Jeg har tidligere skrevet om computerspil om og med frihed. I relation til det noget gamle indlæg kan det være interessant at læse denne artikel om spillet BioShock. I artiklen hedder det bl.a.:
The point of BioShock, the raison d’etre, is really the story, and the messages and intellectual content that Levine [spillets skaber] tries to deliver as a payload. “Look at Lord of the Rings,” he challenges. “Why is Lord of the Rings more interesting than random RPG story number 507? They’re exactly the same thing. They have orcs and goblins and demons and trolls. But Lord of the Rings is a meditation on power. And it’s really interesting because of that. It’s what gives it it’s heart.” And with undenied hubris, Levine’s trying to do the same thing with BioShock, while still delivering a game 16-year-old cheese eating high school students will want to play. “We have these philosophical notions, but you’ve got to deliver. You gotta bring home the monsters. You gotta bring home the superpowers.” In short, he’s become a commercial realist.
But he’s still determined to get the ideas across. “Even as we live in a country divided, I feel that most of us are sort of in the middle. And I think there are some really interesting themes to play on there.” The most prominent character in BioShock — Andrew Ryan, Rapture’s founder — is an embodiment of a self-centered, free-will political ideology called Objectivism. Objectivism is the brainchild of 1960s author Ayn (rhymes with mine) Rand. She defined it thus: “Man as a Heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason his only absolute.” Put more simply, an Objectivist says “the world is what it is, my place in it is important, the only way to know anything is to use your own head, and the best political system is one that leaves me the hell alone. “Andrew Ryan is Ayn Rand meets Howard Hughes,” explains Levine.
The initial plot of BioShock — the founding of this utopia — mirrors the plot (albeit through a glass darkly) of Rand’s 1960’s epic book “Atlas Shrugged.” In “Atlas Shrugged” the worlds elite — the “atlases” — stage a minor rebellion and remove themselves to a better place: a valley where they can be free of the eye and hand of the world’s governments and those who would leech off their talents. While the rhetoric of Rapture’s founder, Andrew Ryan (an anagram of Ayn Rand with an extra “rew” thrown in for obfuscation) sounds like a Randian polemic, his nemesis is ambiguously named “Atlas.” To figure out which one is really the good guy or the bad guy, we’ll all have to play the game.
At spillet så samtidig er en af de bedst anmeldte og højest rangerede PC-udgivelser nogensinde ifølge gamerankings.com hjælper blot endnu mere på ens lyst til at prøve det. Når jeg har dette skal jeg nok komme med et uddybende indlæg. Indtil da anbefales det at læse hele artiklen, da beskrivelsen af BioShocks narrativ og (hvis man er computernørd) BioShocks spillemæssige bestanddele og effekter, er meget interessant.
