Bioshock (

2007

)

Is there any medium that ages less gracefully than video games? Novels and poetry from hundreds of years ago can still enthrall modern readers even if they have only a cursory understanding of the world that produced them. Silent films more than a century old can astound audiences and surprise film scholars with their surprising depths. Hell, with sculpture and painting even the primitive works from the medieval period betray more skill and care than the bulk of modern artwork. Yet play a classic game a couple of decades after its release and it can feel like the video game equivalent of deciphering cuneiform tablets. Sometimes, the game is like Super Mario 64 [1996] or Doom [1993], a game whose brilliant technological advancement can only really be impressive in the context of its time. While they're still enjoyable enough to play, going through them without the little quality of life improvements the genre has made over the years feels a little bit like going back to eating frozen TV dinners after four years of culinary school. Other times, the passage of years is even less kind, rendering once thrilling games nearly unplayable. This is the fate of games like Resident Evil [1996] with its abysmal tank controls. Then there are games like today's game, where even though it's nearly a decade and a half old it feels like it could have been released yesterday and been a candidate for game of the year.

Part of the reason is no doubt since, by 2007, most of the conventions of the FPS genre had been set and refined to the point where the basic gameplay was as natural and accessible as it was ever likely to get. The growing pains of the genre have been ironed out, bit by throughout the 1990s going from the one-dimensional mazes filled with pixelated enemies to full-3D adventures. The popularity of the genre ensured that there were plenty of innovators willing to tinker with the formula until it reached a state of perfection. Hell, after Halo: Combat Evolved [2001], FPS could even be effectively controlled with gamepads (though why you would ever want to when you had the option of using mouse and keyboard instead is beyond me). Bioshock was not a completely standard FPS of course, but its novel RPG-elements had had ample testing runway with its predecessors System Shock [1994] and System Shock 2 [1999]. As a result, there is nothing clunky about Bioshock's combat, nothing that feels particularly dated or egregious when compared to modern titles. There is no moment of confusion, like in Doom [1993], when you realize that you cannot aim up or down; no frustration as you try to decipher how to control Goldeneye [1997] with the bizarre n64 gamepad.

The other thing that keeps Bioshock fresh is its visual design. The game takes place in Rapture, a gloriously rendered underwater, art-deco city. Once it was a splendid marvel, but years of war and mad science run-amok have transformed it into a crumbling ruin. It is the rarest thing in modern AAA gaming, an original idea executed with skill, and the result is one of the most immediately compelling game worlds we've ever seen. From the moment the player sees their first exterior shot of the city, they are instantly compelled and want to know what sort of place Rapture is and what happened there. How did it go from a roaring metropolis to a charnel house? The details here are simply lovely, in particular the way the game takes pains to remind you from time to time that this is all happening at the bottom of the ocean. In one memorable moment, I jumped at the sight of a shadow that flickered across the ground in front of me, only to look up and see it was cast by a school of fish swimming above the glass ceiling.

Rapture is a haunted place, and at times Bioshock captures a feeling of dread and horror that makes it resemble a horror game more than the action-oriented shooter it really is. Part of this is just the gloomy corridors and haunted screams of the mad splicers that lurk within, yet in the first few levels of the game, there are carefully cultivated scares as well. Take for instance the moment in the medical pavilion when you enter a misty office, that is occasionally filled with so much mist that you can't see more than a couple of inches in front of your nose. If you pick up the audio log in the corner the screen will fill with mist and when it clears a splice will be lurking right in front of you ready to pounce as well as giving you a good jump scare in the process. This horror aspect will gradually fade as your character becomes more and more powerful and you become more and more acclimated to the world of Rapture. However, in the first few levels, it makes the player feel Jack's terror and confusion at being thrown into this strange nightmare realm.

Sure, from a technical standpoint, something like Crysis [2007], released the same year as Bioshock, is unquestionably visually superior. However, Bioshock's unique style and look makes it more memorable than its more realistic competitors. Indeed, Bioshock is just another example of inspired art design being more important than cutting-edge graphics technology. Indeed, I doubt there has ever been a video game “remaster” team that had to put in less effort than the guys that worked on the remaster for Bioshock. The game looked gorgeous to start with, and indeed in some side by side comparisons I have trouble telling the remastered from the original version.

Yet if Bioshock was just another competently made FPS with a unique art style, it is doubtful that it would be remembered as fondly today as it is. What really sets Bioshock apart from its peers is its surprisingly deep and nuanced story in a genre where the normal complexity of storytelling consists of “there are bad men why don't you shoot them?” with the occasional twist of “Oh no! Good man is really a bad man!” Not that there is something inherently wrong with those sorts of stories, I am after all someone who would defend such tripe as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009] at length, yet in all things, variety is a welcome change.

