Gameplay Journal #7
A great example of political representation in games is the BioShock series. BioShock begins with the player surviving a plane crash and swimming to nearby land. Once you enter the building, you are immediately greeted by the propaganda of the antagonist, Andrew Ryan, which states, “No Gods or Kings. Only Man.” This supports his agnostic mindset, as also revealed through cutscenes and quotes. Scattered around the environment of the game are advertisements for the Plasmid Rapture market(seen below), which is unregulated, as the utopia of Rapture has a laissez-faire capitalist system. This was due to aggravation with the communist society before it. The game reveals the negative consequences of this deregulation, for example, the discouraging side effects of Plasmid. The free market economy ended in collapse when people became addicted to this medication.
The most critical thing to note from this week’s reading about value-based design is that “values are always ‘at play’ in games whether designers intend them to be or not.” (Belman and Flanagan) Bioshock was made to express and challenge certain political views, but sometimes when cultivating a game there are unintended consequences due to different perspectives. Conflict is a large part of the storyline of the game, but restricting this to violence, as games often do, can marginalize the scope of the game’s political commentary. BioShock does a great job of balancing these two things, as a FPS game. Although violence is a heavily involved mechanic for the sake of gameplay, BioShock does not present this as one of the main values present in the storyline and narrative.
Works Cited
Belman, Jonathan, and Mary Flanagan. “Exploring the Creative Potential of Values Conscious Game Design: Students’ Experiences with the VAP Curriculum.” Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture, vol. 4, no. 1, 26 Apr. 2010, pp. 57–67, www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol4no1-5/156. Accessed 2 Mar. 2021.
