Bioshock Analysis pt. 1, or: Philisophical Objectivism 101

(This entry was written for SNHU's GAM-205 class in the Fall 2017 semester.)

    It's not a common sight to see a video game take a notable political stance on an issue. It's even rarer when the game is a mainstream release that gets sold in major retailers. The game in question is Bioshock, a game released in 2007 by 2K Games. A lot has been said about the content of this game, but what may be most interesting is how it introduced players to the idea of philosophical objectivism via showing a dystopian system run by objectivism. All screens are from the remastered version because that's the version I had installed. Plus, it has Steam achievements.

From what little I grasp of Objectivism from Kingdom of Loathing, beating you up isn't unethical. You're responsible for not getting a wrench in your skull if that's important to you, buddy.

    Objectivism is a philosophical system that was created by American-Russian writer Ayn Rand. It features prominently in her books, most notably Atlas Shrugged, the book that you might know for the joke of people wondering "When will John Galt shut the hell up?" for it's 60+ page filibuster. In all seriousness, it's a philosophy that puts self-interest as the highest moral value. This is, of course, a very bare bones crash course.When it comes to political talk, I'm the sort of person would counter anything political with a cute dog to the face. You can read a bit about Objectivism here and here, but the essence of the ethics of Objectivism comes from a quote by John Galt saying "I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

    Bioshock itself takes place in the 1960's where Jack, a featureless protagonist who primarily acts as a stand-in for the player, winds up in the underwater city of Rapture after his plane crashes into the ocean. This city is the creation of an eccentric billionaire known as Andrew Ryan (note the intentional similarity to Ayn Rand.) However, the city seems to be falling apart and most of the population has gone flat-out insane from the use of ADAM, a mysterious substance used to make Plasmids, mutagenic serums like that you promptly inject into yourself minutes into the game.

Jack takes the Dahir Insaat approach to medicine: "Imma poke this shiz in me! What could go wrong?"

    (As an aside, I find it weird that the city of Rapture bans religious belief and is hyper-capitalistic, yet Andrew Ryan named the city Rapture and the weird chemicals are called ADAM and EVE. You know, highly Christian themes. Just a curious thought.)

    Luckily, the ADAM doesn't drive you nuts, but it does let you shoot lightning at the crazed splicers of Rapture. You can get other abilities from plasmids that let you shoot fire, give you telekinetic powers, or just summon swarms of bugs to attack enemies. Of course, before the city fell, all of that ADAM had to come somewhere, and that somewhere is the Little Sisters (some have noted how it's always sister and never brother) and the Big Daddies that guard them. In a way, it acts as the objectivist philosophy of self-interest taken to an extreme: literal human resources.

Unholy Diver / You will never go to the midnight sea / Oh, please don't drill a hole in me.

    Apparently down on the ocean floor are sea slugs that produce small amounts of ADAM from their stem cells, but of course, more of it is needed to meet demand. Turns out implanting one of those slugs in a girl turns in into an ADAM harvester that takes it from the corpses of the splicers. Don't feel too bad about that though: the splicers are all parasites, according to Andrew Ryan. The whole civil war that started before you got to Rapture, however, meant that the Little Sisters needed protection in the form of those hulking divers known as Big Daddies.

    A big aspect of the game that was written about is the morality system in which after defeating a Big Daddy, you can choose to rescue or harvest the Sister. Harvesting her gets you lots of ADAM and kills the girl, but rescuing gets you less and turns the girl to normal. From a gameplay perspective, harvesting seems optimal, although harvesting more than one Sister gives you the bad ending. It should also be noted that rescuing Sisters gives you gifts, including unique plasmids and ADAM, meaning that you get slightly less ADAM, but eventually you get more ADAM than you need either way. In a way, this could be seen as a subtle commentary about how self-interest (harvesting) is less rewarding than aiding others (rescuing). My professor for this class (a cool guy named Randal Case) said that most players chose to rescue the Sisters, most likely because the Sisters are still children, and most people don't want to be known for infanticide, real or fictional.

    Bioshock is definitely an interesting game, and I'll be sure to play more of it. I'll also be playing more of it because I'm doing a second part on Bioshock, which will be my last blog post for this class.