T w e n t y S i d e d
As I mentioned in the comments section of the last episode, at the time of that recording, I hadn’t played Bioshock in six months. I didn’t really know what I was doing – I hadn’t even remapped the keys before we started recording. Though, to be fair, how long have we had the standard WASD shooter keymap now? Why does crouch in Bioshock default to ‘c’ and sprint to ‘crtl’?
In any case, these problems have been rectified with this episode.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
Enjoy.
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
I hear it’s someone’s birthday today . . .
And as a result of his Stolen Pixels, I now have a headache.
So I say the fact said author of Stolen Pixels giving people headaches is a present for said birthday.
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday, Shamus!
Can’t think of much to say about the episode, honestly. I love the wrench. That is all.
I will partake in birthday greetings. This means I’m now entitled to a slice of cake right? Just email it to me when you get the chance.
The cake is a lie…Happy Birthday Shamus
It is? In that case; happy congratulations to you.
(the wrech is awesome)
Happy Birthday, Shamus! (… also, it’s my birthday today as well! Wee!)
Happy birthday!
Two posts in a row from Josh, with more to come? Shamus must be busy in Azeroth again.
Or possibly just having an awesome birthday. Happy b-day, Shamus!
Eye infection, from what I understand.
I hear cake and ice cream are good for that. Okay, maybe not, but it couldn’t hurt, right?
I never used the telekinesis, mainly because it didn’t work like I thought it should. I’m stubborn that way. That bit with the grenades from the balcony can take quite a lot longer if you don’t use it though…
The bit late on in this episode summed up my feelings about audio logs though. When you couldn’t find the log with some plot info. I’m quite happy with having them for incidental stuff, like safe combinations, background on characters and so on. The main plot though should be conveyed without having to rely on people picking up randomly placed items though.
I agree it didn’t work like you would intuitively think it should, but I found that once I got used to it that it was the most indispensible of all the powers.
I generally kept Incinerate and Telekinesis on me at all times.
The most awesome but by far most useless of all the powers was the Wasp Swarm one.
Really? I loved the Hand of Bees, especially the upgraded one.
1) Charge up power.
2) Release on target.
3) Watch in amusement as target, and any target of opportunity in the direct vicinity, is assaulted by BEES BEES OH GOD GET THEM OFF GET THEM OFF BEES EVERYWHERE WHY
4) Profit!
I rarely used anything other than electro bolt and telekinesis, although I kept incinerate around for its melting utility. Throwing grenades and… oxygen tanks? at people is FUN :D
Yeah. The bit about the audio logs was interesting. I liked the discussion about how developers handle the revealing of story/plot elements differently.
It is a little amusing to contrast this with FO3 though. During our last “season” we heard a fair amount of criticism for the terminals that reveal information about the story in FO3. Despite this, I heard a decent amount of praise for the audio logs in this episode, which fulfill the same function. Personally, I’m fine with either method. I tend to explore _everything_, so I find the vast majority of what has been placed. On the other hand, it is a valid point against both methods to say that plot-central info will be missed if you aren’t exploring. Valve’s method of putting you inside a cutscene is probably my favorite.
Audio logs, unlike terminals, don’t break the flow of the game. Turn sound effects volume down a couple notches and you can listen to the plot while your Tommy gun is firing.
What? Really? I’m in the midst of being attacked by multiple enemies, trying to find the exit / next waypoint, and listen to story information? No exaggeration: I tried with the volume up AND down. Up, I missed audio cues that I was about to be attacked. Down, I couldn’t tell what was being said over the gunfire and screaming. Honestly not trying to be difficult here, the audio logs were virtually always found and played in a dark corner. I loved them. They were _well done_. But they broke my flow of the game just as much.
Audio logs in a game are not storytelling using game. They are storytelling using established, linear means. They are a radio play; or an audio book if you prefer. They break the flow of the game because they are pieces of not-game dropped like litter around the virtual environment.
You cannot seriously support the argument ( although every fan of this game tries to ) that audio logs are a great example of ‘games as storytelling’, because they aren’t even a bad example of games as storytelling.
If the story being told is so great, why didn’t Irrational just bolt all the audio files together and release them as an audio book? That would have allowed the story to be told far better.
Conversely, if Bioshock is really supposed to be a game, why is there a radio play about objectivist philosophy littering the gameworld and interfering with your ability to engage in FPS mechanics?
The answer, of course, is that Levine wasn’t really interested in telling a story that explored the flaws of objectivist philosophy. All he wanted to do was contrive the pretense that Games Are A Legitimate Storytelling Medium. And also: Games Are Art.
This Spoiler Warning is a clear indication that Bioshock: The Game and Bioshock: The Story are unconnected entities, that are merely shredded into strips that lie side-by-side on your hard drive, and that you are obliged to experience in jarring alternation.
Audio logs are not the entirety of Bioshock: The Story, any more than dialogue is the entirety of Comic Books: The Story. Games contain elements of other media as part of an overall experience greater than the sum of its parts.
But clearly in the case of comic books the words and the pictures work together, often simultaneously, to convey the experience of the story.
Games contain elements of other media
But that’s not how other media work. Cinema isn’t simply a mish mash of other, older media cobbled together. There are ways to convey experience using cinema that cannot be done in prose. And vice versa.
as part of an overall experience greater than the sum of its parts.
But that’s my point. In Bioshock, the parts do not sum; the story is not told by the parts that are game.
The one thing that you don’t mention in your post is that games are a multimedia format, not just a single medium. They can take the best elements of other media and integrate them into the rest of the game. BioShock has a few moments where events in the game world are synchronised to audio, which could not happen in an audio book. More generally, I’d also say that the audio diaries would not have the same sort of effect when taken in isolation. When placed in the context of a larger environment and story, they take on a different meaning – though whether or not that makes them “better” or “worse” is certainly up for debate.
games are a multimedia format, not just a single medium. They can take the best elements of other media and integrate them into the rest of the game.
See my reply to Robyrt above.
BioShock has a few moments where events in the game world are synchronised to audio, which could not happen in an audio book.
A few? Is that all? Hardly integration. And sure, that couldn’t happen in an audio book, but how essential to the story is it that those ‘few’ moments run in synch with the player’s Find The Red Keycard quest? And even if not an audio book, a stage play or movie could do it. The point is that the stuff that makes Bioshock a game is not the stuff that tells the story.
When placed in the context of a larger environment and story, they take on a different meaning
This I can appreciate, in as much as the setting in a FPS can convey many things that contribute to the story ( while not being, technically, story in themselves ). I have some experience of that myself. However, setting is not game just because it is rendered by the Unreal engine.
