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Jessica Aldred and Brian GreenspanConvergence

A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys: BioShock and the Dystopian Logic of  

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A Man Chooses, A SlaveObeys: BioShock andthe Dystopian Logic of

Convergence

Jessica Aldred1 and Brian Greenspan1

AbstractFor all the critical attention paid to dystopian landscapes in recent literature and film,a similar dystopian turn within gamespace has been largely overlooked. The authorscontend that post-apocalyptic digital games merit the same critical examination astheir literary and cinematic counterparts, arguing that such games can provide ameaningful site in which questions about the future of technology play out againstthe dialectic of utopian and dystopian alternatives. Specifically, this article argues thatthe popular console game BioShock simultaneously celebrates and interrogatesutopian notions of technological progress and free will embedded within prevailingindustrial and academic conceptions of convergence. The authors explore the differ-ing, yet complementary, conceptions of utopia put forth by critical theorists andthe games industry in order to examine how BioShock’s ambivalence towardtechnology—and technologies andpracticesofmedia consumption inparticular—com-plicates more idealistic and totalizing forecasts for the future of media convergence.Building upon Alexander Galloway’s treatment of gamic action as an ‘‘allegorithm’’ thatpermits procedural exploration and mastery of dominant control protocols in theinformation age, the authors analyze the way in which BioShock operationalizes the‘‘control’’ logic of convergence. By performing a close reading of the game’s ideologicalcontent as well as its procedural strategies of transmediation, they link BioShock’sambivalence to the multifaceted, often conflicting nature of convergence discourse andpractice within the digital games industry.

1 Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Jessica Aldred, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Email: jessica.aldred@gmail.com

Games and Culture6(5) 479-496

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Keywordsdystopia, utopia, convergence, games industry, BioShock, FPS

The Dystopian Turn (and Shoot)

In recent decades, literature, film, and the collective imaginary more generally have

taken a decidedly dystopian turn. Visions of widespread destruction by catastrophic

political or environmental upheavals have achieved unprecedented popularity,

alongside visions of alternative societies arising beyond the ruins of both state-

sponsored and transnational capitalism (Harvey, 2000; Jameson, 2005; Moylan,

2000; Seed, 2000). These dystopian imaginings have in part been enabled by

transformations in Western mass media since the 1960s: on one hand, today’s global

information media proliferate accounts of poverty, political violence, and ecological

disaster at an unprecedented rate (Levitas & Sargisson, 2003); on the other hand,

networked communications and open-source movements offer new avenues for the

dissemination of dissenting opinions, allowing the formation of alternative commu-

nities that cross-national and geographic borders.

From the scorched World War III battlefields of Tom Clancy’s Endwar, to the

decimated human colonies of the fictional planet Sera in Gears of War, to the lawless

expanses of the quasi-fictional Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto IV, even a cursory

examination of recent popular titles reveals that digital games have been particularly

rife with catastrophic and post-apocalyptic scenarios. Dystopian games are hardly a

new phenomenon; however, recent titles seem especially intent on foregrounding

their dystopic storyworlds as a major selling feature. While this dystopian turn

within gamespace could be dismissed as mere Windows dressing, engineered to help

legitimate (and product-differentiate) so much virtual violence, we contend that

post-apocalyptic digital games merit the same critical examination as their literary

and cinematic counterparts. Indeed, given the somewhat paradoxical nature of digi-

tal games as hyper-commercial products of globalization and capitalism on one hand

(Kerr, 2006; Kerr & Flynn, 2003; Ip, 2008), and as liberating avenues for user inter-

vention, customization, and empowerment on the other (Jenkins, 2006; Postigo,

2007), we argue that digital games can provide a meaningful site in which questions

about the future of technology play out against the dialectic of utopian and dystopian

alternatives. That utopian and dystopian motifs can be found within the majority of

games has attracted surprisingly little critical notice. Only a few critics have com-

mented on the anticapitalist strain of utopianism evident in certain game genres. Ted

Friedman (1999), for one, has argued that so-called god games such as Civilization

and SimCity hold out the utopian potential to actualize the ‘‘aesthetic of cognitive

mapping’’ that Fredric Jameson has famously found to be lacking in postmodern

culture, and which he deems necessary for a total social transformation. Ben

Hourigan (2003) likewise characterizes networked RPGs as enabling ‘‘the utopia

of open space,’’ online intentional communities with the potential to undermine

transnational capitalism through alternate networks of exchange: ‘‘many consumers

480 Games and Culture 6(5)

engage in practices that actively thwart large capital’s control over videogame

distribution. These include mod-chipping, emulation, rom-hacking, fan translation,

and piracy, all of which have the potential to make videogames both free in space,

and just plain free’’ (p. 60).

This article takes a somewhat less enthusiastic view of the potential for utopian-

and dystopian-themed digital games to model real social transformation. Specifi-

cally, we consider the popular digital game BioShock for how it continues a broader

dystopian turn in world-building within popular culture, constructing a historically

disjunctive retro-future that simultaneously interrogates and celebrates utopian

notions of technological progress and free will. Although BioShock outwardly

seems to critique both technology and capitalist excess as ruinous forces, as the

gameplay and story unfold, they subtly recuperate the power of corporate capitalism

and managerial principles for stable social engineering. Building upon Alexander

Galloway’s treatment of gamic action as an ‘‘allegorithm’’ that permits the proce-

dural exploration and mastery of dominant control protocols in the information age,

we read BioShock as both a storyworld and a cultural/technological property

embedded in the very real, material conditions of media conglomeration and conver-

gence that both allegorizes and operationalizes the ‘‘control’’ logic of convergence.

