BioShock or BioSchlock?

Greetings friends!

Today I'm going to talk about BioShock 2, a 2010 sequel to 2007's BioShock. BioShock is wrongly considered a masterpiece by a lot of otherwise well-meaning people thanks to advances in public relations and marketing. The sequel fares a bit better but is ultimately plagued by many of the same problems as the original.

First I'm going to talk a bit about the original BioShock: It's lineage and main promises, what it did right and where it went wrong. Then I'm going to talk about the sequel, BioShock 2, and why it's a bit better despite making most of the same mistakes as the original.

Somewhere along the way I'm probably going to insult people who think these games are anything other than schlocky B-grade trash with nice window dressing. I'd rather not end up insulting people but when appraising these games honestly it's very hard not to piss the fans off. But oh well, fans blow!

Let's get to it.

Back in 2005 or 2006 word came out that some of the members of the team behind the revered System Shock games were getting back together to make a new game in the same line. I believe the words "spiritual successor" were thrown around and fans of System Shock 1 and 2, but mainly 2, all went atwitter on the interwebs well before Twitter itself was even a thing.

I didn't play much of System Shock the First, maybe ten minutes or so of the first level once, and I had only played the first few hours of System Shock 2. Despite my inexperience I knew what the hype was about: These were games, cyberpunk-themed sci-fi horror PC games to be precise, where you had to manage inventories and hack computers all in first person and generally try not to die because dying is lame.

System Shock 2 had a malicious AI for an antagonist called SHODAN and people still quote lines from when this AI would taunt you near the final stages of the game. One of my best friends since childhood could never get very far in System Shock 2 because it scared him too much. While I'm pretty sure my friend is just a weenie I will say from my own experiences the game had some tense moments if you weren't careful with managing your resources.

Anyway it was this pedigree that set the stage for the prerelease hype. A pedigree of high atmosphere, resource management, First Person Shooting and Adventuring and intertwined game systems that play off of each other such as hacking security systems to attack your enemies instead of you. When the game finally did come out some were actually surprised that it was basically just another FPS.

Then came all the awards.

All the games publications and websites do this thing once a year or so where they all trip over themselves to put one, maybe two, games for that year up on an untouchable pedestal and then encourage everyone else to admire them from afar. For 2007 that game was BioShock thanks in part to its pedigree but mainly due to its marketing.

I'm not going to quote anyone but I am honest to god not lying when I tell you that people, not just game industry people like IGN but people who write about culture for real life respected newspapers and everything, were going on about how this was a mature, deep game with mature, deep themes and it was designed to really make you think while you played.

No one went so far as to call it "a thinking man's shooter" but you could tell that a lot of people really, really wanted to use that phrase. Praise be to Old Man Murray for making fun of the people who used to say it regularly.

Another phrase people say all the time is something to the effect of: "If it's popular then there must be a reason why." and this is also true to a degree. In the case of BioShock it was going to be massively popular anyway because it had such a strong setting: an underwater city that has fallen into ruin.

In order for a game to succeed in the FPS genre it needs to have at least one of two things going for it: Either the shooting itself needs to be really good or the setting the game takes place in needs to be really interesting.

In the case of BioShock they nailed the setting. It's an underwater city with architecture inspired by the art deco design and since it has fallen into heavy disrepair by the time you show up there's ocean water leaking in from all angles. These levels really are a sight to behold the water effects are still quite gorgeous even seven years later.

The city of Rapture was the utopian dream realized by the game's main antagonist, the hyper-capitalist Andrew Ryan. Creating a more perfect society has been the fever dream of utopians of all stripes for centuries. Back in the middle 20^th century there was a different kind of utopianism afoot. A kind that focused on creating utopia for a few rather than the many.

In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged all the elite movers and shakers of society, the leaders of the business community who own everything, all decide they've had enough with the rest of the ungrateful, shiftless masses mooching off their brilliance and hard work so they take off and start their own society away from everyone else.

BioShock's main plot premise is that something similar has happened in the world of the game, except instead of setting up Galt's Gulch like in the book they set up Rapture at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Also unlike the book everyone in Rapture has access to weapons via vending machine and regularly tinkers with their DNA to give themselves super powers like the ability to shoot lightning out of their fingertips.

