BIOSHOCK.

[BEAT]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1493643824274591747

Normally when a much beloved franchise gets announced as a Netflix Movie, the immediate reaction is one of dread. This is not unreasonable. Netflix has a TERRIBLE track record when it comes to adapting much beloved nerd things. There's no reason to trust them to get anything right at any point. They're Netflix. That's just what they do.

But in this case, I don't feel any sense of trepidation or dread regarding this announcement at all! As far as I'm concerned, this can only be an improvement!

Because Bioshock has always sucked.

As first Person shooters, the Bioshock games are "competent". You point the crosshairs at things and pull the triggers on your Xbox controller to make the things die. If that was all there was to it, they would be perfectly fine things to put inside your XBOX360 during those times when you want to play a shootmans game but have misplaced your copy of Halo 3 ODST. They are acceptable.

But Bioshock didn't set out to be "a perfectly functional video game." No, Bioshock wanted to be ART! To have BIG IDEAS and BIG OPINIONS, and do some of that CHALLENGING COMMENTARY stuff all the cool kids were doing!

And that's exactly where it all went straight to hell. Because you can't be challenging if you're a coward, and the Bioshock series is as cowardly as they come.

Let's start at the beginning with

BIOSHOCK.

I can pinpoint the exact moment I realized there was something wrong with this game waaaayyy back when I first played it in 2007. The marketing for it back on IGN and the like was all about CHOICE and CONSEQUENCES, how if you did the GOODGUY action, you would get less POWER JUICE but if you did the BADGUY ACTION you would be rolling in the stuff. I liked the idea of a game doing one of those dreaded moral choice system where the obvious moral choice carried no reward other than the knowledge that you did the right thing. A Hard mode that existed because the easy mode was unacceptable. That's unironically a cool idea!

Then they ruined it 20 minutes in by giving you WAY MORE POWER JUICE for doing the "right" thing. Joke's on you, idiot. You should have known better than to expect things from a video game.

But enough about spitting in the eye of the very idea of Player agency, let's talk about the PLOT, which much ado was made of at the time. It's about an objectivist Libertarian Utopia straight out of an Ayn Rand novel where everything immediately went to hell because OF COURSE IT FUCKING DID. What a bold and cutting commentary on the failures of Objectivism as a philosophy!

Except... then the BIG TWIST happens, where the working class revolutionary dude who feels that workers should have rights and stuff is ACTUALLY a bigshot mobster who is even eviler than the guy screaming about how actually we should charge people to breathe. Oh also you're not just some hapless stranded passerby, you're actually a genetically engineered superman with a kill switch in your brain sent here for, uh, reasons. There was also something about a Jewish Nazi collaborator who remains as the "good" radio voice, which is... Yeah. What the fuck man. What the fuck.

This is normally the part where I'd transition into talking about

BIOSHOCK 2.

Buuuut let's be real nobody gives a shit about Bioshock 2. I didn't play it and neither did you. You might think that you did but you didn't quit Lying. Fuck Bioshock 2. Let's just skip ahead to what you're REALLY here for,

BIOSHOCK INFINITE.

You know, people actually talked about this game like it was POWERFUL and MOVING and BOLD upon its release? I know right? What the fuck were we on back in 2013?

Bioshock infinite is the story of a bunch of racist religious fundamentalists that made a floating city, and then seceded from the United States so they could be the MOST United States. They do racist things very racistly and the game makes it a point to make sure you're aware that the racism that these racists keep doing is very bad, and they should be stopped, which you will do with your guns because you are a video game protagonist.

Then an anti-racist uprising happens, where the oppressed underclass overthrows the cruel masters that have enslaved them. They do anti-racist things very anti-racistly and the game makes a point to make sure you're aware that the anti-racism that these anti-racists keep doing is very bad and they should be stopped, which you will do with your guns because you are a video game protagonist.

Wait, what the fuck???

