Bioshock - Defeated Andrew Ryan

"A man chooses. A slave obeys."

Andrew Ryan

With these words Andrew Ryan, megalomaniacal superman and founder of the underwater city Rapture, escapes the mortal coil with the kind of epic drama befitting a man and ego of his stature. [SPOILER ALERT]

He has just revealed the true identity and intentions of Atlas, the man who has been leading you through Rapture on a crusade to raze the Objectivist Xanadu that is Ryan's creation. As a demonstration of his own strength of will, Ryan puts a putter in your hand, utters the mind control phrase that Atlas has been using to make you his pawn, and then commands you to kill him. The villainous Atlas (really a smuggler named Fontaine) has taken control of the city, but Ryan will not be defeated. He has set the whole city to self-destruct and has handed you his putter. You have a choice, he tells you. Only a slave obeys. Are you a slave? Will you allow Fontaine to control your mind, do his dirty work, kill out of blind obedience? Or will you, a man, be stronger?

Unfortunately for Ryan the game is not over yet. Rapture isn't going to self-destruct today because you are, indeed, a slave. Control of your character temporarily taken away for the cut-scene you watch as the putter, in more blows than would seem possible, crushes Ryan's skull. The superman has given you his life to prove that, although he has lost control of Rapture, he remains strong in his convictions and that you, player, are but a slave.

If you find this troubling, here's the silver lining: you get a 30G achievement just for watching this go down.

Okay, yes, this game is a couple years old. And, yes, a sequel is already out. So why am I playing this now? The short answer is that my PC's hardware can't handle it and I didn't get my XBox until 6 weeks ago. The long answer is that, in addition to being timely with the release of the sequel and all, the things I want to write about this game involve many details of the plot that, if you haven't already played the game, you might not want spoiled. I think the statute of limitations on spoilers is about two years, so it should be safe now to discuss BioShock at length.

If you are unfamiliar with the game, the multiple "Game of the Year" for 2007 award-winner is an action-survival shooter set in a city at the bottom of the ocean with dystopian themes and a back-story based on the books and philosophies of Ayn Rand.

The Horror of Objectivism

In many academic contexts "objectivism" is a dirty word. The basic tenets seem reasonable, even admirable in a stubbornly proactive kind of way. Objectivists believe that the world is knowable, that an objective view of reality can be attained through sensory perception and logical thought processes. The criticism of the philosophy--in my opinion valid criticism--is that this view leads one down dangerous roads. Dangerous because, for the Rand and her followers, objective reality is not a theory. It is a matter of fact. And that leads to corollary beliefs that treat humanity as a quantifiable resource, equate happiness with self-centered pursuit, and use art as an arena in which to make value-judgments.

It's a cold view of the world. Appropriately then, BioShock places you in the midst of the most isolated city in any fictional universe conceived since James Blish's Cities in Flight literally left the planet to roam amongst the stars. Rapture is a frightening place in which to find one's self. Aside from being an excellent shooter (the gameplay elements in this regard are very good, but apparently improved in the newly-released sequel) this game is an entertainment experience unlike any other. Horror games, following the example of their golden goose box-office counterparts, are traditionally jump-inducers: rather than going to the effort to explore the mental landscapes that real nightmares inhabit, they settle for editing tricks that catch an audience off-guard--like having a knife-wielding maniac jump out of a shadow just when you think the virginal young heroine has finally found a safe basement to hide in. Not really scary, just manipulative. But this game takes its cues from intelligent thrillers like Rear Window or Alien. The idea is to ask you what would you do when presented with a terrible choice, not show you the gory results of stupid people making stupid choices when a crazy person is chasing them with a chainsaw.

Surviving Rapture

So your enemies, no brain-dead zombies, are the former inhabitants of the city that have had their minds, bodies, and genetic material perverted by the heartless social order founded on the pure laissez faire principles of Andrew Ryan, a.k.a. Ayn Rand cypher/stand-in. Their bloodlust--or should I say 'genelust'--is the result of living in a society that places finite values on their abilities, finds their physical forms lacking, considers them viable subjects for experimentation, and makes no special exceptions for spouses or children. If you hide behind a desk and listen for a moment, you'll hear them raving in their madness about daughters that have been taken from them or personal failures that have cost them their sanity. All they have left is self-interest. They hunt you for your genetic material, harvesting it as currency for upgrading ("splicing") their own arsenal of superpowers.

