So, I just used Bioshock in my Philosophy Class...

[Exterminas]

...And I thought it would be fun to share some Bullet Points of that experience with you!

It was an eighth Grade Philosophy course and the subject was "Utopias and Dystopias". Lesson itself was part of a series of lessons regarding the Philosophy of State, with different visions of the perfect state being the main focus.

I won't bore you with the details of the lesson, but here are the basics:

I used a video of roughly the first ten Minutes of Bioshock, leading up the first loading screen. With this being eight grade I obviously could not show any of the M-rated stuff that comes past that point. But I was able to use Andrew Ryan's presentation of the principles of Rapture and the ride in the bathysphere as an opener.

During the lesson we established the terms Utopia and Dystopia and the students were tasked to perform a classical thought experiment: We wrote down the Principles of Rapture and explained them (again, eight grade, you can't dump something like "Scientists are free of moral restrictions!" in front of them without going through lengthy explanations).

Then the kids were supposed to image what life in Rapture would be like, based on the Presentation in the Bathysphere and the stunning ride alone. Most of the kids did not know Bioshock (shockingly about six of these kids (age 14) were familiar with the game and it's sequels, despite all three games being rated Mature), so they did not know the city had turned to hell.

The central task of the lesson was to imagine what kind of society could be built upon the Principles narrated by Ryan during the Bathysphere-Ride. Surprisingly the majority of the Class was able to tell Rapture's big problems upfront: Mad (Nazi-)Scientists, it's cold and dark down there and nobody will want to scrub the toilets in Utopia.

Overall the lesson went very well, the students enjoyed it and got a much firmer grasp upon the concepts of utopian/dystopian societies than they would have if I had used a classical (and boring) text.

But there was something negative as well:
As I mentioned, some of the students were familiar with Bioshock. They were surprised that I would bring up the game in Philosophy, since they mostly remembered the graphic Violence and Horror-Elements of the Game. Personally, I would have about as much fun with Bioshock if it had the Gameplay of "Dear Esther", read, no gameplay at all, safe for a Flashlight. I loathe the combat of the Bioshock-Series, since it is mediocre to me and just in the way of me exploring the city and hearing it's story. But to my students, Bioshock was that Game with the crazy Surgeon cutting people to pieces.

Now, obviously an eight Grader's opinion has to be taken with a grain of salt. But to me personally this illustrated a new angle about this old Games, Violence and Kids Discussion:
If we don't educate kids with and about Games, how exactly are they supposed to see past the flashy Violence? There is nothing wrong with enjoying a violent game or two, of course, but If the mad Doctor is the main thing they take away from Bioshock, they somewhat dropped the ball in my opinion. So the lesson I take away from this is to use more Video Games in my Lessons, to create awareness that Games can in deed by a vehicle for all that boring Crap I teach them in Philosophy.
(Obviously one could make the point that they were not supposed to play the games in the first way, to which I reply: Well, but they did.)

TLDR:
Used Bioshock to explain to my students what a utopian society is and isn't. The Lesson went well but it became aware to me that kids don't have any clue that games can be smart. They should be thought about that some more. Bioshock isn't about the Big Daddy.

 

[shrekfan246]

If we don't educate kids with and about Games, how exactly are they supposed to see past the flashy Violence? There is nothing wrong with enjoying a violent game or two, of course, but If the mad Doctor is the main thing they take away from Bioshock, they somewhat dropped the ball in my opinion. So the lesson I take away from this is to use more Video Games in my Lessons, to create awareness that Games can in deed by a vehicle for all that boring Crap I teach them in Philosophy.
(Obviously one could make the point that they were not supposed to play the games in the first way, to which I reply: Well, but they did.)

TLDR:
Used Bioshock to explain to my students what a utopian society is and isn't. The Lesson went well but it became aware to me that kids don't have any clue that games can be smart. They should be thought about that some more. Bioshock isn't about the Big Daddy.

Kids are going to be kids.

In other words, they'll look beyond the flashy violence as they get older. I did, I assume you did, I bet most of the other people on these forums did as well. Bioshock is arguably a great game because it can be both about Flashy Violence[sup]TM[/sup] and the philosophical implications of a society filled with great minds unfettered by the simple limitations of the outside world.

 

[Legion]

Kids are going to be kids.

In other words, they'll look beyond the flashy violence as they get older. I did, I assume you did, I bet most of the other people on these forums did as well. Bioshock is arguably a great game because it can be both about Flashy Violence[sup]TM[/sup] and the philosophical implications of a society filled with great minds unfettered by the simple limitations of the outside world.

Huh, answered already.

