Philosophy of BioShock: How 2K Made Players Live A Randian Philosophy In A World That Embraces It

BioShock’s long-lasting claim to fame is its non-straightforward critiques of utopian philosophy, but very specifically of Ayn Rand’s social, behavioral philosophy, so called “Objectivism.” What must be known about Ayn Rand as a philosophy is that her work reached prominence through fiction before the standards expected in scholarship. She was educated, emigrated to the United States, and survived due to the financial support of her mother, who practiced the Jewish faith. Her career as a publicly known author was kickstarted by a government sponsored subsidy for the arts. She required her close, inner circle of friends to take routine loyalty tests to maintain friendship with her, encouraged them to cut ties with other friends and loved ones who did not agree with her philosophy, as well as swear oaths on her books over any other in official capacities. The very notion that Ayn Rand lived her philosophy, that she was a self-made success, and that she was not a cult leader, is purely false. Her disparagement of every social organization structure, political, religious, or academic, was done so through intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy. Proving this point is not the task of this essay, but such information is readily available to any person who studies history more than propaganda or seeks a critique of her philosophy that is not purely apologetics. She is ridiculed among philosophers of experience for good reason. If you are seeking kind words about Randian philosophy, you will not find it here.

On a personal note, the fact that bees are a superpower in this game is one of my favorite things in things in the world. Just go was Dr. Bees by Harry Partridge, and you will agree that it is the best of all superpowers.

The genius of BioShock is found in how 2K Games made players live a Randian philosophy in a world that fully embraces it. The main difference is that the world does not give Randian philosophy’s assumed premises without question. When we think of games that try to engage morality, what comes to mind first? For most the answer is choice. You are typically presented with an obviously good choice and an obviously bad choice. These choices either slightly change the story or character in a way that does not significantly impact the script or gameplay, or cause you to engage in a completely opposite or different story entirely. BioShock goes in a different direction than its contemporaries on this point.

BioShock gives us a drastically different character to play as. Other games that engage moral choice will go with characters that are essentially blank, like in The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, so that the player has freedom of choice. Craft whatever character you want, see a bunch of outcomes, and have a ton of scenarios. That or they will go with established character with their own personalities and things they value, but no established codes of ethics.

This can be seen in games like the Infamous series. BioShock, on the other hand, puts you in the head of a character that already has his mind made up, has completely figured out the best way for himself and the world to be, and he has decided that Rand is that way. The very first line of the game is our character’s internal soliloquy, “They told me, ‘Son, you’re special. You were born to do great things.’ You know what? They were right.” The game developers decided that they were going to let you control this character, but you as a player are going to see his world play out, not yours.

What is particularly interesting about this design choice is what it does to how the game creates the illusion of choice as a true illusion. The character establishment leads the player into identifying as the character through creating an empowerment dynamic, an illusion of choice that is similar to other games but is ultimately not an impactful presence in the game world.

The main moral choice is in the kill or curing the Little Sisters after murdering their silent, sub-mariner guardians, the Big Daddys. The kill option is supposed to benefit you more by giving more “adam,” the resources with increases in-game abilities, at the expense of an innocent person, but doing so fits your won personal goals and well-being. To cure her is supposed to be self-sacrificing, selflessness that is harmful to the character in the short term. After curing enough Little Sisters, you get a bonus of adam tat evens out the totals in the long run. This is perhaps to point out the benefits of benevolence that are not immediately recognizable to those who find selfishness, not self-interest, as a positive value. The long-run bonus, however, makes the difference of choice irrelevant to the story.

In the end, your character is still performing the act of initiating aggression at a person whose only mission is to protect children from a world gone to hell. You could have chosen not to fight the Big Daddys, and not get any powers, but you will not be able to progress the game should you commit to this choice. In other words, our character is entering this apocalyptic world in pursuit of his lofty goals, he thinks of himself as objectively greater than all those people he left behind who let themselves be limited by government, charity, and morality. He believes he is entitled to do whatever he wants in pursuit of his goals, and he crosses that door completely willing to kill innocent children, and only saves them, in the true Randian sense of the word “charity,” if he feels good by saving them. That is, we as the player still cause the harm, still reap the reward, but only act on a small measure of help to another if and only if it makes us feel good to do so.

Unwittingly, BioShock makes us take on the life of a true Randian, making whatever degree of control we try to have over the character necessarily fall into that philosophy. Bu tour character is special in a way. It is understandable why Randian philosophy is so appealing to him, because it is a very productive philosophy for our social context here in the United States of America. Yet the character is entering the nation Rand envisioned, taken to its logical end.

