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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.'"

17 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Political gaming? by Trent+Hawkins · · Score: 3, Funny

    So, like. You can vote republican AND rape little girl like aliens?

    1. Re:Political gaming? by untaken_name · · Score: 3, Insightful

      CAN? Hell, isn't that one of the planks of the platform?

      --
      http://xkcd.com/386/
    2. Re:Political gaming? by untaken_name · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Oh, right. Nonvoluntary Noninteractive Copulative Treatment. I forgot about that! It goes along with Discomfort Creation for Informational Access Initiatives and Voluntary Mandatory Regulatory Compliance.

      --
      http://xkcd.com/386/
  2. Who will get offended by svendsen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wonder how many people will get "offended" if the games political ideology is different then theirs? For a 100% fictitious example: Someone plays GTA 37 and kills hookers and has no problems. Burns people and runs them over, again no problems. Their in game girlfriend gets an abortion, or says the like democrat / republican, or says the world is more than 6000 years old...all hell breaks loose.

    1. 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.

    2. Re:Who will get offended by svendsen · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ya good point. Guess I am giving too much credit to those who might play this game. I'm sure the reviews will be all about graphics vs. anything deeper.

    3. Re:Who will get offended by Kelbear · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think American History X did a good job of presenting controversial material in a balanced manner.

      American History X overall message was put forward in an Abraham Lincoln quote, 'We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.'

      But the movie doesn't try to bullshit you that there aren't reasons for hating minorities and immigrants. It's trying to say that you shouldn't let those reasons outweigh the reasons against hating minorities and immigrants. The Neo-Nazi main character is portrayed in a positive light and as being justified in many portions of the movie. His arguments are not contradicted within the film, it's just that in the latter half of the movie they present opposing arguments.

      They don't argue that black criminals don't kill whites often. Instead they showed an innocent black guy saving the nazi, and also a black guy killing his little brother.

      So even if the game settles on one side of an issue, it can at least portray pros and cons from both sides fairly so that it can minimize the negative impact on audiences that disagree.

  3. hmm by TinBromide · · Score: 2, Insightful

    does anyone feel that bioshock (for as great as the system shock games were), comparing itself to one of the great stories of the last century kind of like a high school baseball player comparing himself to babe ruth?

    It may be, but Tolkien hated allegory, and any comparison of lotr to ww2, ww1 or Europe at the time of the writing would come up seriously lacking. In fact, he writes about broader, more applicable things, power, nature vs destruction, hobbits, but politics? If lotr was about politics, it wouldn't have been made into movies nearly 45 years after it was published in complete form. The crucible was about politics, but instead of movies, they read it in highschool to explain McCarthyism and to explain why paranoia is bad.

    Summary Recap: LOTR was not about politics, it was not an allegory. Anyone who says different should read the introduction to the book, written by Tolkien himself.

    --
    Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
    1. Re:hmm by PixelScuba · · Score: 5, Funny

      Arragorn was his pirate cousin.

    2. Re:hmm by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Summary Recap: LOTR was not about politics, it was not an allegory. Anyone who says different should read the introduction to the book, written by Tolkien himself.

      First of all, you can't trust everything everyone says/writes. They can be deluding themselves. Even highly intelligent people engage in this particularly self-destructive behavior.

      Second, it might not have been about a particular event, but being written when it was it seems highly likely that real-world events motivated Tolkien, and even influenced his writings, even if it was only at the subconscious level.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:hmm by bigbigbison · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't think that Tolkien should be the ultimate arbiter of what his books mean. To take another situation that is radically different look at Michael Richards' racist tirade. I saw his apology on Letterman and I believe that he was truly sorry and that he really doesn't think he was racist. However, he has yet to convince me that he isn't a racist.
      Tolkien may not think that there is allegory in Lord of the Rings but he has yet to convince me that there isn't.

      --
      http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
  4. 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

    1. Re:Highly anticipated by me at least by CommunistHamster · · Score: 2, Informative

      Supreme Commander is primarily CPU-limited, due to all the projectile trajectory and unit AI calculations.

  5. 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.

    1. Re:More Importantly by bWareiWare.co.uk · · Score: 2, Informative

      Think you mean Unreal 3. AFAIK the only release is the xBox360 only Gears of War which obviously doesn't help; UT3 should be about the same release dates as BioShock.

      Unreal 3 supports DirectX 10, so turning everything up to 11 is likely to max out any current box. More optimistically the engine also supports Linux (any word on BioShock?) and is likely to still give great graphics on more modest hardware.

  6. Lord of the Rings. . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I rarely post b/c, for the last 5 yrs that I've frequented Slashdot I've been too lazy to get an account and for the most part I just enjoy what you guys say, but I've gotta add some input here. For a split second the summary made me really interested in Bioshock. Then he claimed that the Lord of the Rings was a meaningful story. I like the Lord of the Rings as much as the next geek, but I also know a bit about literature and I understand that there is no hidden message. It is NOT a mediation on power, and this is underscored by the fact that Frodo is so weak. Unlike Bilbo, Frodo rarely used the power of the ring, and when he did he just endangered himself. The most powerful characters in the series were the antagonists, and like any run of the mill adventure tale, it's about the weaker good guys standing together to take on the more powerful evil nemesis. If you think Tolkien had a point other than using writing as a primitive form of World of Warcraft then you gotta be chasing the dragon more than Tolkien himself.

    My question is, if this guy so grossly misinterpreted such a well known trilogy as Lord of the Rings, what makes him capable of crafting a meaningful storyline? If these video games want to compete on an artistic level they're going to have to hire writers such as Michael Crighton, William Gibson, or Alex Garland (first rendition of the Halo movie doesn't count). Anyway, just my 2 as a college kid working on his English degree.

    Oh, and after reading the article, expressing political ideas through a negative utopia was outdated when Orwell did it. . . Furthermore, I'll believe the game translates objectivist ideas when I see it. Just because the creator has this in mind while he creates the game doesn't mean that it's commnunicated within the story. To me, this guy sounds very Molyneuxish - impractical big ideas. Lets hope he proves me wrong, but considering that I'm at odds with objectivism and I don't understand how it could be coherently examined within a video game, my pessimism persists.

  7. 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?