Ian Garrity Matthew Tierney MCM1202R Rhetorics of New Media 12/18/13, DUE: 12/20/13 Bioshock as a Critical Object Video

o games are the new objects of inquiry in critical studies. Their importance to mainstream media has grown in recent years, with advertisements for video games now appearing on television, the Internet, and on enormous posters on building exteriors. One such game is Bioshock, a first-person shooter game developed by Irrational Games and distributed by 2K Games which has gained a significant cult following within the gaming community. As a video game it is an interesting object of critical inquiry because the narrative both counters rhetorics of technology as put forth by Langdon Winner and Marhsall McLuhan and furthers the narrative potential of the game as imagined by Marie-Laure Ryan and Alexander Galloway. Through a deep understanding of the games plot and the theory surrounding video games, particularly the first-person shooter, we will gain a critical understanding of Bioshock and its philosophy of choice. Bioshock is a game about Rapture, a technological utopia gone horribly wrong. Although the gamer plays as a man named Jack whose plane crash-lands outside a lighthouse that ferries him down to the city, the ruined desolate metropolis is what truly takes center-stage. Disembodied voices guide him through Rapture via radios or left-behind audio tapes, and the few remaining humans are horribly deranged, physically or mentally: splicers, Little Sisters, Big Daddies, and the main villains Dr. Steinman, Sander Cohen, Andrew Ryan, and Atlas / Fontaine. Interestingly, Jack only speaks at the very beginning of the game; otherwise he is totally silent. Thus, the world of Rapture imposes itself upon him and structures his identity as well as the

gamers. In light of this interchangeability, I will refer to the movement and experience of Jack as that of the player or gamer. Raptures ideology is fundamentally based on complete freedom for the individual. Once the player walks into the lighthouse, the first thing we see is a bust of Andrew Ryan, the leader of Rapture, and a banner illustrating his core statement of the citys ideology: No Gods or Kings. Only Man.1 It begins with a grand statement of limitless individualism that is not bounded by religion or any form of authority. He believes that society functions at its best when man is left to his own devices, outside of morality, ethics and law, and welcomes all of the best to come to Rapture and explore and do whatever they wish. Advertisements and works of art scattered about emphasize the centrality of this ideology; and the overarching concept that embodies this individuality and argues for its potential for societal growth is The Great Chain. It is an ideology of positive determinism where every action that a citizen of Rapture performs guides the citys path for the better. The socioeconomic technology that determines the material foundation of Rapture is the plasmid. Due to innovations in stem cell research, scientists are able to restructure ones genetic structure via ADAM, a substance derived from a special brand of sea slugs, granting a person supernatural powers after an injection of that substance into their bloodstream. A person can teleport from place to place, shoot electric bolts from their hands, ignite oiled surfaces, or manifest a holographic version of herself to distract enemies, just with an injection of ADAM. They even open up possibilities for experimentation in fast-growing vegetation, plastic surgery, or more extreme expressions of the self through art. All one need do to gain these powers is acquire ADAM and dispense it into a vending machine called the Gatherers Garden.2 In order to

1 2

See figure 1 in the Appendix. See figure 2

facilitate this factories run by the government and wealthy private owners churn out new innovations in plasmid technology, thereby commodifying them and creating an entire capitalistic structure for free individuals to function within. This technology restructures Raptures socioeconomic hierarchy and transforms the government into an oppressive institution that rules with its own economic hegemony in mind rather than guaranteeing the total freedom of the individual. The two primary companies that compete in the manufacture and distribution of plasmids, Ryan Industries and Fontaine Futuristics, wage economic warfare on each other when Ryan, also the president of Ryan Industries, determines that Fontaine Futuristics is a threat to his control. He decides to assassinate Frank Fontaine and take over his plasmid industry, and that tosses the entire city into all-out civil war, with the dock workers of Fontaine Futuristics led by a mysterious Atlas fighting the brainwashed splicers of Ryan Industries. The player enters Rapture shortly after the end of that civil war, and it is this destroyed utopia that we witness. It is in the tragedy and fall of Rapture that we find Bioshocks mirroring and critique of rhetorics of technological change that have been illustrated in Langdon Winners book Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. The game allows room for the exposition of these processes by both showing how they are manifested in the society of Rapture itself in its initial phases and allowing the player to experience how they have been completely thrown off. The first theme that Bioshock navigates is that of technological determinism. Through the writings of Jacques Ellul Winner illustrates a determinism heavily laden with moral quandary, for men voluntarily enter and submit themselves to social processes that generate a pattern of technical advance, which, in the end, cannot be distinguished from an ever-multiplying cause-and-effect progression. . . It is self-generating in the sense that all human

