They all started killing each other because plasmid use makes you psychotic, unless you can afford to keep taking more and more.
They all started taking plasmids because they needed to compete in the workplace (then later, in the war) or end up homeless / dead.
Plasmids were legal in the first place because Randism, being based 100% on individual responsibility, doesn’t believe that things like feedback loops or cumulative effects can happen at a societal level, and so doesn’t believe in regulations.
Plasmids are a pretty clear metaphor for dehumanizing yourself to serve the market, especially because the Randian superman is a psychopath that is only self interested.
But even without plasmids the fact that the worlds elite were brought down to Rapture, yet (to quote an audio log) “we couldn’t all be captains of industry, someone had to scrub the toilets” bred a huge amount of resentment from people who felt scammed and now trapped down there. Just like in the real world the markets in BioShock rely completely on low level workers to be able to function, and yet punish them for being in that position.
Your takes gets more and more based as it goes on.
Anon lacks media literacy
What’s your take on it? (I just like reading takes on Bioshock)
It’s been a long time since I played it. And honestly, it doesn’t have to be a take. Things are spelled out for the player from what I remember.
The ‘intellectuals’ in the rapture considered activities such as plumbing, cleaning etc to be beneath them. Which led to having an underclass of workers doing these things and eventually there was a rebellion.
Basically, cooperation is far more important than intelligence (or any other talent for that matter) in isolation.
An example I can give is Josh Trank. After Chronicle, his directorial debut which received great reviews, he got opportunity to direct Fant4stic. The production was an absolute shitshow.
Compare that to David Fincher. He was directing music videos before he got Alien 3. That movie had a lot of studio interference. David kept his head down, did his job and moved on. Only spoke negatively about Alien 3 after more than 15 years.
That executive meddling ruins final bosses.
But on a serious note, look at modern society and the tipping points we’re reaching. AI, climate change, ultra-individualism bred by class disparity. Rapture just happened to get capitalism’d a hundred years earlier.
There are points to be made about comparability to Hitler’s rise, slavery through class busting and then mind control, races to the bottom, oligopolies, regulatory capture, and-and-and- but this is a greentext community.
Does he though? In Atlas Shrugged, which Bioshock seems to be somewhat of an antithesis to, it’s not the capitalists that go crazy, but the socialists, who enact more and more draconian laws depriving the productive class of all their profits in order to funnel more money to the unproductive, which ultimately makes working entirely unprofitable.
Both works are basically at opposite ends of the spectrum — Atlas Shrugged depicts a communist utopia gone wrong, while Bioshock shows a capitalist utopia gone wrong. They’re both myopic in their own way, but the common thread seems to be that absolute power corrupts absolutely, which is a truth no one can escape. In reality, a functioning society requires a delicate balance between both forces, not a winner-takes-tall approach. Unfortunately, that idea seems to be lost on both of them, which is probably what anon is trying to hint at.
but the common thread seems to be that absolute power corrupts absolutely
This is not at all the intended message of Atlas Shrugs.
Perhaps not, but that was what I took away from it.
Sue me, I guess.
The entire theme of Atlas shrugged is about how capitalist oligarchs are the critical class desperately needed in the world to make any real progress.
That they should be handed unregulated power because they’ll do more with it than the “workers”.
It’s the polar opposite of what you’re describing as the takeaway, and it’s not even subtle or mysterious about it. It repeats that point ad nauseum from about chapter 2 until the end of the book.
So my question to you would be: are you sure you’re thinking of the correct book? If so, it might be time for you to refresh yourself on it because there’s not another interpretation about the point of it. It’s not a hidden meaning or left up to the reader. It literally beats that into the reader during every capitalistic sychophantish chapter.
From playing and replaying both BioShock and Infinite, and reading interviews from Ken Levine, my own conclusion is that both of the BioShock games simply use ideology as a narrative tool to create conflict, and the only thing he is condemning broadly is extremism.
