Beyond the sea: navigating BioShock

Author(s) Parker, Felan; Aldred, Jessica

Imprint McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018

ISBN 9780773554979, 077355498X, 9780773554986, 9780773555556, 0773555552

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The fall 2016 release of Bioshock: The Collection – a deluxe anthology ofBioshock (Irrational, 2007), Bioshock 2 (2k Marin, 2010), and BioshockInfinite (Irrational, 2013) along with each game’s downloadable content(dlc) episodes and supplemental material, remastered for current gener-ation game consoles – marks an almost decade-long span in which theBioshock series has been at the forefront of scholarly, critical, and populardiscourse about digital games. Yet, unsurprisingly, the collection itself didnot engage with or even acknowledge the myriad debates and discussionsthe series has inspired over the years, or attempt to situate it in any largersociocultural context. Instead it prioritized the consumer logic of the gameindustry, with glossy packaging and marketing, a shiny coat of audiovisualpolish 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 directorKen Levine and lead artist Shawn Robertson. Although Levine was not in-volved in the anthology release (which was outsourced to a third partycompany), these paratextual materials reinscribe his well-established au-thorial presence. The videos give Levine a platform to reiterate for theumpteenth time the series’ much-touted creative aspirations, influences,and narrative/mechanical innovations, among other things. The flurry ofmainstream media coverage and enthusiast press reviews surrounding TheCollection’s release primarily focused on whether the additional contentand superficial updates were “worth it” for owners of the earlier versions,

There’s Always an Introduction

Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

and bemoaned the absence of anything particularly new or interesting inthe 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 adiverse 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 theway we approach, appreciate, make, and study digital games. As a nebulousacademic field, game studies has run a parallel course to the Bioshockseries. Game studies made its initial bids for legitimacy in the same historicalmoment that the series’ progenitors, in particular the System Shock andThief games,2 established the contours of a new sub-genre of “intelligent”stealth-oriented action games or “immersive sims” that set themselvesapart from the supposedly more “mindless” shoot ’em ups that came be-fore.3 By the time the original, much-lauded Bioshock arrived, game studieshad become a more visible and accepted area of inquiry; but in order tojustify its own existence, and reinforce its still-precarious position at theintersection of several disciplines, game studies was hungry for games thatwould appear self-evidently worthy of study to those outside the field.Bioshock became enshrined in the burgeoning field’s canon and has beenthe subject of numerous papers, articles, and book chapters (as evidencedby this collection’s bibliography). In the subsequent decade, alongsideBioshock’s multiversal expansion across two subsequent titles (which sawsimilarly 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 providea much-needed renewal of critical perspectives on Bioshock.

This volume is more than a retrospective account of a game series thatwas extensively written about during its heyday. Sustained and multifacetedreflection on a specific foundational game series creates the opportunityfor game scholars to have a productive interdisciplinary conversation. Thechapters collected here illustrate how seemingly disparate approaches tostudying games can complement one another and provoke new insights(or, in some cases, compellingly incommensurable interpretations). The

4 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

thematic structure of Beyond the Sea enriches our understanding of thesame ludic and representational elements by integrating a multiplicity oftheoretical 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. Followingthis overview, we delve more deeply into the evolving relationship betweenBioshock and game studies, and its ongoing significance to the field. Weconclude 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 seriescome to occupy such a central place in popular and critical discourse ondigital games? And what role has Bioshock played in the formation andevolution 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 drawsa number of genres and influences – ranging from the Objectivist politicalphilosophy of Ayn Rand, to the anxious visions of postwar science fictionfilms, to the claustrophobic traverses of survival horror games, to steam-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 disgruntledindustrialist 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, religion, and petty morality. Theplayer is Jack, a mysterious figure who discovers the sunken city after hisplane crashes in the Atlantic Ocean – only to find that a perfect storm ofcorruption, civil war, and genetic manipulation has caused the city to col-lapse. Using a variety of upgradable weapons and pseudo-magical geneticpowers, Jack must fight his way through the leaking corridors of Rapture,under constant threat of its violently insane, horribly mutated inhabitants,the Splicers.

