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Beyond the sea: navigating BioShock

Author(s) Parker, Felan; Aldred, Jessica

Imprint McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018

ISBN 9780773554979, 077355498X, 9780773554986, 9780773555556, 0773555552

Permalink https://books.scholarsportal.info/en/read?id=/ ebooks/ebooks3/ upress/2018-12-13/1/9780773555556

Pages 18 to 39

Downloaded from Scholars Portal Books on 2019-05-01 Téléchargé de Scholars Portal Books sur 2019-05-01 There’s Always an Introduction

Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

The fall 2016 release of Bioshock: The Collection – a deluxe anthology of Bioshock (Irrational, 2007), Bioshock 2 ( Marin, 2010), and Bioshock Infinite (Irrational, 2013) along with each game’s (dlc) episodes and supplemental material, remastered for current gener- ation game consoles – marks an almost decade-long span in which the Bioshock series has been at the forefront of scholarly, critical, and popular discourse about digital games. Yet, unsurprisingly, the collection itself did not engage with or even acknowledge the myriad debates and discussions the series has inspired over the years, or attempt to situate it in any larger sociocultural context. Instead it prioritized the consumer logic of the game industry, with glossy packaging and marketing, a shiny coat of audiovisual polish on the earlier games, as well as the insertion of a series of collectible “golden film reels” that allow players of the original game to unlock be- hind-the-scenes interviews with Bioshock and Infinite creative director Ken Levine and lead artist Shawn Robertson. Although Levine was not in- volved in the anthology release (which was outsourced to a third party company), these paratextual materials reinscribe his well-established au- thorial presence. The videos give Levine a platform to reiterate for the umpteenth time the series’ much-touted creative aspirations, influences, and narrative/mechanical innovations, among other things. The flurry of mainstream media coverage and enthusiast press reviews surrounding The Collection’s release primarily focused on whether the additional content and superficial updates were “worth it” for owners of the earlier versions, 4 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred and bemoaned the absence of anything particularly new or interesting in the reissue, as well as the general lack of any more substantial, self-aware, or thought-provoking reflection on the series and what it has meant to a diverse range of players over the years.1 As a very different kind of collection focused on the Bioshock franchise, this book strives to do what a consumer object like The Collection cannot: to critically examine Bioshock and the significant impact it has had on the way we approach, appreciate, make, and study digital games. As a nebulous academic field, game studies has run a parallel course to the Bioshock series. Game studies made its initial bids for legitimacy in the same historical moment that the series’ progenitors, in particular the and games,2 established the contours of a new sub-genre of “intelligent” stealth-oriented action games or “immersive sims” that set themselves apart from the supposedly more “mindless” shoot ’em ups that came be- fore.3 By the time the original, much-lauded Bioshock arrived, game studies had become a more visible and accepted area of inquiry; but in order to justify its own existence, and reinforce its still-precarious position at the intersection of several disciplines, game studies was hungry for games that would appear self-evidently worthy of study to those outside the field. Bioshock became enshrined in the burgeoning field’s canon and has been the subject of numerous papers, articles, and book chapters (as evidenced by this collection’s bibliography). In the subsequent decade, alongside Bioshock’s multiversal expansion across two subsequent titles (which saw similarly high degrees of engagement from scholars employing new meth- ods and modalities of game studies), game studies has evolved, fragmented, re-constituted, and diversified itself. With these parallel histories in mind, the goal of this book is to push beyond the habitual repackaging of well- established accounts and interpretations of the series in order to provide a much-needed renewal of critical perspectives on Bioshock. This volume is more than a retrospective account of a game series that was extensively written about during its heyday. Sustained and multifaceted reflection on a specific foundational game series creates the opportunity for game scholars to have a productive interdisciplinary conversation. The chapters collected here illustrate how seemingly disparate approaches to studying games can complement one another and provoke new insights (or, in some cases, compellingly incommensurable interpretations). The There’s Always an Introduction 5 thematic structure of Beyond the Sea enriches our understanding of the same ludic and representational elements by integrating a multiplicity of theoretical and methodological vantage points. To help frame this inter- disciplinary conversation about the Bioshock series in its various contexts, we begin by tracing in broad strokes the series’ history, forms and conven- tions, narrative arcs, industrial context, and cultural reception. Following this overview, we delve more deeply into the evolving relationship between Bioshock and game studies, and its ongoing significance to the field. We conclude with an outline of the book’s thematic sections. Taken as a whole, this introduction is your compass for navigating Beyond the Sea.

