Alien Isolation. On being alone.

One of the first lines of dialogue in the scriptures concerning human beings is from God, who has just made Adam, formed him out of the dust of the ground, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, then placed him in the garden, and says this.

It is not good for man to be alone.

This passage is frequently used in weddings, when we say about ourselves that it isn't a natural, preferred condition to be alone.  We as human beings are not supposed to be alone.  This is why in the corrections system, one of the last few bastions of punishment is solitary confinement.  That is, being segregated from other people is unnatural, punishing, and difficult to endure.  The word of God above is one of those that, whether you believe in God or not, holds true.  You know from your own experience, whether introvert or extrovert, whether you are close to those whom you love or far away, you know that it is not good for you to be alone.  

Most games, you aren't alone though.  The big ones, like Gears of War, Left 4 Dead, and so on, have you surrounded by a group of friends, people who, like you, are well

armed, and prepared to take on the threats, locust, undead, or otherwise, as a group, as a team.  And teams, they make horror much more palatable.  The thing that left 4 dead does, and does well, is to communicate to you that if you get separated from your team, you're dead.  You may not die straight away, but it won't take long.  If you're on your own, sprinting towards the end, you'll be scraped up in a body bag pretty soon.

The wonderful thing about Alien Isolation is that it brings this feeling to the forefront.  You are alone.  In space.  With a monster.  Oh sure, there are other humans, and you have weapons, but ultimately, they're not much help to you.  Most of the humans will

be wildly aggressive towards you, and the weapons aren't much good against the problems that present themselves.  Often, your best bet is to hide, and hide well.  Your best bet is to sneak around under tables, and in vents, trying to hide from what you have all around.  

And the thing you're hiding from, for the most part, is the Alien.  And this alien is a problem for you.  The alien is a hulking monster, a killer whom you know is desperate to wipe you out, to kill you and eat you.  And when this monster shows up, oh boy.  It slithers down from the ceiling, and stretches itself out, snarling and growling, and stomping throughout the space station where you find yourself.  Yes, you have weapons, yes, you have a gun, but shooting that alien yields no success.  It takes bullets like popcorn, and will definitely kill you if you take a potshot at it.

So when the alien shows up, it's a terrifying moment, because you're dealing with something that is in every way immeasurably stronger than you.  It's a monster, a killer, and an unstoppable force.  And as you hide under a table, cower in a locker, or crouch behind a door, those words of God echo in your ears - it is not good for you to be alone.  With friends, with heavy weapons, with a team of marines with guns, this would be easier, but it would also be a different game.  And as Gearbox software found out, a much worse game.

The presence of the alien in the game, as a monster, as a killer, as a brutally efficient slayer, reminded me a lot of something else from the Bible while I was playing.  It reminded me of the passage about the devil from the book of first Peter.  It says 

Be sober minded; be watchful.

Your adversary the devil prowls around 

like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

Resist him, firm in your faith.

Before this game, I wasn't too sure about this whole thing.  I have no experience with roaring lions, but I have seen them in the zoo, and they sure don't seem to frightening.  If anything, they seemed pretty lazy.  They seemed awfully laid back, content to sit around, to do nothing, and to take it easy.  Well, that's because I'm separated from them by fences, glass, and all that.  It would be a different story if I was in there with them.

The alien from Alien Isolation is reasonably analogous to the devil of the Bible.  He prowls around seeking to devour, to destroy.  And if we were paying attention to what the Bible says, we'd be alert, we'd be sober minded, we'd be paying attention to the possibility of the approach of the devil, who seeks whom he may devour.  But we

aren't.  We're complacent.  We get relaxed, we get used to the idea that the devil, well, he might be out there somewhere, but he's nowhere near us.  And you get this idea in Alien Isolation too, because that's how games are supposed to work.  Games are ususally divided up into sections, into action set-pieces, where you fight specific enemies at specific times, with a difficulty curve thrown in there to keep it fair.  Enemies get progressively more diffiuclt as you progress, and there is a fairly straightforward linear curve.  

But in Alien Isolation, all that goes out the window.  The alien is always watching you.  There's no such thing as being out of sight, out of mind.  There's no such thing as him not paying attention to you, there's no such thing as a safe zone, there's no such thing as a space where the alien isn't close at hand.  She's like a lion - she likes to stick close to the zebras.

