BioShock: Realizing Rapture

Ever since its release in 2007, discussions of interactive narrative have been awash with mentions of BioShock, the immersive FPS by the now-defunct Irrational Games. Its influence can be felt even today, serving as an enlightening “missing link” between older game design philosophies and more modern ones. BioShock’s long, dialogue-filled hallways echo more modern games like Gone Home and The Last of Us, while its sprawling, enemy-infested levels harken back to titles like DOOM and, of course, System Shock. This unfortunately also means that the game is up to its gills in contradictions, as many of its systems tend to clash with one another. However, in spite of those contradictions, BioShock is still an incredible showcase of interactive worldbuilding.

One of the first lessons that BioShock demonstrates is how it conditions players to view its world as worth paying attention to. This is a crucial step for any video game that expects to be taken seriously, because the default assumption for many players is that games are simply dispensers of fun and challenge, and things like “worldbuilding” and “plot” are only there as window dressing. This isn’t simply a result of player ignorance, either, as many games genuinely do follow that design philosophy, and paying excess attention to those kinds of games’ narratives would be a pointless distraction. As a shooter released in 2007, BioShock had to reckon with these assumptions considerably more than the games it would go on to inspire, but it dispels them almost immediately.

In the first few minutes of the game, after the player’s plane crashes, they are given no explicit objective, only a floating tower in the distance. The player will naturally head to this location, but by not giving them explicit instructions to do so, BioShock makes this process feel organic. As soon as the player enters the building, the doors shut behind them, and they are confronted with a massive sculpture of the game’s antagonist, Andrew Ryan, adorned by a banner stating “NO GODS OR KINGS, ONLY MAN.” This moment is the most striking first impression that BioShock gives, essentially serving as the game’s topic sentence to which everything that follows will relate.

Then, the player enters the bathysphere and descends into the ocean, only to be shown a crude recording meant to convey Andrew Ryan’s driving philosophy. This conveys three crucial pieces of worldbuilding to the player. The first and most obvious is that Andrew Ryan is an extreme objectivist, believing so firmly in his utopic vision of laissez-faire capitalism that he built an entire underwater city for it to thrive in. The second is that Andrew Ryan is the kind of self-obsessed jackass to force everyone to hear about his lofty ideals before they even get to enter his city. The third piece comes when Rapture is revealed to the player right as Ryan’s speech concludes. By having these two moments coincide, the player will easily draw the clear connection between Ryan’s ideals and the submerged art deco nightmare of a city that lies before them. By having all of this occur before the player so much as picks up a wrench, the game is making its intentions clear. BioShock is a game about guns, Plasmids, and Big Daddies, but before all that, it is a game about Andrew Ryan and his twisted beliefs.

    Or, at least, that is its intention. In practice, BioShock has a few vestigial mechanics taken from the immersive sims that inspired it, and these mechanics can undo some of the conditioning that the game’s opening fought so hard to achieve. One such mechanic is the ability to search any corpse or container for lootable objects. On the one hand, this rewards exploration by giving players precious ammunition, and when a player is forced to loot pocket change from a dead body, it reinforces the feeling that Rapture is a dog-eat-dog hellscape in which only the most monstrous can survive. On the other hand, this reframes every corpse in terms of what resources it might provide, rather than in terms of what it says about the environment. When the player comes across one of the victims of Dr. Steinman’s grotesque aesthetics, they will see them as a loot chest first and a human tragedy second. Even for more narratively focused players (such as myself), the prompt of “PRESS E TO SEARCH” popping up over literally every carcass distracts from the intended emotional impact quite severely.

    The most egregious example of this ludonarrative disconnect is the ethical dilemma surrounding the Little Sisters. Little Sisters produce ADAM, a resource used to create gene-altering serums called Plasmids, and hence they are fought over in Rapture as a precious commodity. When the player is first confronted with the decision whether to harvest or rescue a Little Sister, the intention is to make them weigh the life of an innocent girl against their desire for power, serving as a counterpoint to Andrew Ryan’s philosophy of unrestrained greed. However, the player still gets a fair amount of ADAM for choosing “Rescue,” and they are even promised a future reward by Dr. Tenenbaum for doing so. This completely reframes the decision from “mercy vs. power,” to “free power-ups vs. killing a little girl for some more free power-ups.” Rescuing the Little Sisters is such a win-win that choosing to harvest them feels cartoonishly evil, which deprives this core pillar of BioShock’s worldbuilding of any ethical nuance it might’ve had.

Despite these mechanical snags, though, BioShock still succeeds at its worldbuilding more often than not. By showing us the ruined hallways of Rapture, still adorned in cheery 1960s-style advertisements, we can see its past and present in bloody contrast to one another. Sometimes these approaches can come off as a bit sophomoric, such as Dr. Steinman smearing “ABOVE ALL, DO NO HARM” in blood on the floor, but others, such as watching a Little Sister play with her Big Daddy on the other side of an aquatic tube, are deeply memorable. It’s these moments that define BioShock as a haunting tour through a truly twisted and inventive world.