About a year and a half ago we had a thread where an Objectivist weighed in on Objectivism in BioShock. It made for an interesting thread and was surprisingly civil, given the subject matter. I usually discourage or shut down discussions about politics and religion here on the blog because they generate anger without really contributing anything. But we can’t very well discuss a game that supposedly features this philosophy as a central theme and not talk about the philosophy.

And now that I’ve played the game I’ll pose this question: In the game, Andrew Ryan sets up this place with a certain degree of totalitarian thugishness that runs antithetical to Objectivism. Specifically, banning certain types of trade and religion. The idea of regulating thought and trade are about as counter to Ayn Rand’s philosophy as you can get, even if you’re dealing with ideas and trading in things she would have disagreed with.

So… is this showing that Andrew Ryan wasn’t really an Objectivist? Or did the author of BioShock just not understand Objectivism?

Before we get started I’ll repeat my earlier warning:

Please remember that this is a geek blog. We have a nice community here. We get along well enough, and I’d hate to see bitter feuds appear over previously obscured fault lines in the group. Keep it civil and don’t make it personal. Don’t post angry. I’d rather get along and talk about gaming than have a fight which will cause division without changing anyone’s mind.

I signed in. Star on Chest was just where I left him. The robot cowboy amusement park was right where I remember it being. In fact, I couldn’t find a single thing that had changed. No new content. In a year. (That I could spot.) I flipped through the character creator and after ten minutes I only managed to find one new costume piece. This game really needs more content.

Although, if you’ve never played before they will have enough content to keep you busy for a week. Just don’t read the quest text.

They have a celebratory cake in the super’s decadent city center, where you can gather and emote with other players in a crowded mess of spooling chat text and lag. It’s more fun than I make it sound.

And yes, when you arrive at this location the game makes a “cake is a lie” joke. Sigh. Everyone knows that only the saddest, most desperate sort of hacks are still making cake jokes.

EDIT: Ah. They have added new content, but it’s in the higher level areas, which is why I didn’t see it during my tour.

The Rachni invaded the galaxy and it was bad. They were winning and nobody could figure out how to make them go away. Then the Salarians discovered the semi-primitive Krogan, handed them space-age weapons, and threw them at the problem.

The Krogan… in Space!

The Salarians discovered the Krogan and introduced them to the world of interstellar travel and galactic future toys. With space age guns and armor they were more powerful than ever, and their natural aggression made them want to fight the Rachni. All the Salarians had to do was equip them and give them a lift, and they had an almost endless supply of fearless bloodthirsty badasses to throw at the Rachni problem.

This was a very Salarian solution. You can probably see the unintended consequences coming, but the idea had a clever simplicity about it that let the Salarians defend the galaxy without putting their fragile butts in direct combat.

For the Krogan, it was the ultimate dream: An epic galactic war which depended on their unique talents. A chance to face a truly powerful foe using weapons they’d never even dreamed of. Their warrior culture drove them to fight, expand, conquer, and destroy. And here was a seemingly endless supply of enemies for them to chew on and numerous worlds for them to grab. It would be like if Yahtzee Croshaw was transported to a galaxy where there was an evil alien armada that could only be defeated through creative swearing. You can bet it would take him a long, long time to get homesick.

It was the perfect solution, right up until the moment the Krogan pushed the Rachni all the way back to their own homeworld and then killed them, right down to the last bug.

The Rachni vs. The Krogan

The Krogan were correctly hailed as saviors of the galaxy. While it’s tough to prove what would happen in the road not taken, just about everyone agreed that the Rachni would have supplanted all sapient life the galaxy if not for the Krogans. The Rachni never cared for diplomacy and never seemed to have any goals beyond “kill everyone else”. They didn’t just want to conquer, they wanted to exterminate. You could argue that the Rachni genocide was wrong (the game allows your character to adopt this position, although I can’t think of anyone outside your party that thinks this way) although it’s tough to see how they could ever peacefully co-exist with other races. Whatever their problem was, it was something innate. If they wouldn’t sue for peace even on the brink of their own extinction, then there was probably no set of circumstances where they would ever live peaceably. Their race was defective in the sense that it was 100% incompatible with other sapient life.

Since they seemed to be able to travel through space without the aid of technology, it wasn’t even possible to strand them on some sort of “nature reserve” planet. You couldn’t contain them and you couldn’t reason with them. They were trying to kill us, right up until the moment the Krogan stepped on the last Rachni and ended the war.