You see, any interactions we have with the devil are pretty short lived. We feel him at work in times of trial and temptation, we feel his work when we are angry or agitated, we know when he is around, but we forget about him at all other times.  And this is what he wants.  The lion wants the zebras to forget she exists.  The Alien wants you, while you play, to forget about her.  She wants you to be occupied by other threats, by the androids and the other workers.  And the devil wants you to be occupied with the bits and pieces of daily life, forgetting that he's at work at all.  The more you forget about him, the better he works.

This all culminates in the game when we are occupied by the Working Joe androids, hiding from them, runing down the hallway away from their stiff legged strolling, and then the Alien pops down from the ceiling and plucks your head like a man might pluck a grape.  If you're distracted by minor threats, you forget the big ones

even exist.  If you're distracted by the day to day, then you forget about the big monster, the dragon, the ancient enemy, that you're powerless against.  And that's exactly where that particular monster wants it to be.

1 Peter cautions us to be vigilant, to be aware of the fact that we're always in temptation, just as Alien: Isolation reminds you, usually through your death, that the Alien is always there, always watching, and usually waiting until you're distracted for her moment to strike.  Yeah, there's a bunch of other stuff going on, but you've got to stay mindful of that monster.  No matter what else is going on, she's always going to be your biggest problem.


PJ.

Bioshock infinite - oooh heaven ain't a place on earth

This is one of those cases where I don't have to make a tenuous connection here.  When you're looking at the absolute masterpiece that is Bioshock Infinite, you don't have to make a massive logical leap to pull in a reference to baptism.  I don't have to, because the game does it itself.  This is the only video game that I've ever played that both begins and ends with a baptism.  I've never seen a game do that before.

For those of you who don't know, the game mainly takes place in the floating sky city of Columbia, set apart from the city of Rapture from the first game by virtue of being in the sky, vs far far under the sea.  But both games have the element of being trapped in the city until the mission is complete.  But in Bioshock Infinite, some of the best parts of the game happen before you pull the trigger a single time, which for a first person shooter, is quite an amazing feat.  The game starts with a black screen, with a pair of voice overs.  A woman asking 'Booker, are you afraid of God?' and a man replying back 'No, but I'm afraid of you.'

That conversation between Elizabeth and Booker sets up the game, because this game is all about Baptism.  From beginning to end, the game itself is about baptism, and what baptism means.  Booker starts the game already heavily in debt.  His isn't a noble quest to do the right thing, he isn't guided by passion, by a sense of honor, or duty, he is following a voice which proclaims to him loudly 'Bring us the girl, and wipe away the debt!'  This refers to two things, first of all bringing the girl Elizabeth back so that his gambling debts might be erased by a wealthy benefactor.  But the second meaning to this sentence is the one in which Booker's moral debt might be erased by him doing something good.

Booker's moral debt was built up by his time at wounded knee, where he massacred native Americans by burning them to death in their teepees, and scalping the dead, keeping the trophies.  After his time at wounded knee, he fell into a deep depression, drinking and gambling, and having a hard time dealing with his past.  When the events of the game start, and Booker is dropped off at the lighthouse by the Lutece

twins, and he walks into the main door of the lighthouse.  As he walks through the door, he comes across a cross-stitched pattern that says 'OF THY SINS SHALL I WASH THEE' to which Booker replies 'good luck with that, pal.'

Booker's past is so big, so harmful, that he is seriously in doubt that he can ever be rid of the effects of it.  The things that he did out at Wounded Knee haunted him so much that the well of alcohol of gambling that he sunk into continued to ruin his life so much that he had to sell his own daughter to keep out of debt.  And this combination, the war crimes plus the selling of his daughter, lead Booker to the city of Columbia, to the city in the clouds where the new baptism would be found.

The city in the sky of Columbia is promised to the 'pilgrims' as the 'New Eden,' as an Ark for a new age.  The first of the white robed potential candidates for baptism that Booker talks to tells him that it's 'heaven.  Or as close as we'll get this side of judgment day.'  The city in the sky that Booker goes to, Columbia, is a place that is as close to

Heaven as people can imagine.  It's in the clouds, beautifully decorated, the crime is almost non-existant, goods are sold on the honor system, and people up there are astonishingly racist, but very polite to whites.  And this world that Booker goes to is the one in which he has a chance to start again, start totally fresh.  Nobody knows him, nobody has any idea as to his past, he can melt right in as a normal person, with no debts, no extra baggage hanging onto him, nothing that is dogging him from his past.  Nobody knows about Wounded Knee, nobody is counting his gambling debts, nothing at all.  He has the chance to start again.  And when it comes time for his baptism (and the baptism is unavoidable.  You either get baptized, or turn the game off and start again), you are baptized into the prophet, the founders, and our Lord.  A very strange Trinitarian baptism.  And this baptism, is like the baptism at the end of the game too, where Booker looks at it and says 'Might as well get it over with.'