Is mucking around with an excessive number of ammo types or cranking slot machines for bits to bolt onto your shotgun anything whatsoever to do with the fiction-as-critique of Objectivist philosophy? Does the variety ( or rather lack of ) in the splicers attacks make any difference to the experience of the story? Do these things – game mechanics – honestly add to the experience of the story? Or do they detract?
Isn’t this like saying that nothing should be written or spoken in a movie because that’s radio theatre and books and not a movie?
IMO you can use whatever you like to tell a story in a game be it text, audio, visual design, game mechanics etc. They just all have to tell the same story and reinforce each other. I think Bioshock was a great attempt that deserves to be praised but I don’t think that it totally worked. The problem I have is that the game mechanics of combat doesn’t really gel with the rest like the visual atmosphere and the story of the audio logs. Then again that is hard to pull off (Deus Ex did it best I think with a story focused on conspiracies and gameplay focused on stealth and RPG elements which made everything feel shadowy and intricate).
Isn't this like saying that nothing should be written or spoken in a movie because that's radio theatre and books and not a movie?
No, I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be done. I’m saying that it doesn’t work.
Using voice in radio, tv, and cinema, rather than restricting it to just e.g. theatre, works. When you watch a movie and hear what a character says, it immediately adds to the experience of what you’re seeing in the movie, have previously seen and heard in the movie etc. It works.
Bioshock is held up by pseuds across gaming culture as an example of A Masterpiece Of Storytelling In Games. But it is so starkly an example against that, because the gameplay and the story do not happen as one experience. As in Braid, the designers – for reasons other than artistic compulsion – wrote what is essentially a novel or other form of textual storytelling, then chopped it up and simply crammed it into the gaps between the gameplay segments. That the audio logs in Bioshock are optional doesn’t change that fact.
When you are playing the game, you are not being told the story. When you are being told the story, you are not playing the game.
Yes, you can choose to struggle with both audio logs and combat at the same time, but that’s no different than listening to a rock album while playing Quake. It doesn’t suddenly turn Quake into a legitimate musical form. I could pause in every safe room in Left 4 Dead and have my girlfriend read me a chapter of The Stand. It wouldn’t be an example of games as storytelling, and it wouldn’t benefit the enjoyment of either the game or the book.
I think Bioshock was a great attempt that deserves to be praised but I don't think that it totally worked.
I think Bioshock was a pretentious attempt, made for reasons of pathetic insecurity amongst game culture, to artificially veneer artistic legitimacy onto the medium. It did not work very well at all.
Meanwhile, every game by Valve is a rigourously crafted masterpiece that supplies millions of cumulative hours of fun, garnished with genuine wit and humanity. But talking about that doesn’t make gamers sound like intellectuals, so it doesn’t get the treatment Bioshock, Fallout3, Braid etc. recieve. This does not reveal anything complimentary about gaming culture.
Then again that is hard to pull off
Then perhaps that suggests that games are not a good medium for storytelling.
Ok I can sort of see your point about Bioshock, I don’t agree but I can see your point. I don’t get your point about Braid though. Braid was a game of regret perfectly accentuated by the game mechanics of rewinding time. The only game that I know of that has surpassed it’s ability to tell a story through gameplay is the passage http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/
I think you define gaming to narrowly. That you’re reading in a game does mean that you have stopped playing the game, it is merely one facet of the experience that you have in the gamespace. A game is not just the combat mechanics or the puzzles it is the whole thing, it is Bioshock and it is Myst.
Really what I’m curious about is how you think that HL2 tells a story through gameplay any more than Bioshock? All the exposition and character development there is delivered at set moments away from any other gameplay. Really what is the difference between that and an audio log, the only difference I see is in Half Life you can see the person talking.
Meanwhile, every game by Valve is a rigourously crafted masterpiece that supplies millions of cumulative hours of fun, garnished with genuine wit and humanity. But talking about that doesn't make gamers sound like intellectuals, so it doesn't get the treatment Bioshock, Fallout3, Braid etc. recieve.
Are you kidding me? I have never heard of a game getting more praise than Half Life 2. It is constantly brought up as the pinnacle of gaming and it seemed to be the most common pick of best game of the decade. The praise Bioshock is nothing compared to the praise HL2 gets and Fallout 3? 50% seem to hate that game while the rest thought it was mindless fun. No one mentions Fallout 3 to sound intellectual (fallout 1 and 2 maybe but definately not 3).
I’ll use this post to address all your answers so as not to repeat myself.
You are, in fact, addressing a point that has been made a number of times on a more general principle. It is not a 100% rule but most often games break gameplay in order to address the story, there’s a long gameplay section (say, a level, or a dungeon) at the end of which the gameplay is interrupted by a non-interactive (hence “non-gameplay”) cutscene, or the player needs to pause the actual game in order to read the quest entry in his journal, or there is a lengthy bit of exposition at the start of the game. In fact the more I think about it the more I agree you make a perfectly good point, most often large portions of the story are disconnected from the actual gameplay.
This is, I’d be willing to agree, a failure of games as a medium, even if there are large grey areas to define at what point does the gameplay start or stop (for example: are dialogues in FO3 or Oblivion part of gameplay or not?). Game designers have been struggling, with various degrees of success, to integrate, or create an illusion of such integration, storytelling and gameplay (quicktime events during cutscenes, “in engine” cutscenes). On similar grounds Star Wars fails as a storytelling movie because it needs a textual exposition at the start.
There are, now, two things that I’d like to address. The first one is that a number of other mediums have been struggling with similar problems. Someone already mentioned cinema but I don’t think anyone pointed out that movies were initially mute. While this may seem an obvious observation initially movies have been dealing with a very similar problem: once the stories that they wanted to convey became to complex to be properly conveyed with image and motion only the “proper medium” sequence of the movie had to be interrupted with a “different medium” which was a board with text. Without this textual exposition a lot of them would appear as just a bunch of people performing a chaotic pantomime that could be interpreted in fifty different ways. However, I don’t think you’d go so far as to say that movies are therefore not a proper medium to convey a story that is too complex to be expressed in pantomime. Admittedly this was an easier problem to overcome that what the game designers face because it was obvious what was missing: one of the key channels used for communication was not receiving input.
The second is what games, as storytelling devices, attempt to achieve and not to consider only present day mainstream games. On the most basic level games attempt to add participation to cinema or books (in case of text games), I already agreed that many games need to divide between the two components (interactive and storytelling) there are however examples to the contrary. Consider adventure games that basically tell you a story of, for example, a wannabe pirate who goes on to have various adventures. By solving different puzzles you figure out how the story is supposed to go, in some events you can even pick one of a few pathways for the story to go. While this is perhaps not the perfect solution (I would again like to point out to my mute cinema example) it makes a step in the direction we’re discussing: the gameplay elements (the puzzles) are part of the story the game attempts to tell (Guybrush becomes a might pirate overcoming different obstacles along the way).