In Bioshock, our story begins once the story of the world has already taken place. Atlantis was supposed to be the promised land for the skilled, talented, and determined. One where every person was already the elite of the elites. As with any society, some win, others fail, and we show up to see the full force of a revolution crossing the gap of anarchy amidst regime change. Atlantis has gone to hell only days, maybe even only a few hours, before we arrive. After all, if the news of the destruction had gotten out, I doubt there would have been any first-class commercial airlines, offering a complementary cigar and a glass of scotch, for a trans-national flight to this wonderful city.

As we go through the story, we learn bits and pieces of the political dealings going on.

Andrew Ryan escaped from communist Russia, became a successful American industrialist, and, along with a few other super-citizens, built Rapture in secret. Then seemed to just vanish from society when they officially picked up their bags and moved. For a while, everything went swimmingly. The science gets done, they make some neat guns, and they eat cake. But then they discover “adam” inside sea-slugs, and its ability to be manipulated to alter DNA in order to make superpowers. Only silly, naively moral people from Washington or the Vatican would warn against pursuing science that could benefit humanity at the cost of changing DNA, so they are all in.

The product is a hit. Everyone wants it. Everyone is getting it. They cannot keep up with demand. By happy accident, Dr. Tenenbaum discovers that if the slug infects a host, the Little Sisters, they produce significantly more ADAM than before. Seeing drastic change in DNA, and supposedly behavior, the people of Rapture no longer see the Little Sisters as humans. Thus they no longer need to respect their humanity. Now we have human farms. Three cheers for societies where individual happiness and success determine whether you are correct and rational.

The company responsible for discovering adam and harnessing it was Frank Fontaine’s Fontaine Futuristics. Fontaine’s business was the wealthiest in Rapture; he had complete vertical control over all factors of production of his genetics-altering drugs. If it were not for the smaller competitors: Sinclair Solutions and Andrew Ryan’s Ryan Industries, Fontaine would have had a complete monopoly.

But not all was well. See Fontaine was cheating. His fisheries that discovered the slugs had been smuggling illegal goods in order to finance his business. But wait, according to Rand, correct philosophies lead to success and incorrect philosophies lead to failure. Fontaine was the most successful business owner in Rapture, so he must have had a correct philosophy. Thus it was not wrong to smuggle. But oh wait! Fontaine was supposedly killed in a shoot-out during one of Rapture’s police force’s raids on a fishery. But Oh Wait! That police force is actually Ryan Securities, a company owned by Andrew Ryan, who was then given all of Fontaine’s business assets after he died, because the city council which Andrew Ryan is a part of voted to give those assets to him! So that means, because smuggling did not ensure his survival, Fontaine must have been wrong. But his success means he must have been right. But oh wait! Andrew Ryan became the most successful businessman in Rapture by supposedly killing him and taking his company. Thus Ryan’s philosophy must have been right, and thus it was right for Ryan to have killed Fontaine, who was also doing the right thing by smuggling, because that made Ryan successful and thus philosophically right. Right? The success burden of proof in Randian philosophy conflicts with its idealism that rational actors never disagree.

Many of the citizens of Rapture did not see Andrew Ryan’s actions as proper. They thought nationalizing Fontaine Futuristics then giving it to Ryan’s private ownership was crooked, and a denial of individual liberty and property the setting was supposed to be based on. They revolted and created civil unrest. People were afraid to go out. They bought more weaponizable plasmids to protect themselves from protestors. Andrew Ryan, head of Ryan Securities, decided to convert Fontaine’s Department Store into a prison to stop the protestors who were interfering with the individual liberty and property of Rapture’s other citizens. By New Year’s Eve, 1958, only 7 years after Rapture was completed, they had a full-scale civil war. All Randians, all fighting for what they saw as the protection of their individual liberty and property from those who oppressed it.

While racing through Rapture, the player not only gets to learn of the city’s collapse, but also encounters unique and successful citizens of rapture through finding discarded audio recordings along the way. The player gets to see bright-eyed idealists, working only toward their own happiness, their own sense of accomplishment and productive work. People that lived without any limiters of systems of morality that say that those things are not the only worthy considerations. We see these people fall into the natural conclusions of their work that eventually consuming them.

What we must see about BioShock’s criticism is that the setting puts Rand’s society through the greatest test imaginable for any model of social order or utopia. It takes the structures of the society and exposes them to true anarchy, mob rule, and despotism. The particular genius was in getting to that point by letting all of its characters live Rand’s ideals without compromise, until they finally hit that wall that forces some of Rand’s ideals and optimisms conflict. Any government must be able to have balances by maintaining order, having systems to facilitate a degree of change and revolution, and also present fairness on a grand scale.

