The sea of broken dreams

During the initial hype cycle for BioShock 2, the game had the subtitle "Sea of Dreams". The player can find a recording in Siren Alley that ties this name into Dr. Sofia Lamb's view of Rapture itself. The world's brightest and most creative minds were drawn to Ryan's underwater would-be utopia, each trying to remodel its world to fit their own desires. BioShock drew much of its power from depicting the ways those dreams could grow out of control and become malignant obsessions. The sequel, in contrast, builds its world from the dreams that died. In many ways, the subject of BioShock 2 is failure.

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Critical Thinking Compilation: BioShock

BioShock is the rare game that really does change the way we think about video games, if for no other reason than that it has turned up as an example in almost every discussion of game style, mechanics, story, or design that has been written since its initial release in 2007. BioShock has received excessive adulation, a much-discussed backlash, and even a backlash to its backlash. Discussions of the game spawned the most popular jargon in games writing. So much has been written about BioShock that I could only put my hands on a fraction of the material without driving myself nutty as a splicer. Thus, this constitutes only the first draft of a survey of critical thinking on a game that will likely be regarded as a classic.

"Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?"

One of BioShock's most compelling features is that it details an interesting philosophical system and then uses it to frame an ethical question. The underwater utopia of Rapture was founded by an industrialist named Andrew Ryan on a system of principles much akin to Randian Objectivism, so much so that John Lanchester argues in the London Review of Books that BioShock is the only popular work in recent years to give Rand a drubbing. Lorenzo Wang fleshes out this case in his rich and interesting essay "BioShock Explained". In his view, the game attacks two key flaws of Rand's philosophy: society can never sustain its ideal state (somebody must, after all, scrub the toilets), and free will, even in the land of plasmids, is limited. Jay Barnson felt that the game critiqued the intrinsic short-sightedness of the market, which is regarded as all-wise by the lovers of laissez-faire economics.

This interpretation of the game's attitude towards Objectivism was not universal, however. Shamus Young interviewed an Objectivist on the subject, who argued that BioShock really aims its criticisms at the idea of philosophical certainty. In his very interesting Marxist critique, Richard Terrell lays out a case that the game conditioned the player to accept the principles of Rapture's economy. In his view, the choice to attack the Big Daddies (and possibly the little sisters) makes the player part of the oppressive capitalist regime. Justin Keverne argued that the mechanics of the game suggest that one's goal is to acquire power in order to gain the ability to acquire further power.

At this point, designer Clint Hocking felt that BioShock went off the rails in a certain sense. In his essential essay "Ludonarrative Dissonance in BioShock", Hocking argues that the game presents the player with two conflicting contracts. The gameplay establishes that the player must serve his own interest in order to advance, while the story forces the player to serve others in order to advance. Our attempts to deal with or ignore this tension are them mocked by the game's central twist.

"How can you do this thing? To a child?"

The philosophy of rational self-interest provides context for the story, and also for a moral choice that the player makes. When Rapture's lumbering Big Daddies are defeated, the player may choose the fate of "little sisters" they protect. If he rescues a little sister, he receives a small amount of ADAM that he can use to purchase plasmids, tonics, and other upgrades, and the girl survives. If he chooses to "harvest" the girl, he gets a great deal more ADAM, but she does not survive. For Leigh Alexander, saving the girls is like saving Rapture's last bit of innocence. In her view, the whole saga with ADAM was like a child's wish, and saving the girls is a way of forgiving Rapture for making that wish, despite the destruction it caused. Yet many did not find this choice to be compelling. As Wes Erdelack notes, in BioShock as in many other video games, the moral choices are too simplistic and do not feature a sufficient challenge to "goodness".

One frequent complaint about the rescue / harvest choice is that if the player rescues enough little sisters, then the twisted Dr. Tenenbaum will leave a Teddy bear at a nearby vending machine, stuffed with plasmids, ammo, and extra ADAM she has presumably harvested on her own. In a thorough critique of this moral choice, D. Riley argues that the benefits of rescuing are sufficiently great that the whole system is neutered. Duncan Fyfe concurs, and wonders how the developers could have gotten this so wrong.