However, despite the indebtedness of our approach to a recent insistence within

game studies upon studying games strictly for their ‘‘procedurality’’ rather than their

representational techniques (e.g., Aarseth, 2004; Bogost, 2006, 2007), we argue that

BioShock exemplifies the necessity of an approach to analyzing digital games that

considers both aspects. As we will show, unlike many digital games, BioShock’s

procedurality is in many ways dependent upon its narrative and vice versa.

Performing a close reading of the game itself, the dystopian alternate history it

constructs, and the broader industrial conditions of its production and reception,

we link BioShock’s ambivalence to the often conflicting nature of convergence

discourse and practice within the digital games industry. While convergence once

meant the strictly technological notion of different media functions ‘‘converging’’

in a single device, recent scholarship has expanded the definition of convergence

to signify a multifaceted heuristic that considers the increasingly concentrated nature

of media conglomerate ownership across once-disparate industries, the synergistic

flow of content or ‘‘intellectual property’’ across multiple media platforms, the

sharing of talent and technology between media, and the increasingly ‘‘converged’’

formal and narrative qualities of media content resulting from all of the above (see,

e.g., Bolter & Grusin, 1999; Ip, 2008; Jenkins, 2006; Ndalianis, 2004). Scholarly

studies of the games industry have also acknowledged how digital games in partic-

ular are produced within an increasingly converged industrial structure wherein

developer, publisher, and distributor are all owned by the same company (see,

e.g., Kerr, 2006).

Within industrial and academic discussions of convergence alike, much atten-

tion has been paid to how the ephemerality of digital media content enables the

seamless cross-media flow of IP and the mastery and creative intervention of its

Aldred and Greenspan 481

consumer-operators. And for its part, the games industry has been keen to foreground

those examples of user intervention that have complimented both the creative and the

economic motivations of their original game texts—evident, for example, in Valve’s

decision to repackage and distribute the now-infamous Counter-Strike mod of Half

Life or Maxis’ encouragement and facilitation of the online posting and sharing of

films and ‘‘photo albums’’ created by Sims’ players. Major game releases are now

being increasingly tailored to harness this gamer creativity and emphasize such

capabilities as a major component of gameplay, highlighted, for example, in the

overwhelming promotional discourse and media attention surrounding the user-

created level-design and sharing capabilities of Sony’s Little Big Planet. However, for

all these much-publicized celebrations of gamer agency and choice within highly

participatory ‘‘convergence culture’’ (Jenkins, 2006), we seek to further explore and

complicate this utopian discourse of progress and personal choice that surrounds what

Ip (2008) terms technological and content convergence, examining how it tends to

elide the extent to which hardware and software manufacturers increasingly curtail,

rather than enable, user agency. We consider the ways in which BioShock allegorizes

the procedures through which gamers are compelled to purchase converged devices

despite their planned obsolescence, consume converged content in the order and

fashion desired by media producers, and accept that the choices and agency they are

given are illusory at best. In particular, we explore the differing, yet complementary,

conceptions of utopia put forth by critical theorists and the game industry in order

to examine how BioShock’s narrative and procedural ambivalence towards

technology— and technologies and practices of media consumption in particular—

complicate more idealist and totalizing forecasts for the future of media convergence.

Welcome to Rapture: Dystopia at 20,000Leagues Under the Sea

BioShock is set in 1960 in the sealed underwater ruins of Rapture, a futuristic city

designed by fictional entrepreneur Andrew Ryan, who took a page from Ayn Rand

to provide elite men with a haven from the will of God, the people, and the State. To

play the game is to learn the story of the city’s demise, which was apparently brought

about by Ryan’s official mandate of rampant capitalism, individualism, and self-

improvement, achieved through state-sponsored programs of eugenic enhancements

and radically transformative plastic surgery. The failure of these experiments in

post-human transformation are evident at every turn, the surviving citizens of

Rapture having been transformed not into Randian uber-menschen but into mutant

zombies or ‘‘splicers’’ ruined by their own lust for perfection.

On the surface, the visible trappings of BioShock’s storyworld seem to allegorize

a dystopian ambivalence toward technological progress that is echoed in the game’s

engine and affordances. Based on the Unreal 3.0 engine, BioShock’s gameplay has

been criticized by some as derivative of much older PC games, including System

Shock II and Deus Ex but simplified for the users of the Xbox 360 console platform

482 Games and Culture 6(5)

on which it was originally released.1 (Despite the game’s simultaneous release in

Windows PC game format, the Xbox version was widely considered the ‘‘flagship’’

release and viewed as the driver for the bulk of its design choices.) Critics have cited,

for example, the relative ease with which one can collect ammo, weapons, and med

kits during gameplay, as well as the minimal impact that the death of our avatar,

Jack, has on progress through the game.

BioShock’s immense popularity has instead been attributed to the environment of

Rapture itself, the grandeur and complexity of which tends to overshadow the

game’s familiar mechanics. Yet, despite being praised as ‘‘a unique ride through a

warped world’’ (BioShock Review, n.d.) that is at once ‘‘unbelievably immersive

and tenaciously inventive’’ (Dinolpho, n.d.), BioShock’s lauded post-apocalyptic

setting is no more original than its gameplay, but reproduces dystopian motifs famil-

iar from popular science-fiction literature, film, and games. An intentionally anti-

quated, historically disjunctive gameworld, Rapture combines advanced robotic

and genetic technology with a pastiche of brass machinery reminiscent of either a

Jules Verne story or its steampunk pastiche and streamlined art deco trappings that

were already outmoded by 1946, the putative date of the city’s construction. Gianni

Vattimo (1992) has explained the cultural dominance of recycled dystopian motifs in

recent years as the result of the dawning awareness of the ‘‘counter-finality of rea-

son’’ or the knowledge that technological progress leads inevitably and ironically to

a less rational society characterized by mutual destruction and environmental decay.

