In these hard economic times, it's nice to sometimes look around and see just how much worse things could be. Then again, if you're at all human, looking at other people's misery probably just makes you even more depressed. That's why I prefer to get my schadenfreude from the virtual world – all of the gloating and none of the guilt. And when it comes to visions of extreme capitalism run amok, there's no better game out there than last year's Game of the Year, Bioshock.
Bioshock is a superb first person shooter set in 1960, but not a part of any 1960 you'll recognize (although it might seem familiar to some of you Objectivists out there). The game begins with a plane crash that leads you to a vast, underwater, art-deco metropolis known as Rapture. Created by Andrew Ryan as a libertarian paradise, this vision of Utopia clearly takes its inspiration from Ayn Rand's nasty, bloated behemoth of a novel, Atlas Shrugged. And just as you might imagine would happen in a world where capitalism operates without restraint, the housing bubble bursts, the markets crash, the leader for the past 8 years goes power mad and starts imprisoning citizens without trials, and people start injecting themselves with sea-slug extract filtered through genetically modified little girls so they can shoot bees from their hands and blast each other with lightning bolts.
Under the caring tutelage of rebel leader Atlas, players journey through Rapture, discovering one horror after the next, piecing together both the story of how Rapture fell apart and learning a thing or two about life along the way (like how shooting bees from your hands is AWESOME). This is, in all honesty, as good a game as there has ever been. It offers a storytelling experience that literally only a video game can. Plus, it's well over a year old, so you can totally pick up a copy on the cheap. Then a good 12 to 16 hours of pure, unencumbered “well, at least I'm not in an underwater city when I'm getting evicted” pleasure is there to help ease the pain. Now would you kindly play some Bioshock?
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This article appears in Jan 14-20, 2009.