So that's the absurd premise on which the deep, mature themes are supposed to play out. There was a plot twist where you find out that, spoilers!, you're a clone of Andrew Ryan and by the end of the game you're literally fighting the golden statue guy from the cover of Atlas Shrugged.

This is my main criticism of the story in BioShock. It's not so much the story itself because it's just video game schlock like we've seen a million times already. It's that the schlock is dressed up real nice and everyone was told beforehand how to view the game as this mature masterpiece in storytelling that was doing all these new things when really it wasn't.

I won't even go into the "tough, moral choices" that were hyped which basically amounted to you deciding to either rescue or murder little girls because just describing it in plain english should be enough.

The game literally gives you a button prompt to either rescue or murder a little girl at various points and this was painted up as being some difficult choice for the player when in reality it doesn't matter either way what you decide to do the game will still give the same "rewards", enough of the in-game currency known as ADAM, harvested by the little girls, to purchase upgrades for your superpowers.

Deep, mature themes. Because video games... mother fucker!

While the underwater setting was great in BioShock the gunplay was not so great. I remember there being a pistol and a tommy gun and there were upgrades to make them do more damage and so on but really it was the plasmids, or the superpowers, that made the combat interesting.

And the wrench. Really the combat was better and more interesting when you were playing a melee/magic character. Because the enemies were basically bullet sponges and the guns just weren't that interesting.

BioShock 2 continues this tradition. The guns are more interesting than a pistol or a tommy gun, sure. There's a rivet gun! And a spear gun! But the combat is still only interesting if you limit yourself to melee and magic attacks because the default enemy response is to just rush you.

You're back in Rapture in part 2 as a different character. Now you're a Big Daddy, one of the sentinels that guarded the little girls, known as Little Sisters, in the original. You had to kill Big Daddy's to get to the Little Sisters and this is still true in the sequel only now you have to make the tough moral choice of either adopting them as your own or killing them.

So mechanically both games have an interesting dynamic to them. You need a resource only available from a certain character who is protected by a big hulking guy in a diver suit. You have to kill him to get to the girl. Sometimes you can draw other enemies into the fight with you to help you kill the Big Daddy because they all want the ADAM as well.

BioShock 2 adds a new wrinkle in that this time after you kill a Big Daddy, and when you adopt a Little Sister, you can choose to have her harvest ADAM for you from certain dead bodies. While she does this you have to fend off attacks from Raptures crazed citizens who want the ADAM.

Compared to the first game this one plays the story more straight-up. There are no major "mind-blowing" plot twists even though I kept expecting one. The antagonist this time is a psychologist named Sofia Lamb who has infiltrated Rapture to spread collectivist philosophy amongst the citizens so that they may find common cause to rise up against Andrew Ryan.

By the time the game starts Ryan is already dead from events during the first game and Rapture is even further in ruin only now the citizens have signed up for the cult of Lamb and refer to themselves as the Family.

All of these details would be more interesting if the philosophies both these games employ to paint up their antagonists weren't mere window-dressing for the shooting and exploding of things. By contrasting Ryan's hyper-individualist philosophy with Lamb's hyper-collectivist philosophy the game's writers end up contributing nothing to the conversation between the merits and demerits of individualism or collectivism other than the bog standard notion that "extremism is bad".

Which sums up the deep mature themes of these games in a nutshell. Apparently any belief or ideology is dangerous when taken out to its logical extremes so the safe ground, as always, is somewhere square in the middle. In this way the BioShock games are not revolutionary or particularly thoughtful. They are celebrated for being novel and mature but they are actually just middle brow shooters that peddle the same "moderate" philosophy that keeps the status quo, now and forever.

I haven't played the latest game in the series, BioShock Infinite, yet but I will someday just to see the fantastic flying city of Columbia. From what I've read of the story the game tells us that racism is bad and also collectivism and really things don't change because people pick sides and won't compromise and this is also bad.

But before I play Infinite I will revisit BioShock 2 to play its expansion, Minverva's Den, which I have heard is quite good story-wise. I look forward to finding out just what that means in practice while murdering more Randian supermen and superwomen and I will be sure to update you, my dear readers, when I do.

Until then keep playing and don't forget to have fun!

Thanks for reading.