I wrote this paper for a class on postmodern fiction last year. I'm not sure how interesting it will actually be to anyone else--it references the class fairly significantly, and it's not a particularly unique or new analysis of Bioshock, but I thought I'd put it up here anyway. Massive spoilers for all of Bioshock, so be warned.

The first video games were developed in the 1950s, but it was not until the 1970s that they became a commercial enterprise and not until the past decade that they have begun to receive critical recognition. It is perhaps not coincidental that postmodernism—both the literary genre and cultural phenomenon—arose at the same time; at the very least it can be said that postmodernism and video games influenced and were influenced by each other, even if many involved with either field were not cognizant of the influence at the time. Postmodernism is, after all, deeply connected with the rise of computers and later network technology; and video games are from one perspective simply the narrative entertainment aspect of those technologies—the natural development from books and movies into the new realm of computers. Video games are of course much more than just movies on a computer, and the difference between the two is what makes video games arguably the most postmodern medium yet in existence: consider that if postmodernism is a preoccupation with the culture of the “easy edit”, the ability to change anything and everything at the click of a mouse button, then video games—narratives in which people are not passive readers or viewers but active players who interact with, change, edit the narrative as it occurs—are postmodern in their very bones.

This, at least, has been the argument of many academics in the fledgling field of game studies, if not in so many words: while they rarely connect their work to postmodernism, such academics frequently declare the power of video games to be their capacity for choice, in opposition to the locked linear narratives of almost all other artistic mediums (barring niche aberrations like the infamous Choose Your Own Adventure series of children's books). Yet one of the first video games to generate substantial critical discourse—2K Games' Bioshock, the magnum opus of designer Ken Levine published in 2007—is a game that deliberately, methodically, brutally deconstructs the myth of choice in video games. Bioshock's narrative and ludic climax revolves around a demonstration of the total lack of agency the player has, a demonstration of how everything the player has done in the game has been carefully orchestrated and choreographed, with the much-vaunted choices being nothing more than crude illusions.

Bioshock, a title near the pinnacle of both blockbuster action games—Bioshock sold over two million copies in its first year—and artistic and intellectual games, is a supremely postmodern video game. It is a video game in which body modification, addiction and compulsion, resistance to meta-narratives, self-referentiality, ontology, conspiracies, and nearly every other trope or trend of postmodern fiction appears in some way or another with a significant impact on either the gameplay or at least the narrative. It is a video game that combines an absurd, 1940s adventure serial-esque plot and over-the-top characters, setting, and art style with intensely serious points about human nature and the nature (and danger) of narrative. It is a video game whose first two acts build to arguably the most important comment in video games on video games yet made and then collapses in its final act into cliché and stereotypes, unable to overcome the problems it worked so hard to point out. It is a postmodern artifact both in the sense that it is concerned with postmodern concerns and in that it is itself deeply postmodern.

Bioshock is a first-person shooter, a video game played from a first-person perspective and in which the primary gameplay involves shooting enemies with a variety of weapons—the same genre as the infamously less cerebral Doom and Halo. After surviving a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic, the player explores the underwater city of Rapture, an objectivist utopia built at the height of the Cold War that has since collapsed into anarchy. Early on the protagonist injects himself with a “plasmid”, a genetic modification device that allows him to use supernatural powers like shooting lightning from his fingertips; the various types of plasmids, along with more conventional firearms, form the basis of the player's arsenal. The player follows the instructions of Atlas, a man who speaks to him over a radio, as he gradually learns the story behind Rapture, founded by ex-Soviet industrialist Andrew Ryan and eventually brought down by the discovery of ADAM, the material that powers plasmids; the power struggle to control ADAM between Ryan and gangster Frank Fontaine, combined with the delirious effects of prolonged plasmid use, leads to the collapse of civilized society in Rapture and leaves the city occupied almost solely by “splicers”, citizens of Rapture gone mad with plasmid use and their own traumatic circumstances. Unlike everyone else in the game, the player cannot die: when “killed”, the player simply reappears in the nearest “Vita-Chamber”, a resurrection device that obscure audio logs in the game reveal to now be keyed only to Ryan's genetic code.