Bioshock’s Past, Present, and Future

So, what’s the big deal about Bioshock? How did this idiosyncratic series come to occupy such a central place in popular and critical discourse on digital games? And what role has Bioshock played in the formation and evolution of game studies as a field? The original Bioshock is a science-fiction/horror first-person shooter (fps) with role-playing game (rpg) elements. It is set in Rapture, a dys - topian underwater city, circa an alternate history 1960. The game draws a number of genres and influences – ranging from the Objectivist political philosophy of , to the anxious visions of postwar science fiction films, to the claustrophobic traverses of games, to - punk meets Art Deco architecture and graphic design – together into a sur- prisingly cohesive, stylish package.4 In Bioshock, the underwater city of Rapture was created by a disgruntled industrialist named Andrew Ryan. Ryan built it to be a free-market capi- talist haven, dedicated to the principle of rational self-interest and unhin- dered by the machinations of the state, , and petty . The player is Jack, a mysterious figure who discovers the sunken city after his plane crashes in the Atlantic Ocean – only to find that a perfect storm of corruption, civil war, and genetic manipulation has caused the city to col- lapse. Using a variety of upgradable weapons and pseudo-magical genetic powers, Jack must fight his way through the leaking corridors of Rapture, under constant threat of its violently insane, horribly mutated inhabitants, the Splicers. 6 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

