GamesRadar: BioShock has a very complex plot with multiple layers of meaning, but relatively sparse dialogue and exposition. How can you tell a story through setting alone?

HP: It's much more important to tell a story through those details because then a player is inventing the story and arriving at their own conclusion. It's not so didactic - we're not telling you exactly what happened. You figure it out and that makes it so much more powerful. We did not want to have 20 minute-long cutscenes of exposition.

We have a narrative team responsible for creating stories visually. For example, a female corpse in the Medical Pavilion looks like she was a desk nurse and somebody murdered her. She flew out of her chair and all the money in her cash register spilled in that direction. Another good example is the log you pick up in the Welcome level, where Diane McClintock is talking about how she's the silliest girl in Rapture because she's in love with Andrew Ryan... in the middle, you can hear what sounds like an explosion. Then that environment, with its destroyed statue of Atlas and the globe, starts to make more sense.

GamesRadar: What about the major characters' strong and distinct ideologies? How did you signal something so intangible?

HP: Those are hard problems to solve. Some of us would even say that we didn't solve them as well as we could have. The Great Chain is a good example. Ken [Levine, Creative Director on BioShock] came into work one day and said, "I was falling asleep last night, it was 3:00 AM and I thought of this idea, this metaphor. This is Andrew Ryan's ideal, sort of a positive, but when you think about it longer, then it has this sinister implication that everybody's hands are on the Great Chain and everybody's responsible for something good in society but everybody's equally responsible for something terrible."

So we have to figure out how to make iconic artistic element work throughout Rapture. We had our concept artists do a bunch of drawings, everything from light fixtures that looked like fists coming out of the wall to giant chain sculptures, and we settled on the big fist.

It was hard for us to tell how much of that stuff people were going to get, but it's nice if you get through the game and realize the symbolism subconsciously. Sometimes it's better to get the murky depths of half-understanding to help it feel more real. Mystery is just as important as being literal.