In a contemporary climate in which the goal of progress itself cannot be trusted, any

attempt to build utopia and transform the totality of society systematically through

rational design also becomes suspect. For Vattimo, the predominant mood of dysto-

pian futures is one of ironic nostalgia for the seductive but dangerous remnants of the

now-vanished world of progress, in which ‘‘the mass of artefacts of the world of

advanced technology [are] treated inventorially, with a contemplative attitude’’ that

transforms any technological ‘‘talismans of progress’’ from working machines into

works of art (p. 85). He argues that such ironic-nostalgic inventories become the

only form of utopia that is still possible for a dystopian world beyond progress, as

the combination of advanced technology in quaint retro packaging undermines the

strict sense of history necessary to maintain faith in technological advances, laying

progress itself bare as an outmoded concept (p. 80).

BioShock derives its dystopian atmosphere not through any unity of effect but

through such ironic inventories of historical styles and technologies that mobilize

multiple, asynchronous eras and their trappings. Rapture’s futuristic technologies

are not projected into the future but hermetically sealed in the recent past calling into

question Rapture’s original plan as a utopia of individual perfection and technologi-

cal progress. Alexander Galloway has argued that a game such as World of Warcraft

is utopian precisely to the extent that they exclude advertisements, slogans, and other

signifiers of modernity from its world, thus allowing its users to participate in the

collective fantasy of a world beyond capitalism. Where signifiers or code appear,

they do so not in the game’s diegesis, or storyworld, but only in the game’s

Aldred and Greenspan 483

non-diegetic layer, its user interface or heads-up display (Galloway, 2008, pp. 113–115).

If utopia is achieved by eliminating signifiers of modernity from the diegetic

layer, then Bioshock is decidedly dystopian. Reminders of the perils of progress

haunt every corner of Rapture’s crumbling infrastructure, from its blood-streaked

billboards touting the latest advancements in cosmetic surgery (‘‘There’s no reason

not to be beautiful with Dr. Steinman’s Cosmetic Enhancements!’’), to the ruins of

once-grand theatres and centers of industry, to the leaky glass hallways that

constantly threaten collapse, clearly conveying the game’s underlying critique of

the technological utopian impulse that created this underwater enclave in the first

place. On the surface, at least, BioShock thus represents what has been called a ‘‘crit-

ical dystopia,’’ a historical inventory of utopian styles, plans, and technologies that

self-consciously critiques the notion of utopia itself (see Moylan & Baccolini,

2003). Rapture’s ironic-nostalgic pastiche of failed artistic and technological utopias

prompts the player to reconstruct the city’s tragic tale, an objective that, however,

holds out the utopian promise of a renewed historiographic consciousness.2

Alexander Hall (2009) has noted the importance of such historicizing strategies

for eliciting a utopian desire for change even within the seemingly dystopian future-

scapes of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). For Hall, the ARG genre ‘‘allows for

collective participation that takes place across multiple media platforms,’’ such as

cell phones, websites, films, and music recordings, thus recovering the utopian

impulse to create new social collectives within a technological sphere that has since

the Cold War been overwhelmingly coded as dystopian. Due in part to their origins

within an industrial telos of constant technological advancement, digital games in

general are particularly well suited to depicting and enacting the tension between

utopian ideals of technological or individualistic progress and dystopian conceptions

of their inevitable failure. Digital games are forged within a broader cultural logic of

convergence that possesses competing ‘‘utopian’’ and ‘‘dystopian’’ strands, strands

that reproduce the antinomies of the utopian consciousness within a decidedly

capitalist context (see Jameson, 2005, pp. 142–169). With the most recent generation

of ‘‘converged’’ consoles and their much-publicized multifunctionality as media

players, storage devices, and gaming platforms, hardware manufacturers have

adopted what Murphy et al. (2005) have termed a ‘‘utopian viewpoint’’ toward tech-

nological convergence, wherein user experience is proportionately linked to

increased functionality (p. 3). Simply put, the utopian viewpoint of convergence

holds that the greater diversity of functions a media device possesses, the more plea-

surable the experience for the user. As Barry Ip (2008) has argued, in conjunction

with this increased functionality, and typically at the behest of lucrative publishing

deals with the ‘‘big three’’ hardware manufacturers (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo),

software manufacturers have taken a similarly utopian stance toward content

convergence, wherein once distinct game genres (FPS, RPG, and RTS) and digital

media forms (cinema, games, etc.) begin to coalesce and merge (pp. 206–208).