It's not different from how when I was younger I laughed at things such as South Park because of the bad language and bizarre stories and can now laugh at it because of the satire and occasionally subtle points. Or how kids will laugh at Disney films because of the funny characters whereas the adults get the subtext.

For example I saw Despicable Me 2 in the cinema recently and as you'd expect there were a lot of children. The kids all laughed at the yellow minions and their antics and the adults were all laughing at Groo because they got the jokes he made that would go over the kids heads.

Most kids at the age of 14 aren't going to understand Objectivism or the the way it can impact a society, or the isolation that would be felt due to being in a city with no contact with the outside world. To them it's about the explosions and the excitement.

Just out of context: I don't get what is so shocking about this. Literally every gamer I know played age 18 rated games before their 16th birthday.

I played the very first GTA when I was 10-11 and saw Terminator 2 when I was 8. I am not sure if I had ignorant parents of lenient ones. A bit of both I guess.

Now on topic:

Religion teachers showed us the Life of Brian to open up peoples minds. Way better than forcing dry texts on youngsters.

We watched that in History class once, and only a handful of us liked it (My father was a huge Monty Python fan so I was familiar with it already). The vast majority of the class didn't get the humour at all, and we were around 15 at the time. Which is kind of what I meant with the above. To most of them if it didn't have violence and explosions it was pretty boring.

 

[Zhukov]

Because the game mostly is about "flashy violence".

90% of your time in a Bioshock game is spent either killing stuff or finding things that will facilitate the killing of stuff.

Ken Levine has said something to this effect. He tries to make a fun shooter first and a thoughtful story second.

The philosophy and setting are barely more than window dressing. Really good window dressing, sure, but at the end of the day all the mechanics and most of the duration is devoted to shooting people in the face. I don't find fault with your students for remembering Bioshock as "that game where you kill crazy doctors."

It says something about gaming that the titles we like to wave about as philosophical and interesting still amount to shooting galleries.

PS. Just to be clear, this is not me hating on Bioshock. I love the Bioshock games. But a little reality never hurts.

 

[Exterminas]

Wierdly enough I played Unreal Tournament back when I was twelve, so I understand that kids will play these games.

But once you work as a teacher, you start to develop these weird ideas, like that age restrictions should be observed xD

In the End I didn't worry too much about that, maybe "shocking" was too strong a word to use.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Bioshock is pretty much a critique of Ayn Rand's philosophy and why it could never work in a society. You could have just used that.

 

[Exterminas]

Bioshock is pretty much a critique of Ayn Rand's philosophy and why it could never work in a society. You could have just used that.

Yes, I could have. But Ayn Rand is pretty much unknown as a philosopher here in Europe. Especially in 8th grade

There are lots of other ways Bioshock could be used, but ultimately you can't fit all of them in a single lesson.

 

[Silvanus]

Bioshock is pretty much a critique of Ayn Rand's philosophy and why it could never work in a society. You could have just used that.

I don't think it would have worked as well to present an eighth-grade class with a giant, dense political tome.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Bioshock is pretty much a critique of Ayn Rand's philosophy and why it could never work in a society. You could have just used that.

I don't think it would have worked as well to present an eighth-grade class with a giant, dense political tome.

Ayn Rand's philosophy is so simple and idiotic, a 6 year old can grasp it.

 

[bak00777]

I used Bioshock as an example of alternative means of delivering a story in a short paper i wrote last year. It was in an American Lit class and I had to be either for or against non book literary means. I also included The Watchmen graphic novvel as an example.

 

[Mike Richards]

Because the game mostly is about "flashy violence".

90% of your time in a Bioshock game is spent either killing stuff or finding things that will facilitate the killing of stuff.

Ken Levine has said something to this effect. He tries to make a fun shooter first and a thoughtful story second.

The philosophy and setting are barely more than window dressing. Really good window dressing, sure, but at the end of the day all the mechanics and most of the duration is devoted to shooting people in the face. I don't find fault with your students for remembering Bioshock as "that game where you kill crazy doctors."

It says something about gaming that the titles we like to wave about as philosophical and interesting still amount to shooting galleries.

PS. Just to be clear, this is not me hating on Bioshock. I love the Bioshock games. But a little reality never hurts.

I don't exactly know if that's fair though, since it brings up the question of what exactly window dressing is. To say that they still amount to shooting galleries is both true and misleading, because it seems based on the idea that the point of all games is inherently the gameplay and anything else is a secondary concern.

However, I think it's totally possible for different games to have different 'reasons to exist' so to speak. I myself never played any of the Bioshock games for the combat, it was always for the story and exploration with the gameplay severing as the perfect delivery mechanism.

