Video Games as Art

Bioshock

Ken Levine is the Creative Director of 2K Boston which was the Developer of the game. This game was released in 2007.

Bioshock. Boston: 2K, 2007.

When deciding what I wanted to do for this blog, I was struggling on picking a medium. I picked video games because, for one, I love playing them, and for two, they get a bad rap by people most of the time. I chose this game in particular because it is beautifully crafted.

This game starts you out by throwing you out of a plane and entering an underground city. This city was supposed to an idealistic society where all of the profit was your own. The government didn’t do anything to regulate you. But something went wrong when this new technology that gave people almost magical abilities went wrong and caused society to crumble. When you play this game, it sucks you in so much that you feel as if you are the protagonist and are travelling through this underground city. It also takes place during the 1950s for a very good atmospheric effect.

The subject is the city. It is based off of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It is expressed by immersing you into the city and the artist gives you little sections of information along the way to keep you going. Being able to explore every nook and cranny in the city really adds a nice vision of how it all went wrong.

This game is art to me because the graphics are beautiful. I also love the story that is portrayed throughout the events that happen. I would call this game instrumental against the type of society created in the city. It could also be seen as mimetic because they were trying to go for realism in the models of everything.

I can’t think of anyway this relates to this class. This could maybe relate to a couple of the societies portrayed in the Phillip Dick Reader in Scientific Revolutions, but it would be a fairly loose connection. The ancestor is clearly Ayn Rand, but we have not and probably won’t cover that in our class. There are also a few characters in the game that might relate to Aesthetics. There is a crazed plastic surgeon that is trying to create the perfect face.