However, this industrial utopian approach toward convergence is not necessarily

shared by media consumers. For all the industry discourse championing, the

484 Games and Culture 6(5)

technological advances of next-gen consoles and games, as well as the implied

multiplicity of consumer choices and empowerment that come with them, recent

studies have shown that users prefer to use stand-alone devices in their leisure

time—and certainly the initially disappointing sales of Sony’s PlayStation 3, con-

ceived as the ‘‘black box’’ where all home media functions would converge, seems

to suggest as much. These findings support the so-called dystopian view of conver-

gence, wherein the increased functionality of a media device negatively affects user

experience (Murphy et al., 2005). As Jenkins (2006) and others have noted, this dys-

topian user view similarly extends to newly converged content, often resulting in

what Trevor Elkington (2009) terms a ‘‘self-defeating’’ project wherein attempts

to elide boundaries between once-distinct game genres and media forms actually

results in the retrenchment of those boundaries, thus achieving a kind of ‘‘negative

synergy’’ for the franchise in question (p. 220). While certainly not unique in its

highly ‘‘converged’’ industrial origins and aesthetic goals, BioShock provides an

especially compelling case study in the competing utopian and dystopian industrial

conceptions of convergence. BioShock was created by critically lauded independent

development studio Irrational Games, who found themselves acquired and renamed

by major publisher/distributor Take 2 prior to the game’s release and ultimately

subject to a year-long timed exclusivity deal with Microsoft that confined the game’s

initial release to the Xbox 360 game console and Windows PC platforms. Launched

with the help of a $5.5 M(US) marketing budget designed to help it overcome a lack

of previous brand awareness, BioShock was also conceived as converged content

from the start—specifically, as a franchise that would hybridize the FPS and

RPG genres, and span multiple games as well as a feature-length film. And while

BioShock’s sales numbers may pale in comparison to an established franchise like

Take 2’s flagship Grand Theft Auto (having sold four million copies as of early

2010, compared with GTA IV’s estimated six million copies in its first two weeks

of release alone), Take 2 chairman Strauss Zelnick eagerly predicted that

BioShock’s sequel would double the sales of its predecessor, which it was well on

its way to doing at the time of writing, shipping three million copies in its first month

of release alone. The fledgling franchise is thus poised to become an influential force

within the games industry in the next few years, especially given the overwhel-

mingly positive critical reception of the first game.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, a digital game such as BioShock is ideally

positioned to enact the residual tensions between utopian and dystopian industrial

conceptions of convergence. Celebrated as a ‘‘masterpiece of design’’ (Barratt,

n.d.) thanks to its ‘‘wonderfully oppressive and unnerving’’ atmosphere (Vicious Sid,

2007), BioShock has also been praised as a uniquely story-driven game. A hybrid of

FPS mechanics and RPG character development, BioShock possesses a moral choice

system that grants the player the option of either helping mutant Little Sister clones,

the ubiquitous orphans of Rapture, or harvesting them for their genetic life force. The

user’s choice will ultimately lead to one of two, apparently opposite, endings. Choos-

ing to harvest the Little Sisters leads you into a downward spiral of greed and

Aldred and Greenspan 485

malevolence, in which, the voice-over tells us, you take over the underwater city

before rising to the surface in bathyspheres full of mutant splicers that kill all the

humans, somehow releasing Rapture’s secret nuclear warhead in the bargain. In the

second, supposedly life-affirming ending, you become the benevolent patriarch who

brings the Little Sisters safely to the surface, where they are guided through a montage

of compulsorily heterosexual life rituals that incrementally bind them to patriarchy

itself, until they at last join together on your avatar’s deathbed in a perverse femtopia

that misrecognizes itself as a bourgeois nuclear family. A strictly ideological reading

might argue that BioShock’s alternate but complementary endings, one utopian and

one dystopian, both seal the player within the same retrograde Cold War horizon,

replete with nukes and pinko zombies in the first scenario, or the compensatory

fantasy of the safe shelter of domesticity in the second. Both endings foreclose radi-

cally on any hope for another world entirely, while leaving no clear transition from

the Rapture of 1960 to the user’s 21st-century world.

However, we would like to suggest that it is not enough to consider simply the

representational level of BioShock and the ideological bind it presents. Without

denying that digital games often exhibit violent, racist, and sexist content, Galloway

argues that such ideologically suspect representations might ultimately distract from

the real cultural work of games. After all, gameplay involves constantly resetting the

sliders on such values. For example, the outcome of games such as Fallout 3 and

Mass Effect can be drastically altered by how we customize our avatar’s appearance,

behavior, and moral choices throughout the course of gameplay, often through a

range of inventory-based choices that are clearly non-diegetic. For Galloway, with

this malleability of gamic representational strategies in mind, reading the specific

ideological content of any given game is less crucial than attending to the way that

game allegorizes the processes of digital control. Whereas films rarely show ‘‘the

boring minutiae of discipline and confinement that constitute the various appara-

tuses of control in contemporary societies,’’ digital games, by contrast, ‘‘don’t

attempt to hide informatic control; they flaunt it. . . . making it coterminous with the

entire game’’ (Galloway, 2006, pp. 89–92; italics in original), and rendering moot a

traditional hermeneutics of suspicion. In short, digital games allegorize the algo-

rithms, or ‘‘control protocols,’’ of digital technology, the source of political power

in information societies. Through gameplay, ‘‘the gamer is . . . learning, internaliz-

ing, and becoming intimate with a massive, multipart, global algorithm. To play

the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system’’

(Galloway, 2006, pp. 90–91). If Galloway is right, and to interpret a game means

interpreting its algorithm, then understanding BioShock and dystopian games

generally means going beyond a strictly representational analysis to instead observe

the particular control protocols that govern gameplay.