5There’s Always an Introduction

Even more dangerous are the roving teams of Little Sisters and BigDaddies, grotesque behaviour-modified little girls and their hulking cyborgprotectors, 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 rewardsfrom their creator and surrogate mother, Dr Brigid Tenenbaum. In thecourse of the game, Jack is guided through a series of tasks and challengesby the seemingly friendly leader of the resistance, Atlas – who is in fact analter ego of Ryan’s business rival Frank Fontaine. It is eventually revealedthat Jack is a brainwashed clone based on Ryan’s dna, manipulated byFontaine into assassinating Ryan using the code phrase “would you kindly.”In a now-infamous twist, an embittered Ryan forces Jack (and by extensionthe player) to murder him in a jarring non-interactive sequence.

Rescued by Tenenbaum, Jack frees his mind and rebuilds his body withBig Daddy technology. Jack faces off against Fontaine, killing him withthe help of the Little Sisters. The game ends with Jack as the new ruler ofRapture, benevolent or tyrannical depending on whether the player har-vested all, some, or none of the Little Sisters.

Developed by Irrational Games starting in 2002, Bioshock was firstpitched to major gaming publisher/distributor Take-Two Interactive’s 2kGames division in 2005.5 Take-Two (corporate umbrella to such flagshipaaa franchises as Grand Theft Auto, Borderlands, and the popular 2K

Sports imprint) subsequently acquired Irrational and funded the game’sallegedly very substantial development costs.6 This lengthy, expensive pro-duction process – as well as a massive marketing and promotion campaigndesigned to help the untested franchise gain traction7 – resulted in tremen-dous hype in the wake of a series of successful previews at major gameindustry conventions.

Bioshock was released in 2007 and was met with almost universal ravereviews. It was praised in particular for its subversion of player expectationsabout choice and agency, despite some complaints about its occasionallyclunky gameplay, as well as a lacklustre final boss battle and ending, whichcontrasted sharply with the game’s otherwise complex themes and richcharacter development. The game received multiple perfect and near-perfectreview scores at the time of its release, as well as the distinction of “Editor’sChoice” and “Game of the Year” awards on various websites, and lofty

6 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

rankings on “Best of 2007” lists. Bioshock also came with a ready-madeauteur in the form of creative director Ken Levine, who was paratextuallypositioned as the visionary force guiding the game, and in the course ofBioshock’s promotion and reception became a celebrated public figure ingaming culture. The game that launched the franchise was “conceived asconverged content from the start,”8 and its popularity and scope grew notonly in the context of two successful sequels and accompanying dlc, butalso through a host of tie-ins including two novels, a board game, brandedclothing, collectibles, and a movie adaptation that languished in develop-ment hell for years before being abandoned.

As noted above, numerous conversations catalyzed around Bioshockthat were important to the legitimation of critical and scholarly engage-ment with games – the game provided a key focal point for debates about“ludonarrative dissonance” and the relationship between game mechanicsand narrative, for example.9 Bioshock has since been analyzed as a critiqueof Objectivist/libertarian and extremist politics,10 an heir to the dystopianliterary tradition,11 a moral-ethical text,12 a sophisticated metacommentaryon gaming conventions and player agency,13 a subversion of the capitalistgame industry from within,14 and an unintentional meditation on choiceand propaganda.15 In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that immediatelyfollowed its release, Bioshock was also examined in terms of the inherenttension between its attempts to resist or critique neoliberal capitalism, viaits dystopian setting, versus the various ways it ultimately reinscribed latecapitalist ideology. This reinscription was enacted through both the me-chanics of the game and the games industry’s strict parameters delimitingits 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 touringshow The Art of Video Games, and it is frequently held up as an exemplarof the form in debates about the status of games as art within and outsideof gaming communities.17

Bioshock 2 was released in 2010, and provided a direct continuation ofthe original Bioshock story with a similar gameplay formula. The sequelrevisits the haunting underwater dystopia of the first game a fictionaldecade later, the political pendulum having swung to the other extreme,from radical individualism to radical collectivism, and Rapture’s already