Even more dangerous are the roving teams of Little Sisters and Big Daddies, grotesque behaviour-modified little girls and their hulking protectors, tasked with harvesting valuable genetic material from the dead. The player chooses whether to “harvest” this material from the Little Sis- ters, which kills them, or “save” them in exchange for in-kind rewards from their creator and surrogate mother, Dr Brigid Tenenbaum. In the course of the game, Jack is guided through a series of tasks and challenges by the seemingly friendly leader of the resistance, – who is in fact an alter of Ryan’s business rival Frank Fontaine. It is eventually revealed that Jack is a brainwashed clone based on Ryan’s dna, manipulated by Fontaine into assassinating Ryan using the code phrase “would you kindly.” In a now-infamous twist, an embittered Ryan forces Jack (and by extension the player) to murder him in a jarring non-interactive sequence. Rescued by Tenenbaum, Jack frees his mind and rebuilds his body with Big Daddy technology. Jack faces off against Fontaine, killing him with the help of the Little Sisters. The game ends with Jack as the new ruler of Rapture, benevolent or tyrannical depending on whether the player har- vested all, some, or none of the Little Sisters. Developed by starting in 2002, Bioshock was first pitched to major gaming publisher/distributor Take-Two Interactive’s 2k Games division in 2005.5 Take-Two (corporate umbrella to such flagship aaa franchises as , Borderlands, and the popular 2K Sports imprint) subsequently acquired Irrational and funded the game’s allegedly very substantial development costs.6 This lengthy, expensive pro- duction process – as well as a massive marketing and promotion campaign designed to help the untested franchise gain traction7 – resulted in tremen- dous hype in the wake of a series of successful previews at major game industry conventions. Bioshock was released in 2007 and was met with almost universal rave reviews. It was praised in particular for its subversion of player expectations about choice and agency, despite some complaints about its occasionally clunky gameplay, as well as a lacklustre final battle and ending, which contrasted sharply with the game’s otherwise complex themes and rich character development. The game received multiple perfect and near-perfect review scores at the time of its release, as well as the distinction of “Editor’s Choice” and “Game of the Year” awards on various websites, and lofty There’s Always an Introduction 7 rankings on “Best of 2007” lists. Bioshock also came with a ready-made auteur in the form of creative director Ken Levine, who was paratextually positioned as the visionary force guiding the game, and in the course of Bioshock’s promotion and reception became a celebrated public figure in gaming culture. The game that launched the franchise was “conceived as converged content from the start,”8 and its popularity and scope grew not only in the context of two successful sequels and accompanying dlc, but also through a host of tie-ins including two novels, a board game, branded clothing, collectibles, and a movie adaptation that languished in develop- ment hell for years before abandoned. As noted above, numerous conversations catalyzed around Bioshock that were important to the legitimation of critical and scholarly engage- ment with games – the game provided a key focal point for debates about “” and the relationship between and narrative, for example.9 Bioshock has since been analyzed as a critique of Objectivist/libertarian and extremist politics,10 an heir to the dystopian literary tradition,11 a moral-ethical text,12 a sophisticated metacommentary on gaming conventions and player agency,13 a subversion of the capitalist game industry from within,14 and an unintentional meditation on choice and propaganda.15 In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that immediately followed its release, Bioshock was also examined in terms of the inherent tension between its attempts to resist or critique neoliberal , via its dystopian setting, versus the various ways it ultimately reinscribed late capitalist ideology. This reinscription was enacted through both the me- chanics of the game and the games industry’s strict parameters delimiting its consumption.16 Bioshock has also been showcased in a number of in- stitutional exhibitions of historically or culturally important games, in- cluding the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s much-publicized touring show , and it is frequently held up as an exemplar of the form in debates about the status of games as art within and outside of gaming communities.17 Bioshock 2 was released in 2010, and provided a direct continuation of the original Bioshock story with a similar gameplay formula. The sequel revisits the haunting underwater of the first game a fictional decade later, the political pendulum having swung to the other extreme, from radical individualism to radical collectivism, and Rapture’s already 8 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred collapsed infrastructure degrading even further in the process. The city is now controlled by Sofia Lamb; Lamb is a behavioural psychologist who opportunistically fills the void left by Ryan’s death with a new collectivist religion/political movement called “The Rapture ,” targeting the Splicer population in particular. The player is Subject Delta, an early Big Daddy prototype bonded to an adult Little Sister with special powers named Eleanor. Eleanor is also Lamb’s daughter. Lamb plans to forcibly embed Eleanor with the genetic memory of all the minds in Rapture, trans- forming her into a living embodiment of her radical collectivist philosophy. Delta, aided by Tenenbaum and her allies, must use a new arsenal of weapons and similar genetic powers to violently navigate Rapture and rescue Eleanor from Lamb. At several points, the player is again asked to choose between killing or sparing the Little Sisters, as well as several of Lamb’s minions. In the climax of the game, Delta and Eleanor prevent the memory-embedding procedure, fight off Lamb and the remnants of the Rapture Family, and escape together. But Delta is mortally wounded. De- pending on how player’s choices throughout the game influenced her, Eleanor kills or spares Lamb’s life, and one of three possible endings plays out: Eleanor either turns her power violently against the outside world, uses it for the betterment of all, or simply ponders the uncertain future. Created by , a California-based offshoot of 2k and Irrational, Bioshock 2 was a commercial and critical success, and effectively sustained popular interest in the now-iconic franchise, but it did not produce nearly the same degree of hyperbolic praise and critical/academic engagement as its predecessor. The game was initially faulted for lacking the same weighty narrative and memorable characters as its predecessor, faults most fre- quently attributed to the absence of Levine in the authorial creative director role. However, Bioshock 2 has since experienced something of a renais- sance, touted by some fans, critics, and scholars as the most underrated game in the series – and, for at least one contributor to this collection, the standout best. As Ryan Lizardi suggests, by situating its narrative in the same game- world as the original Bioshock but swinging the new antagonist’s political beliefs to the other end of the spectrum, “Bioshock 2 specifically asks players to question all sides of debates when extreme stances are taken, and asks players to weigh their decisions in an alternate and complex his- There’s Always an Introduction 9 tory.”18 The dynamic between the