Will You Kindly

Will You Kindly

Will you kindly pay close attention to this sentence. Familiar phrase isn’t it, will you kindly? It is the same set of words that “activate” your character and turn him into Fontaine’s agent of destruction in Rapture. These words help eliminate Fontaine’s enemies, they ultimately cause the death of Andrew Ryan and give Rapture to Frank Fontaine, common thug and con artist with a vision. The words are tongue in cheek, you were merely playing the game, you had no choice. The game gave you tasks, and to progress and continue your entertainment, you followed them. Sure, they were a bit linear, but that’s what the story required.

Will you kindly is a metaphor for game design. We have freedom, as much as the developers give us. If we had more freedom than BioShock gave us, we couldn’t have the story we had. Freedom is something we all strive for in gaming, and yet the best game of the year has almost no choice at all.

Irrational mocks us. Andrew Ryan, confronting you, his brainwashed, programmed, mind controlled son who always responds to “Will You Kindly” with immediate obedience, figures it all out. He is a man who burned a forest he bought rather than let the parasites in Washington nationalize it into a national park. He admits he cannot raise his own hand against you even now, though you’ve brought down his defenses and exposed him to his enemies. At this point when you want to make a choice that goes against Will You Kindly, Irrational takes control of your character, and he has you stop. Turn around. Run. A man chooses, a slave obeys. Will you kindly kill Andrew Ryan, says Andrew Ryan, handing you a putter. And you do so. The truth is revealed to the player in one of the most brutal, moving, memorable death scenes ever.

Of course, you were never under mind control but the game played as if you were and you weren’t aware of it. When you finally become aware of this irresistible influence, when you personally feel the urge to rebel that your character does not, what little choice you have is taken from your hand. The game has you kill Andrew Ryan. And then when control is restored, Atlas gives you one last command, “now will you kindly insert that damn card into the machine” to stop the self-destruct sequence that Andrew Ryan began. Of course, you want to game to continue, so you smile at the situation and insert the card, obeying your last Will You Kindly, before the game changes the rules and de-programs your character.

It is as brilliant a bit of writing as the whole argument about philosophy. It is to gaming what Memento was to movies. It’s art, real art. It makes you think. It makes you admire the flawed visionary Andrew Ryan; the very character Irrational made to mock Objectivism takes on a dignity of his own that you have to respect. He chose death though he could have played “will you kindly” ping pong with Fontaine the whole time. With his defenses taken down, he would rather burn Rapture like he burned his forest than let it fall into the hands of Fontaine. He is a consistent, brilliant character – everything revealed about him thus far agrees with his final actions.

Half-Life 2’s story telling is subtle. It is in the background and around you but rarely in your face. The story is there in bits and pieces for the player to pick up or ignore as he chooses. What is Xen, what is the Combine, what’s going on? You can either piece it together or just shoot things.


BioShock has all of that plus the traditional story, the one thrust upon you, the one that mocks you and mocks gaming and mocks choice in gaming and provides an excellent experience despite it all. You can choose to pick up on these details, or you can simply revel in the mind job that Irrational did on us when we dropped down into Ryan’s sanctum and saw the words “Will You Kindly” scribbled on the wall in blood, lines connecting pictures, identities, ideas, the memories you found recorded on tapes, the puppy that died in your hands.

Magnificent.