching at the claustrophobic walls. To name names, the worst ones are Call of Duty campaigns from Black operations forward – games that killed you if you dared to go left or right rather than straight, and pushed you backwards to watch NPCs play for you.
But I would argue that almost no one who played BioShock in 2007, he reacted by saying, “Damn, it was just a hallway.” Because it was a game that, despite having only one basic path, allowed players to feel a huge sense of freedom. You chose huge amounts in BioShockfrom how you actually played the game (run-and-gun shooter, device-based traps and stealth, immersive simulation) to how you reacted to the nature of the world around you, especially in the way you treated the Little Sisters. People praised the game for the incredible freedom it offered within such a tightly written narrative, all while ignoring the fact that the game being a designated corridor was the whole point.
Sorry to spoil an 18 year aged game, but the fact that you had no choice but to follow the instructions you were given was a huge revelation in the third act. The fact that the game is set in an inescapable corridor is the reason for this BioShock was brilliant because if it allowed players to visit any point in the underwater city of Rapture whenever they wanted, everything else would fall apart.
BioShockThe drama of a game often depends on being exactly where the game designer wants you, at exactly the moment they want you, and this kind of precise narrative choreography is the result of the corridor. By dismissing a game design like this as a failure, we are missing out on these kinds of experiences, and I really think it’s something we should fight for.
Of course, corridors are and should only be part of the games. I’m not stupid, I love fantasy open-world games, and of course I’ve been playing RPGs since the 80s, which offer players a lot of freedom in getting closer to their worlds. I am not for a moment advocating for anything other than the desire to preserve the corridor as an option among many others and therefore not discredit it as a failure of the past. Because damn, it was such a success.
I don’t think I necessarily have to be that individualistic here. In fact, if you look at any number of “best games of all time” lists and account for the recency bias, some names will show up time and time again: Half-Life 2, Deus Ex, Shock 2, Halo, Defamed. They share space on these lists with games that do just the opposite, a litany of great RPGs that often avoid corridors altogether, but games with straight paths undeniably dominate. Indeed, these are perfect examples of how to best hide a hallway.
But rather than get into the nitty-gritty of how and why camouflaging the corridor was key to their success, let’s focus more on what we’ll lose without them.
There are open worlds Greatand I’m very elated to be able to clear the icons on the Ubisoft map or choose my own unique route through the acts Baldur’s Gate 3. But what they can’t do is puppeteer the player, creating thoughtful, narrative moments along a thoughtful, narrative path. They cannot offer something more like scenes from a movie, where the impact of event B is much more significant because it occurred directly in response to the action of event A, and its consequence drives the emotional resonance of event C.
Back in the early 2000s, at the beginning of the rejection of corridor games as a design choice, I remember responding with the same argument that comes to mind now: “Do you reject the need to read the pages of a book in order? Is a book a failure if page 37 appears after page 36 every time?” To which the direct answer is “Games are not books, that’s why we call them different” and sure, but my point is: games Power Try to be like the books in the best way possible. Because when a game takes place in a corridor, when scenes are as inevitable as the pages of a book, they are defined by how we interact with them. It puts the emphasis on our personal interpretation of what is offered to us, and instead of being a sandbox in which we can play God, we find ourselves inside a story that we have the opportunity to experience in a unique way.
(Actually, this is the basis for why I argued this end Mass Effect 3 does not represent a lack of recognition of player agencybut instead a scenario, understood individually based on your personal experiences gathered in all three games.)
Freedom can be wonderful, but it often comes at a price – the cost of a curated, curated and thoughtful narrative. And yes, it wouldn’t be good if all games were like that, but it’s no better to look down on it as an anachronistic flaw in game design. BioShock he just worked Because it was a corridor and it was indeed a thesis in the corridorwhich makes it even more of an oddity for a game to be thrown under the history bus. It’s worth exploring a curated, pre-determined story, reinforced by our unique approach resulting from how we turn these pages. I don’t want this to be lost in the name of “greater player agency” bragging rights.
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