You are a Big Daddy, a person engineered through genetics and mental conditioning to have a bond enforced through pheromones and preconditioned responses. Doesn't seem to be that much of an independent state to me. And while the game say7s that you've been brought to life and your freedom restored, it goes to lengths on several levels to demonstrate that you have not at all had your freedom restored.
Pimppeter2 said:
WRONG. When writing your reviews, unless you feel that spoilers are absolutely necessary to prove a point, avoid including them. Even if you feel that something must be included, do your best to restrain yourself. There are people out there who want to play the game and experience the story for themselves out there, so try to keep that in mind. And if you must spoil something, stick it in these spoiler tags: don't just leave it hanging around your review for all to see.
And I would also appreciate if you weren't such a dick to criticism.
Here's an idea. Read the part where I tell people who have not played the game and want any spoilers to remain sanctant to not go any further. But a guy like you just wants to take a shot or two, not really be constructive. That's cool though man, you've got your little thing going for you, must do you well.
Hahahaha....man..examples of behavior used to claim I've summarized the game. Are you high? What's next, tell me your a high school engrish teacher and you know what your talking about? But perhaps this belongs in Game Discussion. It's not really a review of the game itself, which would be an argument you could have used with merit. It simply examines a theme in the games itself. It reviews a theme within the game, but does not particularity count as a game review.
Tsk Tsk.
Hahahaha....man..examples of behavior used to claim I've summarized the game. Are you high? What's next, tell me your a high school engrish teacher and you know what your talking about? But perhaps this belongs in Game Discussion. It's not really a review of the game itself, which would be an argument you could have used with merit. It simply examines a theme in the games itself. It reviews a theme within the game, but does not particularity count as a game review.
Tsk Tsk.
I think people are too picky on reviews, but here are my thoughts in response to what your saying:
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I'll try and articulate this as best I can, since I'm very tired and having some nasty allergies right now:
This will be long, but please try and suffer through the entire thing, even where it gets seemingly off topic.
You are correct to an extent. Understand that where the first Bioshock was a criticism Right Wing thought, this game was an even worse criticism of Left Wing thought. This is one of the reasons why it's less popular.
Basically the left wing ideal comes down to the idea of freedom and individuality being surpressed for the good of society. It can start out positive with the idea of everyone being themselves and living in freedom, and helping each other "like a family" but in the end it largely comes down to the needs of the community before the needs of any paticular individual.
The left wing ideal is that of communism. The idea that everyone lives together as equals and shares the resources of society equally. This is great when your at the bottom and being lifted up, and get to see people who have more than you and "lord" it torn down, but in the end it also means that your abillity to progress yourself has to be severely limited.
Communism generally falls apart because in the end a society requires people to do a lot of hard, and very nasty work, and a lot more of them than will be able to do anything seen as "worthwhile". Basically given the option not many are going to choose to be farmers or manure shovelers, or work in an assembly line. Everyone will want to contribute by doing something important, "easy" and seemingly prestigious. As a result things are going to fall apart, or everyone is going to die for lack of nessecities.
This is why Communism ultimatly leads to socialism, which is the idea that a goverment is established which makes sure all the needed jobs are done, and distributes resources based on contribution. Of course the administrators wind up having the most important job and thus take the most, and are going to inevitably wind up giving the best jobs to those they favor (friends, family, etc...).
Bioshock 2 pretty much presents this as the backdrop. Basically, even with the best of the best brought to Rapture the bottom line was that someone had to take out the trash and do all th crappy jobs. Despite being determined by competition, the people at the bottom are always going to be disgruntled. Add to this Ryan's slow descent into insanity due to his ongoing war with Fontaine, and other factors and you wind up with a lot of discontent.
