• • BioShock Infinite’s Lead Creator on History, Video Game Violence 
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BioShock  | We were talking about the origins of the first <em>BioShock</em> and [Ken] Levine’s commitment to having Irrational make games about things they think are interesting, even if that sends them down the path of making a game about a failed Objectivist utopia. “We just follow the things we’re interested in.”  

• All My Life I’ve Been Told I Was Special. It Was A Lie. 
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Atlas Shrugged  | What I found [on a public Ultima Online server] could be best described as a mixture of Atlas Shrugged and Mad Max in Medieval England. It was terrifying and awful.  

• Racist Morons Have Serious Issues With BioShock Infinite 
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BioShock  | The BioShock games have always had a weightier tone to them than just shooting things in the face. The first game was lightly basted in an Ayn Rand marinade, while the upcoming BioShock Infinite deals with some tricky issues like racism.  

• • Crossover: Ken Levine Talks About Why There Aren’t Any Bioshock Graphic Novels 
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BioShock  | Kotaku: Which comics did you have in the back of your mind while you were creating Columbia and Rapture? Levine: You know, it’s funny, I based Andrew Ryan on [Objectivist writer] Ayn Rand and when I was doing the research on her, I found out that she sounded a lot like Dr. Doom! There was that imperious, declarative sound to her voice that would brook no interference, just like in classic Stan Lee-written style. That was weird.  

• • How BioShock Infinite is Influenced by Occupy Wall Street 
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BioShock  | [Ken] Levine understands the charged atmosphere; he made BioShock after all, which became either a pamphlet for Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism or a stark condemnation of it, depending on whom you talked to.  

• PayPal Billionaire Continues Work Towards Making Bioshock’s Rapture a Reality 
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BioShock  | The Daily Mail reports that Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, is continuing his work towards making a Rapture-esque "Start-Up Country" off the coast of San Francisco. [....] Of course, this sounds eerily familiar to any who have played Bioshock or its sequels—in those games, billionaire industrialist Andrew Ryan followed similar dreams to the bottom of the ocean, creating the Ayn Rand-inspired objectivist utopia Rapture.  

• Video Games Are Ruled Protected Speech, Now What? 
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BioShock  | When the people who don’t play, think of video games it’s more likely they’ll think of the never-ending gunfights of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, endless Madden games and colorful worlds of Super Mario than BioShock’s exploration of Objectivism.  

• The Big Games, Big Gadgets, Big Surprises Of E3 
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BioShock  |Syndicated  | [Ken Levine’s] last big game married a dystopian world with commentary on Ayn Rand Objectivism to deliver a title filled with fun gameplay and shocking moments.  

• ‘It would be dishonest to say this is not BioShock.’ 
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For the first two BioShocks [the] location was Rapture [—] a failed underwater city built with Objectivist principles and infused with a 1950s Art Deco design.  

• BioShock 2 multiplayer lobby preview: Yes, the lobby 
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[Danny] Wilkins' first [monologue] was all about how he told a young football player that the way to be as great a player as he was is to recognize that, the way Danny Wilkins spells it, there is an I in team. It's no wonder this guy made it to the Objectivist, individualist paradise-to-be of Rapture.  

• BioShock 2 preview: Maybe it was needed after all 
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[BioShock] was a novel dive into a failed Objectivist utopia called Rapture. It was a philosophical exploration of free will played as a first-person shooter designed to accommodate a player's tactical ingenuity.  

• BioShock 2 will explore other philosophies, more moral choices 
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Most of the pleasure I found in playing Bioshock came from the story and the development team's deft use of Ayn Rand's objectivism in the game.  

• Going off the deep end: Has gaming grown up? 
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The trumped up moral dilemma of Bioshock and the ensuing months (and months and months) of discussion, added to excitement over Ayn Rand and Objectivism, was - in the end - overblown, and we quietly put it to bed.  

• • • No gods or kings: Objectivism in BioShock 
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Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Yaron Brook  | BioShock may have been conceived as a study in nuance, a place for gamers to discover and explore at their own pace, but its dip into the ethical morass of Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophies has brought her beliefs back into the mainstream spotlight and even piqued the interest of the Ayn Rand Institute's president, Yaron Brook. Brook, a former member of the Israeli Army military intelligence and award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University, first took notice of the game when he discovered his 18-year-old son playing it. It's a fact that didn't bother Brook despite his son's objectivist beliefs and the game's not so positive take on the philosophy.  

• • Bioshock hang-over 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  | [The game] really nails what it's going for with the lighting and the sounds and the, I don't know, the aesthetic I guess, of the game. What astounds me even more is how well the game seems to capture, both in tone and gameplay, Objectivism. I was highly, very highly skeptical when I heard the Irrational folks mouthing off about Ayn Rand. I knew, I was convinced, that the game would at most touch on some of the sentimentality of her books, perhaps a nod to Atlas Shrugged or Fountainhead. And that was at most, really what I expected was a bunch of 50s era architecture and some mild visual references to Atlas Shrugged. Boy was I wrong. I humbly apologize. I was so convinced that this game wasn't going to capture Rand's subtly complex philosophy that I boasted to editors of several mags I write for how much i was going to enjoy tearing apart Irrational's distant promise of Randian goodness.