motives, decision, creative insights, and acts are placed at its service. 3 This process appears at first glance to be Ryans Great Chain, but Winner generates that concept without the role of the individual. Winners concept of deterministic self-augmentation does not take the individual into consideration, and emphasizes that man is outside of it and has no ability to guide or limit its advance.4 Thus, Winners theory illustrates a lie contained within the technological deterministic concept of the Great Chain, which positions the individual as the arbiter of it. What in fact happens in Rapture is that every individual is only beholden to their own existence and is entirely unaware of the possible consequences that this technology has on the society around them and how the powers-that-be precipitate them. Audio tapes scattered around Rapture detail how their lives have been affected by the pervasiveness of ADAM and plasmids, but there is never mention of how society has changed by Ryan Industries or Fontaine Futuristics. And so, the civil war came without any of their notice. Diane McClintock, a minor character in the game, said at the eve of the war, as fighting broke out all around her, What. . . what happened. . . Im bleeding. . . Oh God, whats happening. . .5 Instead of assessing her surroundings, she focuses on her body and its reaction to the chaos, rather than consciously understanding that the reason behind this civil war was the hyper-development of technology. Technology in Rapture also distorts the body and senses of its users. Marshall McLuhan addresses this phenomenon in his essay The Galaxy Reconfigured or the Plight of the Mass Man in an Individualist Society. He discusses how society is restructured by technology, and he bases

Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 61 - 62 4 Winner, 62 5 Audio diary from Irrational Games, Bioshock. (Take-Two Interactive, 2008), PS3. Welcome to Rapture. Clip can be found here: http://images.wikia.com/bioshock/images/d/d6/Diane_McClintock__New_Year%27s_Eve_Alone.ogg

this re-imagination on a conception of the body. McLuhan imagines a possible market economy that can handle what comes off the assembly line [that] presupposes a long period of psychic transformation, which is to say, a period of altering perception and sense ratios.6 However, this new economy is certainly not a positive one: such co-existence of technologies and awareness brings trauma and tension to every living person.7 These effects are embodied in the figure of the splicer. Splicers are people who have become addicted to the high induced by ADAM and to self-perfection. The player can hear them wander the halls of Rapture proclaiming Im gonna be a star! I came here to be a star!8 or Things were supposed to work out for me down here!9 The reality of Rapture and its technologies failed their expectations, and the splicers are left with only their own awareness of what went wrong. The promises of an improved, free life provided by heightened technological development in fact forced these people into a slavery of addiction and yearning, cursing the leaders and forces that had brought them down to this hell.

*** However, these observations all revolve around the experience of the world itself. If we are to imagine the video game as a text, we must examine it as a cultural object and a textual signifying system. In what ways does the narrative form of the video game expressed? What is its relationship to other narrative modes, cinema in particular? How is the gamer positioned within this text and what ideologies does it impress upon the player? With an understanding of

