Here are some longer thoughts on BioShock, expanding on my review. There are BIG SPOILERS.
Most of the talk I’ve heard about BioShock revolves around the choices you get to make. People love to ask each other whether they saved the little sisters or harvested them; it’s even more fun when you ask somebody who hasn’t finished the game. But maybe because I played it before it shipped, and alone, and obsessively for three days, I’m more interested in another part of the game – a part where you don’t get a choice.
Early on in the story, it’s clear that you’re on a collision course with Andrew Ryan, the man who built, ran and ruined the underwater city of Rapture. He appears to be the “big boss,” and the biggest threat to whatever’s left of the place as it crumbles and springs leaks all around you. But when you finally get to him, the game’s mindfuck clicks in place.
Walk into his lair and look closely, and you’ll see a wall of clues – and I’ll admit I missed a couple – that explain who you are: Andrew Ryan’s your dad, that dead stripper you saw a couple chapters ago was your mom, and your growth has been fantastically accelerated by some kooky scientific process. Ryan’s also not pleased with how you turned out: “you are my biggest disappointment,” he tells you over the PA system.
But that’s not the weird part. When you finally come face to face, the game switches to a cut-scene – you can’t control your actions throughout the encounter. And that’s when Ryan tells you that you haven’t had any control since the moment you got here. The phrase “Would you kindly,” which Atlas – your only friend in this world, and the man who’s been leading you to Ryan – regularly deploys in his instructions to you, is actually a codephrase. You’re conditioned to obey anything you hear after those three words. You have no free will here at all.
There are two mindfucks here. First is for the player: yes, your character is mentally conditioned. But you’ve been sitting on your couch with your controller for hours, doing whatever you were told, and there’s nothing wrong with you! You just did it because you didn’t have any better ideas about how to play the game. How does it make you, the player, feel to be so pliable? Did you ever stop to wonder what Atlas was really getting at? And even if you did, did you consider stopping? This is a similar situation to the ethical transgressions in Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles, where you’ll often commit evil acts – torturing suspects, murdering other adventurers you’ve never even met – simply because the game tells you to. The only choice is to stop playing, which never crosses our minds. But at least BioShock calls you to the carpet for it.
If you’re feeling a little small right now, think how your character feels. Ryan has basically called you (I’m speaking of you “in character” now) a bug. He built a city; you’re just running around blowing stuff up. He led these people; you’re just killing them. You’ve created nothing, accomplished nothing. Taking him out wasn’t even your idea. You are a far lesser man than your father.
And that’s when you kill him. Except he’s really just using you as a tool to kill himself: he gives you the command, “Would you kindly,” and you murder him with a golf club. (This is still in the cut-scene, so the player has no control over how it unfolds.) There’s a lot you can read into his motives here. A couple scenes ago, in Arcadia, he explained how he once destroyed a whole forest rather than let the government take it from him. He almost does the same to Rapture, and now he’s doing it with his own life. You’ve backed him into a corner, and you forced him into his suicide. But the fact remains: he’s in control. He’s taking his own life. He never gives you the satisfaction of so much as pulling the trigger on him.
Nobody beats Andrew Ryan.
After this scene, you should be feeling like quite a shlub. You’re still under Atlas’s mental control, he’s betrayed you, and now what do you do? Well, you do the most logical thing in the world: switch allegiance to someone else – this time, Tenenbaum, an ex-Nazi doctor – and you start doing whatever she asks you to do!
Here’s where the game “fizzled out” for me from a story perspective. It’s a little bizarre, after the lesson we learned about trusting strangers in the first 2/3 of the game, that in the last third, you would just start following Tenenbaum’s orders. I mean, she is a Nazi, right? Yet that’s what you do. The game gives you many clues that this is a bad idea. In Point Prometheus, you have to turn yourself into a big daddy – and you’ll frequently hear that this is a bad idea, that “there’s no turning back,” and that the process is dreadful. (The voicebox modification tool is particularly gruesome, and could’ve used some gorier sound effects to go with the image of a swirling blade that fits down your throat.) As you assume the role of a big daddy and follow a little sister through a museum – where she draws ADAM from bodies that are marked, “TEST SUBJECT #1,” “TEST SUBJECT #2″ etc. – it’s fair to think that something is up, and that you’ve not only walked into a trap, but willingly given yourself up to it.
But then you kill Atlas, and you’re free again. The two endings make some sense in terms of the original choice in the game – how you decide to treat the little sisters. They’re over the top and a little too specific for my tastes (if I’m a good guy or a bad guy, is this really where I would go with it next?). But they make sense.
