From playing and replaying both BioShock and Infinite, and reading interviews from Ken Levine, my own conclusion is that both of the BioShock games simply use ideology as a narrative tool to create conflict, and the only thing he is condemning broadly is extremism.
In other words, Levine and the rest of the team didn’t make BioShock because they hated Ayn Rand and wanted to spread that message. They made BioShock because they wanted to make a first-person shooter similar to System Shock 2. They needed villains to create conflict, and the easiest way a sci-fi writer can create a villain is just to take any ideology to extremes and think of ways that could go wrong.
I think this is made pretty clear by the lack of any “good” characters in either game. I can’t think of anyone the player is expected to just like and agree with- they are all charicatures taking their ideologies to extremes. Andrew Ryan is clearly bad, but the only real representative of lower classes is Fontaine who is argaubly an even more evil antagonist.
In Infinite, Comstock is clearly the villain as a racist and religious dictator. Daisy Fitzroy is the leader of the rebellion, someone who has personally suffered at Comstock’s hands. She initially starts off as the player’s ally, but then shifts to become “too violent” and “too extreme” in her rebellion, so she and the rest of the rebellion become enemies of Booker. It was really ham-fisted and just kind of waived off as “well anything can happen with the infinite possibilities of dimension hopping!”. But the real reason was more simple: they needed to add additional enemy types to shake up the combat and escalate the difficulty. They wanted to add the chaos of having the player run between two factions fighting each other without the safety of making one of those an ally.
Those two games use ideology as set pieces, but when you combine the two games together the final message is “extremeism bad, centrism good”. I don’t think every game needs to be a doctorate-level poli-sci dissertation, but I do think these two games deserve criticism for being pretty weak there.
Those two games use ideology as set pieces, but when you combine the two games together the final message is “extremeism bad, centrism good”. I don’t think every game needs to be a doctorate-level poli-sci dissertation, but I do think these two games deserve criticism for being pretty weak there.
Imo, they get the hype for being “deep” because they are pretty deep as far as popular games go. They are certainly deeper than COD’s “Look, terrorists, shoot them!” or Mario’s “Dragon stole my princess”.
Did you play the BioShock infinite dlc? They had a strange retcon where the Lutece twins approached Fitzroy and instructed her to appear to be a monster, specifically so Elizabeth would feel like she had to kill her.
It was a strange choice, because the remaining revolution was pretty blatantly horrible without her either way, and I’m not entirely sure that’s how this sanitized version of her would want it to go.
The politics of BioShock are not all that deep in the end. They’re mostly just a setting so they can tell a story of someone forced into a role without understanding it
Solid effortpost, but I’m left wondering what sort of alternative to “extremism bad, centrism good” you would propose that might satisfy your intellectual demands.
Well I kind of alluded to it, but both of the games lack any clear solutions other than “play the game kill the bad guy”.
Which, to be fair, is probably the reason BioShock 1 at least got so popular. I would say this point is much more important to BioShock 1 than any commentary about Ayn Rand, or any commentary about how worker’s movements can get subverted by selfish actors like Atlas. It takes the usual tropes about videogames and turns them into a commentary on how easily our assumptions and expectations can deceive us. Players do what the game tells them to, they progress the way the game allows them to, without ever questioning whether that is the morally correct thing to do. I would say that’s a pretty reasonable thing to do considering the money these games cost, but BioShock at least shines a light on that and makes the player think about it.
There are plenty of other examples of games that DO engage with political ideologies, and use games as a mechanism to think about then. The most famous one is probably Monopoly, which was stolen from the original creator who called it “the landlords game” to show how capitalism eventually leads to one rich person and a bunch of broke people.
If you want a videogame, Disco Elysium is a fabulous, recent, and well-reviewed example. Personally it’s a bit dense for me to play for too long (sometimes it feels more like reading a textbook than playing a game).