One final point I’d like to make is that while games may not be perfect storytelling devices they need stories. Humans are wired to think of actions in terms of reasons and results. When encountering behaviour we do not understand we attempt to figure out reasons for it, we attempt to anticipate results (be they good or bad). In short, we tend to think in stories. Consequently, even with relatively abstract games we respond better if we can think within the limits of reasons and results: the yellow ball consumes the pellets, probably because he’s hungry; the frog wants to get through the street, probably there’s a nice pond on the other side; Donkey Kong has not story but provides just enough information for us to create one in the context, partly by relating to what stories we already have “stored” (the monkey kidnapped the girl and climbed to the top of the tower). Coming all the way back to Bioshock, being the game of most interest to us in this discussion, while it may integrate the background story elements (the audiologs provide mostly information on the backstory, not on the story proper) poorly without them the game would make no sense to the player’s mind. You’re in the underwater city of some sort, you go forward killing stuff… While games without any communicated story have been released most players tend to “fill in the gaps” (“is my character a space marine, a crashland survivor or a prisoner who escaped from a futuristic prison into an unfriendly world”). In short, stories may not need games, but games do need stories.
@Sleeping Dragon (apparently we’ve reached maximum of replies)
Does it really matter that the game has non-interactive things in it though? I mean I like games that have a lot of choice but since when is it a requirement? I just don’t see why every aspect of a game needs to be interactive to be enjoyable. Really some of my favourite moments in games have been reading in game texts (the Myst series for example was great at this). I don’t see how this is an argument against Bioshock.
As you said wouldn’t this imply that the Star Wars series was a bad movie series since it always started with a text scroll? Yet that were a completely enjoyable series of movies right?
I can see the problem when not all parts of the story tells the same story (as I said before this is a problem I have with Bioshock since the gameplay seems so different from the rest of the game) because that creates this tonal shift that pulls me out of the experience. Telling the story non-interactively at places could do the same for you I guess but it never bothered me at least because so much of life is basically non-interactive that it just feels like a part of the world.
I disagree in that audio logs sometimes break the flow of the game, if they interrupt other things. I know I was playing Dead Space and whenever I get an audio log I feel I have to stop and listen to it, because more than once I’ve gotten radio transmissions while listening to the logs I just found. I don’t remember Bioshock ever doing that for me.
If I remember, Bioshock will cut out an audio log if atlas or someone talks to you. So that is kinda the same.
I’d like to echo the above posters about breaking the game flow, when I’m concentrating on killing splicers I’m not listening to the audio, so the effect is totally lost. If I listen I have to be hidden in a corner where I won’t be disturbed and therefore it breaks the flow of the game.
If there were less audio logs, I’d have bothered to pick them up and listen to them all, but by the second half of the game I really couldn’t be bothered to listen to them.
Bioshock should have relied on more areas without splicers, buffer zones to give you plot in the form of audio logs, ghosts and other visual elements. I found that too many areas were filled with splicers and you didn’t have enough downtime to listen to all the logs and take in the environment as I would have preferred.
I really liked how the audio logs worked actually. I rarely found any part of the plot that was needed in the audio logs, the essentials was always in the radio chatter whereas the motivation and the workings of rapture was detailed in the logs. I thought this worked wonderfully because I could choose how much exposition I wanted (all of it, but it’s still nice to decide for yourself) and when to listen to it. Very few were that hard to find and those who were more difficult to find you didn’t need for the story. The only problem I had with the audio logs is that you don’t know if you’ve got them all and you can’t back track so if you miss a log, it’s gone forever.
Bioshock doesn’t have a sprint button as far as I know. If it did, it would be something unspeakably awkward like X. (System Shock 2 also had terrible default keyboard mappings.)
It does have a sprint/saunter toggle set to Ctrl by default. Which begs the question: why would you ever want to slowly stroll along in this game?
This is something I have a hard time understanding in any game where “running” can be done indefinitely. I was recently playing World of Warcraft in a dungeon, as the healer, and my finger slipped as I tried to cast, resulting in me hitting the toggle for sprint/move agonisingly slowly (which I’d bound to a key combination that I’d never use and couldn’t remember). The tank we had in the group was a suicidal maniac, as tanks in pick up groups are wont to be, who didn’t bother reading what I’d written in chat and we almost had a full party wipe while I called up the interface menu to find out what button combination would convince my character that moving slightly faster than a comatose tortoise might, in fact, be a good idea. It is the least useful toggle ever.
Well, in BioShock you get sneak attack bonuses.
You gotta be pretty patient and demigodlike to pull it off on a random enemy, but still. It’s there.
Actually the whole shock plasmid incident sounds like something Reginald “Obvious reasons” Cuftbert would do.
I believe that once you get to the bathysphere you can go back to any “station” you visited. Not that you would want to but the option is there.
Josh missed the tonic that comes out once you burn the body in the crematorium. Its probably not very useful but I think its a nice touch in level design.
Werent turrets invented by Sinclair? If they were, it would make perfect sense for him to add a buyout option, sinse he was one of Fontaine’s allies.
Im prety sure Suchong is asian.
Ryan actually betrayed his ideals of free, unregulated and unrestricted enterprise and competition. Fontaine won the plasmid market, effectively beating Ryan at his own game and replacing him as the most powerful man in his own city. Desperate to regain control Ryan started “arresting” his competitor’s assets, imposing restrictions and enforcing laws which, I believe, triggered the civil war.
Also, I hate to repeat myself but PC gamers who wanted more depth and challenge should try the bioshock difficulty mod. It actually adresses many of the issues the guys… ehmm, the gang? was talking about. Your choices become meaningful, you will agonize over each “Circus” purchase, tonic and plasmid you come across, the hacking becomes absolutely essential (and the water flows about 5 times faster) because you need every advantage you can get to survive and vita chambers charge like 50 bucks per ressurection (and restore almost no health) if you turn them on. You have to use every tool at your disposal, use different tactics and get creative (there was this one time when I killed a big daddy by repeatedly triggering the alarm on a vending machine and painting him with security plasmid)… Its awesome. And if you are afraid its a bit too difficult, there are several versions of the mod that scale from fairly balanced to completely unreasonable. I just cant reccomend this enough, its like Fallout 3 all over again.
And there I go again, obsessing about every little thing you said like a huge nerd I am. Anyway, happy birthday Shamus.
Are there any difficulty mods for Bioshock that make the game easier? I would rather just explore the environment and soak in the atmosphere without bad guys breaking my immersion every 30 seconds.