player’s choices and Eleanor’s fate un- derscores the ideological struggles at the heart of the series, making Bioshock 2 richer and more nuanced than the opportunistic sequel it ini- tially appears to be. A narrative-oriented dlc episode entitled Minerva’s Den was also released to critical acclaim, exploring the inner workings of Rapture’s logistical systems, and was critically praised for its innovative narrative design.19 A tie-in novel – Bioshock Rapture (2011) by John Shirley (with some input from Ken Levine) – was also released around this time to lukewarm reception, filling in some of the backstory of the civil war that brought the city to ruin. In the meantime, Irrational Games and Levine had been working on an entirely different kind of sequel, set in a new, parallel universe to the original game. Bioshock Infinite retained the series’ fps/rpg gameplay and introduced a new dystopian setting, the flying city-fortress of Colum - bia, inspired by the history of American and , the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and quantum mechanics (among numerous other influences, both esoteric and mundane). Columbia is presided over by a fundamentalist preacher-dictator named Zachary Hale Comstock, whose pseudo-Christian vision paints the founding fathers as demigods and as a great betrayer. A mostly well-reviewed prequel short story by Joe Fielder with Ken Levine, Bioshock Infinite: Mind in Revolt (2013), was released digitally a month before the game to help establish the origins of Columbia and the motivations of key char- acters. In the game, players control Booker DeWitt, an ex-military, ex- Pinkerton private investigator and alcoholic wracked with guilt over his participation in the brutal massacre at Wounded Knee. Booker is tasked, by the enigmatic twin quantum physicists Rosalind and Rober Lutece (whose technology powers the city), with kidnapping Comstock’s daughter and heir, Elizabeth, in exchange for the erasure of an unspecified debt. Once again travelling via a mysterious lighthouse in the middle of the ocean, Booker is first greeted by a rapturously beautiful, seemingly utopian city, but its segregation and violent racism quickly become apparent. Branded by Comstock as an agent of evil, Booker must use weapons and pseudo- magical powers to kill endless waves of the city’s militarized police and terrifying steam-powered . After retrieving Elizabeth from impris- onment by her father, Booker escorts her through the stratified upper- and 10 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred lower-class neighbourhoods of Columbia; Elizabeth violently dispatches Comstock’s forces all the way, assisted by her supernatural ability to open “tears” to alternate universes. Soon after, the city’s downtrodden minority population rises up in bloody revolution against their oppressors, and the very fabric of space-time begins to break down. Through a complex, transdimensional series of events, it is revealed that Elizabeth is Booker’s long-lost daughter, stolen as an infant by Comstock, who is in fact an alternate reality version of Booker himself who turned to religious fanaticism rather than drink to cope with his guilt. Booker was sent to Columbia by the Luteces in the hopes of ending the cycles of death and devastation that Comstock perpetuated. Upon learning the truth, Eliz- abeth uses her powers to show Booker an infinite ocean full of infinite lighthouses, each representing an alternate universe made up of “constants and variables” based on the actions and choices of other versions of them- selves. Elizabeth then takes Booker back to the branching point at which his alter ego was “born again” as Comstock: a baptism that Booker re- fused but Comstock accepted. Booker allows himself to be drowned by a dozen alternate universe versions of Elizabeth, preventing Comstock and Columbia from ever existing and thus breaking the cycle. Unlike the pre- vious games, Infinite has only one ending, its outcome always predeter- mined even as it gestures to a grand quantum system of infinite possibility. Indeed, the few choices offered to the player over the course of the game are revealed to have no impact on the predetermined outcome, another example of the series’ subversion of player expectations and agency. Hotly anticipated, Infinite launched in 2013 to blockbuster sales and widespread critical acclaim, despite a much-delayed development process and numerous budget overruns. Like its predecessors, Bioshock Infinite was welcomed as one of the top releases of the year and praised for its imaginative setting, its refinement of the series’ gameplay formula and in- troduction of new mechanics, its highfalutin exploration of quantum the- ory and alternate universes, its willingness to tackle politics, race, and nationalism,20 and its metacommentary on the medium of games. And yet a significant number of critics found the game’s simplistic, Hollywood- lite treatment of complex issues such as racism, sexism, state violence, and the corruptive influence of power problematic, and in some cases downright offensive, especially in context of a brutally violent action There’s Always an Introduction 11 game.21 This counter-reception had as much to do with Infinite’s specific failings as with a sea change in the critical discourse on games, and an in- creasing disillusionment with the limited possibilities of aaa games in general.22 Infinite was supplemented by the well-received two-part dlc Burial at Sea, a self-contained story that brings alternate-universe versions of the Booker and Elizabeth characters to the series’ originary moments in Rapture and solidifies the implied connections between the two parallel imaginary worlds, stitching the series closed in a kind of endlessly cycling narrative ouroboros. In a twist worthy of the series, just under a year after Bioshock Infinite’s celebrated release, Irrational Games was shuttered and the majority of its employees were laid off. Levine cited a personal desire to move on and explore new, smaller projects as the reason for the closure, while industry insiders suggested Infinite’s massive budget overruns and a dysfunctional studio culture as contributing factors.23 Critics also speculated, not for the first time and presumably not for the last, about whether the “golden age” of big-budget, narrative-oriented, single-player prestige games was coming to a close.24 Levine himself has stayed on with the publisher, opening a boutique studio called to explore new approaches to narrative game design with smaller projects. While the exact details and circumstances of Irrational Games’ closure remain shrouded by the noto- rious secrecy of the game industry, this unexpected turn of events has left the future of the Bioshock franchise in doubt. Nevertheless, Infinite sold extremely well, and as of 2015, the games in the Bioshock series have sold an estimated combined 25 million copies, resulting in at least $500 million in revenue for Take-Two.25 While new games in the franchise have only been rumoured at the time of writing, Take-Two ceo Strauss Zelnick has been vocal about his company’s intentions to continue releasing Bioshock games and other franchise media well into the future. The remastered Col- lection demonstrates at the very least a willingness to extract additional profits from the existing releases. Moreover, the series has had a lasting influence on other game developers, in the form of what Brendan Keogh calls “post-Bioshock games” that adopt and extend the series’ aesthetic strategies, from subversive blockbusters like Spec Ops: The Line (2012) to indie darlings like (2013).26 12 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

