"Nice work, boyo": An adoration of the Bioshock series

Falling or flying?

*EXTENSIVE SPOILERS FOR BIOSHOCK, BIOSHOCK INFINTE AND BIOSHOCK BURIAL AT SEA.*

I set this March aside for replaying the entire Bioshock series, anticipating the release of the final DLC which would signal the end of not only my favourite game franchise but also Irrational Games, their creators. As I say goodbye to the story of two cities filled with horror, corruption and infinitesimal yet irrepressible hope, I realise how it, more than any other media I’ve experienced, contains and defines the human experience. In exploring what I found in these games, I hope only to share these practical lessons with you.

Above all else, the Bioshock series is a master class in world building. The ceremonial unveiling of the underwater city of Rapture in the first game, with its neon billboard studded high rise towers glowing eerily both from within and from the spotlights dancing over the external structures remains the most overwhelming sensation I’ve experienced playing any game.

The grip on the player this revelation takes never ebbs due to the city’s distinctive history. Andrew Ryan, the founder of Rapture, sought to escape the post World War II nuclear arms race by building his underwater utopia and inviting the finest artists, scientists and doctors to live under the rule of ‘enlightened self-interest’ whereby they are free to live any way they choose without any kind of governmental restriction. The scientific miracle discovery of the ADAM stem cell that grants Rapture’s residents the ability to teleport, move objects with their mind and fire lightning from their hands made the city the progressive ideal Ryan wished for.  The side effects of the drug driving all who use it homicidally insane brings a new arms race to Rapture, with all of the cities progress ceasing while each resident hordes more and more ADAM to increase their power and destroy their competition in a brutal class based civil war. 

As your imagination is flooded by Rapture, your moral character is also tested.  So as not to be wasteful, orphan girls implanted with the sea slug which secretes the stem cell patrol Rapture syringing ADAM from the corpses of citizens who didn’t last under the cities Social Darwinist demands. Forced to horde ADAM to survive your imprisonment in the city, you are given the choice to give these children back their wills for only a small ADAM return, or to ‘harvest’ all the reserves these ‘Little Sisters’ carry, killing them in the process.   The cut scene that is cued by choosing the latter is so traumatic that a player feels like they’ve lost a piece of their souls within this broken, isolated city.

Pragmatism at a price

While it could be broadly identified as a ‘dystopia’, the detailed atmosphere of Rapture built by audio diaries recording people’s experiences of the city, the uniquely off-putting ADAM advertisements and propaganda announcements over tannoy systems make it a dystopia like no other.

Evolve today!

Developing beyond the unique creation of Rapture, Bioshock Infinite, the third game in the series, offers the flying city of Columbia; a utopia with a dystopia hiding inside of it.  Through the eyes of desperately indebted private detective Booker DeWitt, the player explores the floating paradise held aloft by atoms suspended in space/time which was founded by Father Zachary Hale Comstock in order to spread America’s message of freedom and peace amongst men throughout the world. Being a symbol of American civilization in 1912 unfortunately means that Columbia is also founded on vicious white supremacy, with the city elite building golden statues of John Wilks Booth and mythologizing his brave, necessary assassination of Lincoln who was misguided enough to abolish slavery.

'What did the Great Emancipator *really* emancipate the Negro from?' - Father Comstock

Pulled apart by this outlandish ideological contradiction, tears in the fabric of reality appear all over the city that can be opened by Elizabeth, the young woman imprisoned in an angel statue that Booker is charged with rescuing. 

Escaping the city involves traversing these tears, allowing you to see the city from both the perspective of the oppressed class of black and Irish workers known as the Vox Populi and the tyrannically bigoted ruling Founders. The corruptions and hypocrisies of Columbia in true Bioshock tradition come to indict the player themselves, as Booker’s uncovering of the city’s secrets only bring out his own brutality and destructiveness.

As much as these cities are characters in themselves, it is the unforgettable people that make these places their home that secures Bioshock’s prestige.  Along with the cruelly indifferent Andrew Ryan, who taxes the oxygen produced by the trees in his underwater park, Rapture swarms with enemies who could easily support their own horror movies. Among the most distinct are Doctor Steinman, the plastic surgeon turned vivisectionist who seeks the perfect human face with the supernatural powers of ADAM at his fingertips and Sander Cohen, the frustrated performance artist who takes to encasing his protégés in clay to express his muse. 