7There’s Always an Introduction

collapsed infrastructure degrading even further in the process. The city isnow controlled by Sofia Lamb; Lamb is a behavioural psychologist whoopportunistically fills the void left by Ryan’s death with a new collectivistreligion/political movement called “The Rapture Family,” targeting theSplicer population in particular. The player is Subject Delta, an early BigDaddy prototype bonded to an adult Little Sister with special powersnamed Eleanor. Eleanor is also Lamb’s daughter. Lamb plans to forciblyembed 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 ofweapons and similar genetic powers to violently navigate Rapture andrescue Eleanor from Lamb. At several points, the player is again asked tochoose between killing or sparing the Little Sisters, as well as several ofLamb’s minions. In the climax of the game, Delta and Eleanor prevent thememory-embedding procedure, fight off Lamb and the remnants of theRapture 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 playsout: 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 2k Marin, a California-based offshoot of 2k and Irrational,Bioshock 2 was a commercial and critical success, and effectively sustainedpopular interest in the now-iconic franchise, but it did not produce nearlythe same degree of hyperbolic praise and critical/academic engagement asits predecessor. The game was initially faulted for lacking the same weightynarrative and memorable characters as its predecessor, faults most fre-quently attributed to the absence of Levine in the authorial creative directorrole. However, Bioshock 2 has since experienced something of a renais-sance, touted by some fans, critics, and scholars as the most underratedgame in the series – and, for at least one contributor to this collection, thestandout best.

As Ryan Lizardi suggests, by situating its narrative in the same game-world as the original Bioshock but swinging the new antagonist’s politicalbeliefs to the other end of the spectrum, “Bioshock 2 specifically asksplayers to question all sides of debates when extreme stances are taken,and asks players to weigh their decisions in an alternate and complex his-

8 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

tory.”18 The dynamic between the player’s choices and Eleanor’s fate un-derscores the ideological struggles at the heart of the series, makingBioshock 2 richer and more nuanced than the opportunistic sequel it ini-tially appears to be. A narrative-oriented dlc episode entitled Minerva’sDen was also released to critical acclaim, exploring the inner workings ofRapture’s logistical systems, and was critically praised for its innovativenarrative design.19 A tie-in novel – Bioshock Rapture (2011) by JohnShirley (with some input from Ken Levine) – was also released around thistime to lukewarm reception, filling in some of the backstory of the civilwar that brought the city to ruin.

In the meantime, Irrational Games and Levine had been working on anentirely different kind of sequel, set in a new, parallel universe to theoriginal game. Bioshock Infinite retained the series’ fps/rpg gameplayand introduced a new dystopian setting, the flying city-fortress of Colum -bia, inspired by the history of American racism and nationalism, the 1893Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, and quantum mechanics (amongnumerous other influences, both esoteric and mundane). Columbia ispresided over by a fundamentalist preacher-dictator named Zachary HaleComstock, whose pseudo-Christian vision paints the founding fathers asdemigods and Abraham Lincoln as a great betrayer. A mostly well-reviewedprequel short story by Joe Fielder with Ken Levine, Bioshock Infinite:Mind in Revolt (2013), was released digitally a month before the game tohelp 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 hisparticipation 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 daughterand heir, Elizabeth, in exchange for the erasure of an unspecified debt. Onceagain 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. Brandedby Comstock as an agent of evil, Booker must use weapons and pseudo-magical powers to kill endless waves of the city’s militarized police andterrifying steam-powered cyborgs. After retrieving Elizabeth from impris-onment by her father, Booker escorts her through the stratified upper- and

9There’s Always an Introduction

lower-class neighbourhoods of Columbia; Elizabeth violently dispatchesComstock’s forces all the way, assisted by her supernatural ability to open“tears” to alternate universes. Soon after, the city’s downtrodden minoritypopulation rises up in bloody revolution against their oppressors, and thevery fabric of space-time begins to break down.

