“Petty morality” – Bioshock

The underwater city of Rapture is an amazing place. I tend to love when games do big things with their settings, and Bioshock really goes for it. There is a lot of awe in its early moments, moving from a plane crash into its hidden underwater world, met by the emergence from the dark of a gigantic sculpture of its mastermind. The whole setup does a good job of living up to that, taking you through the front and back stages of an aquatic libertarian dream, a vision in art deco brass and neon. The occasional glimpses of the murky depths outside add to the atmosphere of precarity and weirdness.

The ambition and sense of scale is maintained really well as it takes you through strange and wonderful places, largely falling apart to one extent or another. It gets unfurled in careful stages as you follow instructions, find conveniently recorded voice messages, and find yourself amid an ongoing war for the city’s future. You don’t get a lot of freedom in where you go, with (very welcome to me) big gold arrows pointing the direction to reach your objectives a lot of the time, but more freedom is at least present in some of how you do it. Bioshock is a shooter mixed with a higher than normal level of RPG elements, and the latter provides some different ways to go about removing the various enemies hopped up on the sea slug-powered genetic modification which has taken the city over and turned so many of its people into bioweapons.

Largely that just means levelling up in new ways to shoot people, but there are other ways to sidestep things. Getting bonuses to certain things by taking photos of You can hack into drones, turrets, safes, vending machines and other mechanical bits, via a puzzle game where you connect pipes which was low-key my favourite bit of the game. Of course you spend a lot of the rest of your time heading through giant pipes and triggering explosions too, making the swapping puzzle a miniature for Rapture.

The gameplay ties up to the narrative in various more obvious ways. As you gain new powers, you become monstrous in many of the same ways you hear about happening to others. It’s something which the game is particularly grim and inventive in pursuit of, from burning people alive to launching angry bees from your wrist, even if the practical implementation of their gameplay is less inventive than Resistance: Fall of Man. Likewise, being able to pay your way out of attacks triggered by security alerts is no match for having to pay to save your game in Final Fantasy VII’s Gold Saucer, but it brings a bit of the same capitalist menace into a more regular gameplay form.

Within the constraints of a certain model of narrative centred on shooting people and listening to audio, it’s easy to see why Bioshock is so celebrated. It relies noticeably often on turning up to places just in time to see someone killed, but its balance of plot advancement and advancing environmental horrors is very well-managed. It gives you all the evidence to work things out but doesn’t do the work for you, meaning some of its darkest implications creep up extra powerfully. It has great voice acting throughout and a way with viciously memorable quotes.

Andrew Ryan, the founder of Rapture, is a particularly fantastic villain. Played by Armin Shimerman, he mixes being highly charismatic and completely unhinged to fine effect. As he makes his grand speeches, crackling recordings lending them a perverse extra sense of permanence and weight, it’s all too believable that he could have got people to follow him into the sea. (At least with that, and his money and promise of more). He rails against a world that might constrain him, pledging belief in total independence and choice even as the failure of others to live up to them brings his death. His name is not far off an anagram for Ayn Rand, and as a figurehead for her philosophies in all their batshit force he is striking. ”Even the air you breathe is sponged from my account”, delivered with conviction and paranoia befitting the sense of total ownership, is an all-time great villain line.

I’m putting positives up front because while I’m going to get much less positive, I did mostly enjoy playing Bioshock and found it easy to see how it got seen as a breakthrough in mainstream games. The structure and execution of its narrative is well done enough that it makes sense to talk about it on a quite different level to, says, Max Payne or Grand Theft Auto III, where the competence of narrative wasn’t there or wasn’t really the point. The acclaim for Bioshock has a bit of an element of the mainstream of a different style and origin of games belatedly catching up with the potential of narrative that Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid had exploded into the mainstream a decade earlier, but being first doesn’t necessarily have to count for everything, and it has plenty of its own ideas.

I should mention that, like my first time with Final Fantasy VII, I went into playing Bioshock for the first time already familiar with the most famous moment in its story. The big reveal held no great revelation for me. I will note, though, that the idea of being given gameplay instructions and objectives by someone who then turns out to have been lying and manipulating you is basically the twist from no less than the gazillion-selling Myst. On top of that of course, there is the nature of free will stuff, but Bioshock’s attempts to critique players following instructions in a linear game fall flat. The player character is revealed to have been genetically manipulated and brought up to bring about the downfall of Andrew Ryan. Your character has been set up to respond involuntarily to instructions containing “would you kindly”, a phrase mixed into the messages from the affable guide Atlas just rarely enough to not stand out. But when playing, I didn’t do the things because I was asked to kindly, I did them because that was so evidently the only framework that was available to act within.

