I, like so many others of the Zoomer generation, grew up on Let’s Plays, whether that be Pewdiepie playing through some rage-inducing platformer or SkyDoesMinecraft and his friends playing through “parkour maps” on Minecraft(basically a backseat gaming sitcom I watched and adored).
The typical SkyDoesMinecraft thumbnail
It was about 9 years ago when I first saw a “Let’s Play” of Bioshock, the first game of a series I had heard about through online forums, comments, and friends with some more lenient parents than mine when it came to playing violent games. This “Let’s Play” was distinct and different to me – there were no rambunctious comedians playing rage-inducing or community-based games. In fact, there wasn’t even a voice at all, just the darkness and liminality of a game that came out 7 years before I watched this video. I only remember watching the first ten minutes and being absolutely enraptured (pun intended) by an intense plane crash and this mysterious lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. By the time the player went down the lighthouse’s elevator and was introduced to the failed underwater utopia of Rapture – cryptic, corrupted, and captivating – I immediately turned the Youtube video off, telling myself even at the young and naive age of 10: “I have to experience this myself.”
Descending into Rapture for the first time
Those ten minutes were the only exposure I had to the Bioshock series, but the introduction to the world of Rapture really stuck with me, and when I did my bi-monthly late-middle school Gamestop trip (a ritual I begged my mom to occur more often than every two months) , I , at the age of 13, bought Bioshock: The Collection for my PS4. Eager, I got home, played through it, and was honestly pretty frightened. Bioshock utilizes a lot of horror elements to world-build (or really, “world-deteriorate” since it shows the effects of time on an isolated dystopian society). In fact, it was scarier than most horror games I had played at the time because of all the societal implications of collectible audio logs and even torn propaganda posters on the tattered walls. I felt completely immersed with the new world around me, and like the playable protagonist Jack, spent hours discovering the buried secrets of Rapture. After I beat the game, I played it again immediately, which had never happened for any game before for me. After playing through the entire series, I spent weeks going online to forums, subreddits, Youtube videos, and analyses to further understand the worlds I so excitedly delved into. Needless to say, I was a little obsessed.
One of the many posters you can find in Rapture.
Jump to 2021. I’m a senior in high school in a bunch of APs, including AP Literature and Composition. Out of all the teachers I talked to after class, it was the humanities teachers who really took interest in discussing media with me (David Lynch, Stephen King, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, etc.), and while having an after-school analysis session with my Latin teacher Mr. Weganhart(we all called him Wego), he told me to look back at video games I’ve played and see how much classic literature has affected the themes of those games. While Wego’s side-quest he gave me focused on Roman influences on modern media, I immediately jumped back to Bioshock and decided to delve deeper into the non-Classical literary references. Instead of delving into Rapture with a PS4 controller, I delved into wikis about Objectivism(“the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”, quoted by philosopher/author Ayn Rand) and books written by Rand to further understand this game I loved so much when I was younger, and came to an incredible conclusion: I realized the game was actually satirizing the concept of Objectivism and the allusions to Ayn Rand were ample. Antagonist Andrew Ryan (of “Would you kindly…” fame) is a quasi-anagram of Rand’s name with the same initials. The entirety of Rapture, I found out, was based off of the Objectivist, hyper-capitalist society Rand outlines in her novel Atlas Shrugged, further emphasized with the final boss being a replicated statue of Rand’s book cover (see photo below). The game consistently blurs the line between emergence and progression game styles (as Juul outlines) with the moral system of killing or saving the Little Sisters, ultimately showing the futility of Objectivist ideals (no matter how much individuality or free will you may have, society can’t be perfect).
The cover of Atlas Shrugged and Atlas, the final boss of Bioshock
As I grew up and changed mindsets from a child seeking fantastical worlds to an adolescent seeking answers to a young adult seeking literary references and intertextuality, I realize how much this game has stuck around with me throughout my life. It’s pretty fantastic to say that a piece of media could take on so many different meanings to me throughout my life, on top of being a good nostalgia trip. If anyone has the chance, I would implore you to sink to Rapture in Bioshock and Bioshock 2 or fly to Columbia in Bioshock Infinite.
-Spencer
Sources:
Why Bioshock still has, and will always have, something to say , Ars Techina- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/08/bioshock-objectivism-philosophy-analysis/
Juul, Jesper. Half-Real.
New Media: Storytelling in Literature, Films, and Games 
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