As for returning to previous levels – This is useful for achievement hunting, and there are a couple door codes revealed by audio diaries on later levels. It is pretty fun to go back through the game in stealth mode after becoming a Big Daddy, as enemies will just not aggro on you.
Suchong is definitely asian, chineese to be specific. He says he survived the japanese invasion during WW2 (well I guess it was slightly pre WW2? Little hazy on that part of the conflict) by supplying the japanese with opium and is planning to survive rapture with adam.
I never got the hang of telekinesis either. Every bloody thing I tried to pick up ended up winging itself across the level and either getting lost or causing more trouble.
I also never listened to the audio logs when I played, except the few that played themselves. Partly this was because I re-bound the button and then forgot to which one (the game prompts the default), and partly it was because I had a really hard time hearing them over all the other noise going on. This game caused a really bad case of sensory overload visually and aurally for me. I ended up going to the BioShock wiki after each level and reading them.
Happy Birthday, Shamus! Feel better.
One of my pet hates is games that allow you to rebind keys, only to prompt you with the default key settings.
Any programmers out there: How difficult is it to display the changed key binding? Surely it can’t be that difficult, especially for a AAA developer?
I guess it would require them to use variables in their strings, snprintf()-like. I guess it wouldn’t be too hard, but if the developers don’t like to rebind keys it’ll probably never even occur to them. It’s like monoglot developers doing i18n, there’s always some kind of screw-up.
AKA “Console developers trying to make a real game”.
Yeah Atlas is ‘Oirish’, it always amazes me given the sheer volume of immigrants and wanna-be actors from abroad that US film, tv and games can’t get someone with whatever accent is required. Still at least they didn’t do a ‘Dances with Samurai’ on it and make a Scotsman do the accent. Suchong is just another expression of this ‘sounds foreign to me’ school of accents.
I don’t know if anyone here has played Heavy Rain but it has very much the same thing going on with ‘Nahman Jayden’ non-American actors doing what to them sounds like a good Boston accent but is laugh out loud silly to anyone actually familiar with it. I read several reviews where people found that accent game breaking and it can be the same way when I run into the ‘drunken Irish comic relief’ (looking at you Red Dead Redemption). Not ‘screw this game’ bad but just a bad taste of laziness in the mouth.
All that being said even Irish actors can gargle the ‘Oirish’ juice, see Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Mission Impossible 3. Still the best ever Oirish accent is Tommy Lee Jones in ‘Blown Away’ even better than those in ‘Far and Away’ ‘me spoons Joseph!’
Happy Birthday Shamus!
I always thought that while there are plenty of foreigners availible to play with “natural” accents they are just bad actors. I remember in the second season of The Wire, the two extras with total screen time of about 30 seconds were obviously russian-speaking actors, but one of the central characters, who was supposed to be from Ukraine, was played by an american and had an obvious accent when he was speaking russian.
Also, Atlas’ accent is actually fairly accurate because he isnt really Irish.
Hadn’t thought of that way! His bad accent makes sense now :D
I tend to agree with you on the ‘bad actors’ idea, JRM is a prime example. I just think it’s a shame that too few games will tinker with a characters ethnic background to make them suit the voice actor. It’s rare that a specific ethnic background is absolutely essential, a quick hand wave ‘I’m the US cousin, I do all the talking’ would be worth it rather than forcing a bad accent on a good actor.
Russian with an American accent, sounds delicious, if only I knew Russian. Certainly Gaelic with an American accent is pretty amusing too (said he knowing the amusing looks his French gets in France).
Em, the actor Karl Hanover plays Atlas and was born in Ireland
Dammit it is an Irishman mangling his own accent. I think he’s going for Dublin but missing badly.
See, my English friends always tell me that Americans need to stop acting like they know what an accent sounds like :P
Trust me as an Irishman we alone possess the +1 speech check to nationality (I’ve just been rolling a lot of ones lately….)
As an aside it seems to me that US regional accents vary over larger geographical areas (ie almost state to state) than Irish ones. I swear 60 miles from Dublin in any direction will get you a quite distinct accent. I wonder if this is down to the ‘newness’ of the US and whether it’s early and strong embrace of radio and tv has ‘flattened’ regional accents. Or even simpler I just haven’t spent enough time in the US
You can have multiple accents even within the same state. But it does appear to occur more often in at least the medium-sized states, in my experience. I don’t typically notice any significant changes over a 60 mile trip, unless those 60 miles are borders between certain areas. Also, you’d notice more if you spent more time here, and spent it traveling.
Bigger country settled more broadly, I generally think – the tiny states up northeast seem to have more accent variation than the entire Midwest, more or less (it helps that television mainly tries to speak Midwestern, since it’s a more ‘general’ sound)
“Ryan actually betrayed his ideals of free, unregulated and unrestricted enterprise and competition. Fontaine won the plasmid market, effectively beating Ryan at his own game and replacing him as the most powerful man in his own city.”
It’s worse than that: Ryan betrayed his ideals right from the word go. Ryan has set up a city at the bottom of the ocean where he owns the utility company. If he decides to turn off e.g. the air circulators or the heaters, well…
Put another way, you can think of capitalism as a game called “Who can make the most money?” It is possible to win this game by making all of the money (i.e. having a monopoly), and then the game is over. The next game will be called “Feudalism” because the person who won the last game is now king and everyone else is either a vassal or a serf. What Ryan did on Rapture was set up a game of capitalism that he had already won, but then declined to end the game with his monopoly so that he could keep playing in the sandbox and pretending that there was actually a free market in action that he didn’t have a death-grip on. His “competitors” actually believed that the market was free when they started, of course, or they wouldn’t have started playing in the first place.
That changed when Fontaine showed up with his plasmids. He was able to circumvent the Ryan monopoly in an unusual way: rather than competing directly with the Ryan Cartel’s position as a utility provider, he was able to modify humans to no longer require Ryan’s services. When you can make a man who can burst into flame on demand without frying himself in the process, who needs to pay their heating bill any more? It was probably only a matter of time before Fontaine came up with plasmids that would allow people to survive on the ocean floor entirely unassisted, and that would spell the end of the Ryan Cartel. In a game of capitalism that he had set up exclusively so that he would win it, Ryan had now lost.
Of course, Ryan couldn’t allow that: he used his position as the source of life for Rapture’s unmodified inhabitants to try and crush Fontaine, the rest of the city twigged to the fact that there really had never been a free market except at Ryan’s whim, and the rest is history.
I didnt realise Ryan owned Rapture utilities. I always sort of assumed that he set up Rapture in much the same way one starts a multiplayer match of dungeon keeper, just divided the city into chunks of relatively equal assets and distributed them between major “players” and himself. Looking back it doesnt sound like something he would do, but its the only way I can imagine to start the sort of objectivist utopia he was seemingly aiming for.