To use movies as an example, though they are primarily a visual medium, not all movies are 'about' watching unique or interesting direction or spectacle. Some are about following good dialogue or other story concerns, and the visual nature is simply the best way to present it to the audience.

Dear Esther, which the OP brought up, illustrates the potential for this kind of alternative balance quite well. It would be quite interesting to see what a Bioshock game that took more of that approach could do. Perhaps even with a touch of Amnesia influence, that could be amazing and possibly a nice change of pace. But for me at least it would still only amount to a new way to present the stuff I actually came here for, and as far as I'm concerned there's nothing wrong with that.

OP: I love hearing stories of people doing stuff like this and I'm glad that it went so well. Keep up the awesomeness.

 

[Zhukov]

[snip]

However, I think it's totally possible for different games to have different 'reasons to exist' so to speak. I myself never played any of the Bioshock games for the combat, it was always for the story and exploration with the gameplay severing as the perfect delivery mechanism.

So the perfect delivery mechanism for a philosophical counterpoint regarding utopias (or whatever you consider Bioshock to be) is to walk around gathering ammunition, setting people on fire and shooting anything that looks at you funny?

I am unconvinced.

To use movies as an example, though they are primarily a visual medium, not all movies are 'about' watching unique or interesting direction or spectacle. Some are about following good dialogue or other story concerns, and the visual nature is simply the best way to present it to the audience.

Sure, but would you say that of a movie that was 10% dialogue/story and 90% spectacle? Because that's what Bioshock is. Just substitute dialogue with philosophy and spectacle with setting crazy people on fire.

Dear Esther, which the OP brought up, illustrates the potential for this kind of alternative balance quite well. It would be quite interesting to see what a Bioshock game that took more of that approach could do. Perhaps even with a touch of Amnesia influence, that could be amazing and possibly a nice change of pace. But for me at least it would still only amount to a new way to present the stuff I actually came here for, and as far as I'm concerned there's nothing wrong with that.

I'd say Dear Esther was the opposite extreme. Walk forwards while listening to narration with not a single scrap of interaction to be found.

What I'd like to see are some games with themes like Bioshock that come up with means of interaction that are not "Here's a gun, go smoke some fools."

 

[Thomas Barnsley]

Please, a large portion of my year was watching Game of Thrones at about 14 or 15. Bioshock is nothing...

Also I really love it when teachers do this stuff. My religion class did the Matrix, for example, and I enjoyed it so much I actually put effort in and got 28/30 on the exam.

 

[Jandau]

Surprisingly the majority of the Class was able to tell Rapture's big problems upfront: Mad (Nazi-)Scientists, it's cold and dark down there and nobody will want to scrub the toilets in Utopia.

This is the most interesting part of the post to me - the fact that they could process the information about a fairly complex subject and then reach logical conclusions from that, all the while learning in a form that isn't going to bore them to death.

 

[white_wolf]

That is interesting OP that you could bring it into school and create a lesson out of it. We use the older AC to show our kids actual buildings in Europe they can climb around on them and we can tell them about the surrounding area it's great for that some games are also good for debate on morality or cause and effect. You are right though cutting through the violence and getting the actual point of the games the actual lesson if there be one the game was suppose to teach you isn't a bad thing to try to do.

 

[PoolCleaningRobot]

Awesome lesson. I was taking an online philosophy course and I needed an article or video of an opinion that was well argued so used Jim Sterling's video on why video games don't cause violence. I was pleasantly surprised that a few parents agreed with me and thought the whole video game thing was just scapegoating for bad parenting.

I was just thinking the other day that a college could easily teach a class on video games in the same way they teach classes on films and literature. Sucks that I only got one semester left and probably won't get to see such a class in my college career

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Bioshock is pretty much a critique of Ayn Rand's philosophy and why it could never work in a society. You could have just used that.

I don't think it would have worked as well to present an eighth-grade class with a giant, dense political tome.

Ayn Rand's philosophy is so simple and idiotic, a 6 year old can grasp it.

I doubt that. Having read Anthem, her "simplest" book, I can tell you it'd be pretty dense for a 6 year old.
Everything else she wrote, not counting essays, had biblical proportions. You'd get lucky to get Anthem as a school read in high school, tops.

 

[Fox12]

...And I thought it would be fun to share some Bullet Points of that experience with you!

It was an eighth Grade Philosophy course and the subject was "Utopias and Dystopias". Lesson itself was part of a series of lessons regarding the Philosophy of State, with different visions of the perfect state being the main focus.

