Choice in Bioshock


            The game Bioshock has many existential and deterministic themes throughout it. The game starts out with your character in an airplane flying over the Atlantic Ocean. There are complications with the plane’s engine and they crash land in the water, killing everyone on board except the main character. You find a lighthouse on a small island nearby and enter it, finding an elevator that lead down into an underwater city called Rapture. Rapture was created as a capitalists paradise where there is no government regulation whatsoever on the free market. As you enter the city you see a statue of a man named Andrew Ryan, with a plaque beneath it that reads, “No gods, no kings, only man.” In this city of radical freedom there is a lot of violence and a large population of people addicted to drugs. You have to make a lot of choices immediately to try and survive including using some of the available drugs to make yourself stronger and keep up with the people trying to kill you. A man who simply goes by the name Atlas talks to you over the radio and offers to help you survive if you help him kill Andrew Ryan. You do what Atlas says out of what feels like your choice but when you meet Andrew Ryan he reveals to you that you had actually been brainwashed along the way to obey any command starting with the phrase “would you kindly…” It turns out that you had not been helping atlas out of choice but were rather a slave with no free will. He then points out that even before running into Atlas the main character had no free will because he was making choices not of his own accord but as a reaction to the circumstances around him. This city of extreme freedom had actually made a slave of the main character before Atlas had even gotten to him. I found this extremely interesting how the creation of this Existentialists paradise actually took away the power of the people to choose, locking them into a life that was largely predetermined.

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