Jason Rose
BioShock made a big splash not only for the depth of its subject matter, but also for the way it utilized its video game medium to present its big ideas in a uniquely engaging way. The game weaves many themes into its complicated narrative, complete with shifting identities, science fiction superpowers, and survival-horror overtones. As a result, it can be difficult to pick out what Ayn Rand’s (1905–82) philosophy of Objectivism says and what BioShock offers in response. Rand, who developed her philosophy of “enlightened self-interest” in novels and essays written in the 1940s and 1950s, was heavily influenced by events in her childhood—the Russian Revolution took her family’s business and left them starving. Before becoming a United States citizen in 1931, Rand was so impressed with the skyline of Manhattan when she saw it in 1926 that she cried what she called “tears of splendor.”1 It is no accident that Andrew Ryan’s biography reads as almost identical to Rand’s.
It is clear that BioShock wants to be taken as a spiritual sequel to Rand’s philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged, revealing a possible fate for John Galt’s mysterious hidden utopia, sought after for much of the novel but never fully revealed, as the book ends just before Galt discloses his society and its plans for the world.2 On the one hand, it seems rather unfair for BioShock to bill itself as a reimagining and a critique of Rand’s works by making Andrew Ryan’s version of Galt’s utopian Atlantis a place of dystopian horror. Are we to think less of Rand simply because BioShock depicts a possible result of her ideology as very, very undesirable? In fact, I don’t think BioShock is guilty of this cheap rhetorical trick, but to explain why, I must first clarify what Ayn Rand herself has to say about art, emotions, and ethics. Then, we can see how BioShock makes its philosophical points on these topics through its narrative and gameplay. Finally, this will put us in a better position to judge whether BioShock creator Ken Levine is fair in his treatment of Rand.
If you have played and enjoyed BioShock, you probably know Rand’s Objectivist bottom line: society benefits most if everyone is free to act in their own enlightened self-interest, with “enlightened” here referring to fair play and mutual respect for one’s peers. Andrew Ryan refers to “The Great Chain of Industry” as a wonderful metaphor for this outlook on enlightenment-through-capitalism. Frank Fontaine, on the other hand, is an excellent example of the kind of unenlightened selfishness that Rand would never advocate. Starting Fontaine Futuristics to capitalize on the discovery of ADAM on the ocean floor was ambitious, perhaps, but not villainous. Pretending to be a revolutionary figure named Atlas and leading Rapture into a civil war so that he can monopolize the ADAM and conquer the surface world certainly was villainous, and no Objectivist would argue otherwise.
Rand wrote novels as well as philosophical essays like those found in her Romantic Manifesto, where she applies her Objectivist philosophy to art and literature to explain humanity’s need for art. She places great importance on works of art that show us difficult truths in an accessible form (BioShock itself is a wonderful example of this). She even articulates the goal of her own fiction writing—Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, the novels on which BioShock is based—as a projection of her ideal humanity. Rand develops her philosophy through fiction because she defines art as a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s perspective. That is, a work of art is an artist’s take on what it is to be human. Art, according to Rand, concretizes humanity’s fundamental view of ourselves and our existence:
[Art] tells man, in effect, which aspects of his experience are to be regarded as essential, significant, important. In this sense, art teaches man how to use his consciousness. It conditions or stylizes man’s consciousness by conveying to him a certain way of looking at existence.3
Artists selectively reproduce the qualities of man that they think are essential to humankind. According to Rand, this is the objective value of art. Rational human beings need art to “bring man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allow him to grasp them directly,” as if they were something perceivable.4 We need art to truly thrive, not merely to keep boredom at bay.
Faced with an uncaring universe, human beings need a comprehensive view of existence to function: to integrate values, to choose goals, to maintain the unity and coherence of their lives… to save the Little Sisters or harvest them. We find answers in value judgments like the Little Sister dilemma that ultimately influence every moment of our lives, our every action. This is how artworks (movies, novels, video games, interpretive dance) can do much more than merely stave off boredom. According to Rand, contemplating artworks teaches us how to integrate our values and think about humanity’s place in the cosmos.
