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You can hand-wave the toilet paper factories' absence away by saying a) the player doesn't see all that much of Rapture except what's right next to the biggest tube stations b) by the time the player gets there, it's all gone to pieces anyway. But, video games, etc. I think I like Bioshock's plot a little more than Tea does, conceptually and how it is presented, but I have to agree with him that Ryan in particular is a very ham-fisted caricature brought to life (as it were), a golem built of Ayn Rand books. And the common criticism of Rand, courtesy here of Bob, the angry flower,  is so far embodied in Ryan in that he's only investing capital he already had accumulated earlier, be it to build Rapture in the first place, or corner the market on food and breathable air and what have you.
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Sep 1, 2020 10:49
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The Ryan part is IMO pretty well done, all things considered. The game is set around lampooning one of the dumbest ideologies out there, Objectivism, and the 'twist' is that you, as the player, have no agency in actually doing the deed of offing Ryan. A man chooses, a slave obeys. No gods, no kings, only man, remember? It is also a critique, of sorts, of FPS games, but (I will put this in spoilers since the LP authors have not played System Shock 2, which I am spoiling here) In System Shock 2, you the player are a hostage of a sociopathic AI who forces you to do whatever she wants, and this is the framing of all the various fetch quests and objectives in the game. The 'twist' of that game even being the 'revelation' that this is the situation, though it is telegraphed well in advance by the virtue of being a sequel to System Shock in the first place, but never mind. The only time the player character gets a choice is at the end sequence, when SHODAN pleads for her life, and the player character just kills her. But it's a cut scene! The player themselves never get to make that choice either way! They're SHODAN's puppet all through the game, and the moral catharsis, if there is one, is not in the hands of the player, beyond reaching the end credits. By blending this with the nonsenses of Objectivism, it creates, especially for its time, a pretty powerful study slash critique of the Skinner box game design paradigm and what that means for game narratives. Obviously this can be seen as bland and banal today, and Tea did pretty much figure it out even before any of the 'reveals' happened, which was fun to watch!, but there's a lot going on here, and I appreciate what the game designers were after.
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Sep 8, 2020 09:19
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Natural 20 posted:As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the LP overall and broadly on how you feel Bioshock lands so many years later! I really enjoyed this LP, since mister Tea did figure out the major plot-lines somewhat beforehand and that was a pleasure to watch. I will say that Bioshock 1 is a worth-while game even today, even though it sort of capers off after the golf club incident. As has been discussed all throughout the LP, the game's main point (other than paying homage to System Shock 2) is to ridicule the idea of Rapture, Ryan, and how his ideal society is clearly flawed. Tea has outlined not only the many out-right physical issues with building a utopia under the sea in the 1960's, but also how inane and dumb the founding principles of Rapture were, and also how quick Ryan was to abandon his precious principles when faced with body-horror consumables becoming a business model. Fontaine is a caricature of Andrew Ryan, and Andrew Ryan himself was already a caricature of real-life objectivists like Ayn Rand, if that is even possible, so it's a bit on the nose I suppose. I guess today, when we have so many large title games that are effectively sandboxes, it's not such a huge realization that many games, FPS included, are mechanically constraining the player to just "do objective" over and over again. I still think it's a fun play on the motif, though.
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Sep 26, 2020 05:21
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