Bioshock
Basic Game Information
| Developer | Irrational Games (formerly 2K Boston and 2K Australia) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Publisher | 2K | ||||||||||||||||||
| Platforms | Windows, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Mac OS X, iOS (Not including remaster) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Release dates |
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| Genre | Dystopian survival horror first-person shooter |
Brief Synopsis
The player character, Jack, fights his way through the city of Rapture in order to escape it. Rapture is an underwater city, secretly constructed in the 1940s in an attempt for its citizens to hide from – and outlast the suspected extinction of – the outside world. By the time Jack arrives in Rapture, it is in ruins. The invention of plasmids, a drug that grants its user fantastical powers, has left the majority of the remaining citizens addicted to the point of insanity and immediate hostility. Due to the strong emphasis on individuality and free markets during the city’s lifetime, the ruins of Rapture are controlled by a handful of wealthy businessmen, who still feud over the remaining plasmids. Jack must defeat them using scavenged weapons and plasmids in order to escape. Unrestricted scientific research has led to a variety of cruel experiments that Jack encounters throughout his exploration, the most important of which being himself. Andrew Ryan, the city’s founder, reveals upon being confronted by Jack that Jack was genetically engineered to act as an assassin, and to do Andrew Ryan’s bidding under the false belief that it would lead to freedom.
Autoethnographic Component
This was the first horror game I ever played. My friend bought it for me as a surprise and I was quite afraid of playing a horror game but I didn’t want to be rude. Thankfully, I learned pretty early on that the game does not keep me completely on edge the entire time the same way a movie would, and I grew to like it.
A primary feature of this game is its wide array of fighting methods. In my own playthrough, I noted that the rate at which I was able to change my arsenal –- which can be done by buying plasmids with money or Adam (a chemical component of plasmids, which must be fueled with another component called Eve), upgrading a weapon with crafting items, or finding a new weapon at set points in the story – was fast enough to encourage me to constantly change how I fought. This is such an important aspect to me because it kept me in a state of wanting to learn and test more throughout the whole game, which is a feeling that fades away soon after the beginning of most games, especially linear story-based shooter games. This behaviour was primarily caused by the resource management aspect of the game, which, unlike most horror games, rarely left me in dire need of more resources. The primary purpose that the resource management served in my playthrough was to keep me excited about unlocking new weapons and plasmids; the variety of ammo, upgrades, and plasmids would be numbing if given to the me directly, so it instead made me feel like they were rewards for collecting enough currency. Similarly, hitpoints and Eve (a chemical expended in order to use plasmids, similar to mana in typical magic-based games) can be replenished with collectibles, which is naturally a rewarding experience, but these collectibles are also hardly ever scarce. The abundance, in both cases, served to make me appreciate using plasmids, using weapons, and healing, without ever actually making me play the game without them.
Ethics
Bioshock mostly forces the hand of the player when it comes to ethics; The player character, Jack, kills countless enemies as they act only as obstacles, and even when they are not obstacles, the player is usually incentivised to kill them for the resources or money that they may yield. However, the city of Rapture is also riddled with Little Sisters, who are orphan girls who have been, through the use of experimental drugs, enslaved and mentally conditioned to roam the city and extract Adam from corpses of those who have ingested it. They are accompanied by Big Daddies — former prisoners who have been integrated into large, weaponized, metal exoskeletons and mentally conditioned similarly to the Little Sisters. When a Big Daddy is defeated, the player is faced with the choice to “harvest” the now defenseless Little Sister, which decomposes her Adam-rich body into usable Adam, or to “save” her, which extracts the mind-altering drug that keeps her enslaved. The player’s actions are only ever acknowledged once at the end of the game, when the director of another orphanage (one that is not secretly an organ harvesting operation) either scolds or praises you. This makes for a simple good ending/bad ending game structure, but this does not influence gameplay at all and is not made evident to the player until soon before it happens. This means that players are left with a perfectly isolated moral dilemma: save a child and receive no added reward, or kill them for extra resources to keep yourself alive and receive no repercussions. The interpretations of this dilemma are described in Sam Gilbert’s chapter Ethics at Play: Patterns of Ethical Thinking Among Young Online Gamers in the book Ethics and Game Design. In this chapter, three ethical models are defined, which describe various degrees of care for others. The text specifically refers to online games, but such ethical models can be interpreted similarly to concern singleplayer games and nonplayer characters. Bioshock seems to mainly promote only the first of the three models: “Individualistic.” According to Gilbert, individualistic players are “concerned with personal consequences” and “[consider] rules to avoid consequences.”(Gilbert, ch.10) The following systems in Bioshock work to promote this behaviour:
- The player is never shown the effects of freeing Little Sisters until the end of the game. Both of the other ethical models involve caring for the continued effect of your actions. However, Little Sisters quickly disappear once freed and, from a mechanical perspective, cease to exist; To the player, there is no continued effect to be concerned about.
