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Now, you may remember a little game from last decade called Bioshock,
or maybe the more recent Bioshock: Infinite.
If you don't, you've probably been skipping rent cheques for the rock you live under,
as you haven't left it for a long time.
Bioshock was a revolutionary first person shooter,
one that satisfied both the need for a fantastic storyline
and the ability to shoot bees out of your hands while wielding World War 2-era guns.
The art design was also wonderful,
giving you the underwater dystopian city you always dreamed of,
and then adding stuff your nightmares decided it was better to leave out.
Given that it won several awards for story, graphics, and gameplay,
you can consider it a groundbreaking and well known game.
Now that you're up to speed with the game,
I'd like to introduce you to someone you might not have met: Ayn Rand.
While often made a joke of in the present day, or outright forgotten,
Rand's work was pretty influential in the Fifties.
The most important of her stories, Atlas Shrugged, was huge in its message of objectivism.
Objectivism is the idea that one should follow their own destiny
and forge a path for themselves,
regardless of the people trying to hold them back.
So, I'm not going to give you the whole story of Atlas Shrugged,
but I'll paint it in broad strokes:
In a dystopian United States,
the intellectual and the genius, the scientist and the artist,
are all shut down in order to promote equality.
So what's a band of intelligent and creative people to do?
Go on strike of course!
All the intellectuals and big thinkers decide that they'd be better off left to their own devices
and build a... wait for it... underwater city, where
"the scientist would not be bound by petty morality,
where the great would not be constrained by the small..."
Sound familiar?
That's essentially what Rapture, the underwater city in Bioshock, represents.
It's right out of Atlas Shrugged.
Rand called hers Atlantis, the villain from Bioshock called his Rapture.
Tomato Tomahto, right?
That's not the only similarity Rand's book and this game share.
The whole thing is a massive reference to objectivism in general
and Ayn Rand in particular.
Both her and the story's villain, Andrew Ryan,
originally hailed from Moscow,
but left when communism became too much for them.
Even Andrew Ryan's name is a partial anagram of Ayn Rand's.
What separates the game from the book is there view of objectivism.
In the case of Atlas Shrugged,
the message is to pursue your own goals and don't let anything or anyone pull you down.
Bioshock seems to give an example of what would happen if that message actually was followed in a society.
If you leave morality and conscience behind for the sake of progress,
what does society become?
Bioshock seems to say that the answer is a twisted,
broken, underwater city populated only by the insane,
the addled, and the giant mech suits with drills for arms.
But hey, that's a small price to pay to shoot bees from your hands.
Subtitles by Bastien Zara