Talking about HUDs: What Bioshock did wrong

As recipient of more than one Game of the Year award, one looks at Bioshock as a pinnacle of modern gaming. The visuals are engrossing, the world is hyper interactive, the combat is engaging while allowing creative thinking, and it has a great storyline. It breaks my heart then, that Ken Levine and his team at Irrational completely botched the climatic scene, the confrontation with Andrew Ryan, by violently ripping me out of the experience.

What did they do? They screwed up the HUD. It disappeared.

HUDs are funny things. Though I'd never heard the term until I played StarSiege, HUDs have been around since pong. They are a useful and (if well designed) unobtrusive way of giving the player pertinent information about the current game session. In olden days they showed the player's score, coins in Mario games, ammo in shooting games, and the ultimate resource: life. But HUDs give players one more, often overlooked piece of information. A piece of information whose importance increases as the depth of the story does.

The HUD tells the player he's playing a game.

When the HUD is active, any seasoned gamer is on their toes, looking for threats. The game is active, and is feeding them the information they need. Anything that goes wrong is their fault. This reaction is the primary importance of HUDs. They force the player to remain connected and focused, even if they have no actual control over the situation.

Let me start with a simple thought experiment and then I'll return to Bioshock's folly. Think of any game you want that has narrative scenes broken up by gameplay scenes. My example is Shinobi, which shows a cinematic at the start and end of every level, with gameplay filling the gaps between. It doesn't matter if it's an action game or an RPG. Imagine you're in an intense battle in this game, in Shinobi you'd be teleporting around and killing enemies. You're glancing at your life to see how the battle's going, you look at your magic meter (scrolls in Shinobi) to see if you can do any special attacks, you're keeping track of any modifiers the game's engine supports (Such as the number of enemies you've killed in rapid succession in Shinobi).

Suddenly the screen goes white. Your HUD is still there, but you can't see anything else. What runs through your head?

If you're a normal gamer, you're going to start freaking out. Why is the screen white? Did I die? Is this some enemy's special attack? Did my game crash?

All from a simple white screen! Imagine the same situation, but this time your HUD disappears. I believe you'll find that after an initial moment of panic, you quickly realize this is a cinematic and relax. This is exactly the reaction we must avoid when telling stories with games. Once the game reverts to a movie, the player checks out of his character, and returns to reality.

Without spoiling too much, in the climatic scene in Bioshock, the main character is stripped of control of his body. While a nice enough plot point, this scene is delivered HUD free. When I watched it, I didn't feel what the character felt. He was powerless, I was not. I had been completely removed from the game's world. Imagine if the scene had kept its HUD. I would've hammered away at the buttons on my controller, trying to see if any buttons would work. I'd slam the joysticks around trying move my body. I would have been wildly thrashing (much as the character would be) in the only way I knew. Both the protagonist and I would be panicking at our lack of control.

There are other examples, but this seems most prominent. HUDs let players know that they are playing a game. It's a deciding and often overlooked aspect of games that separates them from movies and books. We as game designers must embrace HUDs and use them as traps to ensnare our players.