Basically you wind up with a story about how a leader shows up and rallies the downtrodden: the losers of society, by promising to lift them up and tear down the elite. It's all brotherhood and sunshine, Viva La Revolution. Of course this doesn't work because when all is said and done, there are still only so many resources, someone has to decide who gets what, and of course you wind up with a new leader who is just as tyranical as the old one, and arguably worse, because the new leadership doesn't have the abillity to really do much that is constructive like rebuild the city. Just about anyone who was really good is dead having perished during the war, or having been killed by the revolutionaries themselves. This of course leads to the leader falling futher into madness and deciding to sacrifice everyone in hopes of creating a "utopian" and getting rid of free will and everything in it's entirety.
Much like the metaphors in the first game, a lot of this comes down to the ironic left wind policy of trying to guarantee freedom, by taking freedom away. Big goverment, censorship of free speech to avoid "hate speech", and similar things. It turns into an insane police state despite the best of intentions. For the purposes of Bioshock though all of this was accelerated and done heavily in the sci-fi direction.
The central story of your character "Delta" and his little sister "Eleanor" is very much intended to be about free will and so on. I don't think it's quite as dark as you make it out to be however. Yes, Delta *DOES* die for love, a love which was implanted. However does this make it any less real? What's more the things you do, do indeed influance Eleanor. Being modified the way he was I honestly thought there was no other way the story could have ended, one way or another Delta did what he set out to do, and lived on through his loved ones. Of course the metaphor of love as science... well... ask yourself if that makes it any less real? That's what makes the story resonate on so many levels. Your supposed to think about it.
Also I will be honest in saying that I think a key point your missing is that Eleanor could have probably escaped using the little sisters any time she wanted to. I think part of the entire point was that Eleanor needed "Daddy" as much as Delta needed her, which is why she did things the way they developed. To some extent I think they were sort of two halves of the same being storywise, and that is also a big part of why Eleanor draws the spirit of Delta at the end because she can't be truely whole without him.
Truthfully though I sort of suspect that in a lot of ways the story is also about Sinclaire. The man was pure evil, at one time, yet he did indeed seem to have a change of heart and be out to redeem himself for all that he did. You expect him to turn on you, or show some sleazy motive... but in the end he dies for you. To me I think that was as big a part of the whole thing as either Delta or Eleanor.
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In the end though, the question of "does Bioshock hate freedom" is sort of valid. I suppose you could say the jury is out on the subject. In general for all of the 'zapping' Ryan and his individual empowerment philsophy has gotten, it's noteworthy that he was well intentioned to begin with, and Rapture only fell apart due to some rather extenuating circumstances. Without Fontaine's infiltration things would not have fallen apart, and it's doubtful he would have went off the deep end. A lot of the more evil things Ryan did, took place during the time period when he was at war. You look at what he did to Johnny Topside, BUT at the same time consider that one of the big issues he was facing was Fontaine smuggling goods from the surface into Rapture which was a crime. If he let Johnny live given the political situation and the war going on, that would have really messed with his position. Plus he had a few screws loose at that point. Ryan's big scene in Bioshock 1, showed that he wasn't totally evil, even if he was ruthless, and still had some minor grasp on his sanity.
In the end I think the issue isn't so much one about freedom, but the fact that any philsophy taken to extremes is bad. That and none of the major schools of societal thought have it truely "right". In the end in both cases the failure was that there are going to be more people at the bottom than the top, and those people are going to be discontent.
So in other words, because the game doesn't allow for Mass Effect-style choices that can drastically change the story, the game loves slavery?
No. Bioshock simply has a more linear way or telling the story, allowing interactivity to play the role of storyteller rather than defining the story with interactivity. The game never allows you to choose because Delta is choosing. He is a character that has his own motivations, and he makes his own choices by them. It's not that the game hates freedom, it's that Delta makes his own choices, not the player.
I always found the slavery angle in the bioshock series to be a strange one anyway big daddies/little sisters/pheromone controlled splicers/jack are all products of slavery (completly incompatible with objectivism) the only true freedom is not in your actions but your physical escape from rapture which itself is really a very pretty cage or atleast it was
What's your point tho? Most games make you a slave to the linear development of the story... you're hardly ever presented with real choices, only in sandbox games are you allowed at least some degree of freedom.