Through a complex, transdimensional series of events, it is revealed thatElizabeth 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 toreligious fanaticism rather than drink to cope with his guilt. Booker wassent to Columbia by the Luteces in the hopes of ending the cycles of deathand devastation that Comstock perpetuated. Upon learning the truth, Eliz-abeth uses her powers to show Booker an infinite ocean full of infinitelighthouses, each representing an alternate universe made up of “constantsand variables” based on the actions and choices of other versions of them-selves. Elizabeth then takes Booker back to the branching point at whichhis alter ego was “born again” as Comstock: a baptism that Booker re-fused but Comstock accepted. Booker allows himself to be drowned by adozen alternate universe versions of Elizabeth, preventing Comstock andColumbia 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 gameare revealed to have no impact on the predetermined outcome, anotherexample of the series’ subversion of player expectations and agency.

Hotly anticipated, Infinite launched in 2013 to blockbuster sales andwidespread critical acclaim, despite a much-delayed development processand numerous budget overruns. Like its predecessors, Bioshock Infinitewas welcomed as one of the top releases of the year and praised for itsimaginative 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, andnationalism,20 and its metacommentary on the medium of games. And yeta 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 casesdownright offensive, especially in context of a brutally violent action

10 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

game.21 This counter-reception had as much to do with Infinite’s specificfailings as with a sea change in the critical discourse on games, and an in-creasing disillusionment with the limited possibilities of aaa games ingeneral.22 Infinite was supplemented by the well-received two-part dlcBurial at Sea, a self-contained story that brings alternate-universe versionsof the Booker and Elizabeth characters to the series’ originary momentsin Rapture and solidifies the implied connections between the two parallelimaginary worlds, stitching the series closed in a kind of endlessly cyclingnarrative ouroboros.

In a twist worthy of the series, just under a year after Bioshock Infinite’scelebrated release, Irrational Games was shuttered and the majority of itsemployees were laid off. Levine cited a personal desire to move on andexplore new, smaller projects as the reason for the closure, while industryinsiders suggested Infinite’s massive budget overruns and a dysfunctionalstudio culture as contributing factors.23 Critics also speculated, not for thefirst time and presumably not for the last, about whether the “golden age”of big-budget, narrative-oriented, single-player prestige games was comingto a close.24 Levine himself has stayed on with the publisher, opening aboutique studio called Ghost Story Games to explore new approaches tonarrative game design with smaller projects. While the exact details andcircumstances of Irrational Games’ closure remain shrouded by the noto-rious secrecy of the game industry, this unexpected turn of events has leftthe future of the Bioshock franchise in doubt. Nevertheless, Infinite soldextremely well, and as of 2015, the games in the Bioshock series have soldan estimated combined 25 million copies, resulting in at least $500 millionin revenue for Take-Two.25 While new games in the franchise have onlybeen rumoured at the time of writing, Take-Two ceo Strauss Zelnick hasbeen vocal about his company’s intentions to continue releasing Bioshockgames and other franchise media well into the future. The remastered Col-lection demonstrates at the very least a willingness to extract additionalprofits from the existing releases. Moreover, the series has had a lastinginfluence on other game developers, in the form of what Brendan Keoghcalls “post-Bioshock games” that adopt and extend the series’ aestheticstrategies, from subversive blockbusters like Spec Ops: The Line (2012)to indie darlings like Gone Home (2013).26

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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 premiumcable tv dramas: distinctive and striking aesthetics, the presence of avocal, unifying auteur figure, a message or “something to say” regardingimportant and resonant subject matter, critical and institutional recogni-tion, and so on. As Parker has argued previously: “Bioshock is designedfrom 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 isnot just a game with something to say, but a game worth saying somethingabout – a game that justifies the whole enterprise of game criticism andscholarship. Prestige texts of this kind are designed to appeal to both artand 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 Bioshockfranchise are crucial for understanding what is at stake when we considerhow and why it has been enshrined in the popular and scholarly canon. Itis not in spite of, but precisely because of its status as a consumer enter-tainment object produced and promoted in a hypercapitalist industry andplayed by millions that it has invited such sustained discussion. Without acritical mass of fans, journalists, critics, and scholars playing Bioshock, itcould not have served the same unifying function. Moreover, this catalyzingeffect has extended beyond the insular world of gaming culture.