It's so strange to be playing a video game, a video game rated M for Mature, where it says in big letters on the screen 'PRESS X TO ACCEPT BAPTISM.  I've never seen that before, and I'll likely never see it again.  But the baptism that Booker is offered in Columbia isn't a baptism like we would recognize.  Why is that?  Because of what you're being baptized into.

You're not being baptized into anything resembling forgiveness of sins.  You're being baptized into the magnificence of mankind, of the strength and work and majesty of humanity.  Baptized into the prophet, baptized into the founders, and baptized into the Lord.

The majesty of humanity, American exceptionalism, it's something that is built into the city of Columbia, the world of Bioshock Infinite.  The way the story gets going is, as mentioned above, to leave the 'sodom below,' and ascend into the sky where people have made a heaven for themselves.  It's a reveal similar to the reveal at the beginning of the first Bioshock game, where you see massive whales floating by a city beneath the sea, but it's different.  It's in the clouds.  It talks about ascension.  When you look out of your capsule, you see clouds, you see fireworks, you see children playing, and a massive statue of an angel occupying the centre of the floating city. For all intents and purposes, you are being baptized into a heaven, but a heaven of man's own making.  Something with all the trappings of faith, baptism, white robes, ritual, etc, but with all the content focused on the people who made it.

And this Heaven that Father Comstock has made is racist, it's way over the top, but it tells the story of a world that we could imagine being very much like one of us would make for ourselves.  What's all over the city?  Stained glass of Comstock everywhere,

statues of Comstock, statuary of the founders of the United States, a secret society dedicated to John Wilkes Booth, of all people.  If you had a heaven to make, who would be at the centre of it?

In Bioshock Infinite, the sky is devoted to man's service to self.  And as you see, the deeper you get into it, that was a bad trade-off.  It's racist, corrupt, racist, and more than a little behind the times.  It's got a wonderful veneer, but beneath it, it's all horrible and grotesque, with a struggle between the leaders and the subordinates, and the slaves.  But even the slaves are awful too, when their time for freedom comes, and they begin murdering indiscriminately.  In other words, people are fairly rotten most of the time.  If you take away the limitations on us, if you take away the limits of death, of resources, of social structures, of the rules of the nation we're living in, what do we turn into?  Who are we?  Who are we really?  Well, that's the game's big reveal is that you are both the hero and the villain of this story, just like you are in the story of your life.  Bioshock Inifinite is one of my favourite types of games, really, because it's not like Mario or like Donkey Kong, where you are virtuous by definition, and everyone who gets in your way is bad, mainly because they're not you.  But here, in Columbia, eveyone, including, gosh, especially you, is a bit of a basket case.  No matter who you help, whether it be yourself, the Columbians, the Vox Populi, they're all varying degrees of rotten.  They're all no good.  There is none righteous, as the Bible says, no not one.  For all have sinned, and fallen short not just of the glory of God, but even of your own standards.  But all the people of Columbia are racist, violent, backstabbing, frightening horrible people, that, when the surface is scratched, will show you exactly what they're all about.  And they're about looking out for themselves.

So, in many ways, the floating sky-city of Columbia ends up being less of Heaven as the Christians would conceive of it, and more of a mount Olympus from Greek mythology.  What's Mount Olympus all about?  It's a place where the Greek pantheon has set themselves up in a place to be as unrestricted, voilent, capricious, and wanton as they want.  And it works for them, but it serves to show what a paradise would look like if it was made by men in their own image.  It would be full of all the worst parts of the human expeience, not peace and love but wrath and rage.  Not charity and grace, but fiery passion and death.  It's a world where all the rules of the sodom below are gone, and the new ark of Columbia is free to remake the world, but to do it properly this time.  And what do they do? They go and make a world that is even worse than the one they left. Given the clean slate of a new world, populated by the people of a new ark, the first thing they do is to subjugate those different from themselves, and seek to rain down fire on the rest of the world.

So how do we, who are imperfect, who could easily fall into this same trap, go to a place that is actually good?  Not just made in our own image, but actually, truly, legitimately good?

We'll get into that next time.

spec ops the line part two: Dissonance

So, whose fault is it?

That's the big question at the heat of Spec Ops.  Who is the villain?  Games usually have end bosses, right?  You play your way through to the end of the game, you fight all the low level scrubs, move up to heavies, smack them around, and then each level ends with a boss, with a big boss at the end.  A big boss at the end and then a cutscene where you get cake from princess Peach.  That's how it's supposed to go, right?

