Gamers are the Living Dead?

I was not introduced to much technology as a child.

But, eventually puberty. Middle School. High School. College. I osmosised enough. So freshman year it looked like I would be ok. But I made friends, and oh they had video games.

Video games. The only video game I had ever played was Sonic the Hedgehog. At my sister’s orthodontist appointment. Oh, the thirty minutes once a month for about five months. It was glorious.

My friend had a Wii and an X-Box.

Video games are mind-blowing for those unaccustomed. But video games can be daunting to begin. Gamers have been gamers since they popped out. They have cheat codes in their DNA. Games are meant for people who have gamed forever and have their own language of poor grammar and translated catch phrases. My already done growing hands were surely too dumb to play and figure out video games that already have had seven games in the series beforehand.

But there is Bioshock. (Warning: Video is graphic)

Bioshock holds your hand and tells you it is ok you didn’t have hip and with it parents. Bioshock engrosses the new gamer and shows them how to have fun.

The game starts in an alternative version of 1960. Your character sits in a plane reading a note when the plane starts to shake and explode. You awake in the middle of the ocean surrounded by wreckage, and you have to swim to a lighthouse. You enter the lighthouse and the lights rumble on and you see this face.

You descend the stairs and step into what looks like a submarine. And then you see Rapture.

First of all, the game is unbelievably beautiful. I have played new games that came out this year and none of them match the detail, the precision, and the fantastic look of Rapture. It is a city underwater. A city underwater that whales swim through. And, I must admit, I have a soft spot in my heart for the art deco design. Everything is classy and beautiful.

Once you’re in, you’re in. The game takes you step by step how to navigate within the scenery. It has an easy level for beginners, and the easy setting tells you how to do everything. This is how you walk and look around. Here is how you jump over things. Here is how you duck under things. Would you kindly pick up that wrench? Here is how you kill splicers.

Regardless of if you like first person shooters, the story will suck in you. Rapture is a city built by Andrew Ryan, an Objectivism businessman who built a city under the sea to escape the “Parasites” of government and religion, those that live off of and stifle the individual genius. He brought a bunch of geniuses to the city, including Nazi scientists, and let them run wild. There are no boundaries. Science, art, and technology. But things disintegrated and Rapture developed in an apocalyptic dream. Scientists discovered Adam, which enables you to rewrite your genetic code. With Adam you can use Plasmids, which make able you to shot fire, shot electricity, shot out swarms of insects, use telekinesis, and use lots of other amazing powers.

You need Eve to use Adam; it works like a battery you have to inject in your arm. Then you can splice your genetic code and change it into anything you want. But once you start splicing it’s impossible to quit. Rapture is now full of an army of splicers, those who have changed their genetic codes so many times that they are barely human. The society crumbed into a warzone with everyone looking for more Adam for that last fix. And every last splicer is ready to kill you for it.

Of course, there is never enough Adam to go around. So to extract some Adam from the various corpses lying around the battle ground of Rapture, you have Little Sisters: genetically modified girls who can collect Adam from dead bodies. And protecting these precious resources is the Big Daddy.

And that is the backstory. Well, that is a tiny fragment of the backstory. If you look around enough you will find recorded messages giving you the full story of Rapture. And there is plenty of it in the game.

All of this, and I haven’t even gotten to the game play. It works as a standard first person shooter. As soon as you enter Rapture, a splicer tries to kill you. But Atlas, a man you know only as a voice, intervenes and kills the splicer. He says he will guide you through Rapture if you will kindly save his family and help them escape. It is fantastic rush, shooting and shocking an army of splicers across a gorgeous background. And then there is the arsenal littered across Rapture. You hack into and control alarm cameras, machine gun turrets, and vending machines in order to survive. There is action, there are legitimate scares and horror, there are puzzles, there is a mystery, there is art, and there is so much energy and interest.

And then the story has a moralistic question.

You can play good or evil, depending on whether you kill the Little Sisters for a higher amount of Adam or if you save her for a smaller amount. This choice will affect your whole gaming experience and give you a different ending to the story.

So, you have an alternate history 1960’s underwater apocalypse city full of Ayn Rand and George Orwell references where science has run amok turning men into demigods, and you must either try survive large and win everything or struggle and save a few of Rapture’s children.  

I have played both games, the first Bioshock and its arguably superior sequel, at least four times. Each time it keeps getting better. And if they delay Bioshock Infinite, the third in the series, one more time I might just modify my shottie at a Power to the People, hack into a Circus of Value, splice up at a Gather’s Garden, kill me and Big Daddy and harvest the Adam from a Little Sister because I need it so bad.

So, yes, if you need a way into video games start with Bioshock. Just don’t ever expect you will come back out.