'ADAM denies us any excuse for not being beautiful' - Steinman

It’s insubstantial to talk about these characters as end of level bosses, since the fights against them involve little differentiation from coming up against normal ‘splicers’, the aforementioned psychotic ADAM addicts that make up Rapture’s population.  The terror felt when facing enemies in Bioshock is always subordinate to tragedy; you aren’t fighting criminals, aliens or zombies, just people who have ended up destroying themselves in the pursuit of absolute freedom. 

While Bioshock Infinite exhibits the same level of detail in exploring the impotent, self-congratulatory despot Father Comstock, the affable slave tycoon Fink and the righteous but sinister Vox Populi leader Daisy Fitzroy, it asserts itself as my favourite game of the series (and of all time) for introducing me to Elizabeth. Both inquisitive and soulful while plagued with uncertainty, she repeatedly questions the barbarism Booker commits while trying to escape Columbia, at one point knocking him unconscious with a wrench once she realises his selfish motivations for freeing her.

'Are you real?'

The exemplary human tragedy of the Bioshock series flows from Elizabeth, having the freedom to change reality around her but being forced to ascent to Booker’s violent and myopic view of the world to prevent her being dragged back to her tower by Songbird, the giant mechanical bird that was her jailer.  
 

Stripped of her innocence and her optimism, Elizabeth nonetheless asserts herself as dominant once she gains full control over her powers after destroying the tower that was her prison. Accessing every viewpoint in the multiverse, she discovers that Booker and Comstock are the same person, with the only difference between them being which of them believes they deserve salvation of the atrocities they committed in the Boxer Rebellion and Battle of Wounded Knee.  Drowning Booker in a baptismal lake, Elizabeth, the damsel in distress freed from the bonds of this overused trope by Bioshock Infinite’s metaphysical subject matter, saves the game’s hero and kills its villain at the same time.

 The stunning twists in the Bioshock series come as a direct result of the intimate worlds they create. In the first game, you are lead to comprehend Rapture and its history by your guide Atlas, a socialist organiser who takes on the role of your shoulder angel to Ryan’s shoulder devil, each hacking into your remote radio at different intervals. Taking on the task of avenging Atlas’ murdered family by killing Ryan, the kind of brute logic the action genre take as read, proves to be a part of Atlas long con to control Rapture himself.

Rapture’s ability to reveal the hypocrisy and incapacity of its citizens extends to the player, as killing Ryan has indicted them in the corruption that defines the villains of the game. Defeating Atlas isn’t the end of this moral scrutiny, as the player’s treatment of Little Sisters determines whether you leave the city in peace or bring the Rapture nightmare to the world above the waves when the splicers fall under your control.

The ending of Burial At Sea, so richly complex it can be defined as the fourth and final instalment of the Bioshock series culminates all the particulars of its predecessors to deliver a mournful but inspiring end to a series that characterises itself in those exact  ways. Elizabeth, trapped in Rapture by a recently deceased alternate version of herself, realises that, as a result of Bioshock Infinite’s twist ending, she has been brought into the cycle of violence and revenge that defined Booker’s hypocrisy all along.

Unlike the murderously egotistical members of Rapture’s undersea criminal underworld who only serve themselves, Elizabeth realises that sacrificing herself to eventually free all the Little Sisters, a choice left to the player in the first Bioshock, is the only way to produce anything good from the Rapture disaster. Freeing Atlas from jail and putting his plan to take over Rapture into motion before dying by his hand, Elizabeth’s corruption is washed away and the purity of her sacrifice sings in time with the closing credit rendition of ‘La Vie en Rose’. Elizabeth, in her final moments, mirrors Irrational’s position, leaving us with a pristine, intimate, closed story and bowing out before greed can consume them as well.

Even with Bioshock finishing and Irrational Games closing, for me the series will never truly end. Whenever I realise my own hypocrisies and inadequacies, I will plunge from the clouds of Colombia back into Rapture, to have my self-satisfaction washed away. No longer blinded by self-interest, I will escape the Rapture state of mind by treating others the way I did the Little Sisters; benevolently allowing them opportunities I could have just as easily taken away. This pattern being an inescapable cycle of human nature, the Bioshock story, for those who played it, will never truly end.

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