Bioshock

In science fiction, there is a special type of genre that primarily seeks to manipulate and mislead the person experiencing the story. These tales, whatever their medium, subtly influence their target to begin thinking about the world depicted in a way that may not be entirely accurate. Of course, stories like these can never be advertised as such; few things take away from a story more than knowing a plot twist is coming and trying to identify it. Books and movies have been working on manipulating their readers and viewers in this way for a long time, but incredibly recently, video games have risen as the primary force of this narrative movement. The full immersion, many argue, allows the player to become one with the world of the game; the …show more content…
Columbia is infused with a sense of extreme American Exceptionalism and, like Rapture, is to appear like a paradise. But where Rapture’s philosophical system created social inequality, something I’ll address in detail in my paper, Columbia deals with racial and genetic hierarchy. The city is run by the political and religious leader Father Comstock, who basically claims that Columbia is paradise for the living. His philosophy of earthly heaven, however, only includes the white non-Irish population of Columbia. Mainly people of colour (and the Irish, whose biological markers are less physically obvious) are discriminated against in Columbia, and this creates a kind of cognitive dissonance for the main character. In Mafe’s paper on the idea of race in the game, she addresses the main character’s role as a white man in the city of Columbia; or, rather, a mixed race person with the appearances of a white man. Booker DeWitt, the playable character, is a man whose history is revealed as the game progresses and events like the Wounded Knee Massacre are mentioned. DeWitt is partially Indian-American, and past comments about his ethnicity drove him to be brutally cold-blooded during the massacre, destroying those of his ethnicity because they had the phenotypical biological markers he did not. Mafe points out that even though vigors—drugs …show more content…
My research shifted greatly from focusing only on the transgenesis of Rapture to the interest of morality and exploitation seen in these games. As I progress with my paper, I hope to form a more conclusive argument, but right now mine is this: these games, allowed only by their medium, depict scenarios that manipulate the player in a certain way, highlighting the control those with power in these worlds have over genetic perception. Drawing from all of these sources, I believe that this series scorns the exploitation of naiveté and of innocence found throughout both the history and the planned future of genetic