The Entanglement of Bioshock and Game Studies

All the Bioshock games bear traits ostensibly associated with “higher” forms of popular culture, much like Oscar-baiting movies or premium cable tv dramas: distinctive and striking aesthetics, the presence of a vocal, unifying auteur figure, a message or “something to say” regarding important and resonant subject matter, critical and institutional recogni- tion, and so on. As Parker has argued previously: “Bioshock is designed from the ground up to invite sustained reflection, debate, and criticism, as evidenced by the countless forum discussions, blog posts, essays, articles, chapters, theses, and even academic monographs it has produced. This is not just a game with something to say, but a game worth saying something about – a game that justifies the whole enterprise of game criticism and scholarship. Prestige texts of this kind are designed to appeal to both art and commerce and are purported to elevate the whole industry and en- thusiast culture from which they emerge. In this sense, they serve an ex- emplifying function.”27 Notwithstanding the popular notion that great works transcend the lim- itations of the industry, however, the industrial origins of the Bioshock franchise are crucial for understanding what is at stake when we consider how and why it has been enshrined in the popular and scholarly canon. It is not in spite of, but precisely because of its status as a consumer enter- tainment object produced and promoted in a hypercapitalist industry and played by millions that it has invited such sustained discussion. Without a critical mass of fans, journalists, critics, and scholars playing Bioshock, it could not have served the same unifying function. Moreover, this catalyzing effect has extended beyond the insular world of gaming culture. Indeed, the Bioshock franchise has been discussed in some decidedly unexpected venues; the first game was reviewed in the London Review of Books,28 and a Washington Post tech columnist had a Pulitzer-winning literary critic colleague play the game (he struggled with the controls but found it “gripping”).29 This taking up of Bioshock well beyond the usual reach of a mainstream gaming franchise is indicative in part of broader shifts in the cultural status of games,30 but it also speaks to the series’ fairly unique combination of pleasurable ultraviolence, elaborate specu- lative fiction worldbuilding, and high-minded (if noncommittal) political- There’s Always an Introduction 13 philosophical themes. As we learned while putting this collection together, the Bioshock series has acted as a beacon – dare we say, a lighthouse? – for scholars from a range of disciplines whose perspectives might not have otherwise intersected with the realm of games. Bioshock is strange and multifaceted, at once defiantly highbrow and brazenly populist, and this allows it to act as a “boundary object”31 for productive discourse across disciplinary lines.32 The earliest moments of game studies were characterized by a dogmatic resistance to interdisciplinary approaches – in the polemic that heralded the field’s emergence, “Computer Game Studies, Year One,” Espen Aarseth railed against the prospect of game studies being “colonized” by other disciplines.33 However, as Frans Mäyrä argues, interdisciplinary dialogue has always been “an inherent characteristic of game studies,”34 in part be- cause of its relative youth, and insofar as the vast majority of game scholars still come to it from “somewhere else.” But interdisciplinarity is also nec- essary to apprehend a fundamentally multimodal cultural form like (dig- ital) games, which contain a diverse range of representational and formal elements and furthermore exist as dynamic, enacted processes rather than static objects.35 Games, as Thomas M. Malaby and Timothy Burke argue, invite “an ecumenical appreciation of the complexity and range of forces at work and the need to tap the wisdom of a wide array of fields’ ap- proaches and methodologies.”36 We enrich our understanding of games when this hybridity is embraced rather than resisted. This is especially true of a series like Bioshock, which draws its influences from a multiplicity of other media forms and cheekily sidesteps the foundational game studies non-debate between ludology and narratology by placing the two sides in productive tension – a tension now captured forever, for better or for worse, in the ubiquitous concept of “ludonarrative dissonance,” which was first coined to describe Bioshock.37 A “purely” disciplinary, non-dis- sonant account of Bioshock, if such a thing is even possible, would be woefully insufficient. In much the same way that Bioshock distinguished itself by drawing together gaming tropes with seemingly disparate cultural forms and ideas, the chapters showcased in this collection mobilize a wildly eclectic range of conceptual and comparative frameworks, grounded in the common language of game studies. In doing so, they provide necessary and timely 14 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred critical reflection on Bioshock’s rich heritage and considerable legacy, pro- viding novel rereadings of these now-canonical texts. These chapters ex- amine how the series’ diverse stylistic, formal, narrative, and sociocultural influences have given way to its own substantial influence on digital game and transmedia franchise development more broadly, as well as on popular game criticism and academic game studies. If, as Sebastian Deterding sug- gests, interdisciplinarity “is characterized by the intentional interaction and integration” of different disciplines and their viewpoints, game studies has always been at risk of fragmenting into a merely “multidisciplinary” practice that juxtaposes the diversity of approaches that compose it in parallel but separate, rather than intersecting, tracks.38 The diversity of approaches found in this book demonstrates that game studies, at its best, can have an “easy, natural interdisciplinarity and … methodological in- ventiveness”39 that balances an awareness of industrial and sociocultural contexts with sustained engagement and close textual analysis. It is our hope that this book demonstrates how a common focus on a specific game or series can contribute to this process of interdisciplinary integration, providing much-needed common ground and depth of discussion in a realm that has, at times, been characterized by fragmentation, surface- analysis, and cross-talk rather than constructive conversation. The contributors to this volume respond to and extend the robust body of existing work on Bioshock in new directions, redressing its occasionally narrow focus on the well-worn issues of player agency and narrative raised by the first game, and critically examining the whole franchise, its canonical status, and its legacy in the “post-Bioshock” era.40 We see this as part of a larger intervention in the critical reception of Bioshock and in game studies more generally, as a new wave of critics and scholars are rethinking canonical accounts and adopting more self-reflexively interdis- ciplinary and intersectional perspectives. The near-decade of historical distance between the present moment and the series’ debut has coincided with the emergence of more diverse perspectives on Bioshock, scrutinizing the series through lenses of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and inspiring and informing many of our contributing authors.41 The chapters in this book also collectively wrestle with weighty ques- tions of politics, history, epistemology, and ontology that resonate well There’s Always an Introduction 15 beyond Bioshock. Issues of power, identity, and representation relating to gender, race, sexuality, and class run through the book, and this is by ed- itorial design. In light of the resurgence of misogynist, homophobic and transphobic, white supremacist, and nationalist political movements, which were foreshadowed by the reprehensible “GamerGate” campaign of harassment against marginalized people in gaming culture, these polit- ically informed modes of game criticism and scholarship have never been more crucial. Scholars can and must engage critically with popular block- buster media’s often clumsy, liberal-centrist attempts to use dystopian imaginary worlds to forecast, understand, question, and challenge different forms of . In so doing, we can find ways to think through and beyond dominant ideologies, and in this sense the Bioshock games have enduring relevance not only as individual texts, but also in context as symptomatic instances of broader sociocultural trends.42

