Emily, continuing an impossibly long streak of being great, sent Charles and me some Xbox games as a thank-you for the use of his car when getting her moved back to Philly for the new semester. One is “The Darkness”, which I haven’t yet played but apparently revolves around a demonically-possessed mob hitman who uses his supernatural powers to exact brutal revenge upon his enemies, including eating their hearts to increase his occult abilities (or, as summed up by Game Informer’s review: “Players are immersed in an adventure that brings out the best of humanity”).
The other game is Bioshock, which has received a lot of “Game of the Year” nods and which Charles popped into the Xbox 360 last night. It’s pretty amazing. It’s been out since September, I believe, but for those who don’t keep up with the state of the art in nerdery: set in 1960, the game begins with the player swimming toward the surface of the ocean. You emerge, gasping, amidst the flaming wreckage of a plane. After swimming into the blackness of the waves you find a mysterious tower. Inside is a bathyscope that carries you beneath the sea to a fantastic art deco city filled with super-science, Objectivist folderol and a society that’s in the process of catastrophic collapse. So far the shooter mechanics seem to be fairly ordinary (though fun!), but it’s fascinating to watch the city and its story reveal themselves. The mysterious founder, Andrew Ryan (anagram alert!) is equal parts Ayn Rand and Charles Foster Kane — it’s fantastic to listen to the recordings of his crazed idealism that are scattered through the game, even as you realize that the game’s ultimate means of grappling with his philosophy will likely involve firing rockets at it.
I spent a little time this morning googling for the inappropriately cerebral magazine articles that I expected such a pop-Libertarian exercise to spawn, but so far I’ve come up mostly empty-handed. There’s this Wired review, but it mostly makes it sound like another game where the creators have included a continuum (frequently available by pressing “start”) between obvious good and obvious evil and then called it “moral complexity”. This Onion AV Club piece makes it seem like that may actually be the case in terms of play mechanics. But the comments on this Hit & Run blog post (which points at the Onion review) make it clear that the underlying story isn’t so simplistically interpreted.
The creator of the game has given a number of interviews touching on what he thinks and intended, but I’m surprised that none of the tech-savvy Libertarian journalists I know have taken the chance to write up a review. I should say that although it seems to be a pretty fantastic videogame, I’ve got no illusions about Bioshock’s ultimate philosophical relevance — I get the feeling that most of the Libertarians I speak to consider Rand something of a weight around their necks in terms of how they’re popularly perceived, and it seems unlikely that a video game designer who explicitly bills himself as unserious will have any genuinely new ideas to contribute. But it still seems like a decent hook for an article, and a potentially excellent way to get your employer to pay for an Xbox.
At the risk of self-promotion, I’d like to redirect you to the critique/review I wrote back in October. Also I felt pretty gratified that Ken Levine has acknowledged that everything after a certain high point in the game was probably a letdown, as they all underestimated how much that scene would resonate.
Well, I’ve been saving myself from some of the spoilers (a big twist!? I stopped reading there). But you’re right, I should’ve pointed people toward your post.
What I really meant to say, though, was that I’m curious to hear an appraisal of how well the game hews to Randian ideas. I don’t really have a good sense of that.