I do think an undersold and likely unintended extremely funny thing about the first Bioshock's premise is that the best capitalist minds of the era fled society and nobody fucking noticed or cared
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in reply to @lutz's post:
Honestly, would any of us really notice if Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk disappeared?
Unfortunately thanks to his massive micromanagement style of approving things, SpaceX would discover Musk would have disappeared in under a day.
If you kind of want to anything that costs more than ~$50,000, you need his approval. Which includes payroll.
REGRETTABLE
it'd be fun if they decided to collectively pull a Weekend at Bernie's-type situation to get around that, though XD
I bet his 10 kids approve all sorts of cool space shit. And you know his kids'll get everything cuz that mf is too self-centered to bother writing a will.
not if you divide it into multiple closely spaced $49,999 events you don't
I think we would, eventually. But not in an “oh, no, things are breaking without this key individual” way, but more of a “huh, things seem slightly better today” way.
i dont think its unintended, because im pretty sure the entire game is making fun of ayn rand's entire philosophy
I know that's how it gets sold but I consider it hard to believe since at the time Levine said he found Rand admirable and the pivot of the narrative is when Andrew Ryan "goes back on his principles" and nationalizes a competitor's business
oh weird. idk that much about the plot of bioshock i just knew vaguely that its about all the ayn rand rich guys building a city underwater to do whatever they want and as it turns out "whatever they want" is to all take weird rich ppl drugs and kill and eat each other and the main villain is an evil guy named andrew ryan
Spoilers for a however many years old game. Andrew Ryan isn't the main bad guy, he gets killed in the second act to make way for the REAL villian. Who is a mobster who wants to usurp Andrew Ryan.
That might well be what the author meant, but I always read it as the fig leaf coming off that Ryan had no principles. Everything about Rapture would only be upheld as long as he was in charge and at the first threat he threw his principles away rather than compete over power.
It's this one. I'm pretty sure it's in the text somewhere, like the protagonist said something about it
Really feels like Levine keeps taking half steps on doing some sort of critical critique or messaging. Bioshock Infinite leaves a lot on the table on several interesting philosophical questions and kinda shrugs.
Infinite is bad enough that it makes the original game bad retroactively
it's a window into a mind that can say "minorities taking up armed revolt against an oppressive racist genocidal state are JUST AS BAD as the oppressive racist genocidal state itself"
it's easy to get caught up in the obvious "objectivism bad" read and miss the fact that the game does its level best to lionize Ryan in his last moments ("he's a FREE MAN, he dies on his OWN TERMS, unlike YOU, who are still just a PUPPET"), not to mention the fact that the Splicers are explicitly Rapture's oppressed underclass, drugged up with ADAM, turned loose against Ryan and his works, and given not a whit of sympathy whatsoever
Hi, just wanted to confirm this, as someone who worked on the game. It's an ancap-sympathetic work with a fundamentally turbocentrist world view (the worst thing you can be is too extreme in either direction!) - most evident in the third game where the white ethnostate is put on equal moral ground with the people violently resisting it
thank you for confirming everything i keep saying about BS1 and BSI in a single paragraph instead of twelve <3
It really feels like in BS:I that you are asked, "Wow, that Comstock revelation! What a hypocrite huh? Anyways let's move on, no need to dwell on that..." Like, no room for quiet time.
Imagine being accidentally incredibly based and then spending a decade and a half trying to walk it back
Huh? This is an inherent part of Libertarians, they don't have principles and will immediately seize any power if anyone is foolish enough to give it to them. This is the natural end of their path.
I've thought about this before and I like to imagine the present-day of that world is a noticeably better place because of that.
yeah if there was a mass exodus where all those sorts of people literally walked into the sea like that in real life i think we might be having a nicer time right now. i think headcanonically things are going pretty well outside