[Atlasphere]New ?BioShock? Video Game


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From Atlasphere member Noah Rusnock:


I am not sure how much the Atlasphere community is involved with video games, but in the next few months a highly-anticipated, main stream video game with an Objectivist base will hit the market. The game is called BioShock and you can read about it
,
here
, and
here
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http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/643.php

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Ill be buying this game the second it is released.

The game is not Objectivist per se. It is about an Objectivist utopia that eventually becomes a dystopia due to a civil war over control of a gene-manipulating compound. Ive talked with the lead designer Ken Levine, he is a libertarian politically and has at least some knowlege of Objectivism, and the game is (given what I have heard from him) not going to be a hatchet job on Objectivism. He explained the basic theme as "anything taken to extremes is bad." I do not agree with that position, but the game can be interpreted in a better light, since the main villain, Andrew Ryan ("And Ryan" is an anagram of "Ayn Rand"), is a power-luster who obviously has 'strayed' from what Objectivism actually entails.

Also, Levine designed System Shock 2, my favorite game of all time, and also a game with Objectivist-compatible themes ("Mystics of Muscle" versus "Mystics of Spirit", the links between collectivism and violence, the struggle of the individual against the collective, all embodied by the game's two main antagonists: SHODAN (an evil AI with a God Complex and a genocidal hatred of biology, obviously representing both brute force and gods/primacy of consciousness (in the last level of SS2, SHODAN actually acquires some level of primacy of consciousness)) and The Many (a biological hive-mind representing collectivism, anti-individuality, altruism (by implication) and also brute force).

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