Connection: Post-Modernism/Modernism and Bioshock

During our class's discussion, outlining the differences between modernism and postmodernism, I kept referring all the new concepts in terms of 'Bioshock' a video game designed for the xbox360 console. I have been playing this game recently on account of a recommendation by my friend for its artistic value.

The general premise of this first person shooter, macabre style game is as follows: You are a man who has just survived a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic. It is set in the 1960s. In the water, you stumble upon a strange construction, in which, a bathysphere takes you down to a submerged city, built by 'Andrew Ryan' to escape the confines of 'big society and its phony ethics, where great men can be great'. Upon your arrival, you are contacted via portable radio by a man called 'Atlas' who guides you throughout the city, Rapture, filled with its crazed, and very violent inhabitants. The opening sequence is provided with the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNtHY8Igf0

In most respects, Bioshock is presented in a very modernist way. Each new 'experience' or completed mission, reveals something about yourself as a character, or what had happened to the city, and characters (like Andrew Ryan), who have left obvious visible marks, have contributed to the demise of Rapture. So is the concept of memory. Periodically throughout the game, random sepia images, of maybe a house, or what can be assumed maybe a family, are shown, as flashbacks. Later on in the game, after being betrayed by Atlas, you discover none of those memories are real, they are a product of mental conditioning, and that you are playing as something sort of a biological experiment, created in a lab. If according to Proust a life of memory is the only chance for a life of meaning, then the life of this character no longer has any. This happens to be ironic, as you are trying to find meaning, the motivation for playing the game, which is the proper response to the human condition in modernism.

However, there is also a post-modern aspect to Bioshock. Very frequently, haphazardly as everything else in the ruined city, you can find tape recordings by various major, and minor, characters in the game among the corpses and empty shell casings. These recordings, from multiple points of view help provide the pieces of a seemingly unsolvable puzzle, which help create an understanding of the situation. At the same time, in this itself, is mediation experience. All the the things said in tape recordings were said by people years ago, people who might not even be alive at the moment. Even Atlas, who initially guides you, does not speak to you face to face. And all this 'experience' is then mediated by the television screen the player is looking at. There is as a sense of irony, for when you discover that you were mentally conditioned to comply with Atlas's requests when he utters the phrase 'would you kindly', you never did have a choice. As long as you are playing the game, it is programmed in a way that in essence, all your long term goals are governed by somebodies directions.

I am still in the process of playing this game, so I still do not know how most of the story fits in place. I am very excited, however, to find out.