In other words, society must account for the Others. There must be children for the next generation and people to raise and educate them. For every lofty idealist with a new idea to change technology, mathematics, industry, etcetera, there is man power making it happen, systems and logistics that need solutions and innovations. There must be ways to care for the people who have already given their lifetime of work and have thus earned their place in society.

In fact, there are so many considerations to make, that the society from Atlas Shrugged, where all of the so-called best people of society decided to leave and do their own thing without restriction or duties to others is far beyond unlikely. It is irrational. According to BioShock, a priori utopians are inherently irrational, due to not being grown out of material factors and experimentation.

The model that Bioshock employed was extremely effective for a game looking to shine a critical light on ideas that many people take for granted. There are many social philosophies out that make the claim that if only we did X, Y, and Z, then all problems would be solved. In pursuit of such claims, these philosophies tend to fill themselves with Ad-Hoc explanations for things for which their perfect systems could not account. It is a foolish rule that has no exceptions, but a rule that always needs exceptions is just as foolish.

A good ethical philosophy is not one that merely says what specific things must be done or should be valued, but creates a framework by which we can actively evaluate that for ourselves. One which we do together as a community, which fluidly tackles new problems as they arrive and in their time. It is because of this ability that philosophical schools like Utilitarianism or Kantian Philosophy have lasted for so long and are able to use the insights of other philosophic perspectives to inform them. The strength of the scientific branch of philosophizing is that it seeks to create the tools for finding truths, not in asserting that their understanding of science creates one, undeniable truth for all.

As you might guess, I am not exactly a fan of Objectivism or Ayn Rand. Rand popularized her ideas in fiction first and foremost. That creates problems for scholarship. Her works lack self-criticism and logical argument, relying more on the reader’s emotional engagement with her characters to convince people. Being fiction, readers can draw their own conclusions about what Rand means, making asserting “Rand thinks blank” to any given person a challenge. Once she got critical attention, she continued to defend against criticisms with ad-hoc arguments in articles and interviews and responses to fans but did not reconcile these answers with views expressed in her fiction. However she maintained that it was there from the beginning. It was years after Atlas Shrugged when we finally got something that appears to be a philosophic text, but she got there through fame, not through proving herself to the philosophic community. How would we receive a scientist who got their fame for writing stories, not for proving themselves to the scientific community, and then tried to tell us that all Euclidean Geometry is useless?

I also loath her depiction of the concept of “Rationality”. By claiming that her philosophy comes from pure fact and rationality, and then any rational actor will inevitably lead to her own conclusions, this gives her followers an excuse to end discussion. Rand has the facts, agreeing with Rand means you are rational. Thus, if you do not agree with Rand, then you are irrational. If you are irrational, then Randians have no reason to keep talking to you. You are a lost cause. You are not one of the Atlases, so it is fair to shrug you off. Anyone who criticizes Rand will hear one sentence first, “Have you ever read Rand?” And if you say yes, but still disagree, they will say “You don’t understand Rand.”  Quicker to question you than they are to hear your argument. Quick to drop the conversation when you present counter-arguments. And yes, this is an overgeneralization, but having talked to dozens of Randians, I have yet to hear one person break this mold. Thus my bias has been firmly established in practice. I even had one person say I could not understand Rand from only reading summations of her work, then immediately provided me a summation of Rand’s philosophy written by an unashamed Rand supporter. The irony was lost on this person.

Her work does have some academic merit, but the means she employed in crafting it and expressing it made it fall into traps of self-contradictions and enough ad-hoc explanations that it soon got to the point where is stopped prescribing any sort of change or a means of evaluation, and just became a statement of saying “Everything just is the way it is, and here is my hermeneutical lens.”

I think the best overall criticism of her philosophy is summed up well in this quote, “it attempts to deny in ourselves a desire to nurture and empathize with other human beings by placing ourselves at the center of our own interests, to the exclusion of everyone else in our larger society”

However, I do believe Rand has many views that are worth entertaining to inform our own views, and I am not going to claim that BioShock perfectly tackled Rand at every turn.

In this analysis, I only covered the means Bioshock employed to engaging with Rand’s philosophy. The game itself provides far greater nuance to express arguments for specific concepts in challenging many conceptions of a priori utopias. If anything is taken away from this essay, then I hope it inspires playing BioShock, to experience its philosophy for yourself.