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Write About Games!: BioShock in the classrooms

So as I was finishing up the semester for school I was tasked with writing a paper for my English class in which I proposed a course I’d like to take and a reading list to go with it. I decided to create a course centered around the concept of utopian societies and their inevitable failure. The texts I chose to include were 2K Boston’s BioShock, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Kurt Wimmer’s Equilibrium, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix. Surprisingly, a list half full of movies and a video game actually impressed my teacher quite a bit. I think it really speaks to BioShock‘s depth and substance that it can be respected in an academic capacity, and I’d like to share with you the passage that focuses on that 2007 classic.

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.”

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Tags: 2k boston, ayn rand, bioshock, essay, Write About Games 2.0