Flawed Morality

(BIOSHOCK SPOILERS! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.)

Suspension of disbelief is defined as the willingness for an audience to accept something they know to be impossible for the purposes of entertainment. Nearly every piece of fiction requires some amount of suspended disbelief. These fictional premises may also lend to the engagement of the mind and perhaps the spread of thoughts, ideas, art and theories.  Such is the case with Bioshock. A game lauded for its intriguing story and settings as much as its pitch perfect game play. Just a week and a half ago I finished Bioshock for the first time. (Yes, I know that I am incredibly late, but due to constraints of time and money, I only recently got around to it.) My first thoughts upon completing the game and seeing its ending was: I did not like it. Not to say that Bioshock is a bad game, it is in fact a good game, but Bioshock broke my suspension of disbelief. I could not enjoy it the same after that.

The three principal elements that make Bioshock so incredible and has endeared it into the hearts of thousands of gamers are its setting, principal character and the beliefs that give them both life. Rapture, the man who built it, Andrew Ryan, and Objectivism. Rapture is an astounding place, fully realized and hauntingly atmospheric. The screams of its deranged citizens as they try to find any remnants of their previous life. The way the entire screen shakes as the lumbering hulk of a Big Daddy enters into view. All these little aspects go a long way into building a believably flawed city based around a believably flawed man. Rapture is Andrew Ryan’s city and Bioshock is unquestionably his game. Just as the sea water spills into the city, an ever present reminder of its downfall, Ryan’s philosophies flood the player. He waxes poetic about the virtues of a free and open market. You can hear the fervor of his belief in “the Great Chain” in one audiotape and then hear the self-righteous anger in his voice when it fails him in another. In the games very opening monologue Andrew Ryan claims Rapture to be a city where man can achieve greatness without the constraints of censorship or “petty morality”. The man, the city and the game live and breathe these objectivist philosophies. “Only through individual will and determination can society as a whole be bettered”. These three core concepts give Bioshock a unique feel in terms of setting and story that has never really been matched. 

And yet, with so much of the game riding on those core concepts, Bioshock hangs its ending on the morality system. If you save the Little Sisters then you get the good ending; if you harvest them then you get the bad one. Any other choice you make throughout the course of the game has absolutely no impact upon the ending. I would be alright with this if both respective endings of Bioshock were not so far sided. In the good ending you rescue six Little Sisters, take them to the surface and raise them on your own. You are Saint Jack, Savior of the Little Sisters. In the bad ending you return to the surface bring with you an army of Splicers. Your first action is to hijack a submarine carrying nuclear warheads. You are Jack, Evil Incarnate. There is no middle ground between the two endings. One is gag inducingly good; the other is genocide levels of bad.  Both endings completely rupture my suspension of disbelief about the game. I finished the game, saw my ending and then was saddened as all the rest of my Bioshock memories became tainted.     

Bioshock is a game that excels in the moral grayness of its setting, story and central philosophy. Andrew Ryan is a man of his beliefs. He built Rapture simply to prove that he could, to give physical body to the core concepts which he held dear. The player’s entire experience with the game is dictated by those ideas. The third act twist, that you had been controlled all along, falls within the concepts of individual will. Ryan’s dying words are “A man chooses. A slave obeys”.  It is his ultimate triumph, an idealist victory worthy of sacrificing his life for. The player at that point fully understands and internalizes what Rapture was built for, individual will. The final act of the game has the player hunting down the person who brainwashed them. By the time you ride the elevator up to face the final boss, you are not a slave. You are a man. 

Bioshock encourages the player to lose themselves in the city of Rapture. To give in to the ideals of Andrew Ryan. Personal gain and selfishness are things to be rewarded. Harvesting Little Sisters would not be considered an evil act by Ryan’s standards. The only evil in Bioshock is the failure of the individual. It is that reason that both endings completely ruin the experience. The endings and morality system hold the player to the conventional morality of everyday day life; thou shall not kill. And it has no place in Rapture. To force it in as the game does, to base the games endings upon it breaks my suspension of disbelief. The player character is Jack, brainwashed from birth to kill Andrew Ryan. Jack only goes to the surface so he can be brought back in to Rapture as a seemingly external force. He knows nothing of conventional morality. In the game’s closing moments as Jack and the player have gained free will for the first time throughout their experience, Bioshock forces the player into a pre-set ending cinematic of either good or evil, conventional morality. For the entirety of my play time with Bioshock, I had suspended my disbelief. I knew Rapture was an impossible city and the objectivist philosophies upon which it was built would ultimately fail. Still, I choose not to belief those thoughts, at least for a time, because I wanted to believe in Rapture. I wanted to believe in Andrew Ryan and his ideas.  Yet, the endings of Bioshock were so out of place from the three core aspects of the game that I could no longer believe in it. It is a fault of the game and of its designers that ultimately Bioshock falters in its resolve to deliver an impactful story about individualism and objectivism. It is a failure in a game that otherwise has none. Unfortunately, the end result is a game that builds itself on promise and premise but cannot deliver in execution. Andrew Ryan would not be pleased.