Back in 2007, I was taking my A-level exams. For both English Literature and Drama, I came out with A*s. I’m still quite proud of this, which you can probably tell from the fact I’m bringing it up all these years later – but there’s a reason I’m bringing this up beyond the chance for a belated humble brag: I owe my full-scoring papers, weirdly, to BioShock.
Let me explain. I’m the sort of person that cannot just take something I love at face value. It’s both a blessing and a curse that, if something scratches my brain in just the right way, I am compelled to delve deep into it and extract every iota of it that I can. ADHD and hyperfocus, it turns out, sets you up well to be a journalist. As a teenager that played BioShock, I was lucky: lucky that we were in the dawning age of the internet as we know it today, where magazine interviews and making-ofs would be scanned, uploaded, and dismantled in online forums.
BioShock had captured me, wholly. Elsewhere on Eurogamer, I spoke about selling my entire collection of PS2 games in order to buy an Xbox 360 and a single game: Halo 3. After about five months, the shine had started to come off Halo – playing it for eight hours a day will do that. But there weren’t an awful lot of other Xbox 360 games that really appealed to me. I cut my teeth on gaming with Game Boy and PlayStation JRPGs, and the Xbox was fairly barren as far as they were concerned.
Enter Ken Levine, Irrational, and BioShock. This weird single-player shooter, and its obsession with class, elitism, and power felt like it massaged my brain and tore it open all at the same time. I replayed it near-constantly. I was as hooked on the vision and realisation of the world of Rapture in the same way its doomed citizens had become hooked on Adam. It wasn’t enough for me to read Levine’s treatise on the game, to soak up everything I could from the designers and programmers talking to US-based journalists about this new era of FPS thought experiment. I needed to go deeper.
I’d read that the whole thing was inspired by Ayn Rand, and her controversial novel, Atlas Shrugged – a 1192-page behemoth of a book that’s more a deranged essay on why capitalism is great and any form of alternative is an insult to humanity itself than it is an effective narrative. Four hours later, I was reading it. A week later, I’d finished it. A few days after that, I’d played BioShock again, and I came to the conclusion that this Xbox 360 masterpiece was, actually, a sequel to Rand’s novel whose main goal was dismantling her shaky arguments in video game form.
The game is set in Rapture, a city built in the middle of the ocean designed for ‘the brightest people on earth’ to escape to, free from the peasantry and serfdoms that held them back. Here, beautiful people could cavort and inbreed, making a pseudo-race of super-humans – rich, smart, sexy, funny. Spearheading this initiative was Andrew Ryan (Ayn Rand, hmm), a quite tragic figure at the end of it all, who was so sickened by the idea of socialist parasites sucking dry the wealth of their betters that he made a place where everyone was rich or gifted (or both).
Except, that’s not quite how it works, is it? Granted, Rapture’s uninterrupted pursuit of technical knowledge meant there were some automata that could replace the working classes, but any city – any society – is a ‘global village’, a place that requires people on all levels of economic strata to support the others. In Rapture, the idea of trickle-down economics is laughable: wealth is for the wealthy. It’s a non-stop party, baby!
Factor in a substance known as ADAM (a miracle genetic substance found in sea slugs, but harvested from the bellies of young girls for lore reasons) and you’ve suddenly got this super society where everyone thinks they are better than everyone else, and biological and mechanical revelations are happening on the daily. It’s a perfect crucible for accelerationist thinking; ergo: this post-World War II utopia, free from social, political and religious constraint, quickly becomes an unbearable dystopia.
But this obsession with class, power, and money didn’t stop in the pages of the script. It was folded into the gameplay mechanics, too. Think about it: your wallet is capped at $500, and the game egregiously pushes you to spend all the time. Levine himself voices the vending machines you can hear goading you from across the map, encouraging you to come over and drop all your pilfered money into their coffers. On-screen prompts appear with annoying frequency, telling you to visit a vending machine to upgrade your weapons or abilities, to spend money on healing (oh, how American), or to simply find something to buy so that you can… get more money.