While Galloway offers a compelling framework for interpreting games like

BioShock, he ultimately backs away from addressing the specificity of the economic

and industrial contexts in which informatic artifacts are created, as well as the

audiences and operators that these contexts produce. As one of the highest profile

486 Games and Culture 6(5)

and most acclaimed games released for the latest generation of gaming consoles,

subject to a year-long platform exclusivity deal for Microsoft Xbox 360 and

Windows PC platforms, and conceived of as a cross-media franchise featuring

multiple games and films, BioShock’s broader conditions of production and con-

sumption make it ideally situated to operationalize and allegorize the processes of

digital control inherent to cultural convergence, as well as the utopian and dystopian

impulses within convergence theory.

Talismans of Progress? Media Object Inventoriesand Gamic Action

A procedural reading of Bioshock necessitates looking beyond both the derivative

feel and the dystopian appearance of gamespace to further consider the user’s role

within that space. Such an approach reveals that BioShock’s gameplay demands a

procedural media consumption that recuperates the utopian logic of convergence

apparently undermined by Rapture’s ironic-nostalgic inventory of utopian themes.

Gameplay in BioShock ostensibly consists of winning space by killing splicers and

lumbering ‘‘Big Daddies’’ while navigating the leaky tunnels and ruined businesses,

dance halls, surgeries, and bars of Rapture’s grotesquely hedonistic cityscape. As in

many FPS games, the player must gather and manage assorted armories of weapons,

plasmids, and first-aid kits placed or hidden throughout the gamespace in order to

stay alive. However, BioShock differs notably from many games of its genre in that

it also relies upon the user to locate, collect, and consume various media objects

needed to navigate the game and understand its objectives. The forking narrative

path that leads to a false choice of endings (splicers or Sisters) is finally less impor-

tant than the other, lost voices that whisper throughout the game, the echoes of

Rapture’s dead or zombified inhabitants—doctors, holocaust survivors, corrupt

politicians, and union shop captains, all preserved on reel-to-reel dictaphones,

Super-8 footage, and other dead media strewn about the city. These analog technol-

ogies survive only as fragments, having failed to effect a total transformation of

1940s society.

Ewan Kirkland (2009) suggests that the remediation and appropriation of ‘‘tradi-

tional’’ analog media and media storage technologies within survival horror games

lends these games a physicality and immediacy that would be otherwise lacking

within their seamless digital spaces, thanks to the privileged link posited between

analog media and their ability to ‘‘record’’ reality. At the same time, he contends,

the oft-fetishized flaws and failures of these media—the visible grain of aging film

stock, for example, or the whine of an aging tape recording—can also suggest an

unsettling connection to the ghostly or supernatural (pp. 122–123). While such stra-

tegies are certainly at play within BioShock’s mobilization of antiquated analog

media to provide the back story of Rapture, the diegetic primacy of these objects and

their crucial role in how the game allegorizes convergence protocols merit closer

examination. After all, the goal of gameplay within BioShock is to discover the

Aldred and Greenspan 487

mystery of Rapture—how it came to be and how it came to fail so perfectly—by

collecting these assorted media objects. To play the game, then, is not just to win

‘‘contested spaces’’ (Jenkins & Squire, 2003) and advance the plot, but also to alle-

gorically negotiate the access protocols to this spatially dispersed database of dead

media forms.

If, as Galloway suggests, the formal grammar of digital games can and should be

examined for how it repurposes broader regulatory structures in the information age,

BioShock’s procedural insistence upon the consumption of older media must be

examined more closely for how it allegorizes convergence. BioShock allows the user

to explore the logic of media convergence procedurally, revealing its inherent

tensions as both industrial practice and cultural discourse. While the appearance

of retrograde technological objects seems to critique utopian notions of progress

as surely as the outmoded steamvalves and vacuum tubes of Rapture, collecting

these objects in fact reinforces the game industry’s utopian view of technological

and content convergence. BioShock’s gameplay allegorizes the processes of digital

control inherent to convergence, wherein users must purchase converged devices

despite their planned obsolescence, consume converged content in the order and

fashion desired by media producers, and accept that the choices and agency they are

given are illusory at best. The ostensible goals of the missions, as well as our initial

understanding of Rapture’s past glory and present decrepitude, are provided by the

mysterious guide Atlas, whose helpful instructions we hear over a shortwave radio

we are forced to pick up upon entry into the city. At once working machine and work

of art, put on display for contemplation at the same time as it provides us with

necessary information, the radio cues the game’s general ambivalence toward tech-

nology as both functionally utopian and nostalgically counter-utopian. From the first

weapon we collect, we must follow Atlas’s ‘‘up to the minute’’ instructions, which

are visually cued by the appearance of his cameo sliding into an antique brass radio

icon in one corner of the screen, and acoustically signaled by the media-specific hiss

and crackle of a live radio broadcast.

Significantly, our avatar does not control this real-time ‘‘live’’ media consump-

tion but can only wait for Atlas’ transmissions without ever being given the oppor-

tunity for two-way communication. We are also bombarded with other forms of push

media that accentuate our sense of powerlessness: we trigger propaganda films

featuring Ryan’s grandfatherly assurances while wandering through confined spaces

in which interaction is limited, and at every turn confront print and radio advertise-

ments for assorted personal and technological enhancements. Ad slogans like

‘‘Don’t Wait – Incinerate!’’ and ‘‘Evolve Today!’’ exhibit the sort of ironic self-

awareness that exposes not only ‘‘the dysfunction of advertisement’’ (Bogost,

2007, p. 168) but also the questionable nature of the ideology of progress itself.