At the game's climax two-thirds of the way through, the player finally confronts Andrew Ryan, whom the player has been sent to kill by Atlas. Ryan reveals that the player is actually the genetic son of Ryan himself and a prostitute hired by Fontaine; Fontaine took the baby, had one of Rapture's geneticists accelerate its growth and implant it with false memories and mind control conditioning, then transported it to the continental United States until Fontaine called it back. The phrase Atlas uses to “suggest” directions to the player—“Would you kindly . . .”—is the code phrase that initiates the mind control protocol; Atlas is in fact Fontaine. The remainder of the game concerns the struggle of the player, now under the instruction of a Doctor Tenenbaum, to defeat Fontaine and escape Rapture.

Bioshock's plot would not be out of place in a movie commented on by Mystery Science Theater 3000, yet it aims (and arguably succeeds to a significant extent) at intellectual and artistic achievement far beyond such works. One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is the blurring of the distinction between “high brow” culture of art and “low brow” culture of entertainment (Et Tu, Babe's combination of hyperbolic ego humor and cultural commentary; Motherless Brooklyn's combination of detective genre tropes and a realistic depiction of Tourette's syndrome; Choke's combination of sex and sex addiction); Bioshock is near the apex of the tradition. It is after all first and foremost a video game, a medium until the past decade almost never discussed as anything but the lowest brow of culture, that nonetheless strives for a higher intellectual consideration. It is of a genre habitually described as “mindlesss” and its setting and plot are so obviously deliberately ridiculous and over-the-top that it seems difficult to take anything in the game seriously. Yet for every aspect of the game that exists purely for entertainment, there is a counterpart that has little value beyond the artistic: the splicers that the player guns down throughout the game (entertainment) speak with crazed speech that suggests they are not monsters but merely men and women driven mad by the terrible circumstances of Rapture (art); the struggle witnessed and fought throughout the game between Ryan and Atlas/Fontaine, which is both a classic dual between over-the-top villains and an honest commentary on idealism and nihilism; and of course the mind control, both an absurd device and the linchpin for the game's commentary on video games and the illusion of choice. Bioshock moves between the realms of entertainment and art, primeval and intellectual, high brow and low brow constantly and easily, almost daring a commentator to attempt and fail to draw a line between what is worth analyzing critically and what is not. Like postmodernism, Bishock defies categorization.

Early previews of Bioshock, which discussed an underground Nazi laboratory, reveal that only one aspect of the game remained from original conception to publication: body modification. Literally in the name—“shock” being a reference to the game's spiritual predecessors System Shock and System Shock 2 but “bio” being indisputably short for “biological”—the most notable deviation from traditional first-person shooter game mechanics is the plasmids, the biological weapons that the player collects and upgrades throughout the game. The narrative of course is consumed by the story of plasmids: it is plasmids that lead to the struggle between Ryan and Fontaine that brings Rapture down and it is plasmids that spawn the splicers that hunt the player the entirety of the game. Even the first major “boss” of the game is a plastic surgeon who decided after plasmids and ADAM allowed him to shape a person's body to any possible appearance—after perfection became an attainable goal—that he would become the Picasso of the body and free his patients from the tyranny of “symmetry”.

But more than this, Bioshock's gameplay is consumed by plasmids: the choice of which plasmids to keep in the limited available slots for genetic modification is one of the most important tactical decisions in the game and significantly changes how the player proceeds. Certain plasmids are better at fighting certain enemies or achieving certain effects, and always some option must be sacrificed; in this way even players who pay no attention to the narrative—a significant number—are forced to deal with Bioshock's emphasis on body modification. The choice is not just mechanical but also visual; the appearance of the player's hands (the only part of the protagonist's body visible from the game's first-person perspective) changes radically depending on which plasmid is equipped. Postmodernism is of course obsessed with body modification, perhaps most notably in Et Tu, Babe, with Mark Leyner's geriatric cyborg bodyguards and his own drug-addled physique; Bioshock takes this obsession as far as it can go, and perhaps a little farther.