A Map of Beyond the Sea

Beyond the Sea is organized around five sections, each focusing on an overarching theme or concern that emerged as we assembled the essays. We feel that these sections offer a helpful framework for making sense of the Bioshock phenomenon. Nevertheless, connections, parallels, echoes, and mirror images criss-cross the book in non-linear ways – much like the inter-dimensional “tears” in Bioshock Infinite that bridge the gaps between worlds. We kindly encourage the reader to choose their own path. Tension and conflict across generations of family (both blood and surro- gate) are a common but little-explored theme in the Bioshock series. Part One – “ and Metamorphosis: Making and Breaking Family Bonds in Bioshock,” posits that these twisted bonds are structurally crucial to the se- ries’ operation, especially in light of the individualistic narratives of personal power the games try (albeit half-heartedly) to subvert. The main way that critics have noted these familial themes is by framing Bioshock Infinite, and by extension the rest of the series, as part of the so-called “daddening” of games.43 Coined for a slew of hit games that depict playable father figures using extreme violence to “protect” daughter figures in dystopian settings, this notion of “daddening” suggests that as more game developers have ap- 16 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred proached the age of parenthood, they have begun to draw on their (pre- dominantly male and heteronormative) personal experiences for inspiration. But beyond simply identifying the trope, we are also concerned with how this “daddening” has played out in popular media, and what has been pushed to the margins by this focus on fatherhood. As Sarah Stang, informed by feminist media studies, argues in her chapter, Bioshock’s extensive the- matizing of patriarchal bonds is troubling when situated as part of a post- feminist re-valorizing of masculine violence. Moreover such re-valorizing also results in the consistent de-valuing of female characters in the series. John Vanderhoef and Matthew Thomas Payne draw on psychoanalytic the- ory to extend this argument, addressing Bioshock’s strained relationship to motherhood, which they argue is either omitted entirely or rendered mon- strous and abject, much as in horror cinema. In both of these chapters, the authors connect their specific case studies to general attitudes in gaming culture, arguing that they are symptomatic of the marginalization of women in patriarchal societies. Shifting gears from psychosocial archetypes to the actual dynamics of parenting relationships and its mediated representations, Karen Schrier mobilizes contemporary psychology to explore the series’ trademark tension between parental over-determination and inde- pendence, using it as a framework for a broader analysis of different game design strategies as analogous to different styles of parenting. Game scholar Edmond Chang argues that in the original Bioshock, “queerness is encoded, embedded not only in characters and plot but more importantly in the very relationship between game and player,” even if it is not “intentionally” so, and argues that it is a rich text for teasing out the hidden queerness in games.44 What does it mean to queer game studies, to study games queerly?45 The chapters in Part Two – “To Seduce the Ear and Delight the Spirit: Bioshock, Gender, and Sexuality,” take up this call and extend it across the whole series, bringing queer theories of time, performativity, and heteronormativity to bear on the microworlds of Bioshock. Cody Mejeur retrieves Bahktin’s ideas about masks and the carnivalesque and places them in dialogue with queer theories of perfor- mativity to explore the queer potentials, and inevitable failures, of the se- ries – with a particular emphasis on the arrested time of the last New Year’s Eve before the fall of Rapture. Following a similar trajectory, Jordan R. Youngblood builds on the previous section in his discussion of time There’s Always an Introduction 17 and reproduction, mobilizing the queer concept of “chrononormativity” alongside conventional accounts of “ludic time” in digital games in order to critique the series’ ultimately repressive temporalities. Positioning queer insights in relation to the recent resurgence of right-wing extremism in gaming and beyond, Daniel Ante-Contreras considers how Bioshock can be understood in the context of pernicious notions of white straight male victimization: a paranoid, anti-social subjectivity that appropriates and inverts the language and ethos of social justice for reactionary ends. This false sense of victimization is central to Bioshock’s archetypal narrative, but like the other authors in this section, Ante-Contreras sees in Bioshock a profound ambivalence, containing both the spark of possibility for rad- ical change and the stifling of that possibility. In one of the most frequently cited academic essays on the series, Lars Schmeink notes that while posthuman themes are relatively common in futuristic shooter games (usually in the superficial form of technological superpowers and horrific cyborg monsters),46 Bioshock is unique in its politically and philosophically informed exploration of posthumanism. What does it mean to press beyond the limits of human corporeality or ontology, and what can the technosocial apparatus of digital games tell us about this process? The chapters in Part Three – “The Flesh Becomes Clay: Technology, Humanity, and Embodiment in Bioshock,” each take a different approach to this question. Jamie Henthorn links the series’ overarching concern with the posthuman to its complex and problematic treatment of gender, with particular emphasis on the haunting Little Sis- ters of Rapture, arguing that they represent the gendered dehumanization and abjection of posthuman subjects. Similarly, Gareth Schott focuses on the paradoxical techno-utopianism of Bioshock 2, considering it in the context of real-world and speculative fiction theorizations of bio- hacking and behavioural conditioning. Also focusing on the under-ex- amined second game, Cameron Kunzelman adopts a new materialist framework to go beyond the posthuman into an analysis of total human absence and nonhuman agency in the rotting, ruined assemblages of Rap- ture. As Kunzelman contends, games can do the work of philosophy; Bioshock 2 offers a playable model of the world that offers a useful case study in de-centring the human player, a conceptual move that has im- portant political implications. 18 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