But yeah, that is what slays me about the much touted capitalism and free market system, the ultimate goal is to make more money than your competitors but once you do that, you can just destroy your competition and create a monopoly, thereby breaking the game. So you have to play it well, but not too well. The system which is designed in such a way that dooms it to collapse itself.
Also, according to many of Ryan’s speeches, his goal was to create the ultimate free market, an economic environment the only rule of which is “anything goes”. But in order to maintain such an environment he felt that he had to impose some restrictions, like the ban of religion. So not anything goes. In order to have no rules, the system has to have rules.
Yeah, for a supposed scathing critique of Objectivism or minarchism or what have you, it doesn’t really represent it well. It’s very unclear as to whether Ryan is trying to create his own country, his own business, or his own underwater resort. It’s also hilarious how he decided to create this little project under the ocean, given how easy it is for one person to mess everything up. (Please don’t infringe on my personal freedom to hold a hammer-throwing class right next to the glass dome that shields us from drowning to death.)
Add that to the fact that the problem with Rapture was that it progressed too fast and you have a weird dichotomy where the game is simultaneously telling you “No God, No Government is wrong” and “living in extreme isolation with a bunch of Objectivists is a fun party filled with wizard powers and extremely advanced technology.”
The rationalization he would use, i’m sure, is “I built the underwater utopia so I own it and you are renting from me, so I can do whatever I like”. Of course it’s a closed system, so…
As noted, it’s not a “real” free market…
well to be fair he didn’t really have a monopoly in the beginning I mean he owned all the houses but it’s not like he forbid others from building houses. You might argue that he had an unfair advantage since everyone else started at 0 (since outside currency seems unaccepted in rapture) and he started with owning all the houses. He hardly had a monopoly though and I do think that he followed the idea of objectivism pretty closely at first.
What I find interesting about Bioshock is that it’s not really “against” objectivism as an idea but seems to argue that it’s improbable to work in reality since it demands that everyone is on board and that they all stick to the ideal. Rapture seems like a nice place (not without issues but still) until Andrew Ryan gets challenged and abandons his ideals and before Fontaine starts recruiting those who ended up at the bottom and resent Ryan. Fontaine seems like the typical Ayn Rand villain promising equality to the downtrodden to increase his own power. Basically Bioshock seems to argue that you can’t escape the “parasite” and in the end no one is going to stick to their ideals when their position is challenged. It’s interesting because it’s actually a pretty well formed argument, they didn’t just set up an unlikeable straw man that you get to kill (they left that for the sequel).
Yeah, I imagine that while your surface currency has no value in Rapture, you are free to bring along overworld supplies. That actually raises another problem in the concept of Rapture. You have to interact with the “parasite”. I cant imagine how, even with Wonderscience, Rapture can be completely isolated and self-sustained and have access to the whole range of 20th century resources, from oil and minerals to plant fiber. Take the creme-filled cake for example. To make one you need milk, sugar, flour, cocoa, a bunch of preservatives and paper wrap. Which means there have to be entire farms and plantations with crops and livestock. At the ocean bottom. And if you cant get those, you have to get them from the world above. From the “parasite”. Which means that parasite still has influence over your society. And if you go banning surface products you will break your own principles and there is no telling how the people will react.
Also, as a point against Ryan’s Objectivism, another one of the major cornerstones of Rapture was the idea of science free from ethical concerns and moral judjement. The scientists, given freedom to do whatever they want (and keep in mind that those were the sort of “dr. Moreau” scientists that actively wanted to break the ethic norms of society), created the dangerous and volatile Adam, which ended up in the hands of the greedy industrialists and, with no testing requirements and safety regulations to adhere to, was hammered into the Rapture society by the infinite power of corporate marketing machine, which lead to the widespread adam addiction and violent insanity of withdrawal.
I’d have to disagree and say that Bioshock IS against Objectivism, the entire game is a fallacious argument against it. I’m not an Objectivist*, but I know the basic tenants of the philosophy, and when I played through a borrowed copy of Bioshock last weekend I found the whole premise face-palmingly bad. The game was less like the final proof that games can handle serious themes and more like evidence that they can be used as personal soapboxes like every other media. The problem is that the game completely fails at portraying Objectivism at all accurately, and seems more like a knee-jerk reaction from the writer’s dislike of it.
How? Well Rapture is never an Objectivist society, it’s a police state from the very beginning. The point of Objectivism is to maximize freedom of the individual and minimize government as much as possible, except where doing so would interfere with other people’s freedoms. For example: you could run a coin-operated bathroom because it is your bathroom and you may do whatever you like with it, however there are still police** who will drag you in for committing murder or rape.
The problem with Bioshock’s portrayal of Rapture is that it’s a tyrannical dictatorship and doesn’t meet any fundamental requirements of Objectivism. There is no free trade nor any sort of freedom of belief or speech, as any importing of goods or ideas from outside is punishable by death and any religious belief besides Ryan’s militant atheism is illegal as is speaking out against Ryan.
Ryan isn’t some self-conflicted Captain Nemo with highminded ideals and faulty methods. He’s an idiot. Every action he takes throughout from the very start is contradictory to the beliefs he supposedly holds so dear.
*In the sense of being a Randian. I am an objectivist in the sense that I am not a subjectivist, that is to say I believe something may be definitively/absolutely known as being true or false. Philosophic terminology lesson over.
**Though these police would be provided by a private firm chartered by the local government body.
Fantastic analysis.
True the world is full with police state things completely contrary to the idea of objectivism (I’m not one either but it’s an interesting idea and I really liked both the fountainhead and atlas shrugged so I’m definitely a fan of Ayn Rand ^^) but it seems like those things resulted from Andrew Ryan giving up his ideals one by one. I don’t remember any specific part where they said it but I got the impression that religion was first allowed but the right was taken away after Fontaine started using it to attract followers. Then when it devolves more and more, more and more rights are removed. The contractor (don’t remember his name) says in one of the audio logs that he and Ryan is “on the council” because the inhabitants put them there as things turned ugly implying that rapture had devolved from a democracy to an oligarchy. It was some time since I last played it but I got the feeling that rapture was very much an objectivist utopia of sorts but when threatened Ryan bought the police, put cameras everywhere and took over “for everyone’s best”. The rapture that it became had nothing to do with objectivism really but the rapture that it was seemed pretty objectivist to me.
That said I felt that the whole adam part was pretty tacked on. It was basically a McGuffin to justify giving superpowers to the player and felt sort of out of place in the rest of the story.
EDIT: Also Ken Levine claims that he’s a fan of objectivism while not necessarily believing in it so I doubt it’s a “knee-jerk reaction from the writer's dislike ” but then again he could just be lying I guess.
