WIP No.2

#pixelart #bioshock #retrogaming #mastoart

For Andrew Ryan's Rapture, being a video-game spectacle, is designed to make its audience feel vicariously powerful—something which a blockbuster movie can also do, but not with the hands-on directness of a game. Therefore Rapture is allowed to do something which no real-life "anarcho-capitalist" micronation has ever come close to achieving: #BioShock allows Rapture to look like a success.

Yes, the place is falling apart now, but the miraculous technology actually WORKS in-game, indeed it's necessary for finishing the game and saving the day, and that permits those in the audience who might envy Ryan's vision to come away from BioShock feeling like Rapture could easily have been truly amazing with just a bit more care or cleverness.

In a similar spirit do fans of #StarWars space Nazis tell themselves: "if only I'd been Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine, I could have built an evil empire that lasted."

Whether a game is any worse in this regard than a blockbuster movie, another artistic medium which takes the form of a massive corporate effort that's often blown up into an enormous franchise that keeps going for years or decades, is perhaps moot. Both major motion pictures and big-name videogames have the same problem: they're spectacles on a grand scale, the work of enormous teams backed up by heavy corporate spending and marketing, and thus they become objects of pride. Corporate executives and famous professionals go on TV and podcasts and magazine interviews boasting about the magnitude of their achievement...

... and that's a questionable thing to do, when the achievement is the successful and memorable realization on-screen of an authoritarian eugenicist dystopia, even one that's visibly crumbling. Can it be doubted that there were #gaming nerds who played #BioShock and thought, "gee I wish I could get some combat plasmids! and a machine that makes exploding buckshot out of miscellaneous junk! Rapture is so cool."

#BioShock is a frustrating game, as a narrative. It's maybe half-competent, I feel: once the game arrives at the big reveal about the player character all the dramatic tension goes flat and the game becomes a tedious scavenger hunt—it was already too much of one, but at least Fontaine hadn't shown himself openly and there's still some mystery. Once he does there's hardly anything to him: he blusters, he threatens, he tries to scare you off helping Tenenbaum, and finally he becomes a boring final boss. Imagine how the stakes might have been raised, later in the game, by making Dr. Suchong (a) less of a cardboard-cutout villain and (b) still alive and thus someone who had to be reckoned with, a rival to Tenenbaum and not just a dead voice on a bunch of tape recordings.

And then there's the political dimension of the game! Whew I dunno if I feel up to much commentary, there. Hm.

A #videogame might be a bad vehicle for artistic depiction of a dystopia.