Yeah. Didn't make any of that shit up. The first thing the game does after showing you several hours of the horrors of racisms, is to go "But actually OPPOSING racism is just as bad." Then instead of trying to square that circle, it just dicks around for a few hours, gives a speech about how the Bioshock Franchise is the GREATEST STORYTELLING EVER before ending on shootman protagonistfella drowning himself at his Baptism. Also there's these interdimensional twins who sort of help you but also apparently helped the racists set all their shit up, and your secret adult daughter Belle from beauty and the beast who gives a shit.

So having gone over all that bullshit you probably already knew, we finally come to the reason I started this stupid post in the first place. The one word explanation for why these games are the way they are.

COWARDICE.

The Bioshock series are Artgames as imagined by total fucking cowards. They wish to APPEAR as though they're saying something, but not run the risk of actually making any sort of statement. Everything on display that could be thought of as a BIG IMPORTANT IDEA is quickly walked back until it can be safely ignored. They are games that act like they want to make bold proclamations, but end up only saying "lots of things are bad I guess idk."

Bioshock as a series is a complete and utter failure in every regard other than being mostly well-made first person shooters.

Also the first one is like 70% Pipe Dream by volume.

 

[Issun]

 

[Becksworth]

But enough about spitting in the eye of the very idea of Player agency, let's talk about the PLOT, which much ado was made of at the time. It's about an objectivist Libertarian Utopia straight out of an Ayn Rand novel where everything immediately went to hell because OF COURSE IT FUCKING DID. What a bold and cutting commentary on the failures of Objectivism as a philosophy!

(Points at the Bear Town) I mean it seems obvious to us, but...

 

[Falselogic]

Also the first one is like 70% Pipe Dream by volume.

But Pipe Dream is very good!

 

[Falselogic]

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

It may be bait, but it's tasty looking bait I'll bite on

which you will do with your guns because you are a video game protagonist.

To me, this is the biggest cowardice of all. The fear of any actual meaningful change for the medium and having to risk pissing off braindead gamers by having a world you can interact with more than just murdering everything in your path with a gun. Every game where the only way to interact with your environments is by shooting guns is automatically the most boring thing in the world to me.

 

[Paul le Fou]

it was kinda neat when you could shoot bees at people, I think? Or something? idk I didn't even get all the way through the first one. I don't think I even got the bees.

I remember one of the hype points of the first BS was that there were supposed to be so many different flexible ways you could solve problems and beat encounters with your crazy powers! And then I played it and there were no such things. I think I had ice for freezing people and fire or lightning for zapping them. It did not encourage or even allow for much creativity besides "shoot mans" after all.

 

[jpfriction]

I honestly never played it but wasn’t the DLC for 2 a walking simulator?

 

[Kalir]

Bioshock 2 was notable for exactly two reasons.

The first is that it had multiplayer versus. Nobody cared.

The second is that it was Bioshock 1 except the bad guy was Socialism instead of Libertarianism. Because socialism is less shit than libertarianism, you ended up not killing a lot more guys that go around. Nobody cared.

So basically BEAT is completely right about Bioshock 2.

 

[SpoonyBard]

At the very least the first Bioshock let you attack by shooting bees out of your hand. In the standard videogame lineup of fire, ice, and lightning, adding the 'bee' element was a clever move.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

Whatever the sins of the sequels, Bioshock served as both introduction to and inoculation against Ayn Rand's philosophy, so there is that going for it at least.

I give a shit about Bioshock 2. The politics of Bioshock 2 were a lot more muddled and incoherent, but I liked the aspect of your parental example influencing Eleanor's outcome, since I had a very small Nora at the time (I played through most of the game with her in a rocker at my feet). There's a Gamespite article about that somewhere. It could have had a good point in forced collectivism being as bad as forced individualism, but it was not that nuanced. It played really well though, and the DLC was neat.

Binfinite is... such a mess. Loved it at first (and still like aspects of it) but man, so much of it fell apart on further examination. As noted, the games are ultimately cowardly and unwilling to reckon with their own ideas.

This movie will probably be extremely fun or a total mess, possibly both.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

I've only played one so I keep forgetting there is a Bioshock 2.

