For Leigh Alexander, saving the girls is like saving Rapture’s last bit of innocence. If he chooses to “harvest” the girl, he gets a great deal more ADAM, but she does not survive. If he rescues a little sister, he receives a small amount of ADAM that he can use to purchase plasmids, tonics, and other upgrades, and the girl survives. When Rapture’s lumbering Big Daddies are defeated, the player may choose the fate of “little sisters” they protect. The philosophy of rational self-interest provides context for the story, and also for a moral choice that the player makes. Our attempts to deal with or ignore this tension are them mocked by the game’s central twist. The gameplay establishes that the player must serve his own interest in order to advance, while the story forces the player to serve others in order to advance. In his essential essay “Ludonarrative Dissonance in BioShock“, Hocking argues that the game presents the player with two conflicting contracts. Justin Keverne argued that the mechanics of the game suggest that one’s goal is to acquire power in order to gain the ability to acquire further power.Īt this point, designer Clint Hocking felt that BioShock went off the rails in a certain sense. In his view, the choice to attack the Big Daddies (and possibly the little sisters) makes the player part of the oppressive capitalist regime. In his very interesting Marxist critique, Richard Terrell lays out a case that the game conditioned the player to accept the principles of Rapture’s economy. Ava Avane Dawn argues that the game isn’t a fair critique of objectivism because the people of Rapture actually betrayed objectivist ideals. Shamus Young interviewed an Objectivist on the subject, who argued that BioShock really aims its criticisms at the idea of philosophical certainty. This interpretation of the game’s attitude towards Objectivism was not universal, however. Jay Barnson felt that the game critiqued the intrinsic short-sightedness of the market, which is regarded as all-wise by the lovers of laissez-faire economics. A sprawling essay at Popular Symbolism interprets the game’s history and many characters as a condemnation of Objectivism and transhumanism.
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In his view, the game attacks two key flaws of Rand’s philosophy: society can never sustain its ideal state (somebody must, after all, scrub the toilets), and free will, even in the land of plasmids, is limited. Lorenzo Wang fleshes out this case in his rich and interesting essay “ BioShock Explained”. The underwater utopia of Rapture was founded by an industrialist named Andrew Ryan on a system of principles much akin to Randian Objectivism, so much so that John Lanchester argues in the London Review of Books that BioShock is the only popular work in recent years to give Rand a drubbing. One of BioShock‘s most compelling features is that it details an interesting philosophical system and then uses it to frame an ethical question. “Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?” Thus, this constitutes an in-progress draft of a survey of critical thinking on a game that will likely be regarded as a classic. So much has been written about it that I could only put my hands on a fraction of the material without driving myself nutty as a splicer. Discussions of the game spawned the most popular jargon in games writing. BioShock has received excessive adulation, a much-discussed backlash, and even a backlash to its backlash. BioShock is the rare game that really does change the way we think about video games, if for no other reason than that it has turned up as an example in almost every discussion of game style, mechanics, story, or design that has been written since its initial release in 2007.
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