Indeed, the Bioshock franchise has been discussed in some decidedlyunexpected venues; the first game was reviewed in the London Review ofBooks,28 and a Washington Post tech columnist had a Pulitzer-winningliterary critic colleague play the game (he struggled with the controls butfound it “gripping”).29 This taking up of Bioshock well beyond the usualreach of a mainstream gaming franchise is indicative in part of broadershifts 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-

12 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

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 haveotherwise intersected with the realm of games. Bioshock is strange andmultifaceted, at once defiantly highbrow and brazenly populist, and thisallows it to act as a “boundary object”31 for productive discourse acrossdisciplinary lines.32

The earliest moments of game studies were characterized by a dogmaticresistance to interdisciplinary approaches – in the polemic that heraldedthe field’s emergence, “Computer Game Studies, Year One,” Espen Aarsethrailed against the prospect of game studies being “colonized” by otherdisciplines.33 However, as Frans Mäyrä argues, interdisciplinary dialoguehas 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 scholarsstill 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 formalelements and furthermore exist as dynamic, enacted processes rather thanstatic objects.35 Games, as Thomas M. Malaby and Timothy Burke argue,invite “an ecumenical appreciation of the complexity and range of forcesat work and the need to tap the wisdom of a wide array of fields’ ap-proaches and methodologies.”36 We enrich our understanding of gameswhen this hybridity is embraced rather than resisted. This is especiallytrue of a series like Bioshock, which draws its influences from a multiplicityof other media forms and cheekily sidesteps the foundational game studiesnon-debate between ludology and narratology by placing the two sides inproductive tension – a tension now captured forever, for better or forworse, in the ubiquitous concept of “ludonarrative dissonance,” whichwas first coined to describe Bioshock.37 A “purely” disciplinary, non-dis-sonant account of Bioshock, if such a thing is even possible, would bewoefully insufficient.

In much the same way that Bioshock distinguished itself by drawingtogether gaming tropes with seemingly disparate cultural forms and ideas,the chapters showcased in this collection mobilize a wildly eclectic rangeof conceptual and comparative frameworks, grounded in the commonlanguage of game studies. In doing so, they provide necessary and timely

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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 socioculturalinfluences have given way to its own substantial influence on digital gameand transmedia franchise development more broadly, as well as on populargame criticism and academic game studies. If, as Sebastian Deterding sug-gests, interdisciplinarity “is characterized by the intentional interactionand integration” of different disciplines and their viewpoints, game studieshas always been at risk of fragmenting into a merely “multidisciplinary”practice that juxtaposes the diversity of approaches that compose it inparallel but separate, rather than intersecting, tracks.38 The diversity ofapproaches 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 socioculturalcontexts with sustained engagement and close textual analysis. It is ourhope that this book demonstrates how a common focus on a specific gameor series can contribute to this process of interdisciplinary integration,providing much-needed common ground and depth of discussion in arealm that has, at times, been characterized by fragmentation, surface-level analysis, and cross-talk rather than constructive conversation.

The contributors to this volume respond to and extend the robust bodyof existing work on Bioshock in new directions, redressing its occasionallynarrow focus on the well-worn issues of player agency and narrativeraised by the first game, and critically examining the whole franchise, itscanonical status, and its legacy in the “post-Bioshock” era.40 We see thisas part of a larger intervention in the critical reception of Bioshock andin game studies more generally, as a new wave of critics and scholars arerethinking canonical accounts and adopting more self-reflexively interdis-ciplinary and intersectional perspectives. The near-decade of historicaldistance between the present moment and the series’ debut has coincidedwith the emergence of more diverse perspectives on Bioshock, scrutinizingthe series through lenses of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and inspiringand 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