 

[MetManMas]

To me, this is the biggest cowardice of all. The fear of any actual meaningful change for the medium and having to risk pissing off braindead gamers by having a world you can interact with more than just murdering everything in your path with a gun. Every game where the only way to interact with your environments is by shooting guns is automatically the most boring thing in the world to me.

Seconded. I quite liked what little I played of BioShock Infinite when it involved exploring its world, but I fell off of the game early when it told me it was time to get back to the action and Elizabeth called me a monster and ran off for killing people that the game had programmed to kill me.

Given how much worse things get, I don't regret dropping it.

 

[Issun]

My honest opinion: BioShock the first is a fun game that did some interesting and influential things with the medium. It's good.

I liked Infinite okay, but I will not defend it (except for the barbershop quartets, they were hella lit).

I honestly don't remember a lot of 2 except that the Big Sisters were really frustrating so BEAT is right about it?

Wait no. BioShock 2 actually had pretty good black American representation so never mind.

 

[Becksworth]

I liked Infinite okay, but I will not defend it (except for the barbershop quartets, they were hella lit).

Shit, I forgot about those!

 

[Purple]

BIOSHOCK.

I can pinpoint the exact moment I realized there was something wrong with this game waaaayyy back when I first played it in 2007. The marketing for it back on IGN and the like was all about CHOICE and CONSEQUENCES, how if you did the GOODGUY action, you would get less POWER JUICE but if you did the BADGUY ACTION you would be rolling in the stuff. I liked the idea of a game doing one of those dreaded moral choice system where the obvious moral choice carried no reward other than the knowledge that you did the right thing. A Hard mode that existed because the easy mode was unacceptable. That's unironically a cool idea!

Then they ruined it 20 minutes in by giving you WAY MORE POWER JUICE for doing the "right" thing. Joke's on you, idiot. You should have known better than to expect things from a video game.

I will go to my grave insisting it was a massive design mistake to not actually mechanically reward you for murdering small children. I hate how I can't say that without sounding sarcastic, but for real it should have been that the murder route has you just decked out with all the power-ups and all the MP and blitzing your way through regardless before getting a proper comeuppance in the end, which... I mean that is what happens, but more importantly the route where you just give them nice pats on the head should have had you in this desperate scraping by, having to engage with every otherwise redundant system for killing stuff there is to barely scrape by because yo have some damn principles.

Plus that way the bare-bones, no metaphors, textual plot of the game wouldn't completely fall apart just by engaging with the mechanics. The whole game is just sermonizing you about how this whole city full of people became insane murder monsters because they overdosed on slug juice and the bee arm injectons slug juice enables, especially the main villain at the end who really went overboard and took just ALL the drugs, but unless you're doing a personal challenge run, when you get to that boss fight, you have also taken just absolutely all of the drugs, even the ones that give you dumb powers you're never going to use (which is damn near all of them, just electro-zappery will totally carry you through the game to a degree you forget you have guns too). And yet somehow you don't become an eccentric murder monster, you just become a boring old guy with a weird parental relationship to like 12 identical children (or said children tear you limb from limb, whatever).

BIOSHOCK 2.

Buuuut let's be real nobody gives a shit about Bioshock 2. I didn't play it and neither did you. You might think that you did but you didn't quit Lying. Fuck Bioshock 2. Let's just skip ahead to what you're REALLY here for,

I played a little of it before my 360 red ringed! The early goings at least just have you meandering around as a big friendly clumsy stompy Bomberman, periodically crashing through the floor from your ponderous weight, and letting small children ride on your shoulder and cheer you on as you clear out arbitrary arenas where enemy waves come crashing into your big overcompensating power drill. Which is perfectly satisfying videogamery. Which probably gets ruined by a terrible plot later, but people keep saying it had a really interesting DLC expansion.

BIOSHOCK INFINITE.

Then an anti-racist uprising happens, where the oppressed underclass overthrows the cruel masters that have enslaved them. They do anti-racist things very anti-racistly and the game makes a point to make sure you're aware that the anti-racism that these anti-racists keep doing is very bad and they should be stopped, which you will do with your guns because you are a video game protagonist.