Well, in Spec Ops, that breaks down, it falls apart.  By the time you get to the end of the story, you find yourself dealing with the final boss of the game being dead for the whole game.  There was no Konrad, not for the entire time.  All the things that happened, all the bloodshed that occupies the game, we blame that on Konrad, saying that it must be his fault that we did any of this.  It begins with you shooting refugees, the people whom you were sent to save.

And this is the biggest unscripted surprise of Spec Ops, that all the other human beings in the game have agency, are following orders, and as bizzare as it may seem, believe sincerely that they're doing the right thing.  And in many cases, they're right, and you're wrong.  Sgt. Lugo, one of your Delta Force team comments on the bloodshed at the beginning of the game by saying 'aren't these the people we're supposed to be saving?'  Yes.  And you end up killing them.

When the game turns, when it tips its hand and reveals to you the length and depth that it is willing to go to, it is as perfect of a presentation of original sin as I can think of, and of the concept of Law, in the Christian sense.  The way things work in the Christian perspective is that people need, desperately need to be reminded of their own sin, entirely because everyone, in their own mind, is Captain Walker, the star of their own sitcom, the player character of their own game.  And just like Captain Walker, you have a feeling, for a long time, that because you're the central character, because you're the most important one in any shot, that you can do no wrong.  Nothing you do is that bad or that wrong, and all that bodies that hit the floor, well, they shouldn't have been trying to kill you.  But Walker's big epiphany comes at the Gate.

Notice that Walker says that it's the 33rd who are going to have to pay for what they've done.  Even though Walker has just blasted civilians with white phosphorus, he's still seeking to lay the blame elsewhere.  How does this work?  It works through cognitive dissonance, holding two conflicting viewpoints at the same time.  

The loading screens in Spec Ops are perhaps the most clever partof the game.  They start off by giving you tips on gameplay, but they ramp up significantly in later stages.  And by the end, they start to say things like 'do you even remember why you're here?' 'Cognitive dissonance is the condition of holding two conflicting viewpoints at the same time,' 'This is all your fault.' and my favourite ' You are still a good person.'  The game is subtly reminding you that you still believe that you are doing the right thing, because you're the protagonist.  That's how the story goes, because that's how all stories go.  The Hero does the right thing, beats the villains, and retuns home with full honors, or dies in a blaze of glory. That's it.  

But in Spec Ops, you make bad decisions, and then continue by making worse decisions.  You make bad decisions the whole way through.  But the hero can't make bad decisions, or he wouldn't be the hero, so who is to blame for all the bad decisions?

Walker blames Konrad.  Walker makes Konrad into the final boss, because that's how the story is supposed to go. He, as the hero, has to move through the levels, killing the bad guys, until he faces down with the final boss, his old mentor, and brings him to justice.  And as his squad continues to voice disagreement with his decisions, Walker says :

"This isn't about finding Konrad.  It's about doing what's right."

What we forget about in the real world is that in everyone's view, they are the protagonist in their own games, in their own stories.  And if you're a protagonist in a story, you will do what Walker does, which is to fight through the odds, and come out victorious.  The Hero makes good decisions, and his decisions must be right because he is the Hero.  And we live in this world in which we are the main characters in our own stories.  We are conditioned to look outside ourselves for the reasons behind anything that ever goes wrong.  Why do our relationships fall apart?  Because our ex-husbands are inconsiderate jerks. Why do we get disciplined at work? Because our bosses have it out for us for some reason.  Why do we end up fighting with each other?  Because the other person refuses to listen.  Why did we get stopped while driving?  Because the cops have a quota to meet.  If the truth is undeniable, you make your own.

The thing is, this is what sin is all about.  It's all about us looking at ourselves, and being honest with what is happening.  It's all about us looking at our sin, and repenting of it, and seeking to amend, whether we do or not.  And the more of our blame that gets foisted off on other people, the less likely we are to amend things.  We need someone to blame, but we usually can't abide it being us, so we make up someone of we have to.  Think of Captain Walker.  If he would have just admited what he had done at the gate,if he would have said that he had done some things he should not have done, then he could have walked away, and moved on.  He did not.  Someone else must have been to blame, and therefore, the body count continues.  None of this would have happened if Walker had just stopped, but he marched on.