I didn’t know Levin actually liked Objectivism, but did he write the game? I remember reading his original pitch/design document for Bioshock and it was VERY different.
I just assumed the game’s author/’s dislike Objectivism because so much of the story felt like a contrived strawman argument against it.
I actually had no idea I just have this flawed image of him being the guy behind everything^^ (Bioshock 2, a game he wasn’t involved with, seemed to confirm that somewhat :P).
I actually thought the game was unusually fair to the subject but there are some points that can be rather cringe worthy so it’s a matter of perspective I guess.
Also thanks for mentioning the original pitch got me really curious so I googled it and reading it atm ^^
It was a pretty cool idea. I hope someone eventually makes something similar. The concept of playing a self-mutated minigun toting telekinetic dinosaur-man is so awesome mere words cannot convey the awesome-ity. Nothing short of an interpretive dance preformed to Moterhead’s “Heroes” could even come close.
EDIT: I just realized “self-mutated minigun toting telekinetic dinosaur-man” sums up Flute Cop from the Axe Cop webcomic pretty well.
Actually, Ryan could have stopped Fontaine early on if this were true. See, Ryan’s company was the end all be all for pretty much everything you could buy in Rapture. And, if it wasn’t, you could believe that he had his hand in something. It actually follows with the Rand ideals that if you have the money and power, you should be allowed to have control of whatever business you want. Then, Fontaine came along and started selling ADAM to people. This slowly made him steady competition for Ryan, who could have just taken over the ADAM operation from the start, but didn’t because of his ideals. In a police state that was so concerned with power and money, you better believe Ryan would have crushed Fontaine early. But, he believed so strongly in the rights of the individual that he didn’t. This proved to be one of the factors why the Rapture destruction was so violent.
The two companies began warring and Ryan slowly started taking liberties away from people to maintain the control he thought he deserved. He put a curfew on how late people could be out and even charged those who wanted to stroll in the park. Eventually, he abandoned all his ideals and started to crush people with force (ushering in a police state mentality). Meanwhile, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. The disparity between class and the gradual implementation of police state rule by Ryan ultimately lead to the huge fallout at the New Years Party.
I also want to stress that the hard laws against stealing weren’t put in place until later on when Rapture was starting to spin out of control. It was a last stitch effort for maintaining control by Ryan.
I understand what you’re saying, and I think it’s what is supposed to have happened, that is Ryan become increasingly dictatorial and eventually sacrificed his beliefs for personal power in the name of maintaining order, but so much of what happens before and during the game’s story doesn’t fit with this.
Take the smuggling for example. True it wasn’t punishable by electrified crucifixion until it got way out of hand, but it was illegal to begin with. Therein lies the problem, in a true Objectivist society there would be no such thing as smuggling because there wouldn’t be any contraband or illegal goods, baring perhaps human beings and child pornography. In light of this it is clear that Ryan never set up a free market because no goods could be bought or sold outside of Rapture.
The second problem with this is what was being smuggled. The smuggler’s crates throughout the game all contain Bibles and crucifixes. This indicates that Ryan was dictating what people could or couldn’t believe from the very founding of Rapture, which is again antithetical to the basic ideas behind Objectivism.
I agree the smuggling plotline rang a bell in my head concerning a ‘true’ Objectivist society. My main point, though, is that in Ryan’s mind he was trying to stay with his ideals. It’s not like he was just using Objectivism as a prop to hide his police state behind.
I’m not arguing that Ryan set out to make himself king of a mad dystopia, or to abandon his ideals. As you mentioned earlier, his allowing Fontaine to grow as powerful as he did is proof that he intended to stand by his philosophy.
My problem is that certain aspects of the game’s writing make it seem as if this supposedly genius visionary planned to fail from the outset. I mean this man was able to invent a way for people to sustainably live on the ocean floor, but he never stopped to consider that maybe the people living there might want to trade with the outside world? Or that they SHOULD trade with the outside world, because unregulated trade was the cornerstone of his entire philosophy, the philosophy that served as the foundation of the whole city of Rapture? Maybe if there had been some explanation as to why he made the choices he did, both early and later on, that so blatantly contradicted his core beliefs this wouldn’t seem so nonsensical, but as it stands the story just makes Ryan out to be a complete self-contradicting moron.
It is still a decently fun game, with wonderful atmosphere, and absolutely positively fantastically brilliant heart-breakingly beautiful art direction and lighting, but the plot-holes and fridge-logic throughout the story really hurt it in my eyes. Which is sad because this could have, with just a little more polish on the story, some deeper character advancement, and an inventory, been one of my favorite games ever, right next to the System Shocks and Deus Ex.
You do bring up a good point but I think the smuggling part was sort of Ryans first compromise. The way I imagined it (I really doubt there is some actual cannon here) was that Ryan expected everyone to not trade with the outside since that was what they were escaping but also since that could reveal them. That didn’t really play out so he felt that he needed to outlaw it. In other words I’m guessing that smuggling wasn’t illegal at first.
I’m guessing that this is less an argument against objectivism and more of a comment on Atlas Shrugged. That book had the same sort of hidden away society that would probably be revealed if it traded with the outside. I don’t remember if they ever brought it up in the book if they traded with the outside or not but I think this is more a comment on that book rather than objectivist philosophy.
That said, yeah that part isn’t Bioshock’s finest. Actually that and the “horrible rampant science” part is probably my least favourite part of the games… Themes? Narrative parts? Whatever you want to call them.
But the point of Galt’s secret enclave(?) –I can’t think of a fitting term.– was to NOT trade the with the outside world, So that the Statist/Socialist Countries would all collapse, allowing them to set up a system of free-enterprise and limited government.
It’s never made clear if this is what Ryan is trying to do, but if it is, then he did a craptasticlly shoddy job of it. After all Galt and his posse don’t really have the system in place at their hideout they’re just biding their time. Well, they do have it implemented to a limited degree, but there seems to be an understanding that it wont really work right on such a small scale.
Bah, I should just find out who wrote this confusing mess and see if I can’t email him for a straight answer. “Dear Sir/Madame, Did you write Andrew Ryan as a moronic hypocrite on purpose, or did you just not get the chance to properly flesh out the game’s most important central character? P.S. Please respond, your efforts will greatly aid me in my quest for world domination.”
Happy birthday Shamus, thank you for everything.
What are you going to do now that you’re 26? XD
Valve actually does seem to reuse a lot of taunts with CPs and overwatch soldiers, but I don’t mind because it’s actually sensible and I love Combine chatter so very much.
Bravo! Loved it. Loved the pause at 16:00 for the audio set peice.
