I've written before about the horror/shooter BioShock series of video games being about the closest thing I've ever seen to narrative art in the genre, in part because the games tend to wrestle with political high concepts. The first BioShock envisioned a libertarian dystopia where an underwater city constructed on Randian ideals falls apart and all the residents devolve into some state of slavery. The sequel imagines the destroyed city and its remaining survivors falling into the hands of a religious collectivist. Because there's never really been a Randian society, and communist-style collectivism has largely been discredited as a philosophy, the first game was really far superior to the second.
The trailer for the third BioShock game came out, and I'm pleased to see it's based on another interesting political idea. Instead of taking place in underwater Rapture, the game takes place in a floating city called Columbia, which resembles "the 4th of July in 1900." Instead of libertarianism or collectivism, the high concept driving the game will be American exceptionalism, according to creative director Ken Levine:
The notion of this American exceptionalism came to me quite late. It was only about six to eight months ago. We always had the city in the sky. Because there was this feeling of optimism at the turn of the century. All this technology was changing, twenty years ago we were this little regional power, we were all farmers and fisherman and now we're working in factories and there are cars and there are aeroplanes and there's electricity. If you look at the art back then, if you told someone that in five years they'd be living in the sky, they'd say, okay I buy that, because that's how much the world is changing.
I thought BioShock's take on how terrible a Randian society would actually be was well timed given the ongoing preeminence of Rand in American conservative politics. I'm curious to see how they handle the concept of American exceptionalism, which liberals and conservatives tend to interpret quite differently. It's hard to imagine that all the recent reminders of the actual limits of American power, from the economic crisis, to an endless war in Afghanistan, to ongoing high unemployment won't in some way be a factor in how Irrational Games chooses to reinterpret an era of naive optimism, especially given the company's tendency toward using tragic irony as an element of horror. Having gone from Rand to Marx, it sounds like the third BioShock might have a sprinkling of Niebuhr.
