Anon has a problem with Bioshock

Lol You can't just do a potatoes level analysis of the game and be like "wow what a bad critique." The game is not a bad critique, but many players are bad at critical thinking.

Makes a shallow analysis of a piece of media
Piece of media appears to be shallow

I'm a genius, and this piece of media is dumb

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.

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.

Ayn Rand,s "philosophy" is about as deep as a puddle.
- ‘Mine!’
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
- Ah I hadn't - it's still in my backlog. But it sounds like it just re-affirms what I had drawn from the main games.

A libertarian that doesn't understand satire, what a shock.

What a bioshock

A 12 year old can deconstruct objectivism and see how its DOA because I did it in middle school for an advanced English course. We read this trash book called "The Girl Who Owned a City" that was some guys attempt at teaching Rand's bullshit to children. The book boils down to "be a heartless warlord who hoards supplies and throws hot oil on desperate children who come seeking food".

Counterpoint: it’s a videogame, and if it’s shallow it’s no more shallow and vapid a deconstruction of objectivism than Atlas Shrugged is the opposite.

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

Almost like it doesn't take a deep and thoughtful deconstruction of Ayn Rand to knock the whole thing over.

Now, disregarding the whole ethical thing, the reason why Rapture Fell was because there was a very big divide beetween the workers and the people. (Also because Plasmids were not regulated and the poor became addicted)

And since there was no social housing and stuff, they Protested, and then joined Sofia Lamb, who was appealing to them

So, its more of a mix of the people going insane without ethical restrictions, the consumers going insane because of addiction, and a bunch of people dying because of protests by the workers

Whomst amongst us would not be guilty of a little sperging under a completely unregulated oligarchy? Surely the social contract would protect everyone from lead poisoning 🧐