Bioshock’s multi-layered worlds and histories at the level of fiction are a refraction of its authorship, circulation, and consumption as a highly intertextual transmedia franchise,47 and Part Four – “There’s Always a City: The Many Histories of Bioshock,” engages this multiplicity. How do digital games (re)mediate history, adopting and adapting strategies from other cultural forms? Building on critiques of Bioshock Infinite’s troubling equivocation between systemic racism and anti-racist resis - tance,48 Sarah Zaidan performs a critical reframing of race, identity, and citizenship across the series, showing that the same ideological currents run through the series even as the details change. Michael Fuchs takes as a starting point the frequently noted parallels between Infinite and Thomas Pynchon’s metahistorical novel Against the Day, but moves be- yond superficial similarities and shared influences. Instead, the chapter draws on studies of Pynchon and uses this comparative analysis to shed new light on how both texts comment on American history, nationalism, and the process of historiography. Luke Arnott presents another compar- ative analysis, teasing out the entangled intertextualities and transmedia histories of the Aliens franchise and the popular sub-genre of utopian/ dystopian survival horror/sci-fi digital games of which Bioshock is an ex- emplar, showing the recursive patterns of influence that characterize the relationship between Bioshock, its predecessors, and its descendants. As Arnott contends, the fictional themes of both franchises can be read alle- gorically to make sense of the media industrial logics that continue to produce them. In the final section, Part Five – “All That’s Left is the Choosing: Rethink- ing Agency in Bioshock and Beyond,” we return to the core themes that have driven Bioshock criticism and scholarship – namely player choice, agency, freedom, and constraints – with new, critical eyes. Ten years on from Bioshock’s clever subversion of player control, has the medium and our understanding of it changed? Branching and non-linear narrative sys- tems in games are much vaunted in popular culture and academia alike. Sarah Thorne cuts through the hype, examining the series in relation to several “post-Bioshock” games – including The Walking Dead, , and The Novelist – that attempt in various ways to solve the per- sistent “problem” of player choice in games. Looking to historical an- There’s Always an Introduction 19 tecedents to explain contemporary media, Patrick Brown highlights the often-overlooked but central imagery of hands and control in Bioshock in relation to the 1924 German Expressionist film The Hands of Orlac in a comparative media analysis spanning eighty-three years. Brown argues that both texts serve as powerful media allegory for their time, anxiously working through the sometimes-nightmarish extensions of human experi- ence made possible by new technologies. Like the franchise itself, this an- thology ends with Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea’s dlc episodes. Matthew Wysocki and Betsy Brey deftly analyze this under-examined entry, recon- sidering and complicating canonical understandings of how player agency functions in the franchise and in digital games as a whole, and presenting a more nuanced account of the player/game relation.

There’s Always a Conclusion

Gaming culture moves quickly, casting off the recent past as if it was an- cient history, always looking to the next big thing. The ten years between the series’ launch and the publication of this volume thus provides ample distance for critical reflection, while remaining a timely intervention in the present moment. We are fortunate to have a decade of thoughtful scholarship and incisive criticism to build on (the same is certainly not true of other games and series), but we also recognize the necessity of ex- panding our horizons to drive the conversation forward. As a series of playable texts that have drawn interest, attention, passion, and frustration from far beyond the walled-off, hyper-individualistic undersea realm of the “hardcore” gamer, the ongoing elevation of Bioshock in popular and critical discourse challenges us to integrate different disciplinary ap- proaches, engaging across arbitrary lines of division to do the work of game studies.49 After all, as the intertwining evolutionary histories of the Bioshock franchise and game studies attest, continually interrogating and critically re-evaluating our canonical texts is crucial to advancing our field of study. At the conclusion of Infinite, Elizabeth sums up in retrospect the supposed essence of Bioshock in a neat and tidy aphorism: “There’s always a lighthouse. There’s always a man. There’s always a city.” Rather than taking the series at face value, this book seeks to question its underlying 20 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred assumptions and ideologies. Where is the city, how is it organized, and what does it signify? Who is the man, what does he stand for, and why is it always a man? What does the lighthouse illuminate, and what does it leave shrouded in darkness, somewhere beyond the sea?

