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Saturday, January 17, 2009
Gaming the recession: Bioshock
Posted by Rick Dakan on Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 7:06 PM
In these hard economic times, it's nice to sometimes look around and see just how much worse things could be. Then again, if you're at all human, looking at other people's misery probably just makes you even more depressed. That's why I prefer to get my schadenfreude from the virtual world – all of the gloating and none of the guilt. And when it comes to visions of extreme capitalism run amok, there's no better game out there than last year's Game of the Year, Bioshock.
Bioshock is a superb first person shooter set in 1960, but not a part of any 1960 you'll recognize (although it might seem familiar to some of you Objectivists out there). The game begins with a plane crash that leads you to a vast, underwater, art-deco metropolis known as Rapture. Created by Andrew Ryan as a libertarian paradise, this vision of Utopia clearly takes its inspiration from Ayn Rand's nasty, bloated behemoth of a novel, Atlas Shrugged. And just as you might imagine would happen in a world where capitalism operates without restraint, the housing bubble bursts, the markets crash, the leader for the past 8 years goes power mad and starts imprisoning citizens without trials, and people start injecting themselves with sea-slug extract filtered through genetically modified little girls so they can shoot bees from their hands and blast each other with lightning bolts.
Under the caring tutelage of rebel leader Atlas, players journey through Rapture, discovering one horror after the next, piecing together both the story of how Rapture fell apart and learning a thing or two about life along the way (like how shooting bees from your hands is AWESOME). This is, in all honesty, as good a game as there has ever been. It offers a storytelling experience that literally only a video game can. Plus, it's well over a year old, so you can totally pick up a copy on the cheap. Then a good 12 to 16 hours of pure, unencumbered “well, at least I'm not in an underwater city when I'm getting evicted” pleasure is there to help ease the pain. Now would you kindly play some Bioshock?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoYorK3E4aM[/youtube]
Comments (9)
Showing 1-9 of 9
Wow, this is one of the least relevant and most ignorant discussions of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and her philosophy of Objectivism, that I've read in a long, long time. Thanks for the laugh.
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Mark, To be clear, this is a discussion of a video game called Bioshock, not Ayn Rand's book. The discussion references the book because the video game is, in part, inspired by it (although it does not explicitly reference it beyond themes and a few character names). So your laughter at the post may well stem from not reading the contents of the post Objectively enough.
I have in fact read Atlas Shrugged. I found it to be nasty, bloated, and a novel (among other things), which are the only comments I've written about the book here, other than to point out the undeniably true fact that it served as a partial inspiration for the game Bioshock, which is what the post is about.
Rand had some remarkably deep insight that she conveyed in her novels. But the problem is that such utterly long exposition, could not possibly be practical in the real world. If Francisco were an actual person and he tried to give his "money speech", he'd still be talking when the janitors came for the night to mop the floors...
Wow. How horrible freedom, Rand, and Objectivism must be. After all, here are the basic ideas of Objectivism: 1. There is an objective reality. 2. People should be rational. 3. People should be concerned with what is in their actual self-interest. 4. People own their lives and property. 5. People should be in control of and decide how their own lives and property are used. 6. The initiation of violence against peaceful and innocent individuals is universally wrong. 7. Art should uplift rather than degrade the human spirit. Rarely do I see a discussion by critics of Objectivism that is not primarily full of straw men fallacies that bear little resemblance to what Rand actually believed. To reject Objectivism is to accept the following: 1. There is no absolute reality. Reality is whatever one wants it to be. 2. People should be irrational and illogical. 3. People should be concerned with whatever is destructive to their self-interest. 4. People do not own their own lives and property; all people are and should be slaves. 5. People should recognize that anyone other than themselves should be in control of and decide how their lives and property are used; anyone can, for any reason, take whatever they want from other people and dictate to them how they should live their lives. 5. Initiating coercion and violence against innocent and peaceful others is the basis of all proper social interactions. Only involuntary actions are proper; forcing others to do or not do what they want is the essence of how people should be treated. 7. Art should be degrading to the human spirit and treat people as worthless scum.
Good lord Russ, you talk about straw man and then you break immediately into a false dichotomy. Way to rock the logical fallacies! I suspect that someone could reject objectivism and not be an evil hater who wants anarchy, violence and degrading art. And by the by, if Ayn Rand wanted art to be uplifting, she should not have turned her philosophical discourse into a turgid, dreary "novel".
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