Write About Games!: This month’s choice selection
Well, another month has gone by and it was another hard decision, but user Cody takes the cake again. His entries are just so great that everybody else’s may as well be invisible. This particular piece, titled “BioShock in the classrooms,” is an excerpt from an academic essay he wrote on utopian literature.
The course would begin with a haunting exploration of a fallen utopia’s ruins in 2k Boston’s BioShock. The game’s unique in that the player is an outsider coming to the utopia of Rapture years after its fall. The world is littered with relics of the glory days that hint at what sort of society Rapture was, like a massive banner in the entrance that reads, “No gods or kings. Only man,” or orientation videos featuring the under-water city’s founder Andrew Ryan condemning the irrationally altruistic governments of the surface world. But the player quickly realizes that all is not well in Rapture, and they’re soon fighting to escape a society driven mad by abuse of the wonder-drug ADAM. Along the way the player will encounter dozens of audio-diaries from the city’s former residents that give a taste of what led to the great society’s fall, and according to respected game critic Jeff Gerstman, “Hearing the voices of these wide-eyed idealists as their world falls apart makes the whole game feel more human.” And that’s really the strong suit of BioShock in that it presents players with human characters that almost make you believe in the ideals of Rapture. And there are characters that can make you hate everything that Rapture stands for too. It truly is a tragic tale of the best intentions gone horribly wrong and the audio-diaries give the player a great idea of all the little metaphorical cracks in the city of the sea that led to the inevitable disastrous flood. The player even has some personal choice along the way when it comes to upholding the objectivist beliefs of Rapture or the altruistic values of the rest of the world. Game journalist Brandon Sheffield probably sums it up best when he says, “If you want to be told about the dangers of capitalist extremism and its dystopian results, play Final Fantasy VII. If you want to be shown, play BioShock.”
Author: Cody
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Shin-Ra corporation in FFVII and Andrew Ryan in BioShock had absolutely nothing wrong with their philosophy or practice. Capitalist extremism is a beautiful thing. What fails is people.
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Capitalism is a beautiful thing, my friend, but any form of extremism tends to be, well, too extreme. Is there way too much government regulation in the “free market” of America today? Yes. But idk how great a thing it would be if the government never cracked down on the great monopolies of the late 19th, early 20th century. I would agree with your assessment that it is the people who fail the system though. If people weren’t overly greedy and corrupt, then a monopoly wouldn’t be a problem.
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A man builds, a parasite asks, ‘Where’s my share?’
It’s those that think they’re entitled to a share of anything – be it a job, food, somebody else’s success – that fail the system. People are entitled to what they earn… nothing more. There will be winners. There will be losers. But that’s the natural order of things. Capitalism, extreme capitalism, gives us a wonderful framework in which natural selection and social darwinism can occur in an orderly and progressive manner. Trying to give the losers a “new deal” skews incentives, stifles innovation, and hinders the progress of mankind.
This will all be in my book someday… I’m just ranting now. In short, I view the world in black and white; all things have a right and a wrong to them. If capitalism is right, which it is, then it should be totally right with no compromise – what you call, “extremist.” To me, it’s basic logic.
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I’m with you on the New Deal, that was bullshit. Welfare is a joke and I shouldn’t have to provide for leeches who can’t make it on their own. But the problem with the evolution of a capitalist society is that it ultimately leads to one corporation controlling everything. One monopoly will eventually own all capital and have total control, at least in theory. And that’s why the evolution comparison is bad. If evolution was really about survival of the fittest, there would only be one species. Evolution is actually about be just fit enough to survive. You don’t have to be the best, just better than the guy who couldn’t make the cut. This is what makes diversity possible. And yeah, I’m ranting again…you tend to bring that out in me.
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