Yet that question of player agency – of why you trust these people – never comes back. You’re punished for following Atlas – and granted, it wasn’t your choice, in theory. But you’re apparently just right to trust Tenenbaum, and the air of foreboding that at least I felt near the end never pays off.
And more importantly, you never redeem yourself. I guess by taking out Atlas and resolving the situation with the little sisters, you bring some closure to the game. The job of most gamers in a game is to kill all the stuff the game gives you to kill: and yes, that’s a job you can get done. But Andrew Ryan has challenged you to do something more. To be even a tenth of the man he is, to create instead of destroy, and most of all, to set your own course – to be your own man, to make your own decisions, to embrace the freedom that’s the birthright of every man or woman on earth. The message of the game came straight from Ryan: “A man chooses; a slave obeys.” But within the game, you never become a man. The only choice you have is to stop playing.
UPDATE: By the way, I stole the image above from Kieron Gillan’s fantastic interview with Ken Levine on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Give it a read.
UPDATE 2: If you absolutely, positively have to hear how everything in the game works, check out – courtesy Rock Paper Shotgun – this interview by Chris Remo at ShackNews, where Ken Levine basically gives away the whole store.
Curse Microsoft and their exclusivity deals. I want this mindfuck for ps3!!
In one of the audio diaries it is explained how the vita chambers bring people back to life, and why they only bring you back. It’s keyed to Ryan’s genetic code (and being his son, your’s too). So… couldn’t Ryan still be alive?
That’s a real good point, Chris. BTW, I literally just beat the game maybe 15 minutes ago and one of the first things I did was haul ass over here to see what you said about it.
I would have liked, as many people would have, to have seen some kind of “redemption” ending. I decided on harvesting the Little Sisters, because I thought it would be more interesting. I’ve never played a game that lets you fight as many different ways as BioShock does, and I wanted to make full use of the powers potentially available to me, and all of that great corpse physics. I was really getting off on my own power; I was loving being bad, and thinking it was cool as all hell that I was splicing myself up and going blood-crazy, just like the very monsters who I was busy killing.
But then, of course, there’s that moment with Ryan where you realize what an idiot you are and that you’ve just been a puppet. And I felt enormously small and enormously ashamed. But for me, the big revolution came when I went up directly after into Tennenbaum’s safehouse, saw all the little girls, and was punched in the gut with what I’d done. “Who’s he? He’s the one who hurts us,” they said in their small voices. “I don’t like him; Mama Tennenbaum says stay away from him.” Ugh.
You’re right that it would have been capital to have gotten an opportunity to discover what free will really is. Once I had Ryan’s key in my hand, I didn’t want to use it as instructed, but I had no choice. I saved the little sisters, each and every one, from the time that Tennenbaum saved me, and it would have been nice to have been recognized somehow for having changed. The experience of actually being in the Big Daddy suit and watching over the little sisters through the fisheye of my helmet, the sight of their sad little rooms in their sick “school”, made me utterly repentant. But it was too late after that.
Sucks for me, yeah. But I think it’s good, actually, in the context of the game. You see that even after the Sisters no longer have the sea slugs inside, they’re conditioned to continue harvesting anyway. You see what Suchong had done to them when you explore the laboratory — like that machine where pushing the “Big Daddy” button gives you potato chips, and pushing the figure of a pretty “mother” results in a zap. You can imagine that from the very day of your birth, the same thing was done to you. Perhaps, just like the Little Sisters, even when the mind control is broken, you don’t know what else to do because you’ve never done anything different. No, you never get the opportunity to become a man. But you get a hell of a schooling on objectivism taken to the extreme,and how the difference between choice and fate can sometimes be a hair’s breadth.
I always think the “bad ending” on Silent Hill 2, though the most grim and ungratifying, is the most appropriate to the story; whether you get the “good” or “bad” end in BioShock, I think the lack of opportunity to self-actualize is appropriate, too. You’re not meant to save the world; you’re the eyes through which we can see how the world was lost.
Leigh, that’s a really inriguing take on it. And I love that you tried to mend your ways after you saw the nursery. Someday I want to play through to get the bad ending, ’cause just watching it on Gamesradar doesn’t do it justice.
Chris — I definitely think you need to play it that way, and if you can, suspend your disbelief and forget the fact you’re playing a game whose outcome you already know. My boyfriend and I played separate games all weekend (with me going ahead, of course, to see everything first, because, uh… well, I am a games journalist and have a professional interest) so I had the rather lucky situation of seeing both methods simultaneously. I’m convinced I had the more satisfying experience; all of the game’s most gut-digging moments were made meaningful on many levels by the bad things I’d done and the ways I was forced to think of myself after that.