Somehow I managed to lose steam and take an indefinite break from the game just before this twist happened, so in my memories it's just a proper racist murdering game. Come to think of it I think every single one of these is just a much more enjoyable experience if you stop right before the big mid-game twist and assume things just continued on their trajectory from where you left off.

This is also in all likelihood why they review well. People with busy schedules and street dates to worry about can't be bothered to play long enough for simpering centrism to ruin everything.

Also the first one is like 70% Pipe Dream by volume.

For real it feels like the whole game was designed around the idea that there would be some sort of mechanical restriction forcing you to specialize into just one of Gun Haver, Drug Wizard, or Pipe Dream Aficionado. The finished product feels like you have some kind of debug mode cheat on where you have the infinite capacity to do everything.

 

[Issun]

I will go to my grave insisting it was a massive design mistake to not actually mechanically reward you for murdering small children. I hate how I can't say that without sounding sarcastic, but for real it should have been that the murder route has you just decked out with all the power-ups and all the MP and blitzing your way through regardless before getting a proper comeuppance in the end, which... I mean that is what happens, but more importantly the route where you just give them nice pats on the head should have had you in this desperate scraping by, having to engage with every otherwise redundant system for killing stuff there is to barely scrape by because yo have some damn principles.

Plus that way the bare-bones, no metaphors, textual plot of the game wouldn't completely fall apart just by engaging with the mechanics. The whole game is just sermonizing you about how this whole city full of people became insane murder monsters because they overdosed on slug juice and the bee arm injectons slug juice enables, especially the main villain at the end who really went overboard and took just ALL the drugs, but unless you're doing a personal challenge run, when you get to that boss fight, you have also taken just absolutely all of the drugs, even the ones that give you dumb powers you're never going to use (which is damn near all of them, just electro-zappery will totally carry you through the game to a degree you forget you have guns too). And yet somehow you don't become an eccentric murder monster, you just become a boring old guy with a weird parental relationship to like 12 identical children (or said children tear you limb from limb, whatever).

Or what if, hear me out here, not killing the Little Sisters is kind of more difficult the more you save, but in the end you get a massively good ending, but if you harvest them, it seems easy at first but then you end up with two giant roadblock bosses, the second being almost impossibly difficult? And the ending basically ruins your copy of the game forever?

Nah. No one would ever play a game like that.

 

[BEAT]

I see what you did there

 

[Oathbreaker]

I'll go farther and say Bioshock Infinite's take of "anti-racism is also bad!" is in fact more than cowardly, it is just racist in and of itself. It was the entire reason I never ended up playing the game; had I done so I would've dropped the controller then and there because even though my politics back then were pretty shit, I was at least still better-learned about MLK Jr's real philosophy than the people who wrote this garbage. So in that sense, I'd say Infinite DOES say something actively shitty, and videogame fandom/culture is so fucked up that I can only wish it was safe to ignore.

But wow that ending. I can't not laugh directly in its face at it every time it comes up in conversation. It's rare to see the author(s) so obviously, gratuitously congratulating their own "genius".

More to the point though yeah, Netflix is pretty bad at adaptations but I can't imagine even them managing to make it worse.

 

[BEAT]

It is ABSOLUTELY fucking racist.

 

[BEAT]

It's the sort of mealy mouthed white middle class liberal Racism where it can't wait to tell you how hard they voted for Obama, but can't imagine why anyone would protest the death of George Floyd.

 

[Issun]

It's the sort of mealy mouthed white middle class liberal Racism where it can't wait to tell you how hard they voted for Obama, but can't imagine why anyone would protest the death of George Floyd.

I bet a talented director who had some success with sketch comedy in the early 2010s could make a highly relevant movie about such a thing.

Why yes, I have just now decided to see how many *nudge* *wink* posts I can make in one thread. Why do you ask?