It seems that BioShock is exactly the kind of artwork that Rand would appreciate, even if she would strongly contest its particular claims about her views. Rand saw Atlas Shrugged as “the projection of an ideal man, as an end in itself.” She had in mind the protagonists of her stories, characters like John Galt, an inventor and philosopher who believes that his society is faltering under collectivist socialist ideals by celebrating mediocrity and enforcing self-destructive policies through oppressive bureaucratic regulation. This should sound familiar. Say it with me:
“No,” says the man in Washington, “it belongs to the poor.”
“No,” says the man in the Vatican, “it belongs to God.”
“No,” says the man in Moscow, “it belongs to everyone.”5
In Atlas Shrugged, an industrialist named Henry Rearden develops Rearden Metal, stronger and lighter than any known alloy. The government tries to halt production because other industrialists fear losing money to this new metal, but when the government fails to stop Rearden, it demands that Rearden sell it the new alloy at a low price for it to make use of. Disgusted with society’s hypocrisy, John Galt invites the best and brightest scientists, industrialists, and artists to join him in a secret society cut off from the rest of the world, where they can be brilliant without interference. You might say that Galt is building a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, and where the great would not be constrained by the small. Without these “Atlases” holding up the world, the economy plummets, scientific progress grinds to a halt, and the “parasites” of the world struggle and fail to fill the very large shoes the go-getters left behind. Rand’s message is clear: When Atlas shrugs, the world comes tumbling down. So let great people be great, because in the long run it’s better for everyone.
It is no accident that BioShock invites players to imagine the game beginning where Atlas Shrugged ends—Rapture, Ryan’s version of Galt’s hidden super-science capitalist utopia, after roughly a decade of operation. Rand wrote in her notes that she expected Galt in her novel to have “no [character] progression” and “no inner conflict” because he was already “integrated (indivisible) and perfect,” which makes Andrew Ryan the perfect foil for Galt in BioShock.6 Ken Levine explains:
I wanted to make Andrew Ryan a character that people could relate to just a little. He became a monster, but he started out as a guy who wanted something, with a passion for life that he felt he couldn’t have anywhere else.7
Ryan, unlike Galt, is deeply flawed and, though his will is strong and his philosophy clearly defined, he ultimately engineers his own destruction simply because he does change, he is plagued by inner conflicts, he is only human, and he refused to accept all this until it was too late. As the banner at the entrance to Rapture proclaims, there are no “Kings or Gods” in Rapture—“only Man.”
Part of the novelty of BioShock is found in how it tells its story the way only a video game can, how it uses the features of its medium to communicate more to the player than just what characters say and do, and how it teaches players truths about human nature by engaging with them on an emotional level—exactly the things that Rand thinks great art is supposed to do. And it doesn’t just teach players while they play; BioShock teaches players through the act of play. If BioShock were merely read or watched instead of played, it would lose much of its emotional impact. Everything in the first BioShock game comes down to the role that emotions play in our rational decision making, an observation that Levine places at the heart of his critique of Rand and at the heart of his BioShock series. He says as much:
It’s interesting that people put value in things that actually have no real world meaning. But that’s the wonderful thing about fiction; people sort of hook value to things in their head that don’t actually exist. Attaching emotional value to things that don’t exist is the joy of art.8
And while the first BioShock game had two rather black-or-white endings (which many players considered to be the greatest flaw of the first game, along with a seemingly unnecessary and rather easy final boss fight), that’s something Levine regrets. Shortly after the game’s release, he explained in an interview:
[The game’s two endings] sort of came very late and it was something that was requested by somebody up the food chain from me. One of the reasons I was opposed to multiple endings is I never want to do things that have multiple digital outcomes, versus analog outcomes. I want to do it like the weapons system in the combat in BioShock. There are a million different things you can do in every combat; you can play it a million different ways.9
We can already see BioShock: Infinite in the back of his mind here (it’s right there in the title), but we’re still not done reminiscing about the first BioShock game.
Surely a movie or novel could have made this point about art and emotion and choice simply by having characters talk about it (that’s what Atlas Shrugged did), but instead, BioShock goes further by playing on the very same emotional responses that seem to undermine the very human Ryan, as opposed to Rand’s vision of Galt as an ideal superman. Indeed, it is easy to get caught up interpreting a text as rich as BioShock, but it’s also easy to forget that, when one actually plays the game, most of one’s time in Rapture is spent feeling anxious, wary, and horrified in a desperate struggle for survival (at least, until the player acquires some heavier weaponry and tricks out Jack’s arsenal of guns). Horror is an important part of the uniquely playable aspect of the BioShock experience, so let’s take a moment to clarify the nature of horror in general—why works of horror scare us and why it is entertaining when they do.
