Bio-Shocked

Games I'm currently playing:

1. Fallout 3 (main game)
2. LIMBO
3. SW:TOR
4. Bioshock

It's been a while since I played a game as violent and gruesome as Fallout 3.  This revelation might seem pretty "wimpy", but I don't pride myself in being immune to the goriest and most violent images available.  I don't revel in it and I have no intention of further dulling my senses to violence or disturbing images.  In fact, this blog is an attempt at keeping those parts of me I deem make me human.

At the start of Fallout 3, the appearance of ghouls disturbed me.  Yes, rotting flesh that half covers your face is a bit like feeling slugs squirm in your stomach.  It's such an odd pairing, though.  I can't write it off as pure gore for gore's sake, because there are people who have suffered serious injuries or diseases that are "disfigured" living among us today.  In a strange sense, I feel it's a sort of practice for how I treat people that I see as different from myself.  I can take the opportunity built in to the game and try to see them as I would see myself or my friends and loved ones.

Speaking of a mirror image, today's the first day I have played Bioshock.  Now (SPOILER ALERT), I know that the game does involve becoming partly the thing you are destroying or something to that effect, and I can already see it leaning that way.  You swim to shore from a plane crash over the Atlantic only to dive down many fathoms in a bathysphere into an underground city named Rapture.  Rapture was founded by Andrew Ryan, a man trying to escape the grips of Socialism (taxes for the poor), Church (tithe for God), and Communism (equally shared profits).  Further even than that, Ryan wants to escape any kind of morality that limits scientific or business endeavors.  All of this is communicated to you in a short film on your trip down to Rapture, eventually welcoming you to the city itself.

But things aren't as perfect as you would think they are.  Your first scene is a man being brutally mauled by what Atlas calls Splicers.  Atlas is your first and only friend in the adventure so far, but you only know him via a short-wave radio you pick up in the bathysphere.  Splicers are most of what remains of the population of Rapture.  They are something like what I would imagine a combination of Firefly's Reavers and meth heads are like.  They are certainly more coherent and "human" than a Reaver, but they have lost most empathy or concern for others.  They are violent, pathological, and seemingly addicted to Plasmids or something of the sort.  I haven't quite figured out the difference between ADAM, EVE, and Plasmids, but they all have to deal with rewriting DNA.  In fact, you start out in a Hospital where diary records inform you that plastic surgery has evolved far beyond what it is even today.  People have become like clay dolls, shapeable into whatever form you like.  The head cosmetic surgeon, for his part, has now become, in his own words "limited by his imagination" and my latest diary entry tells me he is fascinated with the idea of applying Picasso-like styles to real people's bodies because he is bored.  This is just a small sample of the kind of world that has been unleashed in Rapture - people are either Gods, animals, or some sick combination of both.

For my part, I have already injected two plasmids - lightning and fire, which let me telekinetically shock and ignite Splicers at will.  The first Plasmid was so painful, I fell off a balcony and nearly got picked apart by Splicers, except that something even worse came along - a Little Sister and her Big Daddy.

Little Sisters are cute little girls who have been somehow completely psychologically desecrated into something from your worst nightmare.  I saw one picking at the dead corpse of a man like she was combing her Barbie.  These Little Sisters carry ADAM - I believe a genetic code, which everyone wants and needs.  Big Daddies are huge, robotic creatures that accompany Little Sisters and protect them from Splicers who want the ADAM.

It's a cruel, cruel world.  I have shocked Splicers, thumped  them with a wrench, shot them with a pistol and a machine gun, and ignited them with pyrokinesis.  I am supposed to be saving myself and Atlas has asked me to save his family.  This is the only good I can find in the game - to save myself and perhaps save Atlas and his family.  Why do I fight?  Mostly self-preservation, but in this unsustainable city, what good is it?  What am I fighting for - to return to the world above?  Will I be able to return afterwards?

The violence is a lot for me.  Seeing both the mutated appearance of the Splicers and the masses of bodies I slay takes its toll- and I want it to.  I have to take breaks from this game and make sure that I play it very slowly so that I can still be myself at the end.  I already try to look away when I loot the bodies.  What does that say of me?  Can I not even look at my own destruction?  Is it too painful?  It is very painful.  It is a burden to carry.  Yes, it's a game, but it is more than that - it is a reflection of myself.  I choose to play the game.  I choose to abide by their rules.  I could just say "I would never kill to survive like that.  Why murder 1,000 or more people just to survive?  I would rather die - that is my beginning and ending to the game."  But I don't say that, so I must keep myself accountable for what I do.