At the moment of revealing the manipulation, and for a shocking up close killing (to add to the hundreds of anonymous killings before that), control is completely taken away from the player. In contrast to Myst, it detracts from any sense that you, the player, are the one who has been manipulated. And the game proceeds from there to have you follow someone else’s instructions in much the same way to remedy things. Those narrative choices stand in contrast to the elegant tragedy of Shadow of the Colossus, where the character and player’s more informed actions are borne through to their inevitable consequences, and where the player can be left in some kind of forlorn control of the final moments.

Elsewhere Bioshock does go out of its way to highlight one actual choice that you have. It regularly presents ‘Little Sisters’, genetically-modified girls whose bodies generate the story’s magical resources, and you can choose to either save them or kill them to harvest a bounty. Yes, apparently the magic sea slug implantations conveniently only work on girls because just making it children wasn’t sympathetic enough. Your guide Atlas tells you that you should have no mercy because you need to do everything you can to increase your power, which does fit with the game’s themes well.

If this wasn’t already one of the more straightforward moral choices ever presented in games, though, it becomes obvious on saving even one Little Sister that you will still get your magical currency provided regardless of your decision. There is no sacrifice in doing the right thing; Bioshock doesn’t have even the courage of Knights of the Old Republic in giving you any real reason to be bad beyond just wanting to. The only thing about this apparent moral conundrum which ever gave me pause was that the choices are coded to the X and Y buttons and I still can’t 100% get the hang of the button positions being the other way round compared to Nintendo controllers.

That’s not the only aspect of Bioshock which makes ambitious gestures that it doesn’t follow through on. One of its earlier areas is the Medical Pavilion area, where through blood-scrawled messages and audio recordings you get filled in on the work of Dr. J. S. Steinman. As he spirals into extreme and gruesome experiments on people, revelling in being freed from ethics, he sets out some of his philosophies. In his world beauty is a “moral obligation” and “aesthetics are a moral imperative”, a chilling phrase. The message to customers, meanwhile, is that you can “change your look, change your sex, change your race, it’s yours to change”. Despite playing with those ideas though, for a game set in the ‘50s and populated with many people from America, anything relating to race and racism is remarkably absent. While what is displayed is pretty obviously a form of eugenics (and elsewhere in the game, experiments are explicitly labelled with that word), there is no sign of the racism and white supremacy that eugenics was developed hand-in-hand with.

Elsewhere, audio diaries reference characters’ past experiences in Nazi concentration camps and in Japanese-occupied Korea. Bioshock isn’t shy of drawing on real-world horrors to lend weight to its story, but it does so in a highly compartmentalised way that doesn’t say anything about structural oppression. It isn’t interested in tackling imperialism or fascism, or thinking about who they affect, for all of its interest in some of their methods. While Bioshock shows Rapture’s individualist society as having fallen apart, it does so through a series of vignettes of the people in charge having lost their grip on reality and done terrible things in a way that’s little motivated by any consistent ideology beyond an all-purpose selfishness. That’s not to say that Bioshock‘s developers necessarily should have made a game about racism (a question I will get to return to!) but that the real-world references come off as more exploitative for not doing so.

In an interview with Game Informer about his approach to Bioshock, writer and director Ken Levine said “The first thing you think about is, ‘Who is this character, and what does he want, and what’s in his way?’ That’s how you develop a character.” […] “If you start from, ‘This is a black dude’ or ‘This is a Jewish dude,’ you’re kind of missing the point.” Which certainly fits with Bioshock’s and Andrew Ryan’s focus alike on the disconnected actions of individuals. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the impressive aspects of Rapture as a setting appear to build on some level of buy-in to Great Man principles of its fictional creators. In the context of the bestselling games I am playing through in order, Bioshock’s narrative stands out as a big step up from a lot of its recent peers, but the acclaim it was met with still feels like a move to a more advanced form of bare minimum – from This Has Writing to This Has A Message.