BioShock

Who is Andrew Ryan?

This concept is too good for an FPS. It deserves an RPG. Game is based on the social science fiction of Ayn Rand and set in a breathtaking retro-futuristic art deco Atlantis built on the ocean floor in 1946...an undersea Galt's Gulch.

I read Atlas Shrugged at exactly the wrong time in my life. It was the summer before I left for college and I was feeling like the king of my hometown, arrogant and victorious, able and deserving to conquer the world. Then that book was put in my hands (by someone even more naïve than myself) and my ego fed like a hog at slop. It has taken years and cost every ounce of my inflated self-confidence to undo the damage.

So imagine my excitement to find, in of all places a video game, an instance of Rand's model society — unchecked capitalism, fierce individualism, survival-of-the-fittest rejection of charity and altruism — devolved into a dystopia. Heady stuff for a shooter. And that's the problem, because it's hard to engage the dialectic when your job is to kill most everyone you see. The backstory is told solely through found audio recordings and one-way radio transmissions that do little to involve the player in the ethical dilemma.

In an RPG, on the other hand, your job is to talk to most everyone you see. That's the optimal way to explore big ideas in a game: Talk it out and develop relationships with NPCs, make choices that affect the world, observe the consequences and refine your choices. BioShock's gameplay fails to live up to its brilliant premise. But I'm still marveling at the art design.