The prolific genre of horror includes books, films, plays, paintings, music, and, of course, video games. In his 1990 book The Philosophy of Horror: Or Paradoxes of the Heart, philosopher of art Noël Carroll attempts to define the horror genre according to the emotional response that horror fictions seek to promote in audiences, which he names “art-horror.”10 That is, thinking about the Holocaust horrifies us in the traditional sense, while being attacked by Splicers merely “art-horrifies” us. This distinction is useful to make, as it explains why players rarely run out of the room when they see Splicers rushing towards them in the game. In contemplating the characters’ situations in horror movies, we become art-horrified for them.
Survival-horror video games have become perhaps the most popular new form of horror fiction. In fact, video games are arguably the ultimate form of horror fiction, because they give players agency to react to the objects of horror, creating the sense that Splicers are not just scary murderous madmen who want to kill Jack—they are scary murderous madmen who want to kill you-as-Jack! It is up to the player to defeat the objects of horror him- or herself, and the best survival-horror video games emphasize the “survival” part of the genre: limited health and ammo, creepy or off-putting music and enemies, and environments designed to reinforce a sense of impending doom. Much of BioShock’s rhetorical success can be traced back to Levine’s team doing an excellent job at weaving these elements of the genre into the narrative and the criticism of extreme ideology that the narrative presents.
BioShock uses survival-horror to play on the player’s emotions, very much like Fontaine manipulates people’s emotions. Indeed, survival-horror video games work for the same reasons that Rapture fails: emotional responses are a vital part of human nature, an evolutionary advantage that unfortunately leaves us open to manipulation (whether we are conscious of the manipulation or not). The game utilizes emotional rhetoric to make the player feel bad about harvesting a Little Sister. Fontaine understood this better than Ryan (hence his Atlas alter ego and his “Homes for the Poor” to manipulate the disenfranchised of Rapture) and it is because Ryan’s understanding of the importance of emotions comes too late that he meets his tragic fate: killed at the hands of a son he didn’t know he had because he finds himself unprepared to kill “his own flesh and blood.” The great Objectivist is poignantly destroyed by his own sentimentality. The persuasive power of emotions can be seen in nearly every feature of the game, always keeping the player’s attention focused on the environment—ammo and food, the iconic neon advertisements and grisly scenes of madness and death, as well as the audio tapes containing most of the game’s backstory, all reward the player for searching the environments carefully, letting the environments tell most of the story.
It is clever that the advertisements in Rapture still work on us, the players, who learn quickly to listen for the catchy jingles and follow them to nearby vending machines. We even find Jack’s first Plasmid by following a huge lit-up arrow pointing the way to a “free sample” of the stuff. This is also why, as soon as we enter Rapture, still safe in our bathysphere, we are treated to a little show of a Splicer brutally slaying a person before taunting Jack (the player) about coming after him next. Right from the get-go, BioShock is focused on showing us what a horrific place Rapture has become. From Dr. Steinman’s insane plastic surgery in the medical pavilion to Sander Cohen’s murderous brand of performance art in Fort Frolic to Frank Fontaine’s disguise as Atlas and his civil war with Ryan, BioShock leaves us with little doubt that Ryan’s experiment at the bottom of the sea failed stupendously. Much of the storytelling in BioShock is spent explaining how and why things went wrong, which is, as you know, a fascinating tale of unchecked ambition, betrayed trust, and hidden identities.
