Somehow, I've gone 11 years without playing Bioshock. That's nuts. But that's also what this blog is for - to play the games that I missed and experience things I haven't yet.
And I'm so fucking glad I came back to Bioshock. It's not just a superb shooter with fun mechanics, it's one of the most cohesive virtual worlds I've ever played. It's a first person shooter with light horror and survival mechanics (technically?). For the first time in a forever, I played a shooter game with health packs.
But, before we go any further, I need to get something off my chest. I'm going to be blunt so I can avoid being anything less than perfectly clear:
Bioshock is one of the best fucking video games I've ever played. And if you're like last-week me, you're a goddamn moron for not having played it yet. So, get on it, ya wonderful dunce.
But hey, let's get back to the game.
After surviving a plane crash over the mid-Atlantic, you stumble across a lighthouse with a strange looking gondola at the center of it. You get in, and you're taken fathoms below the surface to the city of Rapture, a hidden utopia designed by famed industrialist Andrew Ryan. It's 1960, but everything has this incredibly gorgeous Art Deco art direction that makes the city from afar look like a city that fell right out of the 1939 World's Fair.
Rapture is a breathtaking sight. An entire metropolis on the ocean floor that was designed with Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy in mind. A place where a person's happiness and success is the purpose of their life, with the only social structure that can promote this rational self-interest being a laissez-faire capitalist society. The purpose of art is to transform your perception of the world in a physical, tangible thing that can be viewed objectively and heighten your perception of reality.
That's what Rapture is - it's Galt's Gulch from Atlas Shrugged and Andrew Ryan is Ayn Rand. His name is even an anagram for "we r Ayn Rand". Between that and the content of the game... yeah, they're laying it on pretty thick.
To set the mood the way the game did, let me share one of the first things Ryan says to you, the player, through a pre-recorded radio message as you descend upon Rapture from the surface.
"I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No," says the man in Washington, "it belongs to the poor." "No," says the man in the Vatican, "it belongs to God." "No," says the man in Moscow, "it belongs to everyone." I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different; instead, I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well."
Pretty heavy shit, right? Right. And just when you think it's about to get heavier, it gets creepier instead.
While intended to be a utopian society without restriction or regulation, the city has descended into madness, addiction, and even civil war. The scientists of Rapture had discovered in the depths of the ocean a sea slug that contained something they called ADAM - a substance that could unlock genetic potential in humans. This sea slug could keep producing ADAM when implanted in a human host, but the only host that could survive the parasitic relationship was young girls, no older than a kindergartner.
That... unsavory predicament will come back later.
This industry ran unchecked long enough until someone named Fontaine had amassed enough power to challenge Andrew Ryan for control of his own city, and even though Fontaine has died, A man named Atlas had introduced populist sentimentalities, representing the working class for once in a society that favors only the most successful. Atlas decides enough is enough and the only thing left to do is leave Rapture. That's where you come in; he needs your help to get him and his family out of there.
Since the civil war, most of Rapture has fallen into complete disarray, with ADAM-addicts going insane from all the genetic manipulation they've inflicted on themselves. These people, known as Splicers, have killed most of the normal population of Rapture and an army of them stand between you and helping out Atlas. They look like kinda like Malcolm McDowell from A Clockwork Orange - they're well-dressed, well-armed enemies covered in blood scrounging to survive and hoping to cut you in half.
After using a little ADAM yourself, you have powers of your own that when coupled with a large selection of weapons, gives you a fighting chance of dealing with Rapture's crazed denizens. You'll be shooting and shocking (and incinerating, and freezing, and like 45 other things) your way through Rapture.
That may seem like a lot of backstory but the game does the most incredible way of explaining it to you. There are no cutscenes in Bioshock, there is never a single break from your perspective. Story instead is shared through the environment, through Atlas and Andrew Ryan on the radio, and through audio diaries scattered throughout the world. Every piece of storytelling is completely diegetic. You're never told there's a civil war, not really - instead you'll do things like find the audio diary of someone who's been supplying weapons to two different camps, and he'll name the clients. Then later, you'll find one of the logs of said clients and hear about their plan to take over a section. It's a web where each new thing you find expands upon something you've already found building out a fully-fleshed-out world that feels like it was genuinely lived in until it was genuinely destroyed.
Throughout the game you're given chances to upgrade your powers, known as plasmids, but you need ADAM to do it. The biggest supplies of ADAM, are the aforementioned young girls, referred to as Little Sisters when producing ADAM. There are a set amount roaming each section of Rapture, and they have these giant (awesome looking) protectors called Big Daddy's that put up one hell of a fight to keep you from getting to them. Atlas will tell you this little girl is no longer human, that you're putting her out of her misery by removing the slug from its host. Doctor Tenenbaum, the scientist who discovered the slug and created ADAM says she created a new plasmid capable of removing the slug and saving the girl's life, but at the cost of getting significantly less* ADAM than if you were to kill her. The screen hangs on the little girl, looking scared out of her mind, and two prompts appear.
Press X to Rescue.
Press Y to Harvest.
You may have noticed an asterisk, and though it may look small, it's actually a pretty fucking big asterisk. It seems like such a moral dilemma, right? Powers are super fun, and they're part of the reason why you're playing the game - powers are awesome, but you only get them if you kill a fucking child. You can save the child, which is... admittedly, not as cool as powers, but great for, y'know - your conscience. The powers aren't just cool, they make the game easier, letting you upgrade your health, the damage of your weapons, hacking, buying items you desperately need, and a thousand other things. Making people choose between getting more powerful and being an evil degenerate is SUCH a good decision to force on the player, a true quandary**...
* **Except every three girls you 'rescue' instead of 'harvest', you get a huge fucking gift basket from Dr. Tenenbaum rewarding you with the same amount of ADAM. So ultimately, they force you to choose between being a dick for no reason, and being a not-piece-of-shit, not exactly the hard decision it was initially billed as.
The game is ironic since nothing you do is done for yourself. Andrew Ryan is a man driven by self-interest, but the player never gets to choose what they can do because that's the nature of a video game. There are barriers in the game that lock you out unless you follow specific orders. "A man chooses, a slave obeys", Ryan eventually says, but you're never given any choice in the game except what to do with the Little Sisters, which isn't a real choice at all, since they both have what's essentially the same result.
It's a bit frustrating from a game design perspective, but also, since the entire game is basically an indictment of objectivism and Ayn Rand at heart, it kinda makes sense. Everything there is just a huge middle finger to the philosophy. Rapture fails. The free market collapsed the city. The lack of regulation led to a world of addiction and decay. The lack of restriction turned what should've been the 8th wonder of the world into one of the other wonders of the world - a fucking mausoleum. The entire game tells objectivism to go fuck itself so it kinda makes sense that the way you play it feeds into this meta-narrative.
I will admit that after the game's famous second act twist, some of the story got a little frustrating and a little too outlandish considering the game's already insane premise. While it lost me after the twist, it got back on track just to lose me right before the end. All that said though, I still love the game's story. Since I beat Bioshock, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
I've looked at books on objectivism, I've watched a crap load of videos on the game( including a two hour director's commentary interview with the game's creative director), and about every other possible thing I can do to throw myself further in its world. I finished it, and I'm already about halfway through the sequel, and stoked to play Infinite, the third game in the series and one I played about 5 years ago when it launched. It's taken over my life.
If you haven't played it, I cannot recommend it enough. It's the closest I think we'll ever get to a Christopher Nolan level of "holy shit" moments from a game, and it just snuck into my top ten list for best games of all time. Please play it.
A+