Marshall McLuhan, The Galaxy Reconfigured or the Plight of Mass Man in an Individualist Society in The New Media Reader, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 98 7 McLuhan, 202 8 MamaLuigii, Bioshock Splicer Dialogue Rosebud, (YouTube: June 29, 2009), Web, December 20, 2013. 0:47. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfguKSFBU1I 9 MamaLuigii, Bioshock Splicer Dialogue Toasty, (YouTube: June 28, 2009), Web, December 20, 2013. 1:01. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8KtmFWoJfs

these aspects of the video game, we can then access how Bioshock as a text both critiques those processes and advances them through its narrative. Marie-Laure Ryan discusses video games as a narrative mode on par with others such as film and radio, as it allows the gamer to more intimately access its story and experience it as an activity similar to life itself.10 She examines actions taken in video games as halfway points between real life and watching a film; players are both agents. . . [and] spectators of their own pretended actions.11 There are two degrees of separation between the player and the avatar, the controller and the screen, yet the connection created by actively piloting a character through a world without the intellectual work demanded by other literature is what establishes the video game as a compelling narrative method. However, Ryan does not allow that reading for the first person shooter (FPS), the genre that describes Bioshock. She writes, the narrative design is not the focus of the players attention but an affective hook that lures players into the game. . . Having fulfilled its role as a lure, the story disappears from the players mind, displaced by the adrenaline rush of the competition.12 Ryan accounts for this aspect of the FPS by explaining the Platonic concept of ludus, where the game is based on rules that produce outcomes (winning, losing) that bear certain values (wanting to be a winner, fearing to be a loser), which the player strives for.13 The gameplay rules of the genre itself prevent the player from becoming invested in the story as the actions that she takes within those rules ultimately determine her own self-conception. The prospect of being killed and thus being a loser makes the story obsolete, so the FPS does not allow the opportunity for a compelling narrative.

10 11

Marie-Laure Ryan, Avatars of Story, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 191 Ryan, 190 12 Ryan, 197 13 Ryan, 198

Bioshock complicates this understanding of the FPS by eliminating the concept of losing. To lose in traditional FPSs entails dying at the hands of your enemies and seeing a daunting game over screen, so the player, fearful of the prospect of losing, must do whatever it takes to stay alive.14 The game takes out that possibility, allowing the character to die as many as it takes to advance in a level without any game over screen. This shift in the rules of the game allows the player to instead focus on exploring the world and experiencing the narrative rather than following its genres conventional rules. Those acts of exploration and experience open up Bioshock to a whole new arena of narrative and gamic experience, and Alexander Galloway illustrates this phenomenon through his comparison of the FPS to the subjective shot in cinema. As opposed to the characteristic disconnection of the conventional subjective shot as practiced in films such as Lady in the Lake and Elephant, the FPS utilizes it as the central means of exploring the world and advancing the narrative.15 It constitutes a gamic vision that necessitates the full rendering of a complete world, as opposed to a selective frame of an incomplete world.16 Additionally, Galloway claims that the subjective shot as used in the FPS creates identification, as opposed to destruction of stabilizing elements in the film apparatus, thus allowing the gamer to assume an active subject position that enables and facilitates the gamic apparatus.17 Thus, Galloway opens up room for the FPS as a compelling means for narrative immersion incomparable to other mediums. However, that identification also entails a degree of the players subtle subjugation to the games own capitalistic rules, perspectives, and dynamics. David Golumbia explores this process

14

See figure 3 (Game Over Screen). Taken from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GxARm_QiCo 15 Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2006), 63 16 Galloway, 64 17 Galloway, 69

in his article Games Without Play, but the foundation for his argument in this article is an understanding of the video game as a signifying system rather than as an object to be theorized on its own terms. In doing so, he overturns many of the concepts that Galloway established in his writings on the video game, including the processes of identification and exploration, the concept of winning and losing, and the possibilities of narrative. Through a discussion of Derridas concept of play, he illustrates that the freedom of exploration through the FPS could also be examined in line with the concept of structurist exploration contained within play.18 The process of identification is also problematic: the player identifies not with a character on screen. . . but rather with the point of view of a character who is generally unseen during gameplay.19 This point jeopardizes Galloways claim of player identification by pointing out the presence of a pre-defined perspective. Golumbia implies that if the player is piloting from a certain point of a view, they are in fact inhabiting a perspective with its own ideologies, politics, and rhetorics. He deepens this claim through his own discussion of the contrast between winning and losing. Golumbia goes so far as to say that in the FPS there is no winning or losing, only the accomplishment of objectives assigned by an outside force. By virtue of this core gameplay mechanic, there is no possibility for the complex systems of identification that define other literatures.20 The fact that this gameplay only allows for the killing of enemies leads Golumbia to then conclude that these games are instantiations of capitalistic culture:

To the degree that computer games as a genre reflect us as we are, we as a social group are far more murderous and bloodthirsty than out polite, everyday selves suggest. . . games simulate our own
18

David Golumbia, Games Without Play, New Literary History 40:1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, Winter 2009), 181 - 182 19 Golumbia, 184 20 Golumbia, 186

relation to capital and to the people who must be exploited and used up for capital to do its work. But it is overly simple to call this activity simulation: a better term might be something like training.21 So the only possibility left open to examine the subjective positioning of the FPS within this capitalistic perspective is in the flight simulator, where the player is trained to become a killer, the person that we are underneath our societal selves. The developers of Bioshock are fully conscious of the games capitalistic rhetoric, and work against it by creating its own out of its narrative structure. The creator of the game, Ken Levine, was inspired by Ayn Rands The Fountainhead, going so far as to base many of the characters and the ideology of Rapture itself off of her objectivist, laissez-faire capitalistic writings. However, he imagined this philosophy practiced by real, human characters as opposed to the superheroes that Rand depicts, thus deepening the emotional and human impact of the story.22 This newly-introduced humanity then establishes a philosophy of choice.23 When confronted with the choice between killing a Little Sister, a recurring character in the game, to gain a large amount of ADAM immediately or saving her to acquire a small amount but with the prospect of gaining a larger amount later and other perks, the player must make a choice on his own terms. It is Bioshocks availability of choice that reverses Golumbias claims about the FPS. Although the problematic of identification is still at work, the perspective that the game imposes upon the player is not that of a subjugated worker in a murderously capitalistic society, but as a human who must make his own choices within a ruined world. He must examine the desolate
21 22

Golumbia, 194 Kieron Gillen, Exclusive: Ken Levine on the Making of Bioshock, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2007/08/20/exclusive-ken-levine-on-the-making-of-bioshock/ (August 20, 2007). Date accessed: 12/20/13 23 David McCutcheon, Ken Levine Talk Bioshock, http://www.ign.com/articles/2007/08/30/ken-levine-talksbioshock (August 30, 2007). Date accessed: 12/20/13

city surrounding him, dominated by the failed promises of a laissez-faire techno-capitalistic society, in order to allow him to survive and find out who he is and why he is there. It is these choices that structure the games story and world. Do you raid an abandoned motel to hunt for supplies, or do you advance directly to the objective? Do you kill the Little Sisters, or save them? Do you follow the rhetoric of the world around you, or do you fight back against it? As the speakers in Rapture ceaselessly shout, We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us.

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Appendix Figure 1

http://static4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111016005431/bioshock/images/3/31/Bioshock_2009-0109_04-43-59-78.jpg

Figure 2

http://static2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100221212960/bioshock/images/8/8c/Gatherers_garden.png 11

Figure 3

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GeuklARMTdU/TdLsisBHaI/AAAAAAAAAFk/bUl8FQQU9CM/s1600/game+over.png

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Miscellaneous

http://static.gamesradar.com/images/mb//GamesRadar/us/Games/B/Bioshock/Bulk%20Viewer/PC_360 /2007-07-18/3--screenshot_large.jpg

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091126052145/bioshock/images/7/7d/The_Great_Chain.png

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Splicers

http://static1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100311071007/bioshock/images/a/a7/Spider_1.png

http://images.wikia.com/bioshock/images/archive/1/19/20091214040659!Houdini_Splicer.png 14

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100302000412/bioshock/images/thumb/a/ad/Nitro_Splicer. png/500px-Nitro_Splicer.png

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http://static4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130910222210/bioshock/images/a/ab/Leadhead_Splicer.png

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