Bioshock serves primarily as a rebuttal to Ayn Rand's novel-of-ideas, Atlas Shrugged. Allow me to summarize for those of my readers who have not slogged through that particular door-stopper: Atlas Shrugged takes place in a world where all the genius innovators, captains of industry, and various “great men” of history have decided they have had enough toiling for the benefit of regular schmucks and have opted instead to bugger off and form their own shadow society. Lead by the brilliant electrical engineer John Galt who has developed an engine that can run forever off of the static energy in the atmosphere, they establish a hidden city of their own called Atlantis or Galt's Grotto. In their absence, the world slowly starts to fall apart as the corrupt glad-handers and government thugs slowly muck everything up to the point where even the most advanced industrial nations can't keep the lights on. It is then, in the ruins of the old order that Galt and his comrades reappear to remake society into a truly fair and free world, where the great men of history will be free to drive progress without being yoked to slave moralities like Christianity and communism. In short Atlas Shrugged is the ultimate Lolbertarian treatise.

In Bioshock, the John Galt stand-in is Andrew Ryan (a play on Ayn Rand own name) and he has more or less the same objective as Galt in the book, build a hidden city and wait for the world to collapse without the constant help of him and his peers to prop it up. However, he seems to be much more egalitarian in his choice for emigres, Galt only had a handful of brilliant scientists, philosophers, and inventors in his hidden city who he personally recruits. Whereas Ryan seems to have transplanted a population the size of New York City to his. He's also taken Galt's plan to build “Atlantis” literally and has placed his city on the bottom of the Atlantic ocean.

Obviously, things don't go as well for Ryan as they went for Galt, because when the game opens and the player character, Jack, crawls out of the wreckage of a downed airplane and into a bathysphere to Rapture it quickly becomes apparent that the city has gone from Objectivist utopia to desolate hellscape. Everything is in ruins, and the population seems to solely consist of an army of deranged mutants called splicers. As it turns out, most of the problems in the city could be traced back to one tough-talking trouble maker: Frank Fontaine (his name is a reference to Ayn Rand's second-most famous novel The Fountainhead). Fontaine was a criminal who got his start smuggling in contraband from the surface, “beef, real tobacco, just a little extras” that aren't readily available on the bottom of the sea. This quickly brought him into conflict with Ryan, as any contact with the surface could potentially jeopardize the safety and secrecy of Rapture. In most nation-states, this wouldn't be much of a problem, round up the smugglers and toss them in jail and move on with life. However, Rapture was supposed to be an anarcho-capitalist paradise, a place where no form of commerce however morally suspect of physically dangerous was supposed to be beyond the pale. Dealing with Fontaine and his thugs necessitated a compromise with those ideals.

Still, this in and of itself wouldn't have been enough to doom Rapture, if only Fontaine hadn't been quite so clever or quite so capable of exploiting the flaws within Rapture's society against its creator. Unfettered industry in Rapture, just as on the surface, creates tremendous wealth but also tremendous inequality. A handful of people in Rapture live in splendid luxury, while the vast majority are stuck in abject poverty along the lines of 19th century industrial poor. On the surface, a situation like that could have (and indeed has) existed indefinitely, as the majority of people are unwilling to risk what little they have in a bid for something more. Generally speaking, revolutions do not occur so long as a population is fed, clothed, employed, and safe from external threats. However, Rapture is not an ordinary place, it is populated by dreamers and eccentrics. The people who felt like the surface governments, ancient moralities and the worthless parasites who espoused them were holding them back and keeping them from achieving their full potential. Some, like Ryan himself, had a point, but the vast majority were simply not up to the task. As Fontaine puts it: “These sad saps. They come to Rapture thinking they're gonna be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody's gotta scrub the toilets. What an angle they gave me... I hand these mugs a cot and a bowl of soup, and they give me their lives.” After faking his own death and returning as “Atlas” (another reference to Rand's work), Fontaine organized this rabble into a revolutionary army.

Adding fuel to the fire is the technological developments that are going on in Rapture. As it turns out, you get some pretty interesting developments when you scrape the earth clean of every mad scientist and cram them all in a small city with no government regulations and an atmosphere of extreme competitiveness. The most promising of all was the development of Adam, a means of quickly and easily rewriting the human genome developed by Dr. Tenebaum. Sure, to manufacture the stuff you have to turn little girls into monstrous abominations that host parasitic sea-slugs but nobody ever said there wouldn't be sacrifices that had to be made in the name of progress. Fontaine buys in on this technology while it's in its infancy, and immediately turns it toward military applications. The scientists in Fontaine's pay quickly develop plasmids and gene tonics that allow Fontaine's rabble to start hurling lightning bolts and fireballs. 