The last surprise that the game has is that the person that you thought was going to be the final boss had been dead for the whole game.  You, as Walker, had made him up.  He wasn't real.  And as a construct, you realize at the end that the decisions you'd made all game, you weren't forced into them by Konrad.  The walkie-talkie was broken.  The final boss was a corpse all along. So who is the final boss?  the final boss is Walker himself, and what he chooses to do with his legacy.  He can kill himself, or he can kill 'Konrad,' and choose to put and end to the difference between the two.  And so far, this is the only game I've ever played where the final boss is the Old Adam.  The only game in which the last boss is you yourself, the part of you that did the stuff you knew was wrong.  And that's us.  The final boss of your life is your sinful nature.  The final boss of your existence, the only real enemy you've ever had to face is yourself, and the things you do.  It's really hard to admit that, as hard as it was for Captain walker, but it takes a strong man to deny what's right in front of him.  In most cases, you are the one who has been causing problems in your life, you are the one who has been  causing the majority of the problems, and it's this that Christianity, with its focus on sin and repentance, aims to deal with.  Working through this is and always will be complicated. It's a tough look in the mirror, it's a hard, difficult thing to do, to look into that mirror, and to see the Konrad that you were fighting against.  And that's what Walker worked out, was that the only way to beat Konrad was to beat himself.

When Konrad talks in the closing cutscene, he says that someone has to pay for all of this, and that's true.  The wages of sin is death, and Walker has a lot to atone for.  So much, that he'll never pay it off.  And this is where our Christian understanding of Grace comes into it.  We are people who, if we take seriously our beliefs, we end up knowing that our sin will require punishment, some kind of redress.  The great gift of our faith is that this doesn't rest on us, but rests on Christ.  When faced with a similar conversation, when faced with the possibility that we might have to atone for our many and various crimes, we don't have to take the dichotomy proposed to us by Konrad, that either we pay for it, or that we have to enter into dissonance and invent someone to take the fall for us.  Christ's whole work was to take that dissonance away, to understand that sin needs to be payed for, but that we can't possibly manage it on our own.  In all the things we have invented and created in our lives to ensure that we won't take any blame for our sins, in all our dissonance, the thing we need to know is that Christ offers to take that away, to not live in denial, nor to hide from our sins, but to confess them and have done with them.  And knowing those sins is the first step in that process.

The best line in the whole game comes right at the end, when Walker says "I didn't mean to hurt anyone," and Konrad answers "No-one ever does."  All the body count that you racked up in Spec Ops is comprised of people just like you, people who want to do the right thing, who want to help, and yet it keeps on going wrong.  Yes, you never meant to hurt anyone, but you did.  Both as Walker, and as you yourself.  The only question is who pays for it?  Walker, Konrad, or Christ?

Next week, new game.  Not sure which one yet, but probably not paper mario.  Maybe Paper Mario.

Spec Ops: The Line part 1 - original sin.

Massive spoiler alert here.  If you haven't played Spec Ops: The Line yet, please do before continuing this review.  The midgame won't mean anything if you know exactly what's going to happen, though you might figure it out during.

Spec Ops: The Line was one of the big surprises in video games, in that it's a war game in which the enemies are not people you feel good killing.  The thing about action games is that they're supposed to satisfy through adrenaline, you're supposed to get a bit of a high from pulling the trigger and watching someone's head explode, or what have you.  But Spec Ops, a modern military shooter, does away with that in the first few minutes.  The first few enemies you find, and kill, well, as your squadmate Lugo says 'aren't these the people we're supposed to be rescuing?'

Here's the deal.  You arrive in a ruined Dubai, where massive sandstorms have essentially buried the city, and have left the survivors holed up in squalid conditions in ruined buildings.  And those survivors
are working with the CIA to try to oust the 33rd army battallion led by John Konrad who have gone rogue in their role as army ambassadors.  They stayed behind after an order to leave, in order to evacuate the city.  But the evacuation got caught in a storm, and thousands of people died.  The 33rd turned against itself, and the remaining civilians got caught up in the violence.  Everyone starts fighting for their own interests, often against each other, over dwindling water, fuel, ammo, and shelter. The storms keep on rolling in.  It gets awfully muddy.

But the muddiness is vital to understanding how the game works.  The thing about the enemies that you kill, is that they're all people.  They're all people who are doing their best in a terrible situation.  As the sand rolls in, those who are left behind are thirsty, have no food or water, have no place to live, and they're getting increasingly desperate.  And it's into this desepration that you, as a player, enter.