As to the killing/not killing of Grace, Stanley, and Gil - I personally saved Grace as I understood her story and why she hates you. It was neither of your faults but just misunderstanding. I killed Stanley because he was a real douchebag. He was a vile person. And I killed Gil because he wanted me to and I felt it would be for the best. The only thing that peeves me is that by killing those 2 I didn't get the secret trophy, which is real bullshit.
I'm glad to see that other people feel strongly about Bioshock's story, and I always enjoy a helathy debate, but since finishing Bioshock 2 for the second time (on the easiest setting so I could get two trophies and the most negative ending), my original idea does not feel complete.
I believe while essentially there is still a strong basis of truth to my theory, it does not to my satisfaction explain the reasons and motives behind any of the characters in Bioshock 2.
To further express my ideas of the complexity of the psychology of Bioshock, in both the characters and the social and political systems they embody, I will be writing an analytical review of the overall themes of both of the Bioshock games as well as a dissection of the operating psychology of each character.
I realize that many of you might not be interested in something like this, after all, it's just a game, and many of the elements used within it are heavily borrowed and can be easily researched on their own, with each having copious amounts of reference material, eg; Objectivism and the founder Ayn Rand, and the 'People's front', or Bolshevism or Communism or a dozen other collective effort systems, Free Trade Capitalism, and so forth.
However, it is exactly because the creators of the games used these elements as the basis, background and foreground, from the architecture to the political, that I see a need to write this.
Everything a person creates contains a part of themselvs within it, a bit of their inner psyche, whether they intend to or not, concious or otherwise. What you create is part of you because it is your ideas that form it, how and what you think. You can only build what is in your grasp to imagine or understand. You can only perceive something through your own thoughts, and then attempt to explain it to yourself using the logic and reasoning you have formed or been trained to. You can try to see from someone else's point of view, but having never been someone else, it's rather hard.
What my point is though, is that Bioshock, even though at face value nothing more than a game meant to entertain a generation of adults suffering with an overabundance of inner-child, it still has meaning. There is still a purpose to its message. Whether or not the creators of this game intended to, they were speaking to us more loudly and intimately than most people will realize.
And that is why I want to blow your minds.
But give me a week or two.
I wouldn't say that you exactly die at the end. In the good ending which i got yes physically you do die but Elenor absorbs your excistense into her living self so that Delta could always be there to guide her. Very interesting look on the game though
i disagree to some extent, because i DO think there is a fundamental difference between the two games in THAT particular field
the message in the first game is
"a man chooses, a slave obeys"
the message that I got from the second game is
"even as a slave, you can still choose"
and someone who chooses, is not a slave
he's a man
No. I cannot accept your interpretation for the second game. It might be perfectly valid, but it completely undermines the theme of the first game. It would be like if they made a sequel to Dr. Strangelove where the Russians and Americans found a way to protect themselves from Cobalt Thorium G poisoning. Even if it is a damned fine movie it will forever ruin the first one, so it is on those grounds that I must ask you to find a new message for Bioshock 2.
Very, very nice post. Although i dont agree completly with it, you do make a fine point, dear sir.
You certainly put a lot of effort into dissecting the psyche of a Big Daddy and his Slave driver...euh, child.
It adds a nice dimension to the game if i ever would decide to play it again.
I look forward to reading more of your most astute observations
WRONG. When writing your reviews, unless you feel that spoilers are absolutely necessary to prove a point, avoid including them. Even if you feel that something must be included, do your best to restrain yourself. There are people out there who want to play the game and experience the story for themselves out there, so try to keep that in mind. And if you must spoil something, stick it in these spoiler tags: don't just leave it hanging around your review for all to see.
This wasn't really a review, it was an attempt at literary critique and as such needs to openly discuss the most significant elements of the plot, which are usually considered "spoilers". Since I intend to address some of the critique I will be discussing spoilers for both games from here in, I will not be obscuring them because it would break the flow of the argument too much, skip on to the next post if you wish to remain pure.