14 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

beyond Bioshock. Issues of power, identity, and representation relating togender, race, sexuality, and class run through the book, and this is by ed-itorial design. In light of the resurgence of misogynist, homophobic andtransphobic, white supremacist, and nationalist political movements,which were foreshadowed by the reprehensible “GamerGate” campaignof harassment against marginalized people in gaming culture, these polit-ically informed modes of game criticism and scholarship have never beenmore crucial. Scholars can and must engage critically with popular block-buster media’s often clumsy, liberal-centrist attempts to use dystopianimaginary worlds to forecast, understand, question, and challenge differentforms of extremism. In so doing, we can find ways to think through andbeyond dominant ideologies, and in this sense the Bioshock games haveenduring relevance not only as individual texts, but also in context assymptomatic instances of broader sociocultural trends.42

A Map of Beyond the Sea

Beyond the Sea is organized around five sections, each focusing on anoverarching theme or concern that emerged as we assembled the essays.We feel that these sections offer a helpful framework for making sense ofthe Bioshock phenomenon. Nevertheless, connections, parallels, echoes,and mirror images criss-cross the book in non-linear ways – much like theinter-dimensional “tears” in Bioshock Infinite that bridge the gaps betweenworlds. 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. PartOne – “Unity and Metamorphosis: Making and Breaking Family Bonds inBioshock,” posits that these twisted bonds are structurally crucial to the se-ries’ operation, especially in light of the individualistic narratives of personalpower the games try (albeit half-heartedly) to subvert. The main way thatcritics have noted these familial themes is by framing Bioshock Infinite, andby extension the rest of the series, as part of the so-called “daddening” ofgames.43 Coined for a slew of hit games that depict playable father figuresusing extreme violence to “protect” daughter figures in dystopian settings,this notion of “daddening” suggests that as more game developers have ap-

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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 howthis “daddening” has played out in popular media, and what has beenpushed to the margins by this focus on fatherhood. As Sarah Stang, informedby 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-valorizingalso 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 tomotherhood, which they argue is either omitted entirely or rendered mon-strous and abject, much as in horror cinema. In both of these chapters, theauthors connect their specific case studies to general attitudes in gamingculture, arguing that they are symptomatic of the marginalization of womenin patriarchal societies. Shifting gears from psychosocial archetypes to theactual dynamics of parenting relationships and its mediated representations,Karen Schrier mobilizes contemporary child psychology to explore theseries’ trademark tension between parental over-determination and inde-pendence, using it as a framework for a broader analysis of different gamedesign 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 butmore importantly in the very relationship between game and player,” evenif it is not “intentionally” so, and argues that it is a rich text for teasingout the hidden queerness in games.44 What does it mean to queer gamestudies, to study games queerly?45 The chapters in Part Two – “To Seducethe Ear and Delight the Spirit: Bioshock, Gender, and Sexuality,” take upthis call and extend it across the whole series, bringing queer theories oftime, performativity, and heteronormativity to bear on the microworldsof Bioshock. Cody Mejeur retrieves Bahktin’s ideas about masks and thecarnivalesque 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 NewYear’s Eve before the fall of Rapture. Following a similar trajectory, JordanR. Youngblood builds on the previous section in his discussion of time

16 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

and reproduction, mobilizing the queer concept of “chrononormativity”alongside conventional accounts of “ludic time” in digital games in orderto critique the series’ ultimately repressive temporalities. Positioning queerinsights in relation to the recent resurgence of right-wing extremism ingaming and beyond, Daniel Ante-Contreras considers how Bioshock canbe understood in the context of pernicious notions of white straight malevictimization: a paranoid, anti-social subjectivity that appropriates andinverts the language and ethos of social justice for reactionary ends. Thisfalse sense of victimization is central to Bioshock’s archetypal narrative,but like the other authors in this section, Ante-Contreras sees in Bioshocka 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, LarsSchmeink notes that while posthuman themes are relatively common infuturistic shooter games (usually in the superficial form of technologicalsuperpowers and horrific cyborg monsters),46 Bioshock is unique in itspolitically and philosophically informed exploration of posthumanism.What does it mean to press beyond the limits of human corporeality orontology, and what can the technosocial apparatus of digital games tellus about this process? The chapters in Part Three – “The Flesh BecomesClay: Technology, Humanity, and Embodiment in Bioshock,” each takea different approach to this question. Jamie Henthorn links the series’overarching concern with the posthuman to its complex and problematictreatment of gender, with particular emphasis on the haunting Little Sis-ters of Rapture, arguing that they represent the gendered dehumanizationand abjection of posthuman subjects. Similarly, Gareth Schott focuseson the paradoxical techno-utopianism of Bioshock 2, considering it inthe 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 materialistframework to go beyond the posthuman into an analysis of total humanabsence 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 casestudy in de-centring the human player, a conceptual move that has im-portant political implications.