But wait! If BioShock simply states that John Galt’s vision would end up like Rapture, a Randian would be justified in objecting to the game’s critique of Rand. As part of their profession, philosophers recognize and identify fallacious reasoning—statements that don’t hold up or fail to provide sufficient argumentation to posit a claim—and BioShock seems to commit a blatant “strawman fallacy” here with Ryan. A Randian objection might go like this: BioShock sets up a weak version of Randian Objectivism so that it can easily shoot it down with emotional appeals (the horror elements, Ryan’s death), but Andrew Ryan wasn’t a very good Objectivist. He let his paranoia cloud his rational judgment without realizing it; he took over Fontaine’s Plasmid company by force just like the federal governments he claimed to detest; he robbed his citizens of free will with mind-altering pheromones when things got too heavy, and so on. Using survival-horror game design is a good way to communicate to players that Rapture didn’t work out, but does the game fail to show why we ought to think that John Galt would make the same mistakes Ryan did? Andrew Ryan is not so much a stand-in for Galt and Rand as a strawman version of Galt and Rand, and the game uses survival-horror to provoke from players a negative emotional reaction to Rand’s ideals.
BioShock depicts Ryan as an Objectivist who wrongly dismisses emotions as being opposed to rationality. At first glance the “economic” choice would be to harvest the Little Sisters, not save them, which would undoubtedly be Ryan’s choice. Yet Fontaine bested Ryan not by being a better businessman, but by appealing to the emotions of the dissatisfied denizens of Rapture. Tenenbaum has a similar thing in mind when the Little Sisters are created, thinking it will be harder for folks to kill a little girl for ADAM than, say, a Big Daddy. But if we look at Tenenbaum’s interactions with Jack (the player), we quickly see that her detached scientific perspective has been supplanted by a motherly desire to care for the Little Sisters—in other words, she falls prey to the very emotional trap she designed. Furthermore, this newfound sentimentality ends up being her salvation—she is able to begin to make up for her life of horrible experiments by caring for the Little Sisters. And yet Ryan refuses to question his belief that reason should trump emotion, right to the very end:
Could I have made mistakes? One does not build cities if one is guided by doubt. But can one govern in absolute certainty? I know that my beliefs have elevated me, just as I know that the things I have rejected would have destroyed me. But the city… it is collapsing before my… have I become so convinced by my own beliefs that I have stopped seeing the truth? Perhaps. But Atlas is out there, and he aims to destroy me, and destroy my city. To question is to surrender. I will not question.11
Now we are getting to the heart of it. According to Antonio Damasio, a neurologist and philosopher, emotion plays a crucial role in practical reasoning by filtering out an incredible number of thoughts and inferences, bringing the most relevant options to the surface for our practical reasoning to focus on. In his book Descartes’ Error, Damasio observes that an animal has little chance for long-term survival if it thinks, “Maybe this tiger is friendlier than the others.”12 This is why most of us jump back when we see a stick on the ground that kind of looks like a snake—our emotions give us a snap judgment so we don’t get bitten while we sit and contemplate the situation. As strongly social animals, our moral lives largely come out of our emotional lives. Damasio maintains that emotions are not strictly “hard-wired,” but rather shaped by other emotional associations; this is what Rand thinks we learn by engaging with artworks. Andrew Ryan is a pretty terrible Objectivist, but the point is that he was too enraptured in his ideology to recognize his own human failings, not that there is something essentially flawed in Rand’s way of thinking (even if her followers are more at risk of forgetting the humanity that lies at the foundation of their ideology than other kinds of zealots).
We tend to save the Little Sisters on the first playthrough precisely because our emotional reactions to the SAVE or HARVEST dilemma tell us to save them, even though we know they are fictional and are (even if they were real) rather monstrous. (Well, emotion tells most of us to save them—you know who you are.) Jack’s reward for saving the Little Sisters is, in Tenenbaum’s words, “a family,” the very thing that ultimately destroyed Ryan and his dream. He refused to embrace his sentimental side for a long time, and in the end that was his undoing; that and the golf club a mind-controlled Jack used to bash his head in. Andrew Ryan may be a strawman for Randian Objectivism, but the argument embedded in BioShock doesn’t rely on that fallacy to make its point. Rather, BioShock demonstrates the importance of making moral choices as a core aspect of being human, a lesson we learn simply by playing the game, something Rand would appreciate but Andrew Ryan likely would not. And since most of us immediately play BioShock a second time, treating the Little Sisters differently than the first go around, we can see this message in the “bad” ending as well. By choosing to harvest the Little Sisters, Jack becomes a monster devoid of his humanity. Technically he does end up with more raw power than he does in the “good” ending, but at the cost of everything else. Even Ryan would be disgusted at “bad” Jack, who ends up more like Fontaine than anyone Ryan could respect. A conqueror, a destroyer, perhaps even a god, but without a human life worth living. And allowing humans to live lives worth living is the point of Rand’s entire philosophy.