This opinion is not universal. Leigh Alexander believes that approaching the rescue / harvest choice with a cost-benefit analysis is too limiting. In her view the question to ask is not what you want to get but who you want to be. As she says, "The merit of choice in games may not be what we get from it, but when done this richly, how it feels." Bonnie Ruberg feels that the gameplay is really there to expose the selfishness of gameplay tactics in general. I also felt that the near-equivalence (in economic terms) of the two choices was making a point about the hidden values of games.

Some also argue that the harvest choice is not compelling because the player is spared having to watch the act or even see the body that remains. D. Riley's previously noted essay includes a comment on this point, and I make a similar case in my own essay, "Ecce, soror". Nels Anderson acknowledges that this may be so, but points out that on-screen child murder by the protagonist of a game simply could never get by ratings boards or the easily-outraged public. Nonetheless, he argues that the nursery scene provides some of the necessary emotional impact.

And perhaps the little sisters aren't even the real focus of the moral choice. Justin Keverne argues that the player's real moral choice is whether to attack the enslaved Big Daddies for his own personal gain. Unlike the other denizens of Rapture, the extremely dangerous Big Daddies won't harm you unless you attack them first. For Glenn Turner, the choice to put down a Big Daddy was harrowing because of the little sisters' reaction. Gene Koo felt that becoming one of these lumbering behemoths brought the game's emotional and philosophical threads close to each other. In his view, however, this didn't quite succeed, because the player has no choice about whether he becomes a big daddy.

Whether the rescue / harvest choice was compelling or not, BioShock at least invited a fresh consideration of the meaning of moral agency in games, according to Leigh Alexander. She also pondered whether our behavior in the game would change if our peers were aware of it (perhaps through achievements or trophies).

"A man chooses; a slave obeys."

Choice is the subject of BioShock's most compelling moment, the confrontation with Andrew Ryan. This moment twists the preceding exposition of the ideas of rational self-interest into a commentary on the nature of gaming itself. Wes Erdelack views BioShock as parable about gaming, highlighting the fact that the feeling of agency is always an illusion. The Graduate School Gamer notes in an essay comparing BioShock to Braid that "The player can only converse with the text within the confines of the game's design and always remains at the will of the designer." The illusion of choice is not a subject unique to gaming, according to Roger Travis. He notes that the non-choice of killing Ryan resembles Achilles' non-choice to join battle in the Iliad.

The first-person perspective heightened the impact of the climax. Matthew Gallant regards the first-person viewpoint as essential, especially in moments like the confrontation with Ryan. The personal choices at the center of the game couldn't be the same if the player's eye into the game world didn't seem to make him a part of it. Sinan Kubba shares Gallant's skepticism about a BioShock movie, feeling that the immediacy and immersion of the game's perspective could never truly be replicated in film. The praise was not universal, however: Brad Gallaway felt that the silent, first-person protagonist interfered with the narrative at several important points. He especially felt that the internal logic of the game collapsed when the player injected himself with a plasmid for the first time.

The more widely-expressed complaint about the plot, and specifically the encounter with Ryan, is that there is far too much game after it. The denouement of the game is widely recognized as its weakest segment, a fact that Josh Birk explains by pointing out that BioShock, like many other games, has more backstory than story. The confrontation with Ryan is the culmination of the fascinating backstory, leaving the rest of the game to become little more than the tale of a man with a gun out for revenge. Moreover, the game doesn't exactly free the player up to make his own choices after its climax. The player continues to obey a character, only now it is Tenenbaum rather than Fontaine. BioShock refuses to engage this dilemma, which is a significant source of frustration for Duncan Fyfe. Chris Dahlen also found this troubling, because the game's most compelling character (Ryan) has so much agency and the player has so little. As he puts it, "...within the game, you never become a man. The only choice you have is to stop playing."

Aside from Ryan, surprisingly few writers have gone in depth on the characters of the game. A worthy exception to this rule is Leigh Alexander's examination of the bizarre Sander Cohen. She relates his personality to people she knows from her theater background, seeing in him a metaphor for the whole backstory of the game. In her view, Cohen is "a brilliant character not only for his spot-on characterization, but for the way his endless wrestling with 'the muse' is a perfect metaphor for the consumptive nature of Rapture in general."

