Bioshock: Pushing A Lot More Boundaries Than Just Video Gaming

It helps that Irrational’s Ken Levine (Creative Director) has a liberal arts degree – and he calls it “useless” in another interview. It helps that he reads a lot of books, like Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) and George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984). It helps that he likes Logan’s Run.

You see, with Bioshock, it’s not just about the integration of FPS, RPG, and horror/survival. It’s not just about the adaptive difficulty and flexible AI. They’ve designed this game to make you squirm. And then to make you think deep, deep thoughts.

In an interview with 1UP, Levine reveals, at least for a couple of responses, just how foot-forward the “ecological” AI in Bioshock would be (Just how foot-forward? The NPC AI responds to the environment and to each other as well as it responds to the player’s action). Then it becomes a lengthy discussion on pushing the FPS genre, in-game ethics, and political perspectives that tells you what kind of game Bioshock will turn out to be.

Read the interview after the jump.

It helps that Irrational’s Ken Levine (Creative Director) has a liberal arts degree – and he calls it “useless” in another interview. It helps that he reads a lot of books, like Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) and George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984). It helps that he likes Logan’s Run.

You see, with Bioshock, it’s not just about the integration of FPS, RPG, and horror/survival. It’s not just about the adaptive difficulty and flexible AI. They’ve designed this game to make you squirm. And then to make you think deep, deep thoughts.

In an interview with 1UP, Levine reveals, at least for a couple of responses, just how foot-forward the “ecological” AI in Bioshock would be (Just how foot-forward? The NPC AI responds to the environment and to each other as well as it responds to the player’s action). Then it becomes a lengthy discussion on pushing the FPS genre, in-game ethics, and political perspectives that tells you what kind of game Bioshock will turn out to be.

The backstory, revolving around a stem cell-spitting sea slug and how it mutates the “perfect” society into something decidedly inhuman, evokes too much of the current stem cell debate in today’s society and politics, something that has escaped neither the 1UP interviewer nor Levine. The latter especially draws an analogy with fire: it’s very useful stuff to man, but out of control it can kill him. “That’s what the theme of BioShock is: everything has boundaries and if you don’t respect the boundaries, well then you end up with BioShock.” In real life as well as in the game, Mr. Levine?

In real life as in gaming.

“I think that a lot of our games that we’ve worked on, and especially BioShock, you’re someone caught in the middle of the really extreme ideologies and how dangerous that can be if you take anything to the extreme and you don’t keep an open mind as to, you know, “maybe my viewpoint is not 100% perfect; maybe there are some flaws in what I am thinking.” And I think that is a very dangerous place to be.“

It’s not just in the CNN effect where the game will make you squirm, though. Take the Little Sisters, one of the mutated former-humans you’ll encounter in the depths of Bioshock. The dev team deliberately made them little girls. With that done, the choice doesn’t simply become (as it is in most FPS games):

• “Is it more efficient to eliminate them with Weapon 1 or Weapon 2?”

but includes the more bone-chilling observation:

• “I’m about to shoot a little girl. *Bleep* Because if I don’t, she or her companion guardians (the Big Daddies) will kill me. *Stronger Bleep*” 

It is the “core moral choice” when it comes to those little girls, says Levine.

It’s not funny, either. One of our previous articles discussed how and why gaming should start looking past its technical aspects and start looking towards story, because that’s where its future as an art form really lies. With this kind of depth to the story and its creation, Bioshock may be a likely candidate for that kind of praise. Liberal arts may not be such a useless degree after all.