Along with this passive mode of media consumption, the game also encourages

us to actively collect and consume prerecorded, ‘‘archived’’ audio diaries stashed

throughout the various levels of the gamespace, fragments of historical lore that fill

in background information about the key nonplayer characters, and provide us with

488 Games and Culture 6(5)

further insight into the inner workings of Rapture before its fall. We hear, for

example, Dr. Tenenbaum describing her childhood in a Nazi concentration camp,

an experience that contextualizes her role as pioneer of Rapture’s failed genetic

experiments; likewise, we listen to the complaints of one Peach Wilkins that Frank

Fontaine, Ryan’s competitor for the control of Rapture and the game’s true villain,

failed to maintain the city’s crumbling infrastructure despite multiple warnings.

The collection and consumption of media objects in Rapture occupies an uneasy,

interstitial space between the polarities that Galloway mobilizes to demonstrate the

allegorical potential of digital game algorithms. He distinguishes between machine

acts, which originate from the game system (such as the rendering of the game’s

digital world and inopportune system crashes) and operator acts, which originate

from the user. Galloway further differentiates diegetic acts that occur within

the space and storyworld of the game from non-diegetic acts that occur from a

vantage point ‘‘above’’ or outside the gamespace. Jack’s guided movements and

actions within Rapture—killing splicers with his trusty wrench, for example—would

be considered diegetic operator acts. Pausing the game to toggle through your

inventory of weapons or plasmids, on the other hand, is a non-diegetic operator act

that occurs outside of the space and time of the game proper, temporarily suspending

the progress of the story. The receipt and use of power-ups, goals, information, and

health all constitute enabling acts, a special variety of non-diegetic machine acts that

enrich operators’ gameplay (Galloway, 2006, pp. 12–38). While these enabling acts

are crucial to most games, they typically coexist uneasily with the game’s storyworld

and must strain to cover up their non-diegetic status—for instance, by disguising

power-ups as first-aid kits. BioShock, by contrast, renders these enabling acts nearly

seamless by integrating the collection of media objects into the storyworld, valoriz-

ing information that would typically be construed as tangential, and treating it

instead as every bit as crucial to our progress as a shiny new gun, power or plasmid.

The act of gathering and playing these recordings becomes an integral part of the

game story and experience, being thereby transformed from a non-diegetic into a

diegetic act. For Galloway, diegetic operator acts, which he aligns with desire and

utopia, tend to ‘‘immerse’’ the operator too seamlessly in the game to allow for crit-

ical reflection. Conversely, non-diegetic operator acts (which include consulting

inventories and menus, as well as game cheats, hacks, mods, and add-ons) are where

the gamic potential for true reflection, critique, and political intervention lie. In

performing such non-diegetic acts, the operator does not ‘‘submit’’ to the logic of

either the story or the machine but rather hovers above the game and its codes of

informatic control, enacting the game’s algorithm rather than merely experiencing

it from within. BioShock confounds this scheme, however, since its media consump-

tion choices function at the diegetic rather than the non-diegetic level. Although the

automated appearance of the tape recorder and the machinic control of its playback

constitute enabling acts outside of the storyworld proper, media objects are collected

and ostensibly consumed by the user within the diegesis thus remaining in an inde-

terminate space somewhere between machine and user agency. To play through

Aldred and Greenspan 489

BioShock, then, is to enact inventorial algorithms for gathering obsolete media in

one place, procedures which in turn allegorize the protocols of contemporary media

convergence. By constructing the story of Rapture through an apparently active,

creative—and above all, exhaustive—transmedia consumption of text, photos, films,

and audio recordings, the operator seems to enact a utopian vision of the

convergence-era media consumer.

At the same time, the procedural confusion surrounding agency and free will,

enacted through gameplay and echoed at the level of story, could be said to repur-

pose those convergence mechanisms of the game market that are engineered to

provide the illusion of vast consumer choice. By putting diegetic primacy on the

construction of media inventories, using them to pull the operator into the narrative

of Rapture’s rise and fall, BioShock attempts to steer its operator away from enact-

ment and toward experience, away from critical ‘‘allegorithm’’ and toward uncritical

imbrication within a convergence informatic. Significantly, the conventional

machine act through which the game system itself inventories the objects gathered

by the user is completely absent as far as these recordings are concerned: they cannot

be saved in any kind of inventory or archive but rather must be consumed right at the

moment of collection, often against the backdrop of frenetic gameplay, their

contents frequently misheard or drowned out by the noise of battle. Though initially

recorded for posterity by Rapture’s NPC inhabitants, these diaries take on the imme-

diacy of a live transmission, becoming conflated with other live broadcasts that you

cannot but choose to consume (Atlas’ shortwave radio instructions, as well as some

of Tenenbaum’s guidance regarding the Little Sisters). This pervasive blurring of the

boundaries between machinic and operator agency inherent in your consumption of

in-game media objects culminates in a climactic confrontation with Andrew Ryan,

which further subverts any hope you may have had for the true enactment of user

agency within gamespace. Ryan informs you that you have been brainwashed and

have merely served as a puppet for Atlas’ radioed instructions (your obedience

triggered by the phrase that gives the illusion of consent—‘‘Would you kindly?’’).

