Just yesterday, I finished playing BioShock (late I know), a first person shooter game that reveals more about a society without God than most people would think. At first sight, this might be a game filled with violence, gore, and questionable ethics, but when one digs deeper, one will notice that this game is a story of a city that has abandoned God, a human empire that rejected religion and favored science, a social experiment that now lies in ruins. First of all, this game was inspired by the works of Ayn Rand, an author whom I admire for her books concerning capitalism and the “selfishness” of man. However, Rand was an atheist, therefore she left little place for God and religion in her works. The city of Rapture, where the game takes place, is created as a utopia for intellectuals. The founder, Andrew Ryan, built it on the principles of Rand’s idea of a perfect society found in her book, Atlas Shrugged. This utopia embraces the idealistic opinion that man who works to create for himself and no one else, thus making him “selfish”. It embraces the main idea of capitalism, where the desire to succeed is one’s own and can only be carried out if one is selfish enough to accomplish it. However, as the player reaches Rapture, we find that it is a dystopia rather than a utopia. Rapture’s citizens have genetically manipulated (or spliced) themselves with superhuman abilities, but at the cost of their sanity. How does relate to God, one might ask? Well, where is the utopia? A city built by man will crumble to the ground, so what more Rapture? A utopia that rejects God is one that has marked its own death trap; it has directly challenged God. Digging deeper into the game, we find that the morals of Rapture’s denizens are nonexistent as they perform experiments on humans that we would find questionable at the very least today, if not outrageous. Smugglers roam the alleys, selling contraband items such as Bibles, but not with the mission to spread the Gospel, but rather to make a profit. A city such as Rapture is in a state of absolute moral decay that there is no rapture for its citizens (nice pun eh?). Therefore, we can see from BioShock that God really plays a bigger role in the story than most people think. Isaiah 26:5 states this “He [God] humbles those who dwell on high, he lays the lofty city low; he levels it to the ground and casts it down to the dust.” Rapture has boasted that it does not need God, but when it did so, it posed a direct challenge to the Almighty. Just like the Titanic, the man who built Rapture feels the brunt of challenging God; his city will never prevail.
Mmm. No. It is a comment on the unsustainabiltiy of Objectivism. Anti-theism just comes along for the party.
ReplyDeleteYou know about Ayn Rand, right?
jaduncan has a point - the game was probably envisioned as a comment on Objectivism rather than an atheism - but that doesn't mean that your interpretation is wrong. On the contrary, I think you make some very good points, particularly about hubris, the desire to turn ourselves into gods, and the fact that Bibles are contraband (which smacks eerily of communism and the necessity for atheism in that society too...).
ReplyDeleteWhat intrigues me particularly is the fact that God is a law-maker, and Andrew Ryan stands in for God. Ryan *should* lay down no rules for his city: his own rule is "do as you please". When Fontaine appears - a man who does as he pleases to the extent of undermining Ryan - suddenly Ryan panics; it seems clear to me that while Ryan was proposing an ethics of having no ethics, in fact he was proposing an ethics of everyone sharing *his* ethics, ie. do as you please *with your money*, but not with innocent little girls, and certainly not with the sovereignty of the city.