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Political Ideology in BioShock

Posted by Zonk on from the hey-little-sister-what-have-you-done dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Julian Murdoch at the usually-excellent Gamers With Jobs has a preview of BioShock up today. Far from being a normal piece on the game's graphics and gameplay, it delves deep into designer Ken Levine's attempts to include some extremely complex and controversial political ideologies as the baseline for the title: 'The point of BioShock, the raison d'etre, is really the story, and the messages and intellectual content that Levine tries to deliver as a payload. "Look at Lord of the Rings," he challenges. "Why is Lord of the Rings more interesting than random RPG story number 507? They're exactly the same thing. They have orcs and goblins and demons and trolls. But Lord of the Rings is a meditation on power. And it's really interesting because of that. It's what gives it it's heart." And with undenied hubris, Levine's trying to do the same thing with BioShock.'"

4 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Highly anticipated by me at least by LarsWestergren · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you have missed is, this game is made by many of the people behind horror classics System Shock/System Shock 2. It is my most anticipated game this year. I've actually stopped reading about it though, articles contain too many spoilers these days. However, if you liked the 40s-50s vibe of Fallout artwork, check out the great art deco posters in the game.

    --

    Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die

  2. Re:Who will get offended by ShadowsHawk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And how many people will play the game completely oblivious to the political ideology? There's a reason why the masses love summer romantic comedies.

  3. More Importantly by paleo2002 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    . . . will it run on my computer!?!

    The article mentions use of the Quake 3 graphics engine. Are there any games currently out that use this system? They might help estimate the sytem reqs for BioShock.

    By the way, people keep comparing this game to System Shock. I don't know much about that, but BioShock does remind me of Deus Ex. Different background themes certainly, but Deus Ex gameplay was driven by character customization choices and those plasmids sound similar.

  4. Let me get this straight. by ravenshrike · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Soooo, basically the game rants against capitalism, but in order to do so it sets artificial limits on said capitalism and than shows what in all honesty would probably be a relatively realistic portrayal of said artificially constricted capitalist system. Without room for expansion(what, they could make the original city but making multiple cities in various areas didn't occur to them?) and with the obvious limiting of resources within the unexpandable boundaries created by eventual population pressure, of course any capitalist system will go to hell, but that's true of any system that includes beings which are allowed to think for themselves. Now, a bee colony might be able to make it work in such conditions, but last time I checked, the entirety of the human race weren't a bunch of worker bees.

    I found this really funny:

    These plasmids let you modify and slowly build your character in a way not-dissimilar to an RPG. But don't tell Ken that. "This is not an RPG," he demands. "It's not about stats. This is about huge amounts of dynamic exciting player expression ... thousands of ways to exploit the environment, take control of things and use the world to your advantage." He's passionate about this to the point of hyperbole and hand-waving. What exactly does he think the best RPGs aspire to acheive. Hell, what does he think any good DM with a couple of imaginative players can actually do in an actual PnP RPG?