This revelation renders any of the ‘‘choices’’ you thought you had made through the

course of gameplay (including your seemingly ‘‘elective’’ consumption of various

media objects) purely illusory, and the game ultimately mocks your helplessness

at both a procedural and a narrative level. As Ryan admonishes you that ‘‘a man

chooses, a slave obeys’’ and orders your avatar to kill him, the game forces you

to obey, temporarily wresting control of your avatar so that you must look on, help-

lessly, as you beat Ryan to death with a golf club. Even this climactic cut scene, typi-

cally a quintessentially machinic act, is given an unusually strong diegetic

motivation, cleverly focusing the dystopian themes of user agency and free will, and

bringing home the point that, within both BioShock’s narrative and its procedural

allegorization of converged control, we are ultimately slaves.

This sense of disempowerment is reflected in a closer examination of the game’s

reception. Tellingly, as some users have complained, the very spaces in which these

various in-game media objects are stashed cannot be returned to, making it that

490 Games and Culture 6(5)

much more difficult to collect all 122 recordings necessary to achieve the

distinguished rank of city Historian.3 While representationally these objects seem

to be strewn about the game space, procedurally, they are ordered and linear, encoura-

ging the exhaustive consumption and orderly construction of a highly structured and

cinematic narrative. For the active online community of gamers, this aspect of the

game has proved unduly constraining, as it demands slavish completion instead of the

creativity of world-expanding play. Even game reviewers conceded that the very

experience and understanding of gameplay relies heavily upon an exhaustive

consumption of BioShock’s various media objects, which, according to one, ‘‘should

be considered mandatory if you intend to play the game’’ (Gamespot).

Moreover, this constraint on gameplay is paralleled at the level of metagaming,

where the dispersal of BioShock’s intellectual property is carefully controlled

through officially sanctioned media channels. For all the in-game tension between

live and recorded media, players are in fact always situated within an informatic that

denies liveness and connectivity, BioShock having been intentionally designed as a

single-player game that does not take advantage of either Xbox Live or PC multi-

player capabilities. Furthermore, any operators who wish to engage in those non-

diegetic acts that Galloway aligns with truly critical, allegorithmic enactment (such

as mods, cheats, hacks, or add-ons) are denied ready access to such means of experi-

menting with the world of Rapture. Despite the openness of its Unreal 3.0 engine to

such additions, the rumored release of a BioShock SDK proved false. Ultimately, for

users to access more BioShock content, they must consume more iterations of the

text, either by buying the PS3 version (and, thus, another console), or by purchasing

its sequels, and eventually, moving across media platforms to consume the Bioshock

film, originally slated for release alongside BioShock 2, but currently mired in

production delays due to anticipated cost overruns and the departure of attached

director Gore Verbinski. The only capacity in which Take 2 afforded players with

some degree of creative intervention and ‘‘choice’’ was to solicit players’ votes for

what additional items they wanted included in BioShock’s Limited Edition (to be

chosen from a range of options preapproved by the game publisher), as well as

requesting player-submitted cover art to adorn the completed set. In this sense,

BioShock’s extratextual narrative almost eerily shadows the control allegory of con-

vergence experienced through gameplay, wherein the player/consumer can only be

rewarded for one type of action: the truly exhaustive and carefully ordered consump-

tion of producer-sanctioned media objects. After all, the only way players can have

access to their ‘‘creation’’ is by purchasing the $70US bundle that contains their

chosen items, including the BioShock game, a Big Daddy figurine, a ‘‘Making of ’’

DVD, and a soundtrack CD.

Perhaps not surprisingly, avid fans have channeled their desire for more open-

ended exploration of and play within the BioShock universe into nonsanctioned

forms of user creativity. Such efforts include Keiko Takamura’s music video, ‘‘Same

Sad Tune,’’4 in which Takamura (a renowned pop star in Second Life) takes up the

voice of our avatar, Jack, using the kind of pop stylings usually reserved for songs

Aldred and Greenspan 491

about heartbreak and rejection to bemoan Jack’s dependence on Atlas as an

untrustworthy guide. (The video itself blends live-action footage of Takamura

singing with gameplay footage and expansions of different gameplay scenarios she

created in Second Life.) While consumers could initially only access the trailer for

BioShock 2 by purchasing and playing through the PS3 version of the original game,

there has also been a huge proliferation of user-generated trailers for both the game

sequel and the film, many of which are so convincing they have created uncertainty

as to which trailers are ‘‘authentic’’ and which are fan-made.5 As Nick Dyer-

Witherford and Greg de Peuter (2009) point out in their conclusion to Games of Empire,

the game industry can never fully contain or co-opt the excessive labors of its fanbase,

since the success of its franchises depends upon precisely such trangressive play:

‘‘Rather than simply swallowing the utopian potential of digital play’s possible worlds,

commercial game culture might also simultaneously be incubating a culture of system-

simulating, self-organized, cooperatively producing hacker-players capable of looking

to a future beyond the edge of the global market’’ (p. 229).

Take 2 also actively sought to curtail the type of non-diegetic user appropriation

Galloway aligns with true, allegorithmic critique through restrictive digital rights

management policies implemented on the PC version of BioShock, which frustrated

users in part by enforcing a limited number of the times the game could be installed

on a given machine. As a result, any players who wished to upgrade their systems

regularly typically ran out of their allotted number of installs. Ironically, such repeat

installations were often necessitated by the frequent glitches caused by the game’s

exceedingly demanding graphical and processing requirements for their gaming

machines, as well as the inherent instability of Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating

system on which players were forced to run it.6 Simply put, gamers who wanted to

play BioShock on their truly multifunctional, ‘‘converged’’ gaming devices—their

computers—were ultimately punished, so much so that, in the months following the

game’s release, there was a widespread debate within the broader gaming commu-

nity over whether console-friendly, PC-hostile hit games like BioShock signaled the

demise of PC gaming.7 Given that dedicated gaming consoles generally boast

shorter hardware lifecycles than PCs, and that they are marketed as commercial

‘‘loss leaders’’ that must be compensated for by strong sales of game titles, this argu-

ment is far less conspiratorial than it sounds. (It is worth noting, for example, that

conservative estimates place BioShock’s sales for Xbox as more than 10 times

greater than its PC sales.)