I also like the way that you’re positioned as the very thing Rand and Ryan both hate: a scrounger, a parasite, a looter. You take money from corpses, from businesses, even from bins for Christ’s sake! The whole way you’re forced to participate in Rapture’s economy is through robbing others, scrounging from the rich in order to progress through this collapsing colony. It’s bittersweet, and in its own way, hilarious. This is what your dream has been reduced to, Andrew? It must be eating you alive.
The mechanics themselves parody capitalism, but where later games (say, The Outer Worlds) mock the idea of late-stage capitalism, BioShock was much more po-faced about it. Even in the earliest stages of the games, you wander into leaking, doomed malls and reception areas and are immediately subjected to adverts still playing over the still-operational PA systems. Devs had clearly spent a huge chunk of their working lives on in-universe adverts, slogans, and signs.
This goes back to Atlas Shrugged and its desire to be freed from the red tape that Rand, in a quite extreme way, thought was suffocating the United States’ ability to progress and flourish. There’s a somewhat overlooked character in BioShock called Doctor Steinman, a cosmetic surgeon invited to Rapture that became obsessed with Adam and its transhuman capabilities. Emancipated from the regulations that hobbled him back in the USA, he saw Rapture’s scientific frontier as a gift – a gift that quickly turned into a curse.
It’s part-sci-fi thought experiment, part-philosophical takedown of capitalist extremism. For me, Steinman and the Medical Pavilion is the most accelerationist part of Rapture: a microcosm of the doomed ‘free state’ that most clearly shows what would happen in a regulation-free environment Rand thought was utopian. A cosmetic surgeon was tainted by power and the ability to experiment on what, and whom, he wanted, and he ended up acting as a catalyst for Rapture’s downfall. Oops.
I was only 17 at the time, but this game proved something to me: games could be for adults. They could tackle themes as lofty as objectivism versus altruism, and do so with a cool factor you’d be hard-pressed to find in other media. All my mates were playing this game (as were a few of my teachers), and suddenly a bunch of teenagers in an average Midlands secondary school were picking apart the philosophies of Ayn Rand and Marx, all whilst shooting lightning bolts out of our hands and messing up grotesque mutants bolted into 30s diving gear. Cool!
It’s easy to look back on the egregious methods employed by BioShock now – ‘world-building’ graffiti smeared on the walls in blood, narrative delivered almost exclusively through audio logs, boss fights that completely undermine the tension and pace of the whole game – and balk at it. It seems aged, hackneyed, trope-y beyond belief. But for many of us, back then, we’d never played anything like this. It was required reading for anyone with a 360, and if you looked even slightly under the hood, there was this cerebral, fascinating backstory that seemed – at the time – about as radical as the music I was listening to (see: Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down, Enter Shikari).
BioShock captured a moment. For non-PC gamers (this was basically everyone I knew, back then) that had never had the chance to play Deus Ex or System Shock, this sort of political treatise was unheard of in games – a far cry from, well, Far Cry or similar games. Where other games I’d played (Final Fantasy 7 comes to mind) seemed to be more implicit in their political messaging, BioShock wore it all proudly on its sleeves, and it felt like a truly mature game not just because of the blood, the gore, and the swearing, but because of the way it made you think a bit deeper about what you were doing and – as that ever-famous twist will always prove – why you were doing it.
I think the other games in the series damaged the legacy of BioShock to some degree, but for me, the original game will always be one of the most important games of the 360-era. Not only did it open me up to the storytelling potential even a first-person shooter could have, but it also taught me how to go beyond the game as a text, seek out its context in a broader, cultural way, and do all that whilst high on a power trip no other medium can even come close to replicating.
I do sometimes wonder what the markers of my A-Level papers thought when I somehow managed to make both an essay on Wuthering Heights and Georg Büchner’s stage play Woyzeck about objectivism and altruism, and why some random kid in the middle of Derbyshire was quite so fervently attacking Ayn Rand across two texts that had absolutely nothing to do with her. But hey, I got full marks! And that’s all thanks to BioShock, and my wheezing, rasping Xbox 360 that was begging me to play something else. Just a shame it couldn’t do anything to help with my D in History.