The plasmids and their effects on Rapture's citizens hit upon another postmodern obsession: addiction. Et Tu, Babe, Infinite Jest, Choke: all are concerned majorly with addiction and addicts. In Bioshock addiction manifests in the splicers, the former normal people of Rapture who have become consumed by their use of plasmids and transformed into vicious killers that stalk the ruined structures of the city. The game's finale is an extended battle with Fontaine after he has injected himself with an overdose of ADAM, gone mad, and transformed into a physical incarnation of the mythological Atlas he previously impersonated. And while the player experiences no gameplay mechanics of addiction, the player is “addicted” to the instructions of Atlas/Fontaine, compelled just as an addict is to take drugs to follow any directions preceded by “Would you kindly . . .”. Bioshock's mind control is of course rather a form of compulsion, the larger theme that includes addiction and which nearly every work of postmodernism touches on in some way or another. For Bioshock compulsion and control is at the heart of its argument and commentary, the centerpiece of its skewering of the illusion of choice in video games that has spawned so much critical analysis.

The narrative of mind control and the struggle between Ryan and Fontaine is a narrative of conspiracy, a topic that recurs over and over in postmodern fiction. From Et Tu, Babe to Infinite Jest to Motherless Brooklyn to The Intuitionist, conspiracies dominate postmodernism, likely because they are a narrative trope that relates to so many more intellectual concerns of postmodernism: conspiracies, secrets, plots within plots mean resistance to meta-narratives, as Lyotard defined postmodernism, and ontology, the question of “what world is this?”. These concerns are at the heart of Bioshock as well, not just in its conspiracies but in every aspect of the narrative and game.

Before Bioshock was released its conception of a failed objectivist utopia raised the ire of some and the cheers of others, all expecting a satire of Ayn Rand's infamous philosophy; the final product, however, is not so neat in its consideration. Those players interested in the objectivist aspect of the game who explore enough to find the various audio logs detailing the city's fall learn that Rapture fell not because of some inherent failure of objectivism (or despite some inherent success of objectivism) but simply due to the human flaws of Ryan. In fact Bioshock is not so much a satire of objectivism as it is a more subtle commentary on the space between idealism and nihilism. Ryan is portrayed not as a deluded objectivist megalomaniac but as a supreme idealist brought down by his own humanity; at the other end of the spectrum is Fontaine, who at first appears as nothing more than a criminal in search of power and money but gradually reveals himself to be a supreme nihilist whose only concern is the destruction of Rapture and the downfall of Ryan. Yet in both cases Bioshock's position is not one of condemnation or approval but simply a dedication to the idea that Ryan and Fontaine are not ideas but men, not symbols of some grand over-arching narrative that explains everything but simply characters with human motivations and emotions that drive them to take the actions they do and leave Rapture in the state that it lies in.

Beyond the characters and conspiracies of Ryan and Fontaine lies a larger postmodern question: “what world is this?” Bioshock's opening text declares that the game takes place in the North Atlantic, 1960, but clearly this is not a historical 1960: while Ryan may be a Soviet emigrant and he may be worried about CIA and KGB spies, Rapture is filled with technologies on the level of science-fiction. Moreso, such ontological questioning demands, especially in a video game, the question of the narrator: whose perspective is this narrative being told? “Whose world is this?” Bioshock's answer, of course, lies at the heart of its narrative: the revelation of the protagonist's identity not as a random plane crash survivor but as a carefully manipulated instrument in a grand scheme to overthrow Ryan is the climax of the game and dominates its final third.

Bioshock's climax is in fact perhaps its most postmodern element. The move is not just a narrative but a mechanical removal of control: unlike the entirety of the first two-thirds of the game, control is taken away from the player and the events unfold in cinematics for the first time. The scene is deliberately muted, then brutal in a way that ascertains no player can ignore it: the protagonist finally meets Andrew Ryan, who appears not as a megalomaniacal monster but as the most sane person the player has yet seen in Rapture, a tidy man in a business suit putting at one of the office golf sets so often seen in movies. Ryan explains how the player has been deceived, demonstrates the conditioning—“Would you kindly . . . run?” he says, and the player runs—then hands the player the club and solemnly declares, “A man chooses. A slave obeys. Would you kindly . . . kill?” The player watches helplessly as his virtual hands raise the club and bring it down violently against Ryan's face, over and over, as Ryan repeats himself, until finally the top of the club breaks off and remains impaled in Ryan's skull. The scene is shocking not just for its narrative content but for the visceral feeling of inescapability it forces on the player: there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop this. But the move is not to create a jarring juxtaposition from the player's previous freedom, it is to demonstrate the fundamental equality with the player's previous experience. The player character has followed Atlas' instructions due to the mind control conditioning; the player has followed Atlas' instructions because Bioshock is a video game and they understand that he is to follow such instructions in a video game. Players do not have a choice, Bioshock says, as much as they would like to: their experience in a video game is just as directed, just as controlled, just as linear, as that of any other medium. Video games merely present the illusion of freedom and choice.

