"Is a man not entitled to the sweat off
his own brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!'
says the man in the Vatican,
'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected
those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I
chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the
scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be
constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become
your city as well."
-Andrew Ryan,
founder of 'Rapture'
Let's just face it already;
most teenagers will never read "Atlas Shrugged." You'll always
have the oddly prescient, horn-rimmed and girlfriendless product of
locker-reamings and enough hazings to create a few major-league smog warnings
who may peruse the hefty tome while considering how effective it might be as a
bludgeon against bigger, gap-toothed, dull-eyed cronies. So 2K Games just
spared us all the trouble, and gave us a game which gives us the epitaph of
Galt's Gulch; 2007's "Bioshock."
Most of "Bioshock"
takes place in the subaqueous city of Rapture.
Rapture is a metropolis falling somewhere between the Atlantis of ancient
times and the Galt's Gulch of "Atlas Shrugged" infamy in terms of
overall LULz. The game takes place in the 1950s, several years after
Rapture was founded by billionaire savant Andrew Ryan. Ryan intended the
city as a haven for Earth's best and brightest, a utopia where such polymaths
could exist in collegial accord without the monkey-on-the-back burden of us
hapless mortals whinging about tax hikes and long work days and irradiated
babies.
Sounds good, right?
Unfortunately, the inhabitants of Rapture outwiled themselves when
Holocaust survivor Dr. Brigid Tenenbaum creating something called ADAM in
concert with malcontent Frank Fontaine. ADAM were genetic enhancements
which allowed people to manipulate elemental psychic powers like fire, wind,
and water, known colloquially as 'plasmids.' Fontaine mass-produced ADAM
by implanting sea slugs (from which ADAM was derived) in the stomachs of five
orphaned girls, known subsequently as 'Little Sisters' (basically Little Girl
Zombies, known to proliferate cases of Serious Fucking Willies). These
Little Sisters pretty much get to spend their lives scampering around from
corpse to corpse harvesting lots of ADAM. They're protected by "Big
Daddies," plasmid-enhanced humans in chemical-retardant suits whose sole
raison d'etre is clomping around after the Little Sisters and zapping anything
that tries to hurt them.
Which includes you, the
player. See, the Little Sisters have been working overtime recently,
excoriating lots of corpses, so the Big Daddies get royally pissed off and
continually call the social services offices of all three countries which Ryan
denounced, which the joke's on them because their vocabulators all sound like
that guy with the really deep voice from "Jesus Christ Superstar"
with a hangover. All three nations are broke by this point because of
Ryan's abdication, but eventually scrounge up enough money to send a social
worker down by making Stephen Harper impersonate a hamster for Bill Gates.
Just kidding. They actually send down a plasmid-enhanced ex-Marine
beauty school dropout named Whappo to shut the Big Daddies up and save money on
the phone bill.
Close enough. You play
as a man named Jack, a marooned traveler whose plane crashes over the
smouldering ruins of Rapture. Looks like we're in deep shit, and no, the
Little Sisters haven't even hit puberty yet.
As it turns out, ADAM is
addictive. Addictive, like, in a way which makes cigarettes look like the
height of independent and healthy living. ADAM distorts human DNA in a
way that turns users nanners, transforming them into zombie ingrates called
Splicers, all of whom want to chase you down and pump you for ADAM to feed
their rapacious habit. So now the Little Sisters have well-rounded role
models to look up to. Everyone goes home happy, right? Not exactly,
because Jack's still got no ride out, and he must fight his way through a
splicer-infested dystopia peppered with metabolistically-enhanced bionic people
brandishing little undead zombie gals at him.
The reason that the Little
Sisters have been working overtime is because Fontaine (think Sylvester
Stallone meets Rambo with a penchant for diving) launched an insurrection
against Ryan, leaving one half of Rapture dead (including Fontaine himself) and
the other half ADAM-dependent, deleterious husks of their formerly super-smart
selves. Lots of corpses means lots of happy Little Sisters, who get to
harvest their daily quotas of ADAM many times over. Christmas has come
early for the poor little things.
