• • Why BioShock Infinite ‘s Creator Won’t Settle for Success 
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BioShock  |Capitalism  | BioShock teemed with monsters out of Jules Verne’s nightmares. Giant creatures called Big Daddies lumbered around in archaic diving suits with spherical helmets, emitting unintelligible whalelike moans and skewering players with enormous drills while their doll-like child companions, the Little Sisters, harvested genetic material from the corpses. The player, using cryptic audio recordings and graffiti, could gradually piece together Rapture’s history: a catastrophically failed experiment in libertarianism built by an Ayn Rand-like character. At its core, BioShock functioned as an unmistakable critique of Objectivism, Rand’s laissez-faire philosophy. As such, it was the first political manifesto that allowed you to kill people with swarms of bees emitted from your genetically modified hands.      View blog reactions

• • BioShock 2 
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Atlas Shrugged  | I got called out for pretentious writing by Private Eye's "Pseuds Corner" the last time I wrote about BioShock and Ayn Rand. But trust me—the game is an overt critique of objectivism!      View blog reactions

• The Gaming Club 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Discussion of video games.
BioShock is not perfect. But the fact that it is a game about the illusion of choice in video games—wrapped around a larger and less provocative rebuttal of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and her philosophy of objectivism—is why I think critics [...] are missing the point when they complain that it doesn't matter in the long run whether you kill the Little Sisters or save them. Who cares? The whole point of the game is that you have no choice, so why fixate on the meaninglessness of a particular false choice?      View blog reactions