I’m a sentimental chick, so “the good end” made me misty even though I thought it was, like you said, kinda absolute and over-the-top; neither ending, in my view, had as much real relevance as it could have to the over-arching narrative nor the philosophies behind it; felt like the entire game was put together by a single cohesive team, and then one dude was called in at the last minute to just wrap ‘em up (which may have been what happened, for all I know, since game design teams focus on the game and tend not to know what to do when it’s over). Still, the most emotional moments for me happened during the game, and they happened because of my viciousness, my greed and my bad, bad acts. When I saw Tennenbaum’s safehouse and the little sister orphanage, and when I’d unlocked the achievement that let me know I’d “dealt” with them all — that’s when I cried a bit. But again, sentimental chick.
So if you do play through that way, for curiosity’s sake, go for it 100%!
Well, I’m a sentimental guy, so that sounds like a good idea.
Gamer Girl, btw, that would be awesome if Andrew Ryan survived. That could actually make a great Flash tribute game: “BioShock 2: Time To Plug the Damn Leaks.”
Hi just stumbled across your site and have to say I appreciated the way you analysed the game.
To get to the point I decided to post this to bring something to your attention that I have yet to see on some-one site/blog entry dealing with this game; outside Andrew Ryan’s office (not directly obviously) is a Vita-Chamber which only work on those with his DNA, so the part where you kill him in gaming terms (that being that popular games generally get sequels) he may not be dead.
That’s a great theory. I know they’re planning to do another installment, can’t remember if they revealed any details – I’d love to see them find a subtle way to use this, so long as they don’t screw up how well they wrote Ryan in the first game.
When Andrew Ryan explained everything to me I fell into such a state of shock that when, finally, Atlas urged me to turn off the Self-Destruct sequence, I felt myself almost regressing into childhood, my mind completely in a state of blind panic, repeating “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”
I usually don’t get that kind of feeling when I play games, and for a few short seconds it didn’t even feel like a game. It had been a perfect build-up for one of the greatest dramatical moments of clarity I’ve ever encountered in video games.
In fact, if the game had ended right there and then, I would have felt it justified. To me, it made sense that I, having meticulously harvested every Little Sister I could get my hands on, would suffer death here in the depth of the ocean. Had I been nicer, had I saved the children, I would have perhaps been able to escape in a submarine.
That, of course, did not happen. I’m sorry to say that when a Little Sister rescued me and brought me back to Tenenbaum, I felt angry and disappointed. That was, shortly afterwards, replaced with apathy and a complete lack of motivation. Why did they help me? Hadn’t I caused them so much harm? What was the point? I was a tool, Andrew Ryan was dead, and Atlas could easily stop me from even getting close to him.
Following my waking up in the nursery I experienced something that, in my opinion, was the most strained and turn-to-the-worse part in a game I’ve ever encountered. I walked through the streets of Upper-class Rapture only because I wanted to know if the ending was going to be good. Everything from the serum to overcome Atlas’s mind control to the transformation into a Big Daddy (why, exactly, was that necessary plot- and logic-wise? It felt like some kind of desperate motivation put in by the developers to squeeze out an extra hour or so of gameplay) felt like a bad Action Movie and not the suspenseful and tragic story that’d been unfolding so painfully recently.
After perhaps one of the most tragic (in a negative sense) end-boss fights, I’m rewarded with an ending that just left me wondering “Why?”
So, unfortunantly, while I didn’t enjoy the final parts of the game as much as you did, I still admit that Andrew Ryan, that damn liberalist bastard, won this game. And the fact that he himself makes the decisions, all the time, paints his change from liberalist-idealist to fascist despodent so much more darker. One can really see how, with the best of intentions, Ryan does his all to protect the paradise he has constructed from the greedy hands of Fontaine.
So, yeah, sorry for ranting a bit, but this game really, really shows that even FPS:s can provide a story that’s solid and convincing.
I must say that I thought that Ryan was showing his own beliefs in his last moments of life. That any man could be a man and not a slave or a parasite and that he told you to kill him and expected you to resist and not kill him or (after he was dead) take over from him and build the city to it’s former glory.
And the transformation into a Big daddy was probably only there to show you what the Big daddy and Little sisters were and how they were transformed into the monsters you had been killing.
And one of my favorite parts of the game was when you find Suchong, killed by a big daddy after slapping a little sister.