As critique I believe it fails as well however when regarding the issue of agency, which is the central theme of Bioshock (in both games). This issue was exclusively handled as if it were a passive medium. If Bioshock were a novel or a movie, the criticism that any "choice" presented to the character is a pseudochoice because preexisting conditioning can be said to be choosing for them is potentially valid (though see below regarding determinism and choice).
However, in a videogame, that's not as astute a criticism, because the intelligent agent is the player not the character. This is one illustration of that confusion:
Secondly, any so called moral choice in the game can be pointed out to ass animal instinct. The player chooses to harvest or rescue the little girls, either can be reasonably explained by survivor mechanisms or protector mechanisms, consume all available resources so that you can achieve your preset goal, or protect this semblance of something that is familiar and deeply ingrained as a control object.
I am not Subject Delta, I am a person playing a videogame. I have not been conditioned to regard the Little Sisters in any context by anything other than my memories of the original game. When I make the choice to harvest or rescue them, I am making a choice as a free moral agent. Of course, as Bioshock 1 pointed out, this is the only free choice I can make as a player. My progress through the game is not a sequence of free choices, either I succeed at tightly constrained goals, doing anything that is asked of me with the words "would you kindly" or I turn the game off and play something else.
I feel an aside about what free will actually means is appropriate at this point, "free will" can be said to be exercised even in a deterministic universe when an intelligent agent chooses in the absence of external duress. Even if it is argued that my "choice" is nothing of the sort, and is actually an amalgam of my genes, environment, and upbringing, if I am not under duress when I make the choice, if there is no metaphorical gun to my head, I have made a free moral choice. The OP however decides on some bizarre reversal of this:
You are instructed to find Grace in the game by your little sister. You do so and she offers you no direct physical confrontation. The Same goes for Stanley and Gil. Perhaps if these characters threatened you more directly, offered a more immediate threat to you, would these be justified as moral choices, to harm or not at the expense of yourself. But either killing them or not is no sign of free will or independent thought. A reaction to something that has harmed you, or ignoring something that offers you no threat
It is the very fact that these characters offer no physical threat that makes killing or sparing them a free moral choice. If they fought or threatened the player directly when confronted, then that choice would not be made freely, then it would be a reaction to external duress and not a truly free choice. However, by being given the chance to murder them in cold blood, even if that could be justified (Grace directed others to kill you, Stanley is a mass murderer who directly harmed the player's avatar and the object of his quest, though in the distant past, and Gil specifically requests that you kill the thing that he has become). Because none of these characters hold a gun to your head and asks you to choose whether to kill them, the choice of whether to kill them or not is the choice of a free moral agent.
Now, regarding Eleanor, the OP has this to say:
She loves you as a child loves the gentle protector. She needs you there for that presence, and Lamb is right when she says that Elenor's love is selfish. She loves you for the way it makes her feel. She herself was conditioned to love you beyond all things, and where is the demonstrative proof that either she or Lamb have broken that conditioning?
I say that the proof is in the way Eleanor acts at the end of the game. She does not simply love Delta as a Little Sister, she regards him as an actual father, a protector certainly, but also a source of learning and individual moral guidance, which is the one thing which she was specifically kept from by Lamb. The free moral choices which the player is allowed to make are what teach Eleanor as a parent teaches a child by their actions.
In short, I believe the OP to be taking an overly deterministic approach to the concept of free will, which is especially confused by his conflating the character as moral agent with the player as moral agent.
Basically you wind up with a story about how a leader shows up and rallies the downtrodden: the losers of society, by promising to lift them up and tear down the elite. It's all brotherhood and sunshine, Viva La Revolution. Of course this doesn't work because when all is said and done, there are still only so many resources, someone has to decide who gets what, and of course you wind up with a new leader who is just as tyranical as the old one, and arguably worse, because the new leadership doesn't have the abillity to really do much that is constructive like rebuild the city. Just about anyone who was really good is dead having perished during the war, or having been killed by the revolutionaries themselves. This of course leads to the leader falling futher into madness and deciding to sacrifice everyone in hopes of creating a "utopian" and getting rid of free will and everything in it's entirety.