"I know why it has to be children, but why just girls?"

Without focusing a spotlight on particular characters, several interesting pieces have examined the role of women and femininity in BioShock. Although creepy little girls are a staple of the horror genre, as Leigh Alexander has noted, BioShock uniquely gives the player power over their fate. Bonnie Ruberg found the female enemies in the game particularly disturbing, and wondered whether their horrific power drew from the simple fact of their gender. She also found the power relationship between the player and the little sisters to be troubling, and agreed with a Penny Arcade comic suggesting that it had overtones of pedophilia.

Nels Anderson indicates that the design of the girls is intended to evoke sympathetic feelings, but what attitude does this imply on the part of the player and developers? In a comprehensive critique, Richard Terrell argues that BioShock pervasively trades in patriarchal values because it "depicts women as weak, emotional, submissive, and nurturing and men as strong, and protective...". The little sisters are portrayed as helpless human commodities, and for much of the story Diane McClintock equates her self-worth with physical attractiveness. Moreover, Dr. Tenenbaum's redemption comes through an acquiescence to patriarchal ideas of motherhood. Terrell's analysis encompasses the mechanics of interacting with female characters as well.

"I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture"

It's easy to understand how Cohen, Tenenbaum, and so many others could have chosen Rapture. For Ed Borden, the environment was key to BioShock's immersion of the player. The crumbling city arrests the player's attention and inspires his curiosity. Glenn Turner felt the same way, arguing that the art design was perhaps the game's best feature. For Richard Naik also, the selling point of the game was Rapture's auditory and visual design, overwhelming all of the game's shortcomings. The art design unified the disparate levels, making the world of Rapture feel like a coherent whole and maximizing the emotional impact on the player, as Tom Cross explains in "Surviving Rapture".

Part of the power of the environment was the way in which it was used to tell a story. Steven O'Dell compared the player's journey through Rapture to a guided tour of a dying city, one in which the enormously detailed spaces tell a story through the way they are designed. Wes Erdelack points out that the much-loved environmental storytelling of Fallout 3 has some roots in the construction of Rapture's spaces. While the audio logs constitute the most powerful storytelling in BioShock, the game's spaces allow the player to play detective and reconstruct his own history for the game world. Careful construction of spaces and traversals played a significant role in player experiences as well, as Simon Cooke explains. Every time the player encounters a massive set piece, the developers use clever design to make sure he is able to see every bit of it.

"...bugger gets into his 'ead that he's gonna go down guns blazing."

Also making sure that the player can see every inch of the city is the fact that he simply can't die in it. In some respects, the Vita-Chambers that resurrect the player after every fatal encounter resemble a streamlined checkpoint system (much like Elika in the later Prince of Persia), and Scott Juster places them among a number of ways that BioShock used narrative elements to disguise common gameplay tropes. Nonetheless, the Vita-Chambers were widely criticized. This goes beyond the hardcore player's lament, articulated for us by Josh Bycer, that resurrection makes the game 'too easy'. Josh Birk complains that they interfere with the scare factor in the game and the logic of weapon collection. Justin Keverne points out that they encourage the player to take the path of least resistance, though for him the draw of using the plasmid powers was enough to keep him playing fair. Not so for Richard Terrell, who felt that the chambers too strongly encouraged the wrench / revive / repeat approach to combat, and demoted the central activity of the game, which he felt to be shooting. Moreover, he argues that the effective immortality of the player weakens the psychological impact of the game in his psychoanalytic evaluation.

Another way to conceive of the Vita-Chambers might be as a resurrection spell, an apt comparison since BioShock had so many RPG elements. In fact, Richard Terrell felt the game's mechanics tended more towards the role-playing side, in particular because the almost nonexistent cover system forced the player to behave like a bullet sponge. He compares tactics in BioShock to the attack / attack / heal approach common in RPGs. Justin Keverne comments on the oddity of this, as the Vita-Chambers actually make healing and health packs totally superfluous in all but the final battle. Writing for Eludamos, Matthew Weise connects BioShock with RPG roots originating in Ultima Underworld.