Way to age Shamus! happy bDay
To be fair a lot of FPS do use “C” as crouch. Some use Shift as Walk. But I agree, CRTL MUST ALWAYS BE CROUCH! XD
Mouse etc. was indeed very much improved. I’m still impressed by Bioshock’s color palette – also how good a job they did with their ‘glowies’ they seem to show up irregardless of current lighting conditions.
I’m guessing you mean “regardless.”
You could look at it from the other perspective though, they were so afraid that people wouldn’t notice buttons/bullets/other objects that they put a glowing shroud around them to make them very obvious.
It’s a lot like Operation Anchorage in that respect (but executed rather better).
I like that effect, really, because I hate how stuff fades into the background in all too many games.
NO GODS OR KINGS
ONLY SPOILER WARNING
Ergh… Josh, I’m not trying to go all nasty on your editing… but the way you did those credits…
The way you pull up some of the words in larger versions and slowly crawl them across the screen just feels like a cheap YouTube video to me.
Again, not trying to take the piss. Just saying.
(For reference, check out the tip at 0:32 in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YJGSx_-ul0 )
Windows Movie Maker doesn’t have a lot of options in this regard. I’ve been considering switching to the cheapest version of Adobe Premier for a while now, actually.
…Anyone mind if I borrow a hundred dollars?
I use Camtasia, myself.
Cheaper than Adobe, and better than Windows Movie Maker.
On the pile…happy birthday, Shamus!
On the audio logs…when I first played the game, I found myself actively looking for more of the logs. The deeper I got, the more I wanted to know. I think it was Mumbles that mentioned during the episode that at some point she found herself wanting to be there that night to see what happened, which was how I was.
I think the audio logs in general are a nice touch. I do remember having the feeling, though, that they should have been a bit more balanced – given that you can go through the game and not bother with them, and miss so much of the back story.
The problem I have with Bioshock is the disconnect between game and narrative. The problem I have is that the story itself is pretty slowly paced and quite cerebral with it’s comments both on the nature of a linear game and it’s comments on objectivist philosophy. The gameplay on the other hand is almost wall to wall action like the designer thought I had ADD or something. The game is also very streamlined taking away things like inventory and a lot of other RPG conventions like levelling and special abilities. I mean you do have the abilities but there are like 24 slots for tonics and plasmids in total so you very rarely has to make a strategic choice.
It creates this weird mix that seem to say that I’m smart and erudite enough to interpret the comments on ethical philosophy but I can’t be trusted with an inventory system. I’m also supposed to go trough the game slowly enough to get all the story pieces and to get scared at the right parts (action is never really scary you need to slow down to get scared) but I’m constantly bombarded by splicers.
It’s an excellent game I’m not saying anything else but it could’ve been one of the best if the game just didn’t treat you like a moron.
but I'm constantly bombarded by splicers.
Not to mention alarms, turrets, and bots. It was way too much at times.
Not to be a fangirl, but that’s one thing Valve does really well: they know when players are getting combat fatigue and break it up with a puzzle or some story time. I can’t really remember BS doing this, except maybe around the mid-point plot “twist”.
Actually I had a problem with this in HL2 too. I actually didn’t like HL2 (I know, me and no one else) because it felt like I was always running on a track and it never slowed down.
I really liked episode 1 and 2 though and I can’t really pinpoint what they have changed but the pacing there was much more to my liking (even if it still has plenty of characters talking when you’re not near them which I hate, feels like I’m missing out).
What I didn’t like about HL2 was that it dragged in places. Most specifically, the vehicle sections (i.e. boat/buggy) which just seemed to go on for twice as long as they needed to. The buggy especially…actually the entire trek between Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt was my least favorite part of the game cause it just never seemed to end. This section constituted a significant percentage of the entire run through of the game and all you were doing was going from point A to point B with nothing to really pad it out.
I see where you’re coming from – the constant splicer attacks are tiresome, and the open-ended upgrade system lets you stick yourself in a rut for hours on end – but there is nothing that ruins my sense of immersion and thoughtful rumination like inventory management and stat allocation and repairing equipment, so I was very pleased they left those bits out. (One of the sequel’s best bits is when Pipe Dream gets the axe.)
inventory management can get really boring if you do it wrong like giving you to many items or having the equipped items simply being better instead of doing special things that let you strategize (both problems with the ME1). Inventory management can be really interesting though as a way of letting you specialise your character to the way you want to play or to give you a feeling of progression.
That said I can understand not wanting inventory management and I have no problem with games without inventories but Bioshock tries to take both ways and it doesn’t really work for me. The game has items but you can’t save many of them or anything like that, you just eat them on the spot. If I don’t have an inventory I don’t want to get items. That’s really the conflict I have problems with. Half the game tries to be innovative by giving me a complex story, items in a shooter and special abilities while the other half tries to rid the game of complexities by filling it with action, removing the inventory and makes it so you never have to choose which ability to use.
Shamus, in regards to your comment about how you want to be able to go back to old areas with new weapons/abilities and go explore new parts… Ever play any of the Metroid Prime games? That’s kinda how they work. Go, find purple beam, see on the map a door you passed up in the last area because it was a purple beam door and you didn’t have the purple beam, go open said door, get either further into the world or goodies. I never met an energy tank I didn’t like.
Also, in the first game (which I’ve actually only played about half of) they is a surprising amount exploration and not that much combat. I really enjoyed the game, too bad the save points are so far apart (as I only get a little bit of time to play games atm).
Really I think that’s how Bioshock should’ve (seriously spell check should’ve is a word) handled it’s world. The setting seemed appropriate for that kind of game, also that’s way more fun imo ^^.
Holy crap. Josh’s “BioJoshing” (the way Josh just speeds through looting, fights, rooms in a rush) combined with the Drink-o-vision (or ChuggingJosh vision) will probably cause some of the older hippies here to have a acid flashback or seizure or sumpt. *laughs*
Loving the series as usual; you guys (and girl, now) are hilarious. Just a quick heads-up, though, since it’s appeared twice in the credits – you’re spelling “Vitriol” wrong (“The ‘Vitrol’ Machine”).
My initial run of this game I ended up quitting at…somewhere around when you get the bees. I just could not stand how straight out BAD this game was.
After hearing you were doing a run of this game, I decided to try again and blast through it on easy. It helped me tolerate the tedious combat enough to get all the way through and now that I have…I still think it aint that good. But now I think I understand why and the answer is so blatantly obvious, I don’t understand how I couldn’t have figured it out before.
This is a console port. A LAZY one.
I have a GTX 280 w/ 1 full gig of vram, a quad core AMD w 4 gigs of ram and my HD is a 15000 RPM Raptor…and this game chugs more often than a Chino frat boy because it’s so poorly optimized to run on a PC. And that’s not even counting the ridiculous interface and that FUCKING USELESS mouse sensitivity slider.