- Harvesting a Little Sister grants Adam, which is how the player acquires new plasmids, which are a core component of the game. Refraining from harvesting Little Sisters directly decreases how much of the game’s content one experiences, which contradicts the purpose of purchasing a video game.
- Before interacting with a Little Sister, the player must kill the Big Daddy protecting her, which is a risky and expensive process. A defeated Big Daddy does drop resources, but rarely more than the amount spent in order to kill it. This leaves the player with only one option to make the entire interaction with the Big Daddy a net gain: harvest the Little Sister.
Humanoid Monsters
The main enemy in Bioshock is the Splicer. There are many subsections of Splicers based on which plasmids they have, but they all began as ordinary citizens of Rapture who took Plasmids and either took so much as to become immediately hostile or, in poverty and desperation, got recruited to fight for one of the few wealthy people that control Rapture. Such a trope of everyday people turning into monsters is touched on in Zara Zimbardo’s book chapter It is Easier to Imagine the Zombie Apocalypse than to Imagine the End of Capitalism. In this chapter, Zimbardo writes, “Because they are not supernatural monsters, zombies terrify us through their uncanny resemblance to ourselves, rather than their otherness.” (Zimbardo 276) Indeed, some of the most chilling scenes are those where Splicers are simply performing domestic tasks (only in a slightly jittery and uncoordinated fashion) before they realize that the player character is nearby. In the screenshot below, a mother grieves for her lost baby – a very human behaviour – and then immediately turns to fight the player once they reveal themself – a monstrous behaviour.
This resemblance to ourselves was an intentional focus by Ken Levine, the creator of Bioshock. In the summary of an interview with him titled Ken Levine Talks About Making Of Bioshock, Ken Levine likens the player fighting a Splicer to a soldier fighting another soldier who does not want to hurt the other but has orders to.
Furthermore, the idea mentioned by Zimbardo that anyone could become a monster is exemplified in Bioshock as well, when Andrew Ryan, the founder and effective dictator of Rapture, reveals that they created the player character in a lab. At this point, the unspoken distinction between the player character and the splicers is broken, proving him to be just as monstrous as everyone else in Rapture.
A Washington Post article Fifteen years ago, ‘Bioshock’ redefined the narrative video game describes each of the now decrepit and sometimes unrecognizable areas as being “controlled by some warped remainder of the world before.” (Kunzelman) This, too, keeps any one part of the game from becoming so monstrous as to become distinct from humans.
First-Person Perspective
The realization that the player character, too, is a splicer, is aided by the limiting perspective; The player does not ever see their character’s body except for their hand. The radio operators, who are not as they present themselves, are also hidden from the player’s view for most of the game. The realizations that are hidden by these facts are much more complicated than the rest of the readily available, unconcealed information about the story. David Simmons’s chapter “Bringing… Uncertain Geographies Under… Control”? Exploring the Lovecraftian “Walking Simulator” finds such a phenomena to be a pattern across more games than Bioshock, and reads, “the ‘walking simulator’ frequently uses the first-person perspective to aid immersion in a verisimilitudinous virtual space before introducing more abstract, fantastical elements that gain emphasis through their incongruity with the otherwise quotidian environment.” (Simmons 243) While Bioshock is not primarily a walking simulator, the same theory holds true. With any other game perspective, the player would much sooner realize that they are being lied to by their environment. In first person, however, the player’s understanding of the game goes from “simple horror shooter” in the beginning to “situation where it is impossible to know what to believe” at the end.
Body Horror
Pawel Baran’s book chapter Observe, Dismember, Overcome: Resident Evil 4 (2005; 2023) and Dead Space (2008; 2023) as Video Game Extensions of the Body Horror Subgenre references an argument by Bernard Perron, which is that “gamers become one body with the game characters in performance and perception. The importance of the virtual body emphasised by Perron ties video game horrors to body horror. The [extended body] subgenre is, after all, concerned with observing human [sic] body and its demise or transformation due to various reasons.” (Baran 210) Both the nature of Bioshock being first-person and the player regularly changing their character’s abilities lead to a “one body” experience mentioned by Baran. The aforementioned “transformation” is also witnessed in-game, and the “demise” is alluded to. Present throughout the game, Jack’s skin reacts to taking various plasmids. (Shown in figure 2)
It is made abundantly clear that plasmid overdosing is what caused the Splicers to end up as they are, but Jack must take more plasmids regardless of this to progress through the game. At the end of the game, the most obvious example is shown; Frank Fontaine, a drug lord, pumps himself full of Adam, reaching this ominous, somewhat-human form in exchange for strong powers. (Shown in figure 3)