At this point, one would be forgiven for reading Bioshock primarily as a defense of Rand's worldview. After all, Ryan may have been out of his depth in the business of governing a city and made many mistakes in the process, but he comes across as an idealist facing off with a thug. However, when you consider just how Fontaine rose to power it quickly becomes obvious that a petty gangster like Fontaine could not have been anywhere near as destructive if he was operating in a society that had things like charity, religion, and a standing police force. As Fontaine puts it: “I'm gonna miss this place. Rapture was a candy store for a guy like me. Guys who thought they knew it all, dames who thought they'd seen it all.” Leave him in New York City and Fontaine is just another hustler, but in Rapture, he could be a revolutionary leader, a king, even a God. It doesn't take a brilliant criminal mastermind to exploit the flaws of Rapture's society. Fontaine is, at best, just an above-average crook, and look what he accomplished. Put Al Capone or Raymond Patriarca down there and Rapture wouldn't last a month.

Moreover, the way in which Ryan responded to Fontaine's threat proves that despite whatever attractive aspects there are to his ideology, he simply isn't up to the task of running a nation. Power is seductive, and though rare individuals may have a greater resistance to its charm, the safe bet is on everyone succumbing to it if they get the chance. For every George Washington that cast aside imperium in favor of quiet retirement, there are a few thousand Stalins who gleefully amass more and more power until they either die of old age or are assassinated. On some level, Ryan must realize he's one of the latter, indeed why else would he be so contemptuous of government authority if he did not feel the siren call of absolute power so acutely? His actions in power show that whatever he says about freedom and individual liberty, does not survive contact with reality. Once he believes Fontaine is dead Ryan does not cast his emergency powers in disgrace but instead takes more and more, taking full ownership of Fontaine's company in the process. In short order he begins to act just like the tin-pot tyrants on the surface that he despises, going so far as to have his chief of security murder an artist for being publicly critical to his regime. Perhaps Ryan may have been able to pull himself back from the brink, some of his audio recordings do show the capacity for self-reflection and regret albeit in an extremely stunted form, but not with the pressure that Atlas and his revolutionary armies were putting on him. The two were locked in a death struggle and Ryan was ultimately willing to sacrifice anything to save his city... Even the city itself and all the ideals on which it was founded.

The final atrocity Ryan inflicted on his people was a complete reverse of everything he once stood for. He forced everyone who hadn't already spliced up to do so and then pumped the city full of pheromones so he could control the entire population. Effectively overriding their will for the sake of defeating Atlas and saving Rapture. Even as a temporary emergency measure, this is impossible to square with Ryan's original beliefs. For him, free minds, free markets, and free men would create a paradise. Yet when push came to shove he wasn't willing to trust those free men to make the right decision, so instead he enslaved them with a means of control more absolute than the chains or whips of any ancient slave-driver.

All this happened before the game begins. When the player starts the game in a plane crash over the North Atlantic and a desperate swim to a mysterious lighthouse, Rapture has already been reduced to ruins and has been laying smoldering for months. You can piece this story together from environmental details and audio logs left behind by the citizens of Rapture. Sure, it may be a little absurd that so many citizens of Rapture are recording every errant thought, but then again you can find millions of real-life people doing the same thing on social media right now! Eventually, this style of storytelling would become cliché to the point of being ripe for parody, but in 2007 when Bioshock came out it was still a novel innovation. It allowed the player to spend as much or as little time as they wanted thinking about the setting, politics, and backstory of Rapture. If you wanted to uncover every detail and get a complete picture of the city, its downfall, and its population you could. If you wanted to simply plow through the game killing things, then that was always an option. Since the game offered an NG+ I went with the former approach for my first playthrough and the latter approach for my second.

The political and economic aspects of Bioshock have been gone over countless times since its release, but oddly enough the religious themes of the game have been almost completely ignored. This is especially baffling as the player goes through the game collecting a substance called Adam to buy upgraded power that he can use with Eve, in a ruined city called Rapture. What more do they need to do to tell you this game has religious themes? Start each level with a fucking bible verse and invitation to prayer?

Rapture is a city founded on the principle of Objectivism, and one of those principles is the rejection of “slave moralities” Christianity among them. For an objectivist, there are few symbols more odious than the crucifix with its implication that great men should sacrifice themselves for the teeming masses, save perhaps the Buddhist iconography that denies the existence of a self altogether. Certainly, Rapture's appearance with its strip clubs, brothels, casinos, and other assorted dens of vice gives the impression of a population that was not overly concerned with conventional morality. They have built a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah one the bottom of the sea, power by a geothermal vent that taps into the earth's core giving the whole city a faintly infernal atmosphere.

