Suspend your disbelief, but...

It's time to talk realism.

But really it isn't, because there's something that's been bothering me since Bioshock came out, and I feel I have to rant it out now. It's difficult to explain exactly, but you'll find that I've superglued you to that chair, so you're not going anywhere.


Certain things can jar somebody's suspension of disbelief, snapping them out of the magical world the game, movie or book had them in. Sometimes they can be obviously huge and retarded things, but other times it'll be the smallest detail. What I have found is that it's different for everybody, and something that snaps one person won't necessarily do it to somebody else.

Something annoys me though - there are some people who aren't jarred by anything!


In Pan's Labyrinth, there is a Faun, a magical fantasy creature. Fauns don't really exist, but we don't throw the table over and storm out of the room when we see him; it's part of the story, and the costume is really good. We accept the Faun, and we are happy.

At the end of the movie, a drop of blood falls from a character's hand, down a hole - straight downwards - but hits a part of the floor which is a few feet away. It's either magic flying blood or physics have been broken!

For me, just that managed to snap me out of my trance and go 'hey waitaminute!'. It didn't ruin the movie or anything like that, but it just managed to alert my brain, and I wished it hadn't. I mention this to the others, and one of them says 'But here's a faun in the movie.'

Wait a minute, that's completely different!!

This is what bothers me: it's like there are two types of THING. On the one hand you have Fauns, Giant Robots, Laser Guns, and the other hand you have continuity errors, blunders and mistakes. Some people think that because the former are present but do not really exist on earth, the latter can exist by right. Nnnnnnooooooo! This has happened time and time again lately.


It's affected by the viewer's knowledge as well though. A hardened military veteran playing a 'realistic' army-based FPS is going to notice the errors if the soldiers are not using the 'correct' weapons or if the uniform is incorrect, the characters use wrong terminology and so on, whereas I would have no idea about any of this, and wouldn't notice it. My suspension of disbelief would remain intact while Mr. Military's would have been broken. He might find the game less appealing because of it.


So case in point here is Bioshock. In the beginning when you decend into Rapture, and are zooming around the city, you see a whale swim between a couple of buildings. Most people I know look at the whale as a reference of scale, and go 'wow this place is huge!', but a friend who knows a lot about animals was put off, because he knows that whales would swim away from the lights and noise of the city. He said there's no way that a whale would go anywhere near the place, and although most people I know choked on their Stella Artois and groaned 'who cares' at this, I am inclined to feel differently. Actually, I do care!

But then somebody said 'Who cares if a whale does something it's not supposed to, there are plasmids, you can shoot lightning out of your fingers!'

Nnnnnnoooooooooo!!

We accept plasmids as being a part of the game; the game revolves around them. The game is set up to explain how they came about, and why everyday people were able to inject themselves with fantastic powers. It doesn't break one's sense of disbelief because the game presents it so well, whereas the whale is almost 'tacked-on' with no explanation of why this real-world animal does something completely different from-


Oh actually, who cares.