I don’t think BioShock 1 or Infinite are terrible or that they shouldn’t have delved into politics at all. I think that they are overrated in part because they get credit for political commentary that ends up being pretty superficial. I think they could have executed the ideas better.
Fitzroy for example: either give us a better reason to fight her or don’t make us do it. Maybe she gets killed by Comstock and leaves a power vacuum, with the chaos of rebel leaders trying to promote solidarity, fight for their own power, hold off or even negotiate peace with Comstock. Or maybe someone like Lady Comstock or Fink could be a source of division within Comstock’s ranks. Or maybe Fitzroy gets convinced that she needs to kill Elizabeth because she’s some dimensional McGuffin protecting Comstock. Maybe get rid of the rebellion entirely and have another country attack Colombia. They already ceded from the US- surely Uncle Sam isn’t cool with losing this technological marvel, nor having this independent state potentially floating above US territories. It’s been a while since I replayed it but I remember the Boxer Rebellion being a key piece of the story: maybe some fallout from that cones to Colombia.
Right, that makes sense. Unfortunately the “kill the bad guy and the evil will end” trope is very much entrenched not just in video games, but also most popular fiction as well (“all we need to do is throw the Ring into the fires of Mordor and Sauron’s reign will come to an end”).
I guess growing up is realizing there’s a new evil forged every day and you have to keep making the trip again and again, like Sisyphus. But I suppose that wouldn’t make for a good game, would it.
I guess growing up is realizing there’s a new evil forged every day and you have to keep making the trip again and again, like Sisyphus. But I suppose that wouldn’t make for a good game, would it.
I think it could make a pretty good game, actually. You know how some games unlock difficulty modes when you beat them? Do something like that, but with different villains. You beat the game, then you can play it again with a different bad guy. They could make a few bad guys to swap into the game with each one getting a bit harder, like they’ve learned from the mistakes of their predecessors.
Yeah, that’s kinda what roguelikes are doing, isn’t it? Unfortunately it’s not that easy to generate compelling levels and bosses randomly, and more importantly, a story that’s good enough to keep you going. I guess OG Diablo did a pretty good job of it, though.
From playing and replaying both BioShock and Infinite, and reading interviews from Ken Levine, my own conclusion is that both of the BioShock games simply use ideology as a narrative tool to create conflict, and the only thing he is condemning broadly is extremism.
In other words, Levine and the rest of the team didn’t make BioShock because they hated Ayn Rand and wanted to spread that message. They made BioShock because they wanted to make a first-person shooter similar to System Shock 2. They needed villains to create conflict, and the easiest way a sci-fi writer can create a villain is just to take any ideology to extremes and think of ways that could go wrong.
I think this is made pretty clear by the lack of any “good” characters in either game. I can’t think of anyone the player is expected to just like and agree with- they are all charicatures taking their ideologies to extremes. Andrew Ryan is clearly bad, but the only real representative of lower classes is Fontaine who is argaubly an even more evil antagonist.
In Infinite, Comstock is clearly the villain as a racist and religious dictator. Daisy Fitzroy is the leader of the rebellion, someone who has personally suffered at Comstock’s hands. She initially starts off as the player’s ally, but then shifts to become “too violent” and “too extreme” in her rebellion, so she and the rest of the rebellion become enemies of Booker. It was really ham-fisted and just kind of waived off as “well anything can happen with the infinite possibilities of dimension hopping!”. But the real reason was more simple: they needed to add additional enemy types to shake up the combat and escalate the difficulty. They wanted to add the chaos of having the player run between two factions fighting each other without the safety of making one of those an ally.
Those two games use ideology as set pieces, but when you combine the two games together the final message is “extremeism bad, centrism good”. I don’t think every game needs to be a doctorate-level poli-sci dissertation, but I do think these two games deserve criticism for being pretty weak there.
Imo, they get the hype for being “deep” because they are pretty deep as far as popular games go. They are certainly deeper than COD’s “Look, terrorists, shoot them!” or Mario’s “Dragon stole my princess”.
