Like everyone else who plays video games, I picked up a copy of Bioshock when it came out – this game has been pretty popular, and for good reason because it’s amazing – it’s a first-person shooter with crazy graphics, good gameplay, yadda yadda yadda (and if you get the PC version, you had better have a PC that kicks ass because otherwise you’re gonna be in the hurt locker)

The part of the game that is really interesting though, is the story – while it’s shamelessly ripped from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, they take the themes of objectivism and morality and combine it with a spot-on dark, brooding Steampunk aesthetic. It reminds me of how Quentin Tarantino directs – while almost all of his ideas are rip-offs of other movies, the seamless way that he combines all of these different pieces into a meaningful experience is the beauty of the movie. They both seem to be able to take a genre or a style and extract the underlying emotion and why people find it motivating, and combine it in a new and cool way.

Anyways, it’s cool to see the authors take their exploration further than the typical morality of “good guy / bad guy” and see the effects of taking a philosophy to its eventual end-result.