Hey Wisecrack, Jared again.
Today, we’re returning to the underwater city of Rapture to talk about one of the most
widely discussed video game franchises in recent memory: BioShock.
Of course, longtime viewers will remember that we covered the philosophy of BioShock
1 and BioShock: Infinite in the first ever Wisecrack Edition over four years ago!
But you guys were pretty quick to point out that we made a purposeful but glaring omission
in that video.
So, today, we’re finally going to go back and address the often forgotten, frequently
maligned middle child of the BioShock franchise, BioShock 2.
At the time of its release, BioShock 2 was noted for lacking the involvement of the series
creator Ken Levine.
In a 2010 interview, Levine said that he and his team at Irrational Games passed on developing
the sequel because they wanted to avoid repeating themselves.
“We’re always trying to challenge ourselves,” “We felt we had said what we wanted to say
about Rapture, about those kinds of environments and that kind of feel.”
Despite this intimation from Levine that BioShock 2 is a bit of a rehash of the original, there
is still a contingent of fans out there who remain steadfast in their belief that it is
a great game, praising it for its improved mechanics and the spin it puts on the themes
of Bioshock 1.
So, now that we’ve had nearly a decade of distance from this potentially disappointing
sequel, let’s revisit BioShock 2 and evaluate whether it was as successful as some people
seem to think, whether it reached the same intellectual heights as the franchise’s
first installment, whether it’s deep or dumb.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on Bioshock 2.
And, as always, spoilers ahead.
Alright first things first, let’s do a little recap.
In BioShock 2, you play as Delta, a prototype of a Big Daddy living in Andrew Ryan’s underwater
utopia of Rapture.
Like all Big Daddies, you were tasked with protecting a Little Sister, and in the case
of Delta, that Little Sister’s name was Eleanor.
In the game’s prologue, Eleanor is snatched away from you by the main antagonist, Dr.
Sofia Lamb, who then uses mind control to force you to commit suicide.
Ten years later, you emerge from a Vita-Chamber having been miraculously resurrected.
You are then led through the crumbling city of Rapture with the aid of Eleanor’s telepathic
messages and a little help from some unlikely allies.
Your mission is to find Eleanor and save her from the sinisterly soft-spoken Sofia Lamb,
who, by the way, is Eleanor’s mother.
Pretty soon, you learn that Dr. Lamb was once a celebrated psychologist in the heyday of
Rapture, but, after Andrew Ryan’s death in the first BioShock, she transformed Ryan’s
failed objectivist utopia into a utilitarian collectivist hellscape.
Lamb has manipulated the poorest most disenfranchised citizens of Rapture through propaganda and
plasmid addiction to be fiercely loyal to her and the rest of the “Rapture Family.”
What’s more, the Family deifies Eleanor as the “first true utopian” because Lamb
has been pumping her full of ADAM in an attempt to create a completely selfless, completely
altruistic being.
Lamb’s followers paper the walls of the city with iconography representing her and
Eleanor that states, “We will be reborn.
She is our savior.”
As you make your way to Lamb’s hideout, you encounter her various allies who you can
choose to kill or spare depending on how generous you’re feeling or how obnoxious their repeated
dialogue is.
There’s also a new class of enemies called Big Sisters, which are more spritely, acrobatic
versions of the Big Daddies that haunt Rapture’s halls.
There is still the same Little Sisters mechanic from the first game, which forces you to choose
between saving the yellow-eyed innocents or zapping them for their precious ADAM.
As always, the choices you make determine what kind of ending you get, either good,
bad, or neutral.
That’s pretty much it.
You explore the city blasting splicers, in an attempt to rescue your surrogate daughter
from the clutches of her evil mother.
But, BioShock has never been just a first-person shooter.
The games set themselves apart from others in the genre with their rich world-building,
expertly-paced storytelling, and use of philosophical texts to explore deeper themes.
But, just how deep can BioShock 2 get when it’s starting at the bottom of the ocean?
Part 1: The Triumphant Lamb We Worship
In its depictions of the cultish Rapture Family and their fanatical worship of Sofia and Eleanor
Lamb, BioShock 2 offers some pretty decent commentary on the dangers of religious zealotry.
