Bioshock has a very interesting way of worldbuilding, making use of the audio diaries of various residents of Rapture. The player as Jack gets a rundown of Rapture and its workings during the first bit of the game from Atlas, a radical who is guiding the player over a radio. The player learns by doing, or rather, they learn as really crappy stuff happens around them and Atlas is like oh yeah, this happens too, which can be overwhelming as they fight. It is hard to listen to both the intercom, radio, diaries, etc. as the player is distracted by simply surviving enemies coming from all sides. It is a really cool way to incorporate narrative without cut scenes, to explain as the player goes, but it can be very easy to miss details. In the disarray of the flooding city, there are the ruins of history. As the player runs past, they can see what Rapture used to be. One particular intriguing – and definitely creepy – part of the world building are the vending-like machines for Plasmids and the cheerful slogans they hold like “Evolve Today!” and the little animated advertisements. The player can see why the citizens of Rapture wanted to live here and how they became the addicted, deformed Splicers. Bioshock is a retelling of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, shown most prominently in her work Atlas Shrugged. The game took her beliefs, turning the weaknesses into a horrifying reality. Rand believed that “man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life” (Ubrik). Rapture is a world of the elite who were too perfect for the mundane, and in their arrogance, they became less than the mundane, less than the average, they became monsters. Ubrik said in his article “Bioshock’s critique of Ayn Rand & Objectivism” that the developers of Bioshock created the game based on the question: “’What would a society look like if everyone were really only in it for themselves and owed no allegiance to anyone but themselves?’.” It ends in mass murder. The player can just see the madness that such a philosophy creates as the inhabitants of Rapture are not even human anymore and the entire city is collapsing due to no one thinking they were low enough to be a maintenance worker.
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