Ultimately, BioShock’s playing through of convergence strategies does not

enable the kind of utopian, collective participation across media platforms that Hall

identifies in ARGs like Year Zero, but rather allegorizes convergence protocols that

are decidedly dystopian. For all the transmedia creativity and freedom that BioShock

seems to afford its users, the game ultimately offers only an illusion of choice.

BioShock media (both in-game and outside of it) can only be consumed one

way—exhaustively, in single-player format, on a limited range of platforms, with

limited opportunity for expansion or intervention, like Rapture sealed in its

492 Games and Culture 6(5)

underwater dome. While this study has focused primarily on BioShock as a crucial

case study in how digital games can allegorize a highly constraining vision of

convergence, we present it not as an exceptional case but rather as exemplary of one

dominant strand of broader industry practice, which seeks to swallow the utopian

potential of digital play, in Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter’s terms, rather than

embracing and even cultivating its enervating potential. Even the recent game title

most lauded for courting collective, seemingly utopian participation, Little Big

Planet, with its openness for/encouragement of user-created levels, machinima, and

mods, remains subject to a restrictive exclusivity deal with Sony more than 2 years

after its release. Whether Take 2’s departure from their platform-exclusive arrange-

ment with Microsoft in favor of a cross-platform release of BioShock 2, as well as

their inclusion of a multiplayer mode with the sequel, will truly liberate players from

the restrictive convergence informatic of the original game or simply provide a

slightly more varied scenario for exhaustive consumption remains to be seen.

Thus, despite attempts by scholars, fans, and game designers alike to elide the

significance of media hardware while elevating software and the active user’s pro-

ductive and creative engagement with it, digital games such as BioShock demon-

strate that, in the age of intellectual property, the black box still matters. It

underscores the crucial need to acknowledge the limitations of proprietary delivery

systems and the concentrated oligopolies that own them and play on the media

experiences of contemporary users. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s influential theory

that a genuine utopia is unimaginable under the conditions of capitalism, Galloway

notes that, try as it might to banish the signifiers of modern commerce from the

diegesis, a gameworld ultimately can exist only by virtue of an inscription of ‘‘algo-

rithmic coding into the plane of imagination that thereby undoes the play of utopia in

the first place;’’ games, then, never represent utopia proper, but ‘‘the very impossi-

bility of imagining utopia’’ (Galloway, 2008, p. 120). Likewise, if BioShock’s dys-

topian vision of technological failure presents any residual utopian impulse for

change, it does so through a control allegory of the procedures, protocols, and con-

strained freedoms given to gamers in a converged media environment in which three

major producers increasingly control all our hardware and software consumption

choices.

Notes1. BioShock was, in fact, openly referred to by its developers at Irrational as a ‘‘spiritual

successor’’ to System Shock II, which was created by the once-independent developer

prior to its acquisition by Take 2 Interactive in the lead up to BioShock’s release.

2. To this extent, BioShock could be said to exemplify what Varsam (2003) refers to as a

‘‘concrete dystopia,’’ a form of narrative that ‘‘brings together the past and present, creat-

ing thus a continuum in time whereby historical reality is dystopian, possibly punctuated

by utopian ruptures in the form of literature, art, and other cultural manifestations. . . .

Where concrete utopia envisions freedom from violence, inequality, and domination,

Aldred and Greenspan 493

concrete dystopia expresses coercion (physical and psychological), fear, despair, and

alienation’’ (208–209).

3. Gamers who dedicated themselves to locating all of the game’s media objects usually

became frustrated when they fell a few objects short despite their best efforts to consume

exhaustively; typical was the response of one poster on the Gamespot Xbox 360 forum,

who conceded that ‘‘(t)he Historian achievement was a pain. Definitely the biggest hassle

I’ve had for a BioShock achievement’’ (Generic_Dude, 2007).

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼1spR5hHUDW4

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼J9iNfIwEro8

6. To add insult to injury, although the game itself lacked multiplayer capabilities, its activa-

tion required users to go online, a procedure bemoaned by many as inconvenient and

unnecessary.

7. See, for example, Bob Mandel, ‘‘BioShock and the Demise of PC Gaming’’ (2007,

September 17). http://www.avault.com/features/bioshock-and-the-demise-of-pc-gaming

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the

authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,

authorship, and/or publication of this article: Financial support from the Social

Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for writing this article.

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Bios

Jessica Aldred is a PhD candidate in Cultural Mediations and an instructor in the Department

of Film Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is also a researcher with the Hypertext

and Hypermedia Lab. Her research interests include video game avatars and digital human

characters across media, as well as the growing intersections between cinema and videogames

in the age of media convergence.

Brian Greenspan is an associate professor in the Department of English and the doctoral

program in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University in Ottawa. He is the designer and

founding director of the Hypertext and Hypermedia Lab and codesigner of the first ‘‘live’’ and

‘‘locative’’ hypernarrative systems. His research interests include utopian theory, digital

cultures, and the intersections between them.

496 Games and Culture 6(5)