I think you've misunderstood Lamb's ideal. Lamb is not really anything you can understand by relating it to communism or socialism. She is not trying to create a state of equality within Rapture or even the world outside, she is trying to create the ultimate slave, her view of the "utopian" is of a person with every conceivable skill, talent, and benefit, a true superman, but one which is shackled to the ideal of advancing any and every person except themself. Her slave is beyond even Ryan's definition, the slave does not obey, it anticipates the order and fulfils it before the master knew that it would be issued.
Lamb's story is an extension and reversal not of the Objectivist politics of the first game, but what it means to be a free agent.
In general for all of the 'zapping' Ryan and his individual empowerment philsophy has gotten, it's noteworthy that he was well intentioned to begin with, and Rapture only fell apart due to some rather extenuating circumstances. Without Fontaine's infiltration things would not have fallen apart, and it's doubtful he would have went off the deep end.
Rapture would have fallen apart eventually. Pauper's Drop did not come about as a result of Fontaine's actions. Rapture was doomed to begin with, before Fontaine, before Adam, there was an underclass, and Persephone existed long before the war. Fontaine took advantage of an unstable situation, but he did not make that situation, any more than Lamb did. Indeed, Lamb was only brought to Rapture because there was already discontent which would have eventually bubbled over.
A lot of the more evil things Ryan did, took place during the time period when he was at war. You look at what he did to Johnny Topside, BUT at the same time consider that one of the big issues he was facing was Fontaine smuggling goods from the surface into Rapture which was a crime.
Of course, the very fact that Ryan instituted censorship in the first place shows that he started off by betraying his ideal of freedom by imposing censorship by fiat. If Rapture was truly as free as Ryan claimed, there could be no smuggling.
I always found the slavery angle in the bioshock series to be a strange one anyway big daddies/little sisters/pheromone controlled splicers/jack are all products of slavery (completly incompatible with objectivism) the only true freedom is not in your actions but your physical escape from rapture which itself is really a very pretty cage or atleast it was
The slavery angle in Bioshock is nothing to do with conditioning of any character in any way. It is about the conditioning of you as a player to follow the goals laid out for you by a game designer and presented by someone you hardly know in an environment you are entirely unfamiliar with. The fact that your character does anything he is asked to with the phrase "would you kindly" is a reflection of the fact that you the player do anything you are asked to with the word "GOAL:" in front of it on your mission screen, and that this is the only way you can proceed with your interaction with the game. Jack dies if he tries to resist, if you as a player wish to "resist" you can only turn the game off.
The same theme is present in Metal Gear Solid 2, however that presents it poorly as a result of Kojima's confused wittering script and the fact that you hardly "play" one of his games anyway.
The original Bioshock underscored this message by taking "control" away from the player only once, for the scene in Ryan's office.
Delta never chooses anything. Your actions to progress the plot in Bioshock 2 are out of the necessity of self preservation. He must reach Eleanor, or he will die. (Likewise you as a player must continue the story, or turn the game off).
As for whether or not your actions truly forms the base of Elenor's own behavior, you can also consider that because she is a major influence in his actions, perhaps it is her influence on Delta that makes him harvest or rescue the little sisters, and not the other way around.
Eleanor has no moral agency, this was her mother's entire goal in her upbringing. She was intended to never think for or of herself, that was the goal of Lamb's birthing of the "Utopian" human (and it's actually quite clear from her audiologs that she does not have even the normal moral understanding of a young girl). She is not influencing Delta's morality, and even if she were, that would not be relevant, because the player chooses the fate of the Little Sisters, not Delta.
Edit: Right, that's enough from me, I'll shut up and go to bed now.
By god... a thought provoking thread that presents Bioshock as true art. I am disbelief distilled. Honestly I don't know how to feel about it all. If Jack was a slave in secret and Delta was a slave but couldn't grasp that particular idea are they equivelent?
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