The concept of video games as narratives with choice is of course simply another meta-narrative that Bioshock postmodernly refutes, but it is more than that: it is a supremely self-referential commentary in that most obvious aspect of postmodernism. Like fiction about fiction and movies about movies, Bioshock becomes, in this moment, a video game about video games, a commentary (and in some ways an attack) on its own medium, in a way that no other medium could. It is ironic that Bioshock's most famous and powerful commentary is achieved through a cinematic—essentially, through an in-game movie—but it is so successful precisely because it nonetheless could not be achieved in anything other than a video game.

Another piece from Creative Writing.

Linnaeus has failed us:
The old taxonomy
Now shows itself to be
Only a pretty dress.

We try molecular
Phylogenetics—not
Good enough. Such a plot
Cannot explain our scar.

Beneath our K-T line
Our history is swept
Clean: all truth lost except
The mass extinction's sign.

What chondrite struck us then?
Where is our Chicxulub?
Caked with ash we can't scrub
Off: how came this bleak pen?

This was written for my Creative Writing class last fall. For various reasons I haven't posted it until now. I wrote it for an assignment with a multitude of unrelated requirements aimed at inspiring something new and weird.

She is a dire radiance, a star blazing dark
Against the gibbering mouth of pity and self-
Indulgence. Her words dissolve this landscape to stark
Clarity: expose these relics upon this shelf

Of ancient wormwood—sturdy-looking, smelling foul
As decapitated roses—as nothing more
Than hollow tokens, the hooting of a barn owl
Captured by the deaf scribe scratching upon the wet shore.

Because she soars, burning, the world turns—the sun rises—
And the soul of that cursed man, Merlin, master wizard,
Soars above the fields of Albion, no guises
Or masks or crude lies. At long last he hears the word.

With ash on his tongue, the Revelator did speak:
Et nomen stellae dicitur Absinthius—thus,
The name of the star is Wormwood: she shall blaze bleak
Against the dark sky and, pitiless, destroy us.

Like Carthage, Babylon, Ilium before, all falls.
The fields burn, and the cities, and the land and water.
Two star blaze dark together beyond all the walls
Of Earth, the crumbling relics, the noble slaughter.