BioShock resembled RPGs in even less flattering ways as well, specifically because of its fetch quests. These quests added numerous objectives that muffled the story, in Duncan Fyfe's view. Rather than engaging in a breakneck pursuit of Ryan (or Fontaine), the player spends his time mucking about Rapture looking for 7 vials of bee spit. This quest temporarily scared Tom Armitage right out of the game, even though it ultimately led to some interesting exploration. He warns, "I was thrown by the instructions the game gave me..." saying that even a good game can be derailed by players' bad memories of similar quests.

And despite the "too easy" vita chambers and exciting plasmid powers, the conventions that BioShock embraces limit its audience. Although Lanchester praised BioShock's consideration of Randian philosophy, he criticized the game because even its modest difficulty would keep it from being experienced by a broader culture that might genuinely appreciate it.

Author's Note

If you go to any of these blogs and search them for the word "BioShock" you will come up with dozens of posts. The game has become a kind of yardstick by which we measure others, and a rich source of examples to illustrate points. I attempted to limit what I included here by stipulating that the post must be at least 50% about BioShock, and that it should be in fully developed paragraphs rather than bullet points. I'm not sure I actually ended up holding to that, but that was at least the approach I tried to apply. I am positive I left some excellent posts out, mostly by failing to find them in the vast wilds of the internet. If I omitted your dissertation on the semiotics of dentistry in the context of Rapture, it is probably because I didn't run into it while I was doing my survey. Would you kindly let me know about it in the comments, via twitter, or with an e-mail?

Last updated: 4/6/09

Future updates of this compilation have moved to Critical Distance. Look for this and other great critical compilations (by myself and others) there.

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You can't put a price on your soul

BioShock's most famous moral choice concerns the fate of young girls who are wandering through the undersea city of Rapture. The player gets to decide whether these girls live or die, and in a game that features a civilization built on the principle of laissez-faire one expects economics to play some kind of role in this decision. Many writers, however, have complained that it does not, and that the choice has too little of an effect on one's ultimate experience of the game. Leigh Alexander and Bonnie Ruberg, among others, have suggested that something more sophisticated is going on here, and in other aspects of the player's behavior in Rapture. The difficulty of resolving the rescue / harvest choice in BioShock by a cost-benefit analysis illuminates the little-discussed value of selfishness embodied by most gameplay.

Ludonarrative dissonance and the player's choice

Clint Hocking's famous critique of BioShock accused it of developing a case of "ludonarrative dissonance", or tension between the message of the mechanics and the message of the story. As he put it, the mechanics offer a "ludic contract" that tells the player to seek out power (in the form of weapons, ammunition, plasmids, and ADAM) in order to advance in the game. This contract encourages the player to adopt a philosophy of rational self-interest much like that espoused by Andrew Ryan, the founder of the game's undersea dystopia. The story, by contrast, offers a "narrative contract" that tells the player to help others (initially Atlas, later Tenenbaum) in order to advance. In Hocking's view, the player can choose to accept or reject the ludic contract by harvesting the little sisters (maximizing his take of ADAM) or rescuing them, respectively. However, because the overall narrative of the game is fixed, the player cannot really choose to accept the philosophy of rational self-interest, and the climactic confrontation with Ryan seems to ridicule the player for putting up with that limitation.

Subsequent discussions of the game took a curious turn, however, in that aspects of the rescue / harvest choice itself were accused of being the centerpiece of dissonance. Wes Erdelack's excellent discussion of ludonarrative dissonance is a case in point, although I believe this take on the matter originates with Jon Blow. The essence of the complaint in this case is that the story sets up the player's choice to save or kill the girls as crucial, the consequences of the choice amount to almost nothing in terms of the gameplay. Although the player obtains significantly less ADAM when he chooses not to harvest the little sisters, repeatedly rescuing the girls causes Tenenbaum to give him gifts containing additional ADAM, ammunition, tonics, and a unique plasmid. As a result, in terms of strict gameplay consequences, the choice the player makes with respect to the fate of the little sisters doesn't matter. In essence, the game doesn't allow the player to make a choice about the philosophy of rational self-interest because both options are compatible with that philosophy.