This mentality of Rapture's citizens is part of the reason why the destruction of the city was inevitable. Just as Ryan's anarcho-capitalism had no defense against a huckster like Fontaine, Rapture itself has no defense against the corrosive effect of Adam and plasmids. In a purely hedonistic society, there's no reason for someone not to splice and splice themselves to their heart's content. There's also no moral resistance to calls from Fontaine/Atlas to forcibly redistribute the wealth of Rapture so they can get a fair share of the “sweat of their own brows.” There is also no genuine charity to ameliorate the suffering of the poor, only Fontaine's ruse to give them a cot and a bowl of soup so they'll pledge blind obedience to him. The people of Rapture lived in a spiritual vacuum and were easily destroyed by it.

Moreover, they seem to be aware of their predicament as well, realizing all too late what they were missing in their lives. Even though they were all the sort of people who would willingly choose to live in a godless city, once there they began to crave the comforts of surface faith. Among the little extras that Fontaine smuggled back to the city, the first-rate hooch, the real beef, and the genuine tobacco can be found shipments of bibles. The half-mad splicers sing religious songs and cry out in the darkness “We thought we could hide from His light! We were wrong!” They, along with Ryan himself, labored to build a secular paradise only for it to be corrupted and transformed into an infernal dystopia. Their dreams were corrupted by their own pride and inability to realize they needed some form of moral code before it was too late.

The political message of Bioshock couldn't be more obvious, to the point where even people only slightly familiar with Ayn Rand's work can plainly recognize it as an attack on the philosopher's worldview. Still, Bioshock is not simply a propaganda piece, presenting Ryan as an odious figure undeserving of any compassion. He is a great man, who has accomplished feats far beyond the abilities of others. When he says that Jack and Atlas have come to “steal what they could never build” he's not wrong. Indeed, various audio messages left behind by him paint him as a man at the end of his rope, doing what he has to in order to survive and maybe manage to save his city. His tragedy is that his whole worldview failed him after it allowed him to build wonders. He could create with an ease that would dazzle most men but he couldn't administrate worth a damn, because administration is about compromising values, and an idealist like Ryan is simply incapable of that.

Nor is Fontaine/Atlas merely a devil. He is less sympathetic than Ryan no doubt, but he's given a chance to charm the audience with his own brand of humor. He's coarse, cruel, and unquestionably vicious, but he doesn't lack a certain kind of charisma. Indeed, it's hard to fault the guy for taking advantage of the situation, as the world is filled with millions of thugs who could and would do the same thing if given the opportunity. Rapture was living on borrowed time from the word go, if someone's gonna take it down it might as well be Fontaine.

The other reason why people remember Bioshock years after its release is the lovely twist that comes at the midway point. For most of the game, you're running missions for Atlas, who you think is a revolutionary leader who has been fighting against Ryan's tyranny. It's the usual player character/quest-giver relationship where he talks to you over the radio and explains what you need to do to progress through the game. However, once you get to and kill Andrew Ryan, Atlas reveals himself to be Frank Fontaine in disguise, no idealistic revolutionary and instead of a cynical con-man out to make a quick buck. He also reveals that the player character has been brainwashed and made to respond to a phrase “would you kindly” that forces them to do whatever the speaker commands. It's also revealed that Jack is Andrew Ryan's son, which is why he's immune to a number of Ryan's defenses as they are keyed to Ryan's own genetic code.

In addition to being a skillfully executed twist that gives enough hints for the player to guess what's going on while still holding enough back to surprise the majority of players, the twist is also an excellent deconstruction of both the genre tropes and the audience's expectations. FPS games have long used voices over the radio to steer the player in the right direction and keep them from getting lost and confused while playing the game. They can be a very effective tool. As a result, people playing through Bioshock are inclined to blunder about doing whatever Atlas tells them, as they have no reason to suspect that this figure on the other end of the radio is secretly controlling them. When Fontaine betrays Jack and reveals that he has been controlling him all along we feel the same lurching surprise as Jack because the game has been manipulating us in much the same way.