Another splicer, another lost soul, another dead body lying in a pool of its own genetic material. Image by ntwrock via Flickr

To survive in Rapture you must sacrifice your own humanity one splice at a time. Collect your own stash of genetic material, "Adam", until you've saved up enough to purchase your own superpowers. After a quick stop at a Gatherer's Garden upgrade station you'll be able strike down those who stand in your way with a bolt of lightning or a ball of fire that erupts from your palm. Soon enough, you'll find yourself genelusting as much as the next splicer, just another citizen of Rapture living by the law of the land. And then you meet Andrew Ryan.

You've been so caught up in the action, so distracted by the survival instinct, that you've forgotten to ask why you are so intent on killing this man. After all, it wasn't long ago that you were thrown from a crashed passenger plane into the ocean. Luckily enough you, the only survivor of that crash, were just a short swim from the surface entrance to the city of Rapture: a tiny island of concrete in the middle of a vast body of water. Ryan reminds you of this coincidence and you remember how strange, indeed, it was to happen upon this place, without explanation, when you first started playing the game. Ryan offers an explanation: conspiracy, not fate, placed you there. Your crusading friend Atlas is a greater evil and he has manipulated you from the start. He has taken control of your mind and made you destroy yourself, gene by gene, and anything that has crossed your path on the way to Ryan's office.

Ryan is no hero, but neither is he the villain you have been bent on killing almost since the moment you arrived in Rapture. A rainbow of grays suddenly appear where you had previously seen nothing but monochrome. Still a slave, however, to the black and white imprinted on your vision by Atlas/Fontaine, you can't help but kill Ryan with his own putter.

The Grind Continues

Most of the achievements in BioShock--and there are a lot of them--are of completion bonus variety: find every audio diary, acquire all weapon upgrades, max out your plasmid tracks, etc. The rest are nearly all chapter achievements like "Defeat Andrew Ryan." This is disappointing, especially for a game that seems to have done everything else right. But at least it is good for my gamerscore. The one achievement that offers promise, the one that actually enhances gameplay, is "Little Sister Savior," which asks you to complete the game without harvesting any Little Sisters, the syringe-wielding genetically perverted little girls who wander through Rapture collecting Adam from fresh corpses under the watchful eye of their guardian, Big Daddy (the half frogman, half berserker pictured on the game's cover. When you defeat a Big Daddy you have the opportunity to collect Adam from their now-vulnerable Little Sisters, with the choice to either Rescue (safely release the girl from her curse, gaining a moderate amount of Adam in the process) or Harvest (extract a large amount of Adam from the girl, killing her in the process).

A Big Daddy, with his nasty Rivet Gun, protects his Little Sister companion. Image via Wikipedia

What makes this achievement, and the Rescue\Harvest decision more generally, so wonderful is that it adds a wrinkle to the game that invites the player to actually enter into the philosophical discourse going on in the subtext. To Harvest the Little Sister for maximum profit would be the objectivist way: decision-making based on self-interest with little to no consideration of moral or ethical issues. To maintain a consistent Rescue-only policy is to reject objectivism, and resist actually becoming the same kind of monster that you are in Rapture to defeat. The achievement allows a philosophical stance to effect the gameplay experience in real terms (as opposed to pure abstraction). Whether you choose to Harvest or Rescue, you might as well do the same for all and play according to a principle. This engagement in a socio-philosophic debate is the very thing that makes BioShock such an extraordinary gaming experience. I wish there was more of it.

BioShock 2 is, by all accounts, as thrilling and brilliant and terrifying as the first. And it further legitimizes videogames as literature and emphasizes good writing as a necessary element of a good gaming experience. Hopefully I'll get to it a little quicker than I did the first game. Until then, I'll keep myself salivating by reading the praise heaped on the game by reviewers everywhere:

• Review: 2K Games' rapturous return to `BioShock' (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• 'Bioshock' sequel returns to morally-battered Rapture (canada.com)
• Self-expression reigns in BioShock 2 (thestar.com)
• BioShock 2 video game review (telegraph.co.uk)
• Metareview: BioShock 2 (joystiq.com)
• In Rapture and on fire (guardian.co.uk)
• 'BioShock 2' Review - Big Trouble With Little Sister (multiplayerblog.mtv.com)
• Exploring BioShock 2 through the eyes of the Big Daddy (destructoid.com)

Grind Update: As of this writing my gamerscore stands at 2680, a thousand point increase since my last achievement post on Jan. 21, less than three weeks ago. To his great shame, having owned an XBox 360 for two and a half years, koolkamel is now 200 points behind me.