End of the Rachni Wars

But this debate over the genocide of the Rachni is moot anyway, because nobody was strong enough to hold the Krogan’s leash. They were driven to fight. The Rachni were driven to fight. The two of them were going to fight until one of them exterminated the other, and the rest of the galaxy couldn’t do much more than watch. Maybe the Citadel races could have tried to pull the Krogan back into line by cutting off their high-tech supplies. (I think it’s safe to assume that the Krogan never had the expertise to fabricate the fuel, ammunition, and other crucial supplies needed to keep their forces going.) But this would just leave them with the original problem of what to do with the unstoppable Rachni. (And the Krogan might have turned on them as well.) There was no way the Citadel races had the strength to stop the conflict on their own terms. Once the Krogan genie was out of the bottle, there was no going back.

After the war, the Krogan were given the conquered Rachni planets along with other colonies for their help. But since these worlds were all far more hospitable than the Krogan homeworld Tuchanka, the Krogan numbers exploded.

The Krogan are innately aggressive and fearless. It’s a feature of their race, and the reason they survived in an environment that would have driven any other species to extinction. But without the hostile forces of their homeworld to hold them in check they were breeding like crazy. Pretty soon they filled the worlds they controlled.

Krogan Rebellions

Perhaps colloquially known to historians as, “Shit, we should have seen this coming.” This was when the Krogans finally got sick of sitting around and breeding and wanted a little room to grow. So they started grabbing whatever planets were at hand. Even those belonging to the Citadel races. And if this sparked a war, then so much the better. They were restless and itching for a fight.

You could argue that the Krogan simply weren’t sophisticated enough to live in space. They were a tribal species that had never known anything more than an endless fight for day-to-day survival. Now they were living in space and needed a lot of new tools. They needed a way to balance their birth rates and a way to direct and control their aggression. Humans devised birth control, organized sports, and other social structures to slowly hammer our warrior culture into something civilized-ish. The Krogan might have made similar adjustments if they’d ever been able to stabilize life on the homeworld and make their own way into space over the generations. It takes a fantastic amount of brainpower and cooperation to get into space, and so this sort of cultural taming would normally be a prerequisite for getting there.

If you plucked some primitive humans off of Earth and gave them some future toys, you’d probably see a lot of the same senselessly destructive behavioral problems. The Krogan problem was so much worse because they were just so dang strong.

The Salarians had simply replaced the Rachni problem with the Krogan one.

The Krogan didn’t try to overthrow the galaxy because they were evil meanies. They did so as a result of the countless political and evolutionary forces that had put them into a situation where that was the only thing they could have done.

But now we needed a new short-sighted solution to fix the problems caused by our last short-sighted solution. Which means this was another job for the Salarians…

In this episode I brought up the subject of the BioShock DRM. While exotic and new at the time, it’s pretty much the order of the day now for a lot of PC games. Josh mentioned it’s getting better, which is also true. It depends on where you draw the line and what games you care about. Ubisoft has taken the idea to new an absurd heights. Other companies are following the example set by Steam and are trying to sugarcoat their phone-home systems by actually offering some features in return. Blizzard is a great example of this. The new Battle.net requires periodically renewing activation (this is based on hearsay) but offers a ton of new features. Evaluating what you’re really getting for your $60 is becoming increasingly complex.

Still, I’ll always remember BioShock as a forerunner is this regard.

And yes, I am aware of how silly it was to be making stereoscopic images when I was nearly blind in one eye.

I love anaglyph images. I remember in the 90′s I would take screenshots from adventure games like Space Quest and cut the image into its component pieces. Then I’d reconstruct the thing as an anaglyph. A couple of people asked about how these are made. So here is the short version, inasmuch as anything on this site could be counted as “short”:

The trick to these images – what makes them seem 3D – is that they trick your eyes into looking at two different images. It takes advantage of the fact that your brain assumes that when your eyes are looking roughly parallel you’re seeing something far away, and if your eyes have to cross a bit to look at the thing then it must be close.

So step one is to get two different images from slightly different points of view. Take a picture, then take a step to the right and snap another.

Now we want to trick our eyes so that each eye will look at a different image and assume they’re looking at the same thing. The easiest way is with a color filter. Red / green are usually used when dealing with images in print, and red / blue are usually used when dealing with television or theater.

Now, it’s possible to do this without obliterating the colors. For example, this one on Wikipedia is a pretty good color photograph:

But I’ve never been terribly successful at making color work. (I’ve never read a how-to guide on this stuff and everything I know is what I’ve discovered through experimentation.) When I try to make color images, often I’ll end up with a good deal of double-image problems where one eye can see both images and the effect is diminished or fails entirely. So the safest thing to do when making something like this comic (where visual grandeur and robust color use aren’t exactly high on the priority list) is to turn the images into greyscale.

Take the greyscale image intended for the right eye and tint it fully blue. If done right, the image should be clear when looking through the blue side and black when looking through the red side.

