Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of the Pnictogen WingBioShock 2!
We finished our re-playthrough of BioShock 2 (the first time we played through the game since its release) several hours ago, and it's stirred up some uncomfortable emotional backlash, but believe it or not I consider that a good thing: it means the game succeeded in drawing us in, and we actually felt moved by it.
We actually cried several times, especially at the end, and I guess we've still got to unpack that one a bit.
I see from reading the Wikipedia entry on BioShock 2 that the game is generally not as highly regarded as the first (although the article acknowledges that there's at least some inkling that the game might be better, which is my own contention.) I notice that some of the criticism of the sequel was that the trajectory of the gameplay was too much like the first. With the same "plasmid progression" even! I had to laugh at that—as if the point of playing a narrative-heavy game with a strong political message like BioShock or its sequel was to collect a novel sequence of superpowers!
Ah, er, wait just a second. That seems to be one of those "ludonarrative dissonance" things all of a sudden. As I've commented in an earlier post (somewhere, it might have been on the fediverse somewhere) there's an intrinsic difficulty in attempting to depict and offer narrative commentary a nightmarish fascist dystopia such as Andrew Ryan's Rapture, or Eleanor Lamb's Rapture for that matter, as a glossy and highly produced (and intensely advertised) media spectacle like a video-game franchise.
There's been quite a few real-life attempts to build high-tech "micronations" and "cyberstates" touted in Galt's Gulch style as offering independence and freedom from The Parasites™, with untrammelled liberty and uncensored creativity, and to my knowledge not one single one of these things has been a success—unless, of course, it's "success" enough merely to have scammed a lot of gullible investors and speculators out of a heap of money. No real-life Galt's Gulch has ever become a paradise of innovation and creative liberty, much less the seat of extraordinary scientific advancements. Real-life techno-utopians are willing to settle for blockchain gambling and stochastic gibberish machines—I mean, "generative AI"—as proof of their supergenius. There's no evidence to suggest that Rapture, as a scientific and technological powerhouse, is even remotely possible…yet there it is in the game, and it looks slick. There's spiffy superpowers, valvepunk robots, machines that magically mod your shotgun and invent things out of miscellaneous garbage.
And that, I suggest, is a problem. It's a general problem with fascist dystopias, especially in the hands of whitebread sci-fi writers and game programmers: they may be shown as evil and dysfunctional, but they're also shown as extraordinary, as uniquely accomplished, playing off the old Nazi propaganda trope like you see in the Castle Wolfenstein games or a lot of action movies: sure the Third Reich were murderous barbarians but they catapulted Germany up "from nothing" (false, Germany was already an intellectual and industrial powerhouse) and revolutionized warfare (debatable, considering how temporary was the Nazi ascendance in the Second Great War) and invented…uh…that hydrazine-powered Messerschmidt, I guess? And methadone? The reality falls extremely short of the fantasy.
Ironically the "plasmid progression" might be one of the weakest aspects of both BioShock games (there wasn't a third, was there? The second one ends pretty finally after all, it would seem almost silly to fudge up a sequel to BioShock 2! yes I'm joking, a little) for the simple reason that they're not necessary to play the game! There are no-plasmid playthroughs of the first BioShock anyway, although there are a couple of moments where you're basically forced to use plasmids in order to advance, which is plainly meant to have a tutorial quality but is also annoying. The complaint about the sequel having the samae "plasmid progression" may come down to just that: a rather contrived bit of gameplay is repeated in the second game. And while both games offer a good spread of guns and weapons, with enough new weapons in the sequel to make the challenge seem fresh, the plasmids do NOT have that sense of balance. (The "tonics" are another matter.)
I think I will continue this in a later post. ~Chara of Pnictogen
#bioshock #bioshock-2 #ludonarrative-dissonance #technofascism #libertarian-bullshit
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