Ayn Rand,s “philosophy” is about as deep as a puddle.
‘Mine!’
Did you play the BioShock infinite dlc? They had a strange retcon where the Lutece twins approached Fitzroy and instructed her to appear to be a monster, specifically so Elizabeth would feel like she had to kill her.
It was a strange choice, because the remaining revolution was pretty blatantly horrible without her either way, and I’m not entirely sure that’s how this sanitized version of her would want it to go.
The politics of BioShock are not all that deep in the end. They’re mostly just a setting so they can tell a story of someone forced into a role without understanding it
Ah I hadn’t - it’s still in my backlog. But it sounds like it just re-affirms what I had drawn from the main games.
Solid effortpost, but I’m left wondering what sort of alternative to “extremism bad, centrism good” you would propose that might satisfy your intellectual demands.
Well I kind of alluded to it, but both of the games lack any clear solutions other than “play the game kill the bad guy”.
Which, to be fair, is probably the reason BioShock 1 at least got so popular. I would say this point is much more important to BioShock 1 than any commentary about Ayn Rand, or any commentary about how worker’s movements can get subverted by selfish actors like Atlas. It takes the usual tropes about videogames and turns them into a commentary on how easily our assumptions and expectations can deceive us. Players do what the game tells them to, they progress the way the game allows them to, without ever questioning whether that is the morally correct thing to do. I would say that’s a pretty reasonable thing to do considering the money these games cost, but BioShock at least shines a light on that and makes the player think about it.
There are plenty of other examples of games that DO engage with political ideologies, and use games as a mechanism to think about then. The most famous one is probably Monopoly, which was stolen from the original creator who called it “the landlords game” to show how capitalism eventually leads to one rich person and a bunch of broke people.
If you want a videogame, Disco Elysium is a fabulous, recent, and well-reviewed example. Personally it’s a bit dense for me to play for too long (sometimes it feels more like reading a textbook than playing a game).
I don’t think BioShock 1 or Infinite are terrible or that they shouldn’t have delved into politics at all. I think that they are overrated in part because they get credit for political commentary that ends up being pretty superficial. I think they could have executed the ideas better.
Fitzroy for example: either give us a better reason to fight her or don’t make us do it. Maybe she gets killed by Comstock and leaves a power vacuum, with the chaos of rebel leaders trying to promote solidarity, fight for their own power, hold off or even negotiate peace with Comstock. Or maybe someone like Lady Comstock or Fink could be a source of division within Comstock’s ranks. Or maybe Fitzroy gets convinced that she needs to kill Elizabeth because she’s some dimensional McGuffin protecting Comstock. Maybe get rid of the rebellion entirely and have another country attack Colombia. They already ceded from the US- surely Uncle Sam isn’t cool with losing this technological marvel, nor having this independent state potentially floating above US territories. It’s been a while since I replayed it but I remember the Boxer Rebellion being a key piece of the story: maybe some fallout from that cones to Colombia.
Right, that makes sense. Unfortunately the “kill the bad guy and the evil will end” trope is very much entrenched not just in video games, but also most popular fiction as well (“all we need to do is throw the Ring into the fires of Mordor and Sauron’s reign will come to an end”).
I guess growing up is realizing there’s a new evil forged every day and you have to keep making the trip again and again, like Sisyphus. But I suppose that wouldn’t make for a good game, would it.
I think it could make a pretty good game, actually. You know how some games unlock difficulty modes when you beat them? Do something like that, but with different villains. You beat the game, then you can play it again with a different bad guy. They could make a few bad guys to swap into the game with each one getting a bit harder, like they’ve learned from the mistakes of their predecessors.
Yeah, that’s kinda what roguelikes are doing, isn’t it? Unfortunately it’s not that easy to generate compelling levels and bosses randomly, and more importantly, a story that’s good enough to keep you going. I guess OG Diablo did a pretty good job of it, though.