I won't bore you with the details of the lesson, but here are the basics:

I used a video of roughly the first ten Minutes of Bioshock, leading up the first loading screen. With this being eight grade I obviously could not show any of the M-rated stuff that comes past that point. But I was able to use Andrew Ryan's presentation of the principles of Rapture and the ride in the bathysphere as an opener.

During the lesson we established the terms Utopia and Dystopia and the students were tasked to perform a classical thought experiment: We wrote down the Principles of Rapture and explained them (again, eight grade, you can't dump something like "Scientists are free of moral restrictions!" in front of them without going through lengthy explanations).

Then the kids were supposed to image what life in Rapture would be like, based on the Presentation in the Bathysphere and the stunning ride alone. Most of the kids did not know Bioshock (shockingly about six of these kids (age 14) were familiar with the game and it's sequels, despite all three games being rated Mature), so they did not know the city had turned to hell.

The central task of the lesson was to imagine what kind of society could be built upon the Principles narrated by Ryan during the Bathysphere-Ride. Surprisingly the majority of the Class was able to tell Rapture's big problems upfront: Mad (Nazi-)Scientists, it's cold and dark down there and nobody will want to scrub the toilets in Utopia.

Overall the lesson went very well, the students enjoyed it and got a much firmer grasp upon the concepts of utopian/dystopian societies than they would have if I had used a classical (and boring) text.

But there was something negative as well:
As I mentioned, some of the students were familiar with Bioshock. They were surprised that I would bring up the game in Philosophy, since they mostly remembered the graphic Violence and Horror-Elements of the Game. Personally, I would have about as much fun with Bioshock if it had the Gameplay of "Dear Esther", read, no gameplay at all, safe for a Flashlight. I loathe the combat of the Bioshock-Series, since it is mediocre to me and just in the way of me exploring the city and hearing it's story. But to my students, Bioshock was that Game with the crazy Surgeon cutting people to pieces.

Now, obviously an eight Grader's opinion has to be taken with a grain of salt. But to me personally this illustrated a new angle about this old Games, Violence and Kids Discussion:
If we don't educate kids with and about Games, how exactly are they supposed to see past the flashy Violence? There is nothing wrong with enjoying a violent game or two, of course, but If the mad Doctor is the main thing they take away from Bioshock, they somewhat dropped the ball in my opinion. So the lesson I take away from this is to use more Video Games in my Lessons, to create awareness that Games can in deed by a vehicle for all that boring Crap I teach them in Philosophy.
(Obviously one could make the point that they were not supposed to play the games in the first way, to which I reply: Well, but they did.)

TLDR:
Used Bioshock to explain to my students what a utopian society is and isn't. The Lesson went well but it became aware to me that kids don't have any clue that games can be smart. They should be thought about that some more. Bioshock isn't about the Big Daddy.

Hmm, to be fair the type of kids who pick up an M-rated shooter probably weren't the kinds of kids looking for anything philosophical in the first place. I have a similar problem with literature, in that I don't think kids can fully appreciate certain pieces of literature until their older. This isn't because they're stupid, or can't understand what a book is trying to say, but rather that you can't fully appreciate certain ideas until you've had certain adult experiences in your life. That's why everyone I knew, myself included, hated The Great Gatsby when we read it. I still have issues with it, but I've come to begrudgingly give it more credit as I've gotten older due to certain life experiences. The Great Gatsby wasn't a book intended for middle school kids. That's also the reason I'm thankful I didn't read Lord of the Flies until I was in collage, and I did it for personal enjoyment. If I read it in middle school it probably would have ruined it, but now it's my favorite book. Keep in mind my friend had to read that book in class, and the teacher made everyone write a love song for piggy, so your mileage may vary...

My point is, I wouldn't say they necessarily dropped the ball, because the only way for them to make it more accessible would have been for them to either dumb down the themes or to make them more heavy handed. Either would have been bad writing, and truth be told I thought the ending was already a little too heavy handed as it is (you literally beat the cover of Atlas Shrugged to death with a wrench). It was made with an adult audience in mind, not just because of violence, but because of the mature themes. I'm not surprised it went over some of their heads.

It's interesting that you're using games to teach a class though, I haven't heard of that before. I'm glad, there are some brilliant narrative games being released now, especially in the Indie market. With Dear Esther, Coming Home, To the Moon, and Papers Please all exploring really unique ideas about people. If you do more of this then you should make more threads about it, I'm curious to see how the children react.

Maybe you could do an activity similar to Papers Please, where groups of kids have to choose what kinds of people they let through security, but at the same time thay have to keep their jobs and support their family, so they can't let everyone in. Similar to the "we have a lifeboat but we can only fit five people out of ten" exercise.