Then do the same for the other image, turning it red. Then blend the two images together in Gimp or Photoshop or whatever you got. (Additive blend. The effect is usually called “Screen”.) This produces the simplest and crudest anaglyph.

And even this is likely to fail in a lot of cases. If the two images are further apart than the viewer’s eyes, then the effect might not work. It’s pretty hard to prevent this when you can’t control how big their monitor is, how close they sit, or how much the viewer might zoom in on the image. Then there are all sorts of color problems. Not all monitors produce the exact same colors and not all glasses have the exact same colors (the shade of blue seems to vary quite a bit) and these discrepancies can lead to double-image problems.

The inspiration for the joke came from this:

I was casting about for joke ideas and I stumbled across that image and thought, “Fair enough. I can make 3D. Heck, I can make terrible 3D!”

This is actually a good thing. I needed to reach this point. As with Champions Online and Lord of the Rings Online, I find the writing flows better once I push through the initial obsession stage. As the charm wears away I’m more and more able to see the mechanics and the lore and find humor in them.

When I write a Let’s Play I do so by running through the same content again and again, so now that I’ve lost interest in my main character I’m mucking about leveling alts through the early game. Which leads to…

My new hunter Bowhaver and his faithful tiger Eisenhower. Bowhaver is named after mister gun-possessor himself.

Shadowless, my recently-shelved main character, has pets with Old Testament names. (Aside from Eddie.) This one will have presidential pets. I really, really wanted to name my pet Nixon, but that name is verboten for some reason. Garfield would be better for a cat, but I’m sure that one will be forbidden for other reasons.

Of course if I get a bear I’ll name him Roosevelt.

Note to self: Get bear.

A crystal cave, which is located in Un’Goro crater. I love this place. I wonder how many people even get this reference. It borrows from Land of the Lost – the original Saturday-morning show from the 70′s, not the recent Will Ferrell remake – which was part of the Krofft Super Show, which I wrote about back in 2007. In both the show and the World of Warcraft zone, you’ve got this valley filled with dinosaurs, and a series of mysterious pylons that are controlled with colored crystals. In the show, the Marshal family gets stuck in the Land of the Lost. In WoW, the base camp is called Marshal’s refuge.

I logged in last weekend to find the Goldshire inn filled with plumes of colored smoke. This place is usually filled with dueling nutters and people trying to roleplay. (Lots of overlap in those two groups.) But this time it was just smoke. I have no idea.

But some of you asked. So…

Yes, I’m doing better. I’m free of the merciless pain and burning that defined my existence last week. I’m no longer bumbling around the house, curtains closed, sunglasses on, head down, and wincing whenever something brighter than a cooling ember enters my field of view. That was a rough patch, to be sure. My usual practice when I get sick is to distract myself with movies or games, both of which involve looking at things. So I spent a lot of time focusing on just how uncomfortable I was. And complaining.

But that part is over. My right eye is still slow to adjust, but I can look out the window again as long as I work up to it slowly. The eye is also very blurry, although I strongly suspect that’s just a temporary condition.

Now that the pain is gone I have to say I’m really enjoying the rest. I’ve been running at capacity for half a year now. I have a weekly column, a webcomic, a video series, a let’s play, and a blog, all of which feed on my videogaming. As my workload increased, I cut back on my other hobbies in order to keep up. I couldn’t very well justify spending a half hour with an anime when that same allotment of time with a game could spark an article or a joke.

But this week I let everything slide. (Except the column, which pretty much wrote itself this time.) At one point I discovered that while sitting in front of my monitor was too painful, I could sit across the room from the television. So I sat on the couch with my kids and watched three hours of Avatar: The Last Airbender. My review: That was a really, really good show.

By Saturday I was back to playing videogames. Usually I have to keep playing new games to feed the column, comic, etc. But on Saturday I was able to say “screw it” and play whatever I liked. Which turned out to be Mass Effect. What a tremendous game. I’d forgotten just how good it was in places. It’s also painful to think about how badly the setting gets mangled. It’s like going back and watching The Matrix after seeing Reloaded and realizing that the questions that tantalized us in the beginning turned out to have drooling nonsense for an answer. Alas.

I wish I could play this game, except with Dr. Modin Solus in it. That would be perfect.

So that’s how I’m doing. Getting better. All hail modern medicine.

Solution: Erect a bureaucratic system of controlling access to game content on an itemized basis. Then tell gamers they’re cheaters for shopping elsewhere.

I admit that I am not a businessman, yet I remain convinced that there is nothing wrong with this industry that couldn’t be fixed by just one person with an MBA and average-level intelligence.

Yes, I’m very much aware that I’m shouting into the hurricane here and nobody is going to listen. But what the heck, right? It’s a living.