I'm not focusing on Bioshock
because of the graphics, or the sound, or the gameplay, all of which were
superb and well worth the game's purchase price in of themselves. No, I'm
rhapsodizing about this particular game because it's the first title since
"Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty" to really use the gaming medium
as a way to make people think. I actually know people who played through
this game, then spent a month reading "Atlas Shrugged" to learn more
about Rand's philosophy. Most of
"Bioshock" is an ostentatious tribute to Rand and her dystopian
contemporaries, like Orwell and Huxley.
The
basic premise of “Atlas Shrugged” was that a group of lucrative tycoons and
entrepreneurs, tired of the all-pervasive “People’s State” maxims which
pervaded the outside world, created a small city and went on ‘strike’ from
their former lives. “Bioshock” shows us
the cumulative outcome of this choice. The
game is part enigma, part conventional shooter.
It’s ultimately the gamer’s task to piece together what happened to this
fallen city, how such a halcyon of industry could have become a haven of rapine
drug addicts.
“Bioshock”
brings Rand down to Earth in the sense that the founder of Rapture, Andrew Ryan
(whose name is a semi-anagram of Rand’s) has a clearly definable hubris,
whereas the John Galts and Francesco A’Anconias of “Atlas Shrugged” did not Ironically,
a lot of people miss just how supportive of the ‘common man’ Rand
really was. Many critics of objectivism
postulate that Rand had a literary fetish for
capitalist ‘supermen,’ people inexplicably above the rest of us. But this was a literary device, not a literal
prognostication. The people who make
these inferences are the same people who once said that the reason God hates
black people is because one of Noah’s sons saw his father naked.
Rand was, in her own view, trying to supplant over 2000
years of ‘Platonic’ philosophy prating the inexplicable. She believed in the integrity of human
industry, in the importance and potential of human endeavour. Every other niche in human ethics has its own
‘superhero.’ It’s best to think of the
Howard Roarkes and Hank Rearden as just that; Platonic Forms, superheros,
brought down to Earth. Rand
believed that people loved hearing about extraordinary people in very ordinary
circumstances, as opposed to ordinary people in extraordinary
circumstances. In “Atlas Shrugged,”
though, it’s unclear just what happens at the end, whether the ‘strikers’
return to the world or not.
In
“Bioshock,” they fail, just as everyone always predicted they would. It’s like watching a superhero movie where
the superhero dies at the end. Its
message is cryptic and ambivalent, somehow disjointed when seen with the
totality of Objectivism
Andrew
Ryan becomes a universal character, ironically, as a martyr, because he
literally becomes a man with the weight of the ocean on his shoulders. Alone at the bottom of the sea, with the
revenant pioneers of a jeering world chasing their tails and munching on ADAM around
him, one gets the sense of Alexander of Macedon on his deathbed, or Genghis
Khan perishing in his tent, El Cid shot by one of Yusuf’s archers on the field
of battle, or Hitler dying in the Fuhrerbunker.
We see a leader perishing among his extinct ideal. We see a parent watching his child convulse
on the ground and die in front of him, we see an atheist pray, we see a man
gain everything he ever wanted, lose it, and then attain freedom through his
chains. We see a Raskolnikov. We envision someone who imagined himself a
great man, but turned out to be a false prophet. We see the captain of Titanic, over 100 years
ago today, going down with his ship.
Unfortunately, in this case, he doesn’t go easily, but gives you one
hell of a boss battle and tries to make you Big Daddy chow throughout the
game. There is nothing quite like being
pummelled by a colossal juggernaut and then crooned over by a zombie little
girl who calls her hulking behemoth “Mr. Bubbles” to make you appreciate the
small things in life.
If
you visit Rapture, bring me back a t-shirt.
I’ll need something to sell off my back if Ryan’s world order ever comes
to pass.
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