Bioshock

Derridata, remarkable coincidence your post on Heidegger, in light of the fact that I've been playing Bioshock a lot lately. It occurred to me that Andrew Ryan, the creator of the underwater libertarian paradise known as "Rapture", manifests many of the same tendencies, albeit shorn of Heidegger's anti-technological animus. I wonder then if we will start to see ludologists and scholars of thanatourism speaking to each other across disciplinary boundaries. And what of the possible ramifications for virtual "island studies", here referencing the new journal cited in my previous post?

Thematically, the game is distinguished by the complexity of the moral choices faced by the player. By considering these, we can avoid the simplistic analysis of Ken Wark that, "ever get the feeling that all of life is becoming like a game?" No, not really Ken. It seems more to be the case that in either environment, the player, or the tourist, is presented with moral choices, that they can choose to act on. As per the Hobbesian Leviathan, the debauched farangs foregrounded in my posts on Thailand's "zones of indistinction", Andrew Ryan pitches the appeal of his paradise in a very thin liberal conception of citizenship. I say this because liberalism in a sense must remain radically anti-utopian, in that too much of a prescriptive approach to "the good life" is seen as imperilling the freedom of the individual to come together in their own fashion and realise their desires through market interactions. Unsurprisingly then, Ryan is more interested in offering a rationale for Rapture that says more about what it is not, rather than what it is:

"I am Andrew Ryan and I'm here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to the sweat of h is brow? No, says the man in Washington, it belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican, it belongs to God. No, says the man in Moscow, it belongs to everyone. I rejected those answers. I chose something different. I chose the impossible- I chose Rapture- a city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can be your city as well".

Suffice to say, things quickly go pear shaped in Rapture. Set in 1959, the game cannily anticipates the failure of Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis, witness the widesperad disenchantment and rebellion against neoliberal commodification. Rapture has degenerated into a world where mutated children roam the streets, harvesting genetic material from corpses. Assorted other mutations, some of whom are known as "Lead Heads, in what is probably an acknowledgement of the "Chicken Heads" in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", are also encountered at various points. Some espouse bizarre litanies in a desperate attempt at salvation, only to then break into random acts of violence. There are also those who have undergone grotesque mutation through gene splicing, and wear vaguely A Clockwork Orange style masks in an attempt to disguise their misshapen features.

In fact, the retro futurist architecture and character design are so exquisitely detailed, an exhaustive description remains beyond my capacity. I've chosen a few choice pics instead. Unsurprisingly, the New York Times have described Bioshock as "one of the greatest games ever made".