Bioshock part 2 - Free Will

Ah, free will.

This is at the core of the entire Bioshock ethos.  From beginning to end, from start to finish, free will is woven so desperately into the fabric of the game as for it to be pretty much the central theme of the game.  Now, there will be massive spoilers this time, so if you don't want to have the game spoiled for you, then please stop reading now, play Bioshock, and then get back to me.

Good, moving on.

When the game opens, in the airplane, though you don't know it yet, your free will is already shot.  The box that you hold on your lap has a small note affixed to it that you would almost miss if you weren't paying close attention.  In fact, most of us DID miss it the first time.  Such a small detail.  

Would you kindly.  Those three little words at the centre of so much.  You see, this game, Bioshock, calls into question exactly what it means to follow a linear video game story.  After playing it, you probably had a brief moment when you relived old video games, and asked yourself 'huh.  Why DID I jump on all those turtles in Mario?  Why DID I shoot all those aliens in Duke Nukem?'  These are good questions, and Bioshock opens them all up.  For you see, you, as a player, had no idea that your hand was being forced for the entire game. There was someone off camera giving you suggestions that you had no control over.  The phrase 'would you kindly' ended up being a trigger mechanism, as when those words were spoken, you had no option but to follow through with the order.  And for a huge chunk of the game, you had no idea that you were being led like a dog from task to task by that simple phrase.  

This is what this game is all about.  Free Will.  As Andrew Ryan says, in his view, a man chooses, and a slave obeys.  And the game hangs on that idea.

There's a part in the game where you end up in Eve's Garden, which I'll call a burlesque show, which is being incredibly generous.  And the slogan for this burlesque show at Eve's Garden is 

Come bite the apple. Come bite the apple, give in to temptation.  And this is perhaps the most obvious of the hints that the concept of free will is being ever so subtly tweaked around.  For you see, Eve and Adam were talked into eating the fruit by Satan, who tempted them with seductive promises, even though they had free will.  But how free is free will?

In Ryan's Rapture, free will surely isn't free at all.  Eventually, you end up acquiring the ability to hypnotize other enemies, splicers, and eventually the Big Daddies, and they do your bidding, which is precisely the role that you as the player are performing as the protagonist of the game.  Your will is bound, and you follow orders slavishly.  

Now, as Lutheran Christians, we understand this concept perhaps better than most.  From the beginning, people were made with free will, but when they ate of the fruit, (bit the apple, as Eve's garden would proclaim), their will itself was corrupted.  That meant that they were unable to free themselves to choose to do good things, or to choose to worship God, and cling to him.  Their will was in full and complete bondage to Satan.

Now, here's the deal.  This is not just an Adam and Eve problem.  This is an us problem  We inherit a great deal of things from our parents, size of nose, baldness, all that stuff.  And along with that, we inherit this bondage of our will.  We inherit concupisence.  This means that a man chooses, to be sure, but a slave obeys.

We are children of Abraham, and have never been slaves of anyone

I tell you the truth. Any man who sins is a slave to sin.

As usual, stern words from Jesus, and they are especially insightful when staring down the various philosophies of Rapture.  In Rapture, as in Atlas Shrugged, there is such a heavy emphasis placed on the triumph of will, on free will being sovereign, on those who are clever and thoughtful and brilliant having the will to toss off the shackles of convention that bind and hold down the entire world, and yet in Rapture, your will is so heavily constrained as to make deviating from that path impossible.

In the end, you are played for a chump by a voice in your ear that ends up betraying you.  Atlas, the friendly voice you'd heard since stepping off of the bathysphere, ends up being, shall we say, not what he appeared, and his voice, playing to the best of your intentions, ends up leading you to do only what he wants you to do.

Of course, there is a redemption arc in this story, as there should be.  There's a redemption arc, but thankfully, it doesn't happen at the end, as you would expect it to.  It happens close to the middle.  After Atlas turns on you, and leaves you to die, after the voice that was whispering to you to bite the apple leaves you to the consequences of your sins, you are saved.  

This shouldn't mean anything. After all, the vita-chambers scattered through Rapture have been saving you this whole time.  Whenever you die, you just come back to life again, with no trouble whatsoever, but after Atlas turns on you, you are saved not just in body, but in will.  Dr. Tennenbaum, perhaps the only sympathetic character in the entire game, is able to undo the trigger word embedded in your psyhche.  Instead of being captive to the suggestions of Atlas in your ear, you are free to follow your own path.  And in fact, knowing how he was trying to control you makes it all the more laughable that he continues to do so.

You see, the salvation of the character of Jack, the player, in Bioshock, happens when his will is saved, and not through his own doing.  Jack doesn't exert his will, he doesn't rise above the challenge, he doesn't claim anything through sheer force of will.  He is saved by Tennenbaum, who frees him from the suggestion trigger, and allows him to make his own decisions.

This is precisely what we say happens upon Christian baptism.  That without God\s salvation, we couldn't choose God, we couldn't decide to worship him, we couldn't decide to follow his words or edicts.  We were held completely captive in our will in the same way Jack was, even without knowing it.  But when God acts upon us, our will is regenerated, and we can begin to do what is good and pleasing to God.  Without his work, we are endlessly hostile to him, but with his work, we are able to be good and God pleasing.  

I suppose that this would be the best time to talk about the moral choice aspect of this game.  This is one of the few aspects of the game that is not tightly controlled, and in which you have some degree of latitude, where you encounter little sisters throughout the game, who have sea slugs embedded in their bodies to help them to draw ADAM out of corpses.  These little sisters can , upon the defeat of their big daddies, be harvested, or released.  This choice is not controlled by Atlas, and is up to the player - if Jack harvests the little sisters, then he gets a bigger ADAM boost.  Or so it would appear.  The penalty for doing the wrong thing in this case is almost non-existent, as the little sisters give a smaller boost, but then continue to reward the player regularly though the game - something they would find very difficult to do if they had died.  

In this game (unlike in a fallout game, which we will get to.  Promise), the moral choice is obvious.  Kill little girls, or save them.  And that choice was so easy to make that I made it consistently all the way through the game, and was rewarded with the 'good' ending.  But being that it is such an obvious choice, it is a dull one, too.  The only area in which you have a strongly indicated moral choice is the area in which the choice is so obvious as to not even be worth talking about.  The game rewards good behavior, and punishes bad, both in game, and in the ending.  So then, far more interesting is the notion of the illusion of choice, and how that affects the life of the bondage of the will of the everday human being, while the temptation to bite the apple remains out there.

Free will is a fascinating question, both in-game, and out of it.  The idea that we have liberty of will is something that we desperately want, we want to be captains of our own ships, and masters of our own domains, and yet in almost all circumstances, we end up doing things we'd rather not, we make decisions that we'd rather not make.  We end up frequently falling into old traps and habits, we kick ourselves time and time again, in the throes of regret, asking ourselves 'why did I do that?'

Paul puts it this way, when he says about himself:

We know that the law is spiritual, but I am unspiritual,

sold as a slave to sin.  I do not understand what I do.  For what I 

want to do I do not do, but what I hate, I do.  And if I do what

I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good.

As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is 

sin living in me...

Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.

For in my inner being I delight in God's law, but I see another

law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind

and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.

What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this 

body that is subject to death?  Thanks be to God, who

deilvers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!'

Romans 7:14-17,21-25

Bioshock is the first game to really explore this space, to ask the player character why they make the decisions they make.  Is it because they want to, or because they are compelled to?  These are useful and helpful questions to ask in the life of the Christian as well, especially in the light of the seventh chapter of Romans.  Tune in next week for the conclusion of Bioshock.

PJ.