Bioshock: No Gods or Kings, Only Man

“A man chooses

A slave obeys”

Andrew Ryan

The story of Bioshock is one of several overarching metaphors, reaching out across the infinite space of video game lore and culture. One such metaphor is the idea of the player and the creator: where does the creator’s role end and the players begin? Who is the true slave? The player who has to abide by the rules set down by the creator? Or is the creator enslaved by his own creations? Sander Cohen, one of Bioshock’s more elaborate villains, could certainly be labelled in this way, victim as he is to his own explosive ego. The elaborate death scene he creates for Fitzpatrick, all for the sake of his art, tells the tale of a man driven mad by something which motivates and inspires many other much more sane people.

For those of you not in the know (and I doubt there are many who don’t know the big story “twist” of Bioshock) I suggest you look away now but the essence of the trick in Bioshock is that you have been controlled all along to do the bidding of a character called Frank Fontaine, masking himself as the mysterious insurgent - Atlas, no doubt a reference to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a novel which explores the “role of man’s mind in existence” Is he truly free if he is at the whim of society? A man chooses. A slave obeys. In Atlas Shrugged, top Industrialists have chosen not to be a part of the hyprocrisy anymore and leave the nation behind, causing things to collapse behind them. In Bioshock the player moves through the crumbling dystopia of Rapture, an underwater city created by Andrew Ryan to act as a haven for the intellectual elite to pursue their own ends, away from the corrupting influence of government and commerce. The broken edifice of Rapture is the metaphor for Ryan’s idea coming apart and breaking down. You cannot exist in isolation from the creative source: the world.

At the entrance to Rapture lies a giant statue of Ryan holding aloft a banner with the words: No Gods or Kings, Only Man (See Below). A quote that is further explained by Ryan himself during the game:

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? '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.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

Of course, the truth is that by leaving only man as the creator and driver of his own fate, he is still compelled to share his vision with other men and if you fill a city with only selfishly motivated people, you shouldn’t be surprised when they no longer choose to cooperate and all start fighting each other. Although society relies on certain roles and conventions to work, human greed is endemic, according to Bioshock and creating an artificial society makes it harder for those conventions to be applied anyway. And don’t expect intellect to save. If anything, it manages to make things a hell of a lot worse especially in the cases of Dr Steinman and Sander Cohen.

So, the player, upon discovering he is the slave of Atlas’ bidding, desperately tries to free himself from the bond created. Although this proves painful, he is able to do it and wake up to the true knowledge of his fate and his existence. Bioshock presents an interesting moral choice to the player. Be the saviour of the little sisters who you encounter in the game, harvesters of the material called Adam which makes plasmids work, or kill them to harvest more Adam for yourself, making yourself more powerful in defeating the big Daddies (machines that protect the little sisters), and also for the ultimate showdown with Fontaine himself. The choice is yours and the creator is the moral guardian of this choice. What’s interesting is that although Ryan’s idea of Rapture does not abide by any imagined morality or moral necessitude, the fate of the player is tied to the moral choices he makes as someone who comes from outside of Rapture. He is of the world and the world has moral constructs that are unavoidable. A man cannot isolate himself from his own morals which brings mockery to Ryan and Rand’s central idea. No matter how utopian a world may seem where man lives and works only amongst his intellectual peers, such a world would be cold, hard, rational and free of the guiding morality of societal structures such as religion. As controversial as ideas of religion and faith may be, they do offer a way of keeping peace. A man chooses a religion, a slave obeys this religion? Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on your world view.

In many countries we are free to pursue certain interests and just as fictional industrialists such as Andrew Ryan are free to create their own utopian world of industry and commerce, we are free to watch it tear itself apart as the man who chooses his destiny can also be an unwitting slave to it as well. That is the beautiful contradiction which is so elegantly explored in the Bioshock series. I wholly recommend you take a trip back to Rapture. Not so long ago, I did so myself. Sure, the paint was peeling off the walls a bit more and the damp smell had gotten worse but there’s still the same sense of dark foreboding to keep you wondering if that’s really a splicer waiting around the corner or just the flickering shadow of another broken promise.