Whereas the first game poked holes in Ayn Rand’s objectivism by showing the natural
conclusion of a utopia built on radical self-interest, BioShock 2 flips the script by presenting
a criticism of blind, selfless devotion to a higher cause.
While these two ideologies may seem at odds with one another, especially given that atheism
is a central tenet of objectivism, the game takes great pains to show that they have more
in common than one might think.
NARRATOR The people of Rapture, lost and leaderless
following the Civil War between Ryan and Fontaine and the death of both characters at the end
of BioShock 1, are seduced by Lamb’s philosophy and begin joining the Rapture Family in droves.
A skilled psychologist, Lamb plays into their anger at the system that failed them and promises
them something greater through these new beliefs.
These people, many of whom struggled to feed themselves in Ryan’s utopia, are now willing
to throw their lives away at Lamb’s word.
We’ve seen this kind of zealotry throughout history, both religiously and politically,
as people have thrown away their lives or political freedoms in the name of a higher
cause.
Lamb’s targeting of the most poverty-stricken members of the population is more of a direct
allusion to early Chritianity, which flourished in the Roman Empire because of church leaders’
willingness to preach to and incorporate the lowest members of society.
The fact that the word “lamb” is often used to refer to Jesus Christ is no more an
accident than Andrew Ryan’s name being a clumsy anagram of Ayn Rand.
This mirroring of religious methodology is plainly obvious in the character Father Simon
Wales.
Once a downtrodden citizen of Rapture’s poorest neighborhood, Wales is energized by
Lamb’s philosophy and converts it into simple religious doctrine that even the most ADAM-corrupted
splicer can understand.
The senseless death of Wales and his many followers underscores the danger posed by
a complete surrender of the self.
This is the antithesis of the first game’s message, which focused on the danger of complete
and total self-interest.
BioShock 2’s argument appears to be that things on the flipside can be just as bad,
much like how the tear-universe sequence in BioShock: Infinite depicts the populist Vox
Populi freedom fighters ruling over Columbia with the same authoritarian violence as Comstock.
It’s a cynical take to say the least, but it’s at least coherent, and a good reminder
to occasionally criticize your own actions instead of giving yourself over to blind faith.
For that reason, we’re going to give this aspect of the game a “deep.”
Ok, so BioShock 2 does a nice job criticizing over-zealous devotion to Lamb’s philosophy.
But, what exactly is her philosophy?
Part 2: When the Greater Good Goes Bad
In the same way that Andrew Ryan was a physical embodiment of Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy,
Sofia Lamb is an amalgamation of a number of different utilitarian thinkers, most notably
John Stuart Mill.
Mill was a British philosopher born in 1806 who was seen by many as the direct successor
to Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarian ethics.
In his book, aptly titled Utilitarianism, Mill provides a summary explanation and defense
of his philosophy founded on the “greatest happiness principle” which states that “actions
are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the
reverse of happiness.”
In other words, what is good is what creates the most happiness for the most people.
This brand of morality is under the umbrella of consequentialist ethics, meaning that,
when it comes to determining the morality of an action, the ends justify the means.
Rand’s version of rational egoism is also a consequentialist theory.
But where Rand believes each person should act in their own self-interest for their own
happiness, utilitarians favor lessening focus on the self and prioritizing the happiness
of everyone instead.
This line of thinking would certainly appeal to someone like Sofia Lamb, who has convinced
herself that turning Eleanor into an ego-less ADAM repository would be the ultimate dissolution
of the self and usher in a new utopia.
And like any good consequentialist, she seems hellbent on accomplishing this goal by any
means necessary.
All her actions throughout the game— the confinement of Eleanor, the kidnapping of
young girls to make into Little Sisters, the careless manipulation of Splicers —are all
done in the name of a future greater good.
Still, it’s pretty hard to argue that Lamb’s actions are promoting happiness or hindering
suffering across the board.
Throughout your entire stay in the city of Rapture, the only person who seems to be having
a good time is that damn clown.
And if Lamb is really meant to be a student of Mill’s philosophy, she maybe should have
paid a little closer attention to the text.
In his essay On Liberty, Mill very clearly states that “The sole end for which mankind
are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action
of any of their number, is self-protection.
That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of
a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
Basically, the ends don’t justify the means if it requires hurting people.