3. How does international law attempt to limit the propensity of sovereign states to go to war?

War is the purview of a sovereign state--sovereignty is fundamentally the right of a state to impose legitimate violence, which is defined as war (or more generally justice). Therefore the project of international law is to limit and eventually revoke sovereignty and impose a world government on the free Christian peoples--God's chosen--of America. The United Nations--which mocks through its very name the divinely-inspired sovereign righteousness of the United States of America--is obviously the most prominent actor in this conspiracy, a desperate but more successful revision of the failed Leage of Nations--brought down by the righteous refusal of the American people to bow down before such an obvious and overt attempt at external seizure of control despite the President's unlawful attempts to bypass their will--but there are far more actors working against sovereignty, some obvious and inept, like the International Courts, taking the names and symbols of holy justice but clearly missing the divine mandate that enables such proceedings to have any legitimacy, or a few more insidious entities, secret groups whose activities are closely guarded but nonetheless, like all agents of the Anti-Christ, occasionally make mistakes--groups like the Trilateral Commission or of course the Majestic Twelve, who are far greater threats to American sovereignty than any open international organization, infiltrating American society at its highest levels--no President of the last fifty years can be trusted, all puppets or pawns of one or another attempt to destroy the glorious American peoples foiled only by American ingenuity and of course God's will--and slowly gaining control of culture, media, the national consciousness, eating away at the average American's divinely innate sense of superiority and attempting to replace it with the mindless values of equality and unity that are of course the hallmarks of communism, another enemy of American sovereignty and explicitly, openly in the service of Satan but--or perhaps as a result--far less successful, the grand dream of a world socialist government, all individuals nothing more than automated cogs in the machine of production without purpose, never anything more than a mad dream of those Satanic idealists who poured out their dark hearts onto so many pages of texts no righteous American ever read, save for of course the purposes of educating himself about the enemy, studying as one might the ways which Satan attempts to corrupt the faithful so as to be better prepared against his true advances, that in their misdirected passion failed to actually accomplish anything short of blowing up a few buildings, which actions were, ironically, highly antagonistic of whatever public unity they sought to achieve--another sign of communism's clear and intrinsic failure as a true threat to sovereignty--and in its own perverse way more a reflection of the American holy values that protect we glorious chosen people against such threats to soveriegnty, by way of course of the Second Amendment, which decrees or more rightly reaffirms, for it did not establish God's will but merely stated it plainfly for those righteous souls who cannot sense it from birth, the right of all Americans to keep and bear arms as divinely-ordained defense against attacks on our sovereignty--even by our own American government, which as discussed can rarely be trusted to hold our best interests in mind, despite its positioning of itself as a physical incarnate of God's will (itself a blasphemous Catholic notion, as any true Christian understands the soveriegnty of the individual leaves no authority between himself and God), often being corrupted by those Satanic forces it was established to protect us from--and more importantly a symbol or better the physical means itself of our soveriegnty, which if as previously defined is the right to legimiate violence then is most incarnate in this Second Amendment, the most holy Amendment in those second Ten Commandments, the succesor to that which established God as the sole authority over any individual, as proclaimed to Moses upon Mount Sinai but inevitably misunderstood by those near but not completely within God's light and corrupted within that limited gap of misunderstanding by the ever-malevolent and lurking machinations of the Devil and his servants, who include not only communists, the United Nations, the Majestic Twelve and the Trilateral Commission but also of course more ancient evils like the Elders of Zion, that false of council of false chosen who have deluded so much of the world for so much time and orchestrated the most successful of efforts against American sovereignty, most notably the complete control of American government with regards to the illegitimate nation of Israel, which persists today solely through the power of American aid bought by the most heinous scheme in all of history, the intentional massacre of many of the weaker, less "useful" members (as if they were all but tools of the greater Zionist good rather than individuals whose only loyalty lay to God), sacrificed--if such a noble word can be applied to such a horrifically ignoble cause, perhaps the greatest crime in all of history from Adam to now--to achieve public approval for their first step towards revocation of sovereignty through immense guilt, unwarranted of course but inevitable given any good Christian values, an unfortunate consequence, allowing our enemies to exploit God's given goodness to further Satanic purposes, an irony that the Devil must deliciously appreciate even as he fails to realize that such a victory could only be achieved through taking advantage of true Christian values, for no American would ever willingly consort with Satan, and such a victory is achieved only through the utmost deception and fortunately (or not, as it is surely not fortune but simply an aspect of God's eternal plan) cannot be furthered, for any advancement against our sovereignty would require more open corruption, an attempt unhidden by the massive deceit that previously allowed such great evil to come to pass and thus doomed inevitably to failure, as all such schemes are when forced into the light of God by his faithful, those few who recognize the Devil's deceptions always and without failure due to our being chosen by God and ordered as shepherds to protect the chosen people from the great dangers of deception, deceit, and other such Satanic devices, weak of course but nonetheless dangerous, for while to remain righteous the faithful must be ever vigilant, the Devil is pleased with each and every minor success, every minor corruption or disruption in divine righteousness, a satisfaction that is both pathetic, for such minor offenses are small and insignificant in comparison to the totaility of good that is Creation, and misplaced, for God's forgiveness and grace means that all such minor victories are ultimately meaningless, forgotten, more, erased by the light of God's love, all of us imperfect beings transformed into the image and more importantly substance of perfection by God's will and according to God's plan, of which Satan's attempts to disrupt and minor disturbances that are from the total perspective variations upon the whole that add to the fundamental beauty of Creation rather than take away, so that in the end the Devil, ironically, is nothing more than another unknowing servant of God.