BioShock isn’t necessarily claiming that Randian Objectivism will always lead to horror. Rather, the game is making use of Rand’s own discursive method of philosophy-through-fiction to demonstrate to players what Andrew Ryan couldn’t see until it was too late—if we remain blind to the emotional side of human nature, no ideology can save us. Life isn’t a matter of reason versus emotion, but rather reason as emotion, something Ayn Rand clearly understood. After all, that is exactly why she sees art as valuable, isn’t it? It keeps us in touch with our humanity despite not knowing with certainty what our place in the cosmos ultimately is. Ryan thought he found that certainty when he built Rapture. It wasn’t necessarily Ryan’s Objectivist views that doomed Rapture, but rather his stubborn refusal to put people first, before his ideology. BioShock isn’t an anti-Randian statement so much as a cautionary tale about being blinded by one’s ideology. Randian Objectivism is in the spotlight, because it’s radical and extreme and American (and because Rand was someone Levine idolized in his youth).
Whether it is oratorical, visual, or narrative in nature, rhetoric often persuades successfully because it affects reason indirectly, by appealing to the emotions that set the stage for rational consideration. Understanding the relationships found in this triangle of influence that exists between emotion, reason, and rhetoric can help us better understand all three as aspects of value-forming rational deliberation. The takeaway? It is a good thing that rhetoric affects us the way it does. Yes, it leaves us vulnerable to manipulation (here’s looking at you, Fontaine/Atlas), but BioShock suggests that human beings cannot truly thrive without that vulnerability. When you listen to your emotions and help the Little Sisters, they become eager to help you in turn. If Ryan had given more thought to the emotional lives of Rapture’s citizens (as, presumably, John Galt would have done), they might not have been so easily manipulated by Atlas/Fontaine. For Ken Levine, Andrew Ryan is more “real” than Galt, but not identical to him:
To me, Andrew Ryan is a combination of several historical figures, like Howard Hughes and Ayn Rand together. Unlike a character in a Rand book he’s “a real person.” John Galt is a superman. He’s not a normal person. He doesn’t go to the bathroom. If you read The Fountainhead, the characters are these idealized supermen. They don’t have doubts, they don’t have fears—at least the hero characters—they don’t make mistakes. And that’s much like the Superheroes of the 40s. I think people are much more like the Superheroes of the 60s, Stan Lee’s superheroes who have real problems and make mistakes. I think Rapture is a place where there’s a very powerful ideology put into play by actual people. And when people get into the mix, things get complicated.13
Ryan is human and is unable to see his own flaws, unable to see the endgame as anything but an instantiation of his ideals. This may mean that utopias are an impossible dream, as Levine believes, but it also allows for society to function in the first place. Ethical decisions ought to pay heed to our emotional responses, as well as our reason, and this is what BioShock says over and over again.
It is very possible to imagine that the “real” fictional John Galt would not make the same mistakes that Ryan does. Perhaps Galt would have understood that sentimentality has a place, even in his elite secret society of ultra-capitalists. Atlas Shrugged actually implies this. Dagny Taggart (the main protagonist of Atlas Shrugged who tries to solve the mystery of “Who is John Galt?” throughout the book), Hank Rearden, and the other heroic figures of Rand’s novels all embrace their emotional side. When Taggart finishes building a new railroad from Rearden’s new alloy, with the entire nation seemingly against her, she names it the John Galt Line to rub her feat in everyone’s faces. She also falls in love with Rearden, who is already married, sparking a long affair that ultimately betters both of their lives. The novel ends as New York City loses power and Galt promises to reorganize society to keep Atlases from ever having to “shrug” the weight of the world off their shoulders again. Dagny and Hank are passionate, emotional people, but they aren’t ruled by their emotions like the government regulators. Thus, it behooves us not to think about BioShock as a list of complaints against Rand’s philosophy, because BioShock allows for Rand’s views of art and ethics. The time we spend in Rapture, with all its sublime beauty and horror, shows us how followers of an ideology can be too quick to exclude basic human emotions from their interpretation of that ideology. Indeed, any project that doesn’t account for emotion is doomed.