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The Bioshock Collection - Would you kindly talk about these games?

Started by CTPhipps, November 06, 2016, 12:40:37 AM

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CTPhipps

So is anyone picking this up? I still consider Bioshock to be one of the all-time best video games with one of the best settings even as its sequels have some of the best characters. There's just something about Rapture (and to a lesser extent, Columbia) which is just awesome. Interestingly, Ken Levine gave a interview on the subject of his games recently.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/we-were-all-miserable-inside-bioshock-video-game-franchise-w439921

QuoteThere's a good bit in Rolling Stone's interview:

I know there are people – and in some ways, you addressed this in Burial at Sea – who are bothered by what happens to Daisy Fitzroy, the African-American Vox Populi leader, in BioShock Infinite. They basically think, if I can use a 2016 metaphor, that you created a game in which Donald Trump founded a xenophobic colony in the sky, only to learn that the Mexicans really are rapists.


Here's what I'd say. BioShock 1 is about Jews. I'm a Jew. If you think about it, Andrew Ryan, Sander Cohen, Tenenbaum, they're all Jews. Suchong is Korean. During World War II, Korea was brutally occupied by Japan. He's a guy who survived.

They're all survivors of oppression. And they don't come out of it heroes. Oppression turns them into oppressors. And that's the cruelest aspect of oppression. If you look at Andrew Ryan and Daisy Fitzroy, they're not that far apart.

Maybe people wanted me to write about a hero who rose above that. Elizabeth is the character I invented who does sacrifice herself to break the cycle. But I think most people are destroyed by oppression. I could tell a fairy tale about people who are ennobled by it. But in my experience, as a student of history, that's rare.

If you pretend there are a lot of happy endings for those stories, in some ways it elevates the oppression to something it's not.

People also know or suspect that you're a liberal.

I'm not in this to make people feel good about their political beliefs. If anything, I'm there to mostly challenge my own beliefs. The reason Andrew Ryan is a better character than Comstock is I understood the appeal of Andrew Ryan. I don't get the appeal of the Donald Trumps of the world. I don't fear the things he fears.

I understood Ryan better. He was a bourgeois Jew during the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks came and destroyed his family, destroyed everything in his life. That maps Ayn Rand. She's a refugee who came to America because her family was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. It's not really super surprising she became the person she did. Spider-Man was made by Uncle Ben being shot. Ayn Rand was made by her family being destroyed by the Bolsheviks.

I hope if anyone takes anything away from BioShock, it's about how oppression just goes on and on and on, and how ideology can get very muddy once the real world mixes with it.

John Lanchester, who wrote about BioShock for the London Review of Books, told me it was the first game he played that had the ambitions of a novel.


One thing BioShock did for people was it became that thing that people could point to and say, "See, Mom! It's serious!" I guess I always thought video games had weight and meaning, even when I was playing Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II, or System Shock. I was never ashamed to play video games. I never needed something to point to, to say, "This is why I do it." I just assumed that it was always going to be something that was out there, and outré, and never part of the mainstream.

But you did crave mainstream acceptance before the release of BioShock Infinite. Maybe you're past that now.


From a marketing perspective, I felt we had a limitation on our ability to reach a broad audience. You can't promote your game in the same way if you can't go on Colbert.

I think if anything it's worse now, the perception that gamers are some disgusting, gross little thing. The last few years haven't helped with that situation. If you look at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, they would be first in line to say, "Video games are bad." There's nobody to vote for who's going to say that what we do is valid.

Unfortunately, it's Ted Cruz. He plays.


Oh, does he? So there you go. I think you can't look to other people for validation. I just turned 50. Life's too short for pretending you're something you're not. The truth is that video games are nerdy. They're also beautiful.

If you let somebody else tell you that what you like is invalid, and you listen to them, you're sacrificing a part of yourself.

Oh and because these are always well loved, my review of the three Bioshock games.

Bioshock review (9/10)

Bioshock 2 review (8/10)

Bioshock: Infinite review (9/10)

Ratman_tf

I need to play Infinite.

I liked Bioshock, but I felt that the subject matter (Objectivism) was a low hanging fruit to deconstruct. The arguments against Objectivism are well known. (Among those who criticize it.)
But the arguments for? (Or at least, neutral.)

"I read Atlas Shrugged probably about a decade ago, and felt turned off by its promotion of selfishness as a moral ideal. I thought that was basically just being a jerk. After all, if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need (I thought) it’s more selfishness.

Then I talked to a friend who told me Atlas Shrugged had changed his life. That he’d been raised in a really strict family that had told him that ever enjoying himself was selfish and made him a bad person, that he had to be working at every moment to make his family and other people happy or else let them shame him to pieces. And the revelation that it was sometimes okay to consider your own happiness gave him the strength to stand up to them and turn his life around, while still keeping the basic human instinct of helping others when he wanted to and he felt they deserved it (as, indeed, do Rand characters)."

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/

As a game, I found Bioshock to be very unremarkable. A shooter with puzzles and cutscenes. Ho hum. But the ambiance was top notch. That's where I got a lot of enjoyment out of it.
The notion of an exclusionary and hostile RPG community is a fever dream of zealots who view all social dynamics through a narrow keyhole of structural oppression.
-Haffrung