So Bioshock has a compelling intellectual core and one hell of a thrid-act twist, however, it would be misleading to say that the game is simply perfect and leave it at that. Indeed, the brilliant twist is the source of more than a few problems in-and-of-itself. It raises the question of why, if Fontaine wanted Jack to be as spliced up as possible so as to have the best possible chance of killing Ryan, he didn't simply order Jack with a “would you kindly harvest the little sister” in the game's first level. It was certainly within his power to do so and from his dialogue with Tenebaum during that screen, he clearly wanted to, so why hold back? Even ignoring this oversight the moral choice system in Bioshock is busted beyond repair because harvesting little sisters is almost always a worse decision for the player than saving them. In exchange for a small difference in Adam, you'll get regular parcels of special plasmids, ammunition, and healing items. Unless you're playing blind or intentionally going for the bad ending, there's no temptation whatsoever to kill the little sisters. You don't sacrifice anything to be noble, which makes that very nobility considerably less valuable.

Moreover, the twist itself is undermined considerably by the last two levels of the game that follow it. Up until the big reveal in Ryan's office, the player has been assuming that they can simply trust the voices on the radio telling them to reach certain objectives and eliminate certain targets. At that point, the rug is pulled out from under you and it is revealed that the very gameplay mechanic of a voice on the radio telling you what to do cannot be trusted. Only, after the twist, you get a new voice on the radio, Tenebaum, who tells you what to do and holds your hand through the last few levels taking on the same role as Atlas had before. The problem here is obvious, the artifice of this type of gameplay structure has been exposed to the player and as a result, the player has no reason to trust it. A much better way would have been to ditch the whole radio drip-fed objectives altogether and after Ryan's death simply plop the player down into an open map with one objective: Find and kill Fontaine. This would also have the benefit of removing the plot hole where Tenebaum helps Jack even in the case where Jack has been harvesting little sisters (who she sees as her own children) and continuing to do so even after Fontaine's mind control has been broken. As it stands, Tenebaum's actions make no sense for at least some of Bioshock's players.

The other obvious plot hole relates to the in-universe explanation for the character re-spawning. One of the mad science experiments that Ryan cooked up while Rapture was at its height was the Vita Chamber: a vat that uses “Plasmid reconstruction” and “quantum entanglement” to bring dead people back to life. I love it when a game provides a narrative explanation for having extra lives, but the explanation on display here is no undead curse from Dark Souls [2011]. Obviously, the chamber like much of the rest of the city is keyed to Ryan's genetic code, which means Jack as his biological son is able to access and use them. Makes sense so far, but if that is the case why doesn't Ryan pop back out of one after he's killed? There's a Vita Chamber right outside of his office after all. Also, why doesn't Atlas shut the damn things off once he gets control of the city or at the very least re-key them to his genome? At this point, a standard checkpoint system would be considerably less intrusive to the game's setting and plot than this half-hearted attempt. In most cases, I'd be willing to overlook issues that are so obviously related to gameplay mechanics but Bioshock has already invited this criticism by using its central twist to challenge the player's understanding of traditional video game narrative devices. You can't do that and then fall back on the excuse of “it's just a game bro” for other aspects, especially not after trying to offer an in-universe explanation.

None of these issues with the game's plot are especially galling on their own. Indeed, even when taken all together they don't do much to detract from the overall experience. However, when uncriticized these sloppy storytelling techniques have a tendency to metastasize into something much worse. Here, the rough edges of Bioshock's plot would in turn give rise to the absolute mess that was Bioshock Infinite [2013]. The plot in the first game was a comparatively straightforward affair, but the latter deals with alternative realities and time travel, two concepts that invariably reduce all but the most basic stories to a mess of confusing contradictions. Sure, Bioshock Infinite [2013] has its fair share of virtues, but its plot is a mess and the reason why its plot is a mess is because the critical success of Bioshock convinced the creators that they could get away with being lazy about the niggling details.

Beyond the plot though, there are still a few annoying issues that cropped up during my playthrough of Bioshock. As you explore Rapture, splicers will re-spawn and repopulate areas. For the most part, this is completely natural and feels like roving gangs are just moving into the areas you've cleared out while you are in another part of the map. However, when you get to the section where you need to collect bee enzymes, the moment you turn on the smoke machines a few splicers will rush in. It doesn't matter how many times you do this, there will always be a few who turn up to attack you. This was the moment that broke my immersion into the world of Rapture and reminded me that I was just playing a game. It's especially annoying because it's the only moment in a fifteen-hour game where the illusion is shattered in this way.

Then there is the final boss, Atlas, who even on the highest difficulty is still a complete joke if you've spent any time at all optimizing your plasmid/tonic build and hunting down weapon upgrades. Indeed, I'd say your first encounter with a Big Daddy is a considerably more threatening challenge. At this point, I've played through Bioshock three times (once years ago when it first came out and then twice more for this review) and in all those times Atlas has never once killed me. I suppose if you're doing a challenge run where you cannot buy upgrades or plasmids, then he might make a significant challenge but for any normal player, Atlas is less final challenge and more speed-bump before the ending.