And that’s just the technical issues that expose this for what it is. All the things Josh ranted about in that thread he closed…it was because this was a CONSOLE game. If this was intended for the PC straight up, all that shit he loves would no doubt have been included, but it wasn’t, because it was never designed to be a PC game…EVER.
And the story? The thing that kept me grinding through all this shit? Meh. It was nice I guess, but it certainly didn’t wow me like it did everyone else…and the way it was told was pretty generic if ya ask me.
So yeah, in the end, screw this overhyped trudge.
The wheelchair imagery in the Silent Hill series was influenced by the film Session 9, which is definitely worth checking out.
I thought you were going to fix the mouselook issues. Am I only sensitive to this because somebody mentioned it? I didn’t notice in the one episode of Fallout I watched (the one where you follow the giant platitude-spouting American robot) but I can’t find it in the archives to see if it was the same. Anyway, I suggest taking away the mouse and giving him an analog stick controller so that the camera actually has to pan to things instead of flicking.
Darn it, I hate to be negative here, but the next game you guys do, can it please have wide and open areas ? Josh, your constant mouse twitching in this claustrophobic area is seriously detracting a lot from the playthrough (even though I like Cuffbert’s madness).
Watching Josh makes me realize just how flexible Bioshock is. I went through the game with the shotgun and Telekinesis as mainstays, while Josh loves Electro Bolt and the pistol. I guess the back of the box wasn’t just hype.
I gotta say, this game seems more like Reefer Madness than Atlas Shrugged 2: Electric Boogaloo so far. Maybe it’s just because they haven’t shown a whole lot of audio logs up to this point, but the developers could probably have taken the Objectivist (Ayn Rand’s philosophy) stuff to uglier places than we’ve seen so far in Spoiler Warning. “They all go crazy from mutation drugs” is certainly a sufficient comic-book-ish way to destroy a society, but it’s not like Stalin and Pol Pot were bad because they did too much heroin. The best bits of it done well so far are a couple of the audio logs and the spot about 24 minutes into the episode where you see “Aesthetics are a moral imperative!” written in blood on the floor. That is, in fact, a fairly reasonable extension of things Ayn Rand said, and I think it would have been a lot more effective as satire if Steinman and the Rapture world at large had been more coldly calculating and less Looney Toons bonkers.
No it’s not. Much of the point of Rand’s philosophy was to remove the influence of societal norms and mores on the individual. (Which is where many of my personal issues with it stem from.) A person’s appearance is a part of their body and thus their private property owned solely by them, and their own to do with as they please. The idea of forcing everybody to comply with an arbitrarily established standard of beauty as a moral duty to the rest of society is precisely the kind of thing her Objectivism was against.
I was going to retract that but then I read this:
“ The all-encompassing nature of the Randian line may be illustrated by an incident that occurred to a friend of mine who once asked a leading Randian if he disagreed with the movement's position on any conceivable subject. After several minutes of hard thought, the Randian replied: “Well, I can't quite understand their position on smoking.” Astonished that the Rand cult had any position on smoking, my friend pressed on: “They have a position on smoking? What is it?” The Randian replied that smoking, according to the cult, was a moral obligation. In my own experience, a top Randian once asked me rather sharply, “How is it that you don't smoke?” When I replied that I had discovered early that I was allergic to smoke, the Randian was mollified: “Oh, that's OK, then.” The official justification for making smoking a moral obligation was a sentence in Atlas where the heroine refers to a lit cigarette as symbolizing a fire in the mind, the fire of creative ideas.”
That’s from Murray Rothbard’s The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult. Coercively carving people up is quite a leap, but the shoe of aesthetics as a moral imperative fits quite well. Really, Bioshock seems more a satire of the Ayn Rand cult than of Objectivism per se.
Also, Reef Madness. Can’t believe I didn’t see that before. Ha! Perfect Spoiler Warning title.
So really the philosophy is flawed because some of its practitioners confuse symbolism with a real situation? I’m sorry but isn’t that like saying that Newton’s third law doesn’t work because Stephen Hawking is in a wheelchair?
Also in what way does this answer anything? Audacity argued that “Aesthetics are a moral imperative!” has nothing to do with objectivism (I would concur, also I don’t think it was ever meant to) and you countered with saying that cigarette smoking is popular in some circles of objectivism because of a quote from one of Ayn Rand’s books. Is it just me or is that a bit of a non-sequiteur.
Doubly also what does that book excerpt really mean. One person in this community doesn’t smoke someone else remarks on this since smoking is the norm, and that’s it really. I get that we’re supposed to think that the guy asking was dressed in a white robe mumbling latin and was going to kill the poor guy if he didn’t give a good enough justification but really it’s just the author’s use of loaded words. I guess making smoking a moral obligation is a little nutty but can we really trust that they consider it a moral obligation too or is it just the author’s choice of words? If so what does a moral obligation entail in this context?
I’m sorry maybe I completely misunderstood what you just said? Wouldn’t be the first time I guess ^^
I think, Nasikabatrachus, is trying to point out that some Objectivists might take Rand’s philosophy to extremes, nigh fanaticism, and that this could have happened in Rapture. Basically if an individual should always strive to reach their fullest potential then they should do it in every aspect of life as much as they are able. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
But I would argue that the example given by Rothbard stems more from Rand’s cult of personality than her philosophy, and may be slightly exaggerated, he really hates Rand and the Objectivists. She was a very polarizing person as I understand it, and had a reputation for being something of an egotistical charismatic bitch, all at once. But none of the Objectivists I’ve met are cultististic worshipers of Rand, nor do they treat her everyword like the gospel truth so I’m not sure Rothbard is the most objective witness in this case. He’s an “Anrcho-Capitalist”* and dislikes the idea of government which Rand always insisted was necessary. Personally I think they’re both nuts, Rothbard for being an Anarchist and Rand for trying to turn a economic system into a moral code, but agree with them on some points. I’m more of a Milton Friedman style Libertarian myself, just for the record.
*As I understand it he basically want’s to disband government in favor of people organizing themselves around business rather than political lines. Which I think would just lead to companies filling the political vacuum created by the absence of nations, but whatever.
EDIT: Heh, “Reef Madness” that was pretty good.
I propose a new element to the drinking game; take a shot every time we run into a scary set-piece moment that isn’t the least bit scary because Josh and company are talking and laughing over it.
By my count, there were at least 8 this episode, of varying degrees of scariness.
Which of MacLeod’s songs is the end music? It’s an excellent little ditty.
The song is called “Tech Talk”
Nice episode. I’m starting to miss Reginald already. Hope you guys keep playing as that character as much as it is possible in Bioshock.