I am sick and tired of this. BioShock is not clever. It's not intriguing or engaging or immersive. Nothing about the plot or themes of this game is anything special or new. It had the forehead-slappingly obvious point that Ayn Rand was full of shit and one single Shyamalan-style twist that smart players probably saw coming a mile away, and nothing more. It spends the entire game building up to that one underwhelming moment and after it blows that load it has nothing left and starts flailing about for one of the most disappointing finales this side of "Hey dudes thanks, for rescuing me. Let's go for a burger.... HA! HA! HA! HA".
The perception of BioShock as some kind of messianic uber-narrative is nothing more than the byproduct of its cheap, shallow association with Ayn Rand and the fact that most gamers don't actually have any experience with better, more intelligent games, or with serious media in general. If you've never seen anything but buddy cop movies, yeah, Die Hard with a Vengeance probably seems like Citizen Kane to you.
BioShock wasn't bad. It had some fun gameplay concepts and a neat setting. But the pedestal it is placed upon solely on the virtue of its popularity is wholly undeserved, and extremely aggravating to everyone else. Once a game reaches a certain critical mass of fan following, I usually refrain from making any kind of criticism of it, however deserved it may be, but seeing the story of BioShock unironically suggested as the best of all time is one of the most fatuous and shortsighted lapses of judgment I have ever seen perpetrated on these boards, and it makes me wish I could shoot lightning out of my hands and solve the problem once and for all.