These discussions all assume that dissonance ought be avoided, but as Michael Abbott has noted, it has its uses. The odd discordant note may offend the ear, but it draws attention and forces the observer to consider the artwork more carefully. The seeming mechanical equivalence of choice may be the conceptual error of a foolish team, or an intentional effort on the part of the developers to make the player consider the conflict presented more carefully. If we interpret this dissonance in BioShock as signal rather than noise, BioShock indicts the value systems of games and gamers.

You are only a link in the great chain

The philosophy of rational self-interest lies at the heart of both kinds of dissonance in the game. Andrew Ryan intended Rapture to be a utopia with no governing principle other than man's own self-interest, and regards those who seek the protection of a government to be little more than parasites sucking society dry. He builds Rapture for himself. His primary antagonist, Frank Fontaine, embraces this philosophy in a more nuanced way. He too only acts in his rational self-interest, but rather than Ryan's reactionary hatred of charity, Fontaine sees the feeding and housing of the poor as a transaction in which he purchases loyalty. They are very different men — Ryan wishes to build a society, Fontaine aims only to plunder one — but their heuristics for moral decision-making are identical. Whether either of them fairly depicts Randian Objectivism is an interesting but ultimately pointless debate; their self-interested philosophy most resembles the implicit morality of video games.

Obviously I don't mean to attribute a moral system to games like Guitar Hero, but most games that feature a player-controlled avatar operate on a moral system much like Fontaine's, in which all the world is the player's for the taking. Certainly most games try to cover this with a veneer of a story that somehow involves saving the world, but this motivation rarely takes center stage in the player's mind. In almost every game in existence, the player is encouraged to kill everything he encounters and plunder every chest he sees in order to win the game. Role-playing games often acknowledge this, usually through some abstracted morality system as in the Fable games. Yet in these cases only the extent of the behavior is criticized, not the fundamental attitude. So long as a chest or trove lacks any obvious owner, the player will not be criticized for taking it. The primary value of these games is always selfish advancement motivated by hedonism.

"Never play a man for the short con when you can play 'em for the long one..."

In keeping with this value set, we expect our options in games to be clearly differentiated in terms of their utility with respect to our self-interest. Because this is not operationally true of the rescue / harvest choice, many players were frustrated or confused. This statement from Duncan Fyfe, is typical of the protests:

It's hard to understand why this is the case because it's such a fundamentally simple and classic philosophical debate. You can make the rational, self-interested choice to gain as much resources as you can from this one interaction. Or you can sacrifice/minimise your short-term reward in favour of long-term benefit. This is how it's presented to you and it's basic political philosophy. It's realism versus idealism. You'll get less Adam for rescuing the little sisters but there's the promise of a greater reward down the line.

The problem with objections like this is that delaying gratification doesn't put philosophical ideas into opposition at all. The debate over long-term benefit vs. short-term benefit is just an argument over what constitutes self-interest, or what is the more "rational" route towards actuating it. Reducing the rescue / harvest choice to long-term vs. short-term gains merely recapitulates the contrast between Ryan's short-sighted anti-altruism and Fontaine's "long con", but neither of those options entails a rejection of rational self-interest.

It's not the choice you make, it's why you make it

If you want the player to really consider the implications of the philosophy of rational self-interest in the rescue / harvest choice, there are only two real ways to do it. The first is to make the rescue choice truly oppositional to the player's expected self-interest, i.e. give him no ADAM or very little for taking this route. The obvious disadvantage of this approach is that the game now becomes highly skewed. Although the vita-chambers relieve difficulty in the typical sense of dying and thus being unable to continue, the game will certainly become a much more frustrating and challenging experience. A gamer who played through such an experience might come away with the impression that the game was designed to convey the idea that Ryan and Fontaine were right, that he should have chosen killing.

The other alternative is to arrange gameplay in such a way that "rational self-interest" no longer constitutes a reasonable standard for decision, and this is what the choice looks like. The point is not to give the player a way to reject the philosophy in the decision, but rather to draw his attention to the fact that this was such a large part of his decision-making all along. Rational self-interest cannot tell us what to do with the little sisters because both options fit this mindset. Thus, the arbiter of judgment is your conscience, as it is in real life. The fact that costs and benefits of the options you can take with the little sisters don't conform to our expectations about "moral choice" in a game invites us to examine the values that inform those expectations, and the ways in which games express or exploit them.

