Tom's Thoughts and Ideas

This is certainly a different tone than previously, but that is okay since we can not let this all be doom and gloom can we? Bioshock is one of my favorite video games ever made. It was made by 2K games and published in 2007. It is a first person shooter, but unlike games like Call of Duty, it is an art game that spends most of its runtime critiquing philosophy and ethics as much as being a fun gaming experience.

The premise is thus, in 1960 your protagonist character is in a plane crash and lands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The only thing that can be seen is a solitary lighthouse that via futurist tech leads to the underwater city of Rapture. The game’s story revolves around the player exploring this city in search of a way out, among other things. I will try to avoid spoiling the major story beats, while still talking about why the game is so amazing. There may be a later post regarding my thoughts with a spoiler warning, but I am not sure yet.

Art of Rapture for reference:

I will not be talking about the gameplay or practical elements a lot, I am likely to just ramble about how the game criticizes hyper capitalism until I feel I have done enough, and trust me, no matter how long I write for there is a lot more to chew on. People have written whole books about how amazing this game is.

The premise of Rapture as a city is that it was built by a man named Andrew Ryan, a famous and wealthy American capitalist, as a place away from the evils of the world as he perceives them. At the start of the game he gives a little speech about the principles of the city as the person (in this case the player) presumably enters the city for the first time. See below:

“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. 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.”

Now clearly there is a lot going on here. 2K games is laying it on fairly thick at the start, this game is clearly a spoof on Ayn Rand and her philosophy best seen in her book Atlas Shrugged, in all its like 800 pages of foolishness. Rapture is capitalism and to a lesser extent American exceptionalism gone wild, many of the characters in the city are not American but the idea still certainly applies. Ryan built the city as a haven for the most intelligent, creative, and successful people in the world to come and be free from oversight and the morality of the surface world. It is a city built on the ideas of objectivism, that the sweat of your brow should be yours to keep. This directly parallels John Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged. Galt’s Gulch was a place for the wealthy and powerful to strike and seclude themselves away from the evil and dirty poor people of the world. Rand’s theory is that capitalists like John Galt are necessary for the world to function properly and without them the government will collapse from socialism. In Atlas Shrugged clearly she is right, since she wrote the book, but in Bioshock the answer 2K comes to is a bit different.

When the player first enters Rapture they see ruins and chaos. This is the state of the whole city since two years prior on New Years Eve 1958 a rival to Andrew Ryan started a civil war to take control of Rapture. This is only one or two decades after Rapture was created, so the city did not remain a capitalist utopia for all that long. This facade of capitalist success becomes even more clear the further the player explores Rapture. Every place in the city is in total disrepair with the citizens of the city having regressed through plasmid use (future gene editing drugs, it is not really important at the moment) into insane murderers and psychopaths.

The atmosphere of the game is truly its strong suit, since the combat and graphics are very much 2007. Everything in Rapture tells a story. In many cases quite literally, the player sees advertisements for all types of morally questionable products, visual storytelling that chronicles the demise and anarchy that has come to Rapture, and many audio logs from a wide range of characters who talk about how the city was not all that amazing even before the civil war.

Andrew Ryan is supposed to be the Randian capitalist golden boy, but all the lore that we learn about Rapture before the fall shows him to be a deeply insecure man who will not let go of any power he has amassed. He would, and does try, to burn the cities air supply rather than let it fall outside of his control. Ryan styles himself, incidentally I suspect, as a type of tsar of Rapture since he owns the whole city. The issues start when a competitor starts to take away Ryan’s market share, and every action Ryan takes makes his rule more authoritarian and strays further from the ideals of libertarian objectivism. I find that this is the most damning thing of all, since the game is clearly saying that as much as a person might cling to an ideology of freedom for all, once they are personally threatened ideology gets replaced with self interest and freedom disappears. Even zealots stray from the path if their market share is threatened.

This though, brings a slight issue, if selfishness is a virtue then Ryan is a saint. This is true, but Ryan, in error, does not allow others to pursue their selfishness if it challenges his authority, which for Rand is the wrong kind of self interest. Ryan’s ideology, that can be seen all across the city in golden monuments, is the idea of the “Great Chain” that binds. His theory is that the world markets and life acts like a chain and through self interest and laissez-faire capitalism everyone will pull the chain towards themselves, thus making the chain taut and strong. This ideology of selfishness being moral is right out of Rand and makes some sense if you do not think that hard. Lets poke some holes shall we. First, not how chains work, if everyone pulls on a chain some people will be stronger and this difference of force will destroy the chain slowly. This is coincidently exactly what happened since, like any hyper capitalist society, Rapture’s wealth instantly coagulated into the pockets of the wealthy rather than the people. I will not be so gauche as to draw a direct comparison to modern conundrums.

Another issue with Ryan’s chain is that if there is no constraint on science or morality, then the most wealthy will clearly exploit regular people to make money no matter what. This gets us to the interesting case study of plasmids in Bioshock. The idea of plasmids are that they are gene editing in a bottle. For a small fee you can lift huge loads, become smarter, light fires with your hands, teleport, and many other things. Now, clearly these are all horrible ideas. Messing around with genetics in a Randian world can only end badly. And it does, the main ingredient of plasmids turns people insane, yet to the people making them, it makes for repeat customers. Again, how poignant. I think you get the point now though, the great chain is silly and is merely a cover for a wealthy capitalist to create his own city in order to create a more perfect union of exploitative labor.

Every level in Bioshock has a different tone and take on this theme. The Medical Pavilion features an insane surgeon who wanted to create the perfect face then decided that it would be neat if Picasso’s portrait art were replicated. The “docks” (can you have those underwater?) show how the poorest workers live in squalor and poverty in this utopia. Fort Frolic, as the name implies, shows what unchecked greed and hedonism breeds in a society. And Olympus Heights shows how even the wealthy are trodden upon if they are unfortunate enough to not be the most wealthy. These are just some of the levels in the game, they all are unique and interesting. I personally think Fort Frolic is the best since it takes the insane black comedy of the game and turns it up to 11.

I do not want this to be too long since I am sure most people only have a passing interest in both video games and Ayn Rand (rightly so on the second one), so I will leave you will a small anecdote that I find ties this whole thing in a neat bow. When I finished the game I went to the objectivism subreddit among other places and read what they thought about the game. I found it very telling that the prevailing opinion was that the game was a poor representation of their ideas. Truly, Scotland is a land of no men other than imitators…

Adieu.