 

[Ludendorkk]

Bioshock 2 is the best one by far, and especially with Minerva's Den

 

[Kiyone]

BioShock 2 is indeed the best one.

 

[4-So]

Bioshock 2 is the best one by far, and especially with Minerva's Den

The Burial at Sea stuff in Infinite was pretty good. Seeing Rapture before the fall was lovely.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

Bioshock 2 is the best one by far, and especially with Minerva's Den

you get me

Burial at Sea would have been a little better if you discovered that Songbird was some failed Booker rescue attempt forced to bond to Elizabeth to survive and not a rando nobody.

That said, it was nice seeing Sander Cohen again. His interlude is one of the best parts of the first game, much as the Slate interlude is one of the better parts (as I recall) of Binfinite; a self-contained substory that doesn't undercut itself, and in the case of Slate's, actually seems to be taking a stab at the themes the game is supposedly about, before things go off the rails with the rebellion later.

 

[Bongo]

It's some nice looking shootin'. I appreciated that every single weapon and spell was viable to be the only thing you use, and the dynamic roaming minibosses were novel and interesting, and have been expanded on in later games. Didn't get far in 2 but it seemed neat, and wisely never touched Infinite (think I received a copy as a gift at one point).

 

[Adrenaline]

I honestly never played it but wasn’t the DLC for 2 a walking simulator?

No, it was a miniature Bioshock game with a good story. Several of the people who made it left and made Gone Home.

 

[gogglebob]

I remember one of the hype points of the first BS was that there were supposed to be so many different flexible ways you could solve problems and beat encounters with your crazy powers! And then I played it and there were no such things.

This turned out to mean that every room had exactly one (1) inexplicable puddle (well, I guess the place was underwater), and you could electrocute your opponents instantly if they stood in said puddle. VARIETY!

Seconded. I quite liked what little I played of BioShock Infinite when it involved exploring its world, but I fell off of the game early when it told me it was time to get back to the action and Elizabeth called me a monster and ran off for killing people that the game had programmed to kill me.

There were SO MANY places in Bioshock Infinite where I just wanted to hang out. It is a weird situation, but I felt at the time (and still do) that Bioshock: Infinite gave the player a world that they WANTED to save, but it was your inevitable ultimate goal to destroy the place. Final Fantasy 13, meanwhile, was a game where you were "saving the world", but the narrative/locations only ever seemed to reinforce that this world either outright sucked or was vaguely hostile to all life. Mind you, this assessment does ignore how absolutely every human being in BI is an asshole...

And speaking of which! The Daisy Fitzroy (leader of the rebellion that is fighting against racism/slavery) content in the DLC identifies some of what went wrong in Bioshock Infinite, tries to make it better, and then outright fails for different reasons. In BI (pre DLC), Daisy (spoilers for Bioshock Infinite and its DLC) seemingly gets (insanely) frustrated when the rebellion is going in a bad direction, and thus threatens the life of a child before "having to" be killed by Elizabeth. The later-released DLC reveals that Daisy Fitzroy was a super genius (yay!), she vaguely had an idea of how "the future" was going to go (interesting!), and... her heel turn was apparently because it was her fated duty to force Elizabeth to "mature" into a woman capable of killing the big bad. So Daisy, champion genius of the revolution who is incidentally black, willingly sacrifices her life, morals, and reputation so the pretty white lady can go on to kill someone they were both trying to kill anyway. Super Genius! Can only accomplish this by threatening to murder a small boy! I guess! And Discovering this revelation causes Elizabeth to outright state in the game (Burial at Sea, Episode 2) that Daisy is not as bad as the racists she is fighting against, which, cool guys, glad we got through there. But... you see what happened? You basically turned the one named black woman in the cast into the "magical negro" trope, and... yeah.

Yeah.

 

[madhair60]

I remember when Bioshock 1 was literally the best looking thing I had ever seen in my entire life. Holy shit it looked so good.

Bioshock 2 was good. Best one. Easily.

Didn't manage to get far into Infinite, the feedback about the story (as seen in this thread) makes me less than inclined to do so.