Why does BioShock feature first aid kits?
In practical terms they don’t serve a purpose, health itself doesn’t really serve a purpose. Because of the Vita-Chambers death is not permanent. Purchasing, or searching for, first aid kids is money and time wasted. The health meter in BioShock seems as redundant as the Power-Meter in Super Mario Galaxy, when death holds no noticeable penalty the concept of health is redundant.
The only exception to this is during the last level of BioShock. During this final confrontation the Vita-Chambers are unavailable and for the first time in the game the health bar is important. One of the core mechanics of the game is abandoned in order to present a boss battle that already feels at odds with the rest of the game. Furthermore, throughout Rapture there are first aid stations that can be used by both Splicers and the player. Such a means of repairing damage makes more sense within the narrative context of Rapture than it does in most games. As monitoring your health is unnecessary, the existence of first aid stations is called into question (Of course allowing Splicers to heal, feeds back into the apparent difficulty of the game itself; removing it could potentially make them easier to kill, but this could in turn be countered by a form of regenerating health).
It all makes me wonder if the entire notion of a health bar (and of a concluding boss battle) was included simply because it is a standard feature of the genre.
If a resources is functionally unimportant it shouldn’t take up interface real estate; serious consideration should be given to whether it should exist at all, is it there for a purpose or simply because of the dictates of convention?
One reply on “First Aid.”
i confess that i’ve never played BioShock 1, nor 2, but i remember System Shock 2 having the regeneration chambers, which served the same purpose, exept it used up some nanites (15, if i remember correctly?). However, this usually wasn’t an issue if you didn’t die like 4 times in a row. Despite that, when i died, i had quite a strong feeling of failure, and this feeling was the only reason why i was trying to avoid dying generally the same way (and for the same reasons), as if there were no ressurection chambers. Eventually I became aware of this, and embraced it as a part of my role-play. If it was reality, would I be careless about dying, if I knew i would be ressurected again? I don’t think so – death is just generally being percieved as the ultimately unpleasant experience, and as such, people/players will try to avoid it no matter whether it means “Game over”, or not, so to me, the “emotional punishment” is the same, the only difference being whether I can make it part of my role-play (ressurecion, backed-up by the game world itself), or not (having to manually load saved game).