I've been meaning to review Bioshock for some time now. At first I was hesitant because I hadn't finished the game entirely, but only days after I did, Halo 3 hit stores and my decision making faculties were arrested by the desire to pop online and have children and frat boys brutalize my digital avatar and, once they decide they cannot pronounce my gamertag correctly, call me a fag. Kudos to you, guys; you'll be running the country in a few years, God help us all.
I'm unsure if this is exactly the foot I want to start my reflections on, but nevertheless, allow me to say that Bioshock is one of those games that approaches the category of 'art,' enough so that one should second guess Roger Ebert's comparison of a satisfying game to a satisfying crap: both a true pleasure, but neither art (a metaphor which a number of avante garde artists--think Piss Christ--would undoubtedly take umbridge with). Let me see what I can do about disabusing what poor, overweight, aged Mr. Ebert has to say about a medium I suspect he knows little to nothing about.
Now, while I'm hesitant to unreservedly call the game 'art,' (less because of the game itself as the ephemeral nature of the term; I'm always more suspicious of someone who is certain they know whatever art is than those wary of blindly spaming the term) allow me to say that it is an extremely well crafted product that foregrounds a compelling story and visceral atmosphere without sacrificing gameplay in any significant way. To not give too much away, the game is set in a city called Rapture, built underneath the ocean by a renegade industrialist named Andrew Ryan who felt that governmental and religious constraints were hampering the lives and potential of humanity's greatest. As is so often the case in such utopic visions, however, things went awry, and the scientific freedom (in particular) that drew so many great minds to Rapture inevitably led to its downfall. By the time your plane crashes in the ocean and you find a way down there, the city has become a distopic hell where a few survivors hide and try to eeke out a life while genetically manipulated "splicers" roam the halls, quite insane, looking for their next fix of "Adam."
I realize that a few portions of those final sentences may have made no sense whatsoever. That's fine by me, because when you play the game yourself (and you should), you'll figure it all out quickly enough. Bare bones of the story aside, what most impressed me was the atmosphere of the game. The city was supposedly built in the late 1940's, and you arrive in 1960. The walls are covered in classic 50's advertisements, songs like "Beyond the Sea" play eerily in the background, and everywhere you hear Leave it to Beaver-esque jingles and messages advocating narcissism, child experimentation, and a happy acceptance of a rapidly deteriorating and increasingly dangerous society. As you travel around, you pick up radio logs left by important personages of the city, and piece by piece you start recognizing a picture of the city's former political, social, and scientific undercurrents, and why it all went so horribly wrong. There are clear villains in the game, but each one is a man or woman who simply followed too hard a line to fulfill what could, in another situation, have been an admirable philosophical ideal. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that this game was birthed at the time in American history that it was.
If you have the hardware, be it console or PC, to play the game, I highly recommend it. It is, at least in a game mechanics sense, a First Person Shooter, and thus won't clock in at much more than 15 - 20 hours of gameplay, but the pleasure of being immersed in that vividly and superbly crafted world is well worth the time and money. Enjoy Rapture.
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