Games have implicit values — do as you're told, take what you will — that we might disagree with were we forced to acknowledge them explicitly. Because these values are both hidden and integral, it is difficult to force the player to confront them without a shock or a feeling of confusion. The dissonance in the rescue / harvest choice may be intended to inspire the latter. If so, then both the confrontation with Ryan and the choice for the little sisters are commentaries on the nature of video games. Despite the ever-increasing promises of freedom, games have always played you the same way Fontaine played Jack. And regardless of how you feel about Ryan and Fontaine, you have always played games as if you were them. BioShock elaborately displays the callousness and evil of these men, and through them, you. How do you feel about that?

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Ecce, soror

During the course of play, the first-person shooter Bioshock repeatedly presents the player/character with a moral choice. Amidst the ruin of its underwater city, Rapture, a number of small girls wander, girls who possess a resource (ADAM) the player/character desperately needs. Upon defeating the girls' monstrous guardians, the player can choose to kill ("harvest") the child, gaining a large quantity ADAM, or he can choose to save the girl, receiving half as much ADAM and a vague promise of future help from another character. If the player saves a "little sister", he is treated to a short scene in which she thanks him, then runs off. If he chooses to destroy her he sees... nothing.

That's not strictly true, of course. The game shows the player/character reaching towards the girl (the on-screen hand seems to be subtly larger than in the "save" option), and transitions via a swirling effect to an image of the parasite the player/character has just ripped from her body. The girl's body is nowhere to be found. Although the player is meant to believe that the character has just eviscerated a small child in order to gain a strategic advantage, no evidence of the awful crime remains to confront him. Due to the limitations of the engine, the other dead bodies in Bioshock are often temporary, but they at least exist for a moment. The game's most horrible killings are also those that leave no physical trace at all beyond the advantage they confer on the player.

I find this disturbing because it speaks to an ethos that is at peace with the idea of child murder as an intellectual act, but not a physical one. Regardless of what some reactionaries may say about games, I sincerely doubt that any of Bioshock's players could actually go through with the "harvest" if doing so involved a graphic depiction of evisceration. If Bioshock only forced the player to face a dead, bloody body, many would only be able to "harvest" once. Even considered on a purely intellectual level many gamers found Bioshock's options to be too much, and were unable to choose "harvesting". Yet I feel that games which require the player to choose an ethic ought to confront him with the moral horror of his choice. Killing another person, adult or child, is an awful act, and if developers are to be true to the idea of giving the player a morality simulation then they should not hold back on a graphic depiction of the consequences.

I don't mean to imply that developer cowardice is the only interpretation of the design. One can also take the distancing of the player from the act to suggest that the player/character is in denial about his moral agency. Rapture's creator, Andrew Ryan, continued to insist on his objectivist beliefs even as he solidified his totalitarian rule over the city; he was blind to his betrayal of his own principles. The player/character's inability to visualize his own brutality and its consequences may mirror Ryan's refusal to countenance his own moral failure. Because the player/character is a mirror of Ryan in many ways this interpretation has some resonance.

In addition, the choice not to confront the player with the moral horror of the choice to kill may be making a point about our own moral judgments. Nothing beyond a slightly disturbing ending punishes the player for choosing to kill the little sisters. When one does not have to consider the negative consequences, the decision to murder a young girl becomes almost trivial. I would deny, however, that it is necessary or admirable to emphasize this view. The triviality of murder under such circumstances is already a critical element of this and every other shooter. Acknowledging that a lack of moral perspective or an elimination of consequence enables monstrous actions is hardly interesting at this point.

Developers, of course, must contend with factors beside the limits of their creativity and artistic desire. The ESRB would certainly recoil, and anti-game reactionaries howl in protest, were any game to realistically depict the evisceration and murder of a young girl, or even showed the dead body resulting from such an act. In my opinion, however, allowing players to perform the act and not confronting them with the consequences is exactly the sort of behavior the watchdogs should be trying to prevent. The bloodlessness of murdering children in Bioshock does not make that depiction less disturbing, but more so. In its larger story, Bioshock expresses the thesis that abstract ideals falter in the face of real consequences. To shy away from those consequences is to stab at the heart of the game.

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