notes 1 For an indicative example see Rosselli, “Bioshock: The Collection.” 2 The System Shock series comprises System Shock (Looking Glass Technolo- gies, 1994) and ( and Irrational Games, 1999), while the Thief series comprises Thief: The Dark Project (Looking Glass Studios, 1998), Thief II (Looking Glass Studios, 2000), and Thief: Deadly Shadows (, 2004), as well as the recent reboot of the series, Thief (Eidos Montreal, 2014). Ken Levine was involved in designing the sec- ond game in the System Shock series and the first game in the Thief series. 3 Weise, “Bioshock: A Critical Historical Perspective,” 151–5. 4 Ibid., 153. 5 Admin, “From the Vault.” 6 Murdoch, “Bioshock.” 7 Aldred and Greenspan, “A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys,” 485. 8 Ibid. 9 Hocking, “Ludonarrative Dissonance.” 10 Packer, “The Battle for Galt’s Gulch,” 209–24. 11 Schmeink, “Dystopia.” 12 Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games. 13 Tulloch, “Ludic .” 14 Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter, Games of Empire, 194. 15 Jackson, BioShock. 16 See, for example, Aldred and Greenspan, “A Man Chooses”; van den Berg, “Playing at Resistance.” 17 Parker, “Canonizing Bioshock,” 1–25. 18 Lizardi, “Bioshock: Complex and Alternate Histories.” 19 Alexandra, “Minerva’s Den.” Minerva’s Den is also notable because members of the development team went on to apply many of the same environmental narrative design strategies in the acclaimed queer coming of age game Gone Home, an instructive example of the increasingly blurry boundaries between “indie” games and the dominant industry. There’s Always an Introduction 21

20 Mafe, “Race and the First-Person Shooter,” 89–123. 21 See, for example, Alexander, “Now is the Best Time”; Thompson, “On Videogame Reviews.” 22 Parker, “Canonizing Bioshock,” 16–17. 23 See, for example, Alexander, “Airing Dirty Laundry.” 24 See, for example, Hartup, “The End of the Epic.” 25 North, “Bioshock Franchise.” 26 Keogh, Killing is Harmless, 135. 27 Parker, “Canonizing Bioshock,” 14. 28 Lanchester, “Is it Art?,” 18–20. 29 Musgrove, “Monster Fun. But Is It Art?” 30 Parker, “Canonizing Bioshock.” 31 Star and Grisemer, “Institutional Ecology,” 393. 32 Malaby and Burke, “Short and Happy Life,” 324. 33 Aarseth, “Computer Game Studies – Year One.” 34 Mäyrä, “Getting into the Game,” 313. 35 Ibid., 317. 36 Malaby and Burke, “Short and Happy Life,” 324. 37 Hocking, “Ludonarrative Dissonance.” 38 Deterding, “The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies.” 39 Malaby and Burke, “Short and Happy Life,” 325. 40 Keogh, Killing is Harmless. 41 See, for example, Chang, “A Game Chooses, A Player Obeys”; Booth, “BioShock: Rapture through Transmedia,” 153–68; Mafe, “Race and the First-Person Shooter”; and Kareem, “The Girl without a Land.” 42 See Hoey III, “‘O Columbia!’” and Smith, “The Politics of Bioshock Infinite.” 43 Vorhees, “Daddy Issues.” 44 Chang, “A Game Chooses.” 45 Shaw, Gaming at the Edge. 46 Schmeink, “Dystopia.” 47 See Booth, “Bioshock: Rapture through Transmedia,” and Aldred and Greenspan, “A Man Chooses.” 48 Soha Kareem, “The Girl without a Land.” 49 Deterding, “The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies.” 22 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred bibliography Aarseth, Espen. “Computer Game Studies – Year One.” Game Studies 1, no. 1 (2001). Accessed 15 November 2016. http://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html. Aldred, Jessica, and Brian Greenspan. “A Man Choose, A Slave Obeys: Bioshock and the Dystopian Logic of Convergence.” Games and Culture 6, no. 5 (2011): 479–96. Alexander, Leigh. “Irrational Games, Journalism, and Airing Dirty Laundry.” , 19 February 2014. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/211139/ Irrational_Games_journalism_and_airing_dirty_laundry.php. – “Now is the Best Time: A Critique of Bioshock Infinite.” , 11 April 2013. http://kotaku.com/now-is-the-best-time-a-critique-of-bioshock-infinite- 472517493. Alexandra, Heather. “Six Years Later, Minerva’s Den Remains The Best Bioshock Thing.” Kotaku, 14 September 2016. http://kotaku.com/six-years-later-minervas- den-remains-the-best--1786626270. Booth, Paul. “BioShock: Rapture through Transmedia.” In The Rise of Trans- texts: Challenges and Opportunities, edited by Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa, 153–68. New York: Routledge, 2016. Chang, Edmond Y. “A Game Chooses, A Player Obeys: Bioshock, Posthumanism, and the Limits of Queerness.” In Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, edited by TreaAndrea Russworm and Jennifer Malkowski. Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, forthcoming. Deterding, Sebastian. “The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies: Assessing the Past, Present and Future of Interdisciplinary Game Research.” Games and Culture (2016), doi: 10.1177/1555412016665067. Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig De Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Hartup, Phil. “The End of the Epic: Why the Success of Bioshock Infinite is Bad for Gaming.” New Statesman. 21 April 2013. http://www.newstatesman.com/ culture/2013/04/end-epic-why-success-bioshock-infinite-bad-gaming. Hocking, Clint. “Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock.” Click Nothing (blog). 7 October 2007. http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonar rative-d.html. Hoey III, Jack. “‘O Columbia!’: Bioshock Infinite and Donald Trump’s America.” CAPC: Christ and Pop Culture. 6 May 2016. http://christandpopculture.com/ 99331/. There’s Always an Introduction 23

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