In other words, Levine and the rest of the team didn’t make BioShock because they hated Ayn Rand and wanted to spread that message. They made BioShock because they wanted to make a first-person shooter similar to System Shock 2. They needed villains to create conflict, and the easiest way a sci-fi writer can create a villain is just to take any ideology to extremes and think of ways that could go wrong.
I think this is made pretty clear by the lack of any “good” characters in either game. I can’t think of anyone the player is expected to just like and agree with- they are all charicatures taking their ideologies to extremes. Andrew Ryan is clearly bad, but the only real representative of lower classes is Fontaine who is argaubly an even more evil antagonist.
In Infinite, Comstock is clearly the villain as a racist and religious dictator. Daisy Fitzroy is the leader of the rebellion, someone who has personally suffered at Comstock’s hands. She initially starts off as the player’s ally, but then shifts to become “too violent” and “too extreme” in her rebellion, so she and the rest of the rebellion become enemies of Booker. It was really ham-fisted and just kind of waived off as “well anything can happen with the infinite possibilities of dimension hopping!”. But the real reason was more simple: they needed to add additional enemy types to shake up the combat and escalate the difficulty. They wanted to add the chaos of having the player run between two factions fighting each other without the safety of making one of those an ally.
Those two games use ideology as set pieces, but when you combine the two games together the final message is “extremeism bad, centrism good”. I don’t think every game needs to be a doctorate-level poli-sci dissertation, but I do think these two games deserve criticism for being pretty weak there.
Did you play the BioShock infinite dlc? They had a strange retcon where the Lutece twins approached Fitzroy and instructed her to appear to be a monster, specifically so Elizabeth would feel like she had to kill her.
It was a strange choice, because the remaining revolution was pretty blatantly horrible without her either way, and I’m not entirely sure that’s how this sanitized version of her would want it to go.
The politics of BioShock are not all that deep in the end. They’re mostly just a setting so they can tell a story of someone forced into a role without understanding it
Ayn Rand isn’t really studied if you do a philiosophy degree. She’s more on the literature side of “philosophy” as opposed to belonging to the analytic tradition or whatever.
Philosophy fiction
Like the way science fiction isn’t science, but less cool.
Yes, I suppose it’s similar to Herman Hesse or maybe Borges… except those two are quite cool
Borges
borges sucks ass. his book of short stories was basically “yo dawg, this reminds of a story of when I was in a bar an the old guy told me of a story that when he was a boy in a cafe, an old guy told him the story of some ancient gaucho…”
People were easier to entertain back in the day. There is also a clear line between Borges and modern short story authors like Ted Chiang who take what he started and develop it further.
Wow it’s like with vague enough framing, anybody can be the bad guys.
“Germany was making unprecedented scientific discoveries and innovating every aspect of their country from equality to population control when they were brutally attacked and their leader driven to suicide.”
Not only that, he saved the country from a tanked economy and hyperinflation!!!
also gave his life heroically to kill hitler
I think it’s kind of a logical conclusion to science and technology when not constrained by ethics, morality or other regulations aimed at safety as one would find in a Libertarian’s wet dream. It might not be superpowered mutants, but more like human experimentation like the Nazis did or nuclear weapons that go boom when you don’t want them to because you’re being careless about safety.
Also, wasn’t the true downfall of the city more because of the power struggle between Atlas and Ryan? There is a whole subplot about the class war happening in the city along with a rebellion, but I haven’t played it in so long I don’t recall all the details. Ot if that even matters because didnt they turn out to be the same guy just manipulating you? 🤔
Fuck. Gonna make me play through Bioshock again.
It might not be superpowered mutants, but more like human experimentation like the Nazis
What do you think the human experimentation’s goal was?
I mean… I guess it depends which nazi scientist was doing the experiments. One of them had some pretty wild ideas and is where the basis for a lot of the supernatural BS in the Wolfenstein games came from. Forgot his name tho… 🤔