Practically the entire action of the game is set around members of Lamb’s collective
attempting to do harm to Delta through a series of surprise attacks.
The argument could be made that, by attempting to free Eleanor, Delta is doing harm to the
Rapture Family and they’re only acting in self-defense.
But that argument is about as airtight as Dionysus Park.
Ultimately, Lamb talks a big game about her utilitarian, collectivist beliefs but falls
well short of actually being a utilitarian.
Her book Unity and Metamorphosis, excerpts of which are heard throughout the game, asserts
the evolution of the human race is leading to a death of the self, a complete loss of
ego, and, subsequently, the end of tyranny.
But, in practice, Lamb is acting like a selfish tyrant.
She performs dangerous experiments on her own daughter.
She turns young girls and men into Little Sisters and Big Daddies against their will.
She kills anybody who attempts to leave Rapture.
All so she can be proven right in her beliefs and create some hypothesized, ADAM-fueled
God.
She would consider this to be the ultimate death of the self, but for anyone besides
her, there doesn’t seem to be much utility in it.
In the character of Dr. Sofia Lamb, BioShock
2 attempted to create a philosophical villain that believed in everything Andrew Ryan despised
and still managed to be evil.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to make a truly selfless, charitable, collectivist perform
acts of villainy without seeming incoherent.
If their philosophy is about selflessness, but they’re on some egotistical power trip,
you can see how that might criticize the power trip more than the philosophy itself.
So, we’re going to have to give this section a “dumb.”
However, if you’re going to argue that the game is less criticizing the actual philosophy
like in Bioshock 1, and more criticizing how these philosophies are poorly implemented
by tyrants, we could see how one might call it deep.
Unfortunately for Sofia Lamb, the inconsistency between her beliefs and actions is only one
of her problems.
The other, is where she lives.
Part 3: Haven’t We Been Here Before?
By placing the events of BioShock 2 in the same location as BioShock 1, the philosophy
and actions of people like Sofia Lamb are immediately placed in the context of Ryan’s
world.
You may be playing as a different character, but the story is a continuation of the first
game in every sense of the word.
So much so that it’s difficult to avoid picking up audio diaries from familiar old
characters filling in unnecessary plot points.
The game is riddled with superfluous winks and nods to stuff from Bioshock 1, making
this feel more like DLC than a sequel.
And because of this, the villains of BioShock 2 are never given a chance to breathe.
In the first BioShock, we’re given glimpses of Ryan’s utopia at its peak.
We’re shown the potential of his lofty dream, which is what makes the crumbly reality of
it hit that much harder.
The criticism of objectivism is more biting because we see the fallout from these beliefs.
In BioShock 2, the new utopia never gets off the ground because things have already gone
to hell.
Lamb and her followers are attempting to rise from the ashes but they can’t shake off
Ryan’s ghost.
Lamb presented her philosophy as an alternative to Ryan’s, but her utilitarianism or anarcho-collectivism
or whatever you want to call it never manifested in the way that Ryan’s magical city at the
bottom of the ocean did.
And, in the end, the result was the same anyway.
In-fighting, destruction, death, and a one-way trip in a bathysphere to the surface.
It’s hard to effectively poke holes in a new ideology when the player is still inhabiting
a world ruined by the previous one, and when the presence of said ideology is only in the
antagonist’s words, not in her actions.
NARRATOR BioShock as a franchise is about how the lofty
ambitions of men are doomed to fail because of inherent personal flaws.
But in BioShock 2, those lofty ambitions amount to some vague talk about how a young woman
is going to be turned into a utopia.
So, you’re left trudging through a city you’ve already trudged through, all for
the sake of saving your daughter who isn’t even really your daughter.
NARRATOR Oddly enough, that’s also one of the best
things you can say about BioShock 2.
It’s trying to tell a personal, emotional story.
A story about a Big Daddy and a Little Sister.
A story that’s either about redemption or loss of innocence depending on how you play.
For some people that’s enough, and for that reason, we’ll settle on giving BioShock
2 a rating of “kinda deep.”
Sure, the criticism of philosophical ideologies is pretty toothless, but it has some interesting
things to say about the inherent value of the self and the power of caring about someone
rather than the vague notion of everyone.
But what do you guys think?
Is Bioshock 2 a fitting sequel to one of the most revered games of all time?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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