It is worth noting that this final battle with Frank Fontaine is easily the most disliked section in the game, mostly because of how easy and repetitive it was. In an interview with Engadget, even Bioshock creator Ken Levine himself admits that “back on Bioshock 1, we had that terrible showdown fight at the end.” (Gilbert) However, Simon Smith disagrees with this in his opinion piece In Defense: Bioshock’s Ending (Spoilers). He argues, “you can give a man power but Fontaine proves that despite his powerful front his own inner weakness is his greatest burden. He goes down easily and closes what seems like a disappointing moment, but this is actually one of the greatest messages on the nature of power and offers a satisfying conclusion to Fontaine as we see him for what he is.” (Smith)
Disability as Horror
Aside from Frank Fontaine, the other candidate for the main antagonist of Bioshock is Andrew Ryan, the founder of Rapture. Throughout the game, the player is shown portraits of the person on the other end of their radio, which are almost all accurate. The few exceptions are Atlas, who is completely fictitious, and Frank Fontaine, who appears as a non-spliced human. By this, we can assume that Frank Fontaine only transformed into the form shown in the image above recently, or that that form is not permanent. If this assumption is true, then all of the major villains in Bioshock are non-splicers. This is an interesting contrast to a point made in Julia Gruson-Wood’s book chapter Dead Meat: Horror, Disability, and Eating Rituals, which is that “Not only are the victims of horror plots engaged in the constant thrill of succumbing to or evading disability, the villains of these texts are predominantly themselves disabled.” (Gruson-Wood 83) While this is usually the case, the villains in Bioshock are all non-disabled humans, while the smaller-scale enemies all have disabilities that evoke enough sympathy to make it difficult to consider them villains. This difference from most horror media serves to further the game’s message about corruption of power. Instead of the corrupt characters suffering consequences (like becoming a splicer/disabled) for their actions, they can use their power to offload their consequences to those less powerful. In fact, the disability of a character in Bioshock is inversely proportional to their power in the society of Rapture: Little Sisters (shown in figure 4) and Big Daddies are heavily disabled due to their mental manipulation, and they were made from kidnapped orphans and prisoners, whereas the non-disabled villains who set traps and prevent the player character’s escape (such as Andrew Ryan) are wealthy.
Gameplay Video
Bioshock - Full Game Walkthrough (No Commentary Longplay)
AI Disclosure & Appendix
No generative AI was used in the making of this wiki entry.
Works Cited
GameArmy. “Bioshock - Full Game Walkthrough (No Commentary Longplay)” YouTube, 6 Jul. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myzFQ-1ODyI
Hess, Carolyne. A female splicer with a baby carriage. On Family, Relationships, and Romance: Bioshock 10+ Years Later, 18 Sep. 2018, https://medium.com/@carolynehess/on-family-relationships-romance-3a62dee0bfa6
SeaLow3595. Skin reactions to various plasmids. Reddit, 16 Jan. 2024, https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/1980jew/how_bioshock_magic_hands_were_made_and_they_can/
The massive ADAM inducer device. Bioshock Wiki, 25 Jan. 2015, https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Fontaine_(Level)
A Little Sister Holding ADAM. Bioshock Wiki, 20 Mar. 2010, https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Little_Sister
Zimbardo, Zara. It Is Easier To Imagine The Zombie Apocalypse Than To Imagine The End Of Capitalism. https://www.academia.edu/8826773/It_Is_Easier_To_Imagine_The_Zombie_Apocalypse_Than_To_Imagine_The_End_Of_Capitalism
Gilbert, Sam. "Ethics at Play: Patterns of Ethical Thinking among Young Online Gamers." Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, edited by Karen Schrier and David Gibson, IGI Global Scientific Publishing, 2010, pp. 151-166. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.4018/978-1-61520-845-6.ch010
Gruson-Wood, J. (2016). Dead Meat: Horror, Disability, and Eating Rituals. In: Siddique, S., Raphael, R. (eds) Transnational Horror Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1057/978-1-137-58417-5_5
Simmons, David. “Bringing ... Uncertain Geographies under ... Control”? Exploring the Lovecraftian ‘Walking Simulator,’ Taylor & Francis Group, 30 Dec. 2021, www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780367713065-18/bringing-uncertain-geographies-control-david-simmons
Baran, P. (2025). Observe, Dismember, Overcome: "Resident Evil 4" (2005; 2023) and "Dead Space" (2008; 2023) as Video Game Extensions of the Body Horror Subgenre. Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, 68(1), 207–222. https://doi.org/10.26485/ZRL/2025/68.1/26
Kunzelman, Cameron. “BioShock Redefined the Narrative Video Game.” The Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/19/bioshock-anniversary/
Gilbert, Ben. “Irrational’s Ken Levine on Bioshock’s Final Boss and How Infinite’s Solution Is ‘More in Our Wheelhouse.’” Engadget, 15 July 2016, www.engadget.com/2011-10-18-irrationals-ken-levine-on-bioshocks-final-boss-and-how-infinit.html
Smith, Simon. “In Defense: BioShock’s Ending (Spoilers).” GameLuster, 15 June 2023, gameluster.com/defense-bioshocks-ending-spoilers/
Zak, Robert. “Ken Levine Looks Back on BioShock: ‘It Was about Raising Questions, Not Answering Them.’” DualShockers, 21 Aug. 2022, www.dualshockers.com/bioshock-interview-ken-levine/