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 bioshock interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.The world's first semi-objectivist first-person shooter. Set in Rapture, an underwater city built by a Howard Hughes-like millionaire in the 1940s, BioShock is upping the ante of what we expect from a first-person shooter not only in terms of how the game is played but also its content. Consider its setting: Rapture was conceived as a Utopia where the elite could escape the travails of the surface world. In the 1950s, however, the city's scientists used seas slugs to develop a stem cell by-product that could enhance the human mind and body. A genetic arms race and violent struggle ensued.As well as containing some pretty serious subject matter, BioShock also innovates in terms of its playing mechanics. Ken Levine, co-founder of Irrational Games (now 2K Boston/2K Australia) and lead designer of the game, says "BioShock just flows differently than other shooters. We wanted to let the player drive, to set the terms of combat, and to make the rules. Shooters are generally very designer controlled. We wanted to give the rudder to the player." The bottom line is that "BioShock is all about choice."  Games are often sniffed at for their triviality and their basic gratifications. BioShock offers a little more and, despite its 1960 setting, appears to reflect the state of the modern world. "Rapture is a place of big, unbendable ideologies. I was thinking a lot about that in the past few years," says Levine. Indeed, recent world history has been similarly and grimly defined by the clash of unbendable ideologies. Is humanity damned to always behave in such a way? "The political scene in the last few years has been pretty depressing," says Levine. "The dialogue seems more about metaphor than reality. Minor threats get inflated. Real threats get pushed aside. The world seems more interested in maintaining a political narrative than drilling down to the real complexities." Unsurprisingly, BioShock has some pretty interesting cultural reference points. "BioShock really leverages all aspects of the mid-20th century," Levine says. "The art, the music, the architecture, the politics, and then spins them into a freakish offshoot of society that sealed itself in a bit of a time capsule at the bottom of the ocean." More specifically, it's influenced by the writings of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. "Well, the game does take place in a failed semi-objectivist Utopia! However, unlike Rand, we tried to take the concept of Utopia and examine it as if it were built not by gods dressed like men, but by flesh and blood people with real flaws. And unlike Orwell's 1984, we wanted to show a Utopia whose intentions were good, that really had a chance to work if people could just not be so… human."  Levine is, however, reticent about how games compete with other entertainment media. "We all compete for everybody's hard-earned dollar. That's undeniable," he says. "But I don't really feel we're competing with films, books and other media aesthetically. A book is a book, a movie a movie, a game's a game. However, our medium has so much untapped aesthetic capacity. But the 'verbs' of our aesthetics are new and we're just figuring them out." In the meantime, we can just enjoy the basic gratifications of fighting crazed gene-junkies, scary freaks in deep-sea diving suits and sublimely arrogant super-capitalists.
Daniel Etherington
BioShock is released for Xbox 360 and PC on 24 August 07 through Take 2 Interactive.
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