17There’s Always an Introduction

Bioshock’s multi-layered worlds and histories at the level of fiction area refraction of its authorship, circulation, and consumption as a highlyintertextual transmedia franchise,47 and Part Four – “There’s Always aCity: The Many Histories of Bioshock,” engages this multiplicity. Howdo digital games (re)mediate history, adopting and adapting strategiesfrom other cultural forms? Building on critiques of Bioshock Infinite’stroubling equivocation between systemic racism and anti-racist resis -tance,48 Sarah Zaidan performs a critical reframing of race, identity, andcitizenship across the series, showing that the same ideological currentsrun through the series even as the details change. Michael Fuchs takes asa starting point the frequently noted parallels between Infinite andThomas Pynchon’s metahistorical novel Against the Day, but moves be-yond superficial similarities and shared influences. Instead, the chapterdraws on studies of Pynchon and uses this comparative analysis to shednew 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 transmediahistories 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 therelationship between Bioshock, its predecessors, and its descendants. AsArnott contends, the fictional themes of both franchises can be read alle-gorically to make sense of the media industrial logics that continue toproduce 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 thathave driven Bioshock criticism and scholarship – namely player choice,agency, freedom, and constraints – with new, critical eyes. Ten years onfrom Bioshock’s clever subversion of player control, has the medium andour 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 toseveral “post-Bioshock” games – including The Walking Dead, The StanleyParable, and The Novelist – that attempt in various ways to solve the per-sistent “problem” of player choice in games. Looking to historical an-

18 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

tecedents to explain contemporary media, Patrick Brown highlights theoften-overlooked but central imagery of hands and control in Bioshock inrelation to the 1924 German Expressionist film The Hands of Orlac in acomparative media analysis spanning eighty-three years. Brown arguesthat both texts serve as powerful media allegory for their time, anxiouslyworking 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’sdlc episodes. MatthewWysocki and Betsy Brey deftly analyze this under-examined entry, recon-sidering and complicating canonical understandings of how player agencyfunctions in the franchise and in digital games as a whole, and presentinga 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 betweenthe series’ launch and the publication of this volume thus provides ampledistance for critical reflection, while remaining a timely intervention inthe present moment. We are fortunate to have a decade of thoughtfulscholarship and incisive criticism to build on (the same is certainly nottrue of other games and series), but we also recognize the necessity of ex-panding our horizons to drive the conversation forward. As a series ofplayable texts that have drawn interest, attention, passion, and frustrationfrom far beyond the walled-off, hyper-individualistic undersea realm ofthe “hardcore” gamer, the ongoing elevation of Bioshock in popular andcritical discourse challenges us to integrate different disciplinary ap-proaches, engaging across arbitrary lines of division to do the work ofgame studies.49 After all, as the intertwining evolutionary histories of theBioshock franchise and game studies attest, continually interrogating andcritically re-evaluating our canonical texts is crucial to advancing our fieldof study. At the conclusion of Infinite, Elizabeth sums up in retrospect thesupposed essence of Bioshock in a neat and tidy aphorism: “There’s alwaysa lighthouse. There’s always a man. There’s always a city.” Rather thantaking the series at face value, this book seeks to question its underlying

19There’s Always an Introduction

assumptions and ideologies. Where is the city, how is it organized, andwhat does it signify? Who is the man, what does he stand for, and why isit always a man? What does the lighthouse illuminate, and what does itleave 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 System Shock 2 (Looking Glass Studios 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 (Ion Storm, 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 Dystopias.”

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.

20 Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred

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.”

21There’s Always an Introduction

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