This is one of those incredibly rare situations in which you, as a player and as a player characeter, don't actually have any moral high ground in your decisions.  None.  Usually, the people you're used to fighing in these sorts of games are bad people.  Even in relatively sympathetic games, they're people whose motivations you can understand, but they go about it through the wrong methods. But here, in Spec Ops, you're going through things the wrong way too!  Almost all the way through the game, you end up making decisions that you have to make, because you'll die if you don't.  And these decisions, whether they be burying survivors under suffocating sand, or killing civilians who turn their guns on you first, all these decisions are made with survival in mind.  The other people have to die because they aren't you.  And you can't all survive.

This turns the modern military shooter on its head, really, because usually the other people have to die because they aren't on your side, but in Spec Ops, all the enemies you kill are supposed to be people who are on your side.  Refugee combattants, allied soldiers, and even the very unarmed civilians you were dispatched to save.  Why do you end up killing these people?  Because it's either them or you.


The entire game revolves around this problem , that you're trying to do your best to do the right thing, and yet doing the wrong thing time and time again.  You're trying to rescue civilians, you're trying to only shoot 'bad people,' but all sorts of people are turning against you even though you're trying to talk them out of it.  The best way to have moved forward would have been to have stopped, and left as soon as things got going.  But if you keep playing, the body count will keep on going up, and it'll keep on being you who is making the bodies hit the floor.


This pushes you into a real situation that is a lot like a bizarre indie game called save the date, which is well worth playing if you haven't before.  In both these games, it is incumbent on you to realize that the majority of other people will lose as long as you keep winning.  If you can call it winning.  Ultimately, any forward progress you make comes at a great and terrible price to those whom you should be saving.  There isn't a good outcome for you, or the people you're working with, and if you genuinely want the people who you're supposed to save to do well, the best bet is to butt out, and call it even. Look for survivors, radio the cavalry, and go home, to quote Captain Walker in the first mission.  But the more you keep going, the more you find that it's a big mess of people making bad decisions, and you're stuck in the middle of it.


Spec Ops: The Line is the game that comes the closest to really wrapping a game's head around the notion of original sin, or for the layman, the knowledge that everyone is just varying degrees of messed up.  It's harder to see in other games.  You're the hero, other people are disposable.  Their deaths don't even flicker as a blip on your karma meter, really.  And games like Fallout tell you that as long as you do more good stuff than bad stuff, then you're doing a good job.  But Spec Ops, well, you as the playerhenchmen, goombas, koopas, the locust, the Helghast, aliens, whatever, are free to execute because they're not you.
character aren't making decisions better than anyone else out there.  Your decisions are frequently just as bad, if not worse.  Konrad  was responsible for the deaths of 1300 people, while you as a player character are guilty of at least a generous chunk of that yourself.  It's a clear breakdown in games, in which you have been conditioned for a long time to believe that because you're the player, because you're the protagonist, all your actions are morally justified.  Other people in the game, enemies,

Why do you kill enemies in games?  That's a google question that has no answers.  Sure, it'll tell you how to kill enemies, or what weapons to use on particular enemies but the existential question of why you kill enemies isn't covered.  Usually, it's because they're standing in your way.  Because they're not you.  Sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're cartoonishly bad, and they have to be made that way so that you as a player can still feel okay about blasting them to bits.  If they were people, just like you, it would be a lot harder to massacre them en masse.

Which is why Spec Ops, though a magnificent game, isn't fun.  It's not fun becasuse step by step, you're making bad decisions, and as you make those bad decisions, they cling to you and make the rest of the game happen.  Nothing would happen if you'd just leave, but since you don't, or can't, the game and so are everyone else's. Delta Squad, Colonel Konrad, the 33rd, the refugees, the CIA, they're all making bad choices, and you don't get to stand above it all.  As bad as everyone else is, your decisions are equally bad, and equally reprehensible.  And this is what sin is.  You can see it in everyone else, but can you see it in you?  The best part of the game is when the game opens up, and you see yourself for the first time as someone who is, in every way, making the same decisions as your enemies.  The only difference is that you're you.  That is literally the only thing setting you apart. And most of my time spent preaching on the law half of law and gospel, it's spent trying to get people to see that this law, this law of God, applies to them, as much as it does to other people.  And this is so hard for individuals to figure out, almost impossible, until they wrap their heads around the idea that they are every bit as sinful as everyone else.  Most of us don't see that until we have it pointed out to us in very particular ways.
gets more and more difficult, and more and more dark as you go.  And the darker it gets, the worse your decisions are,


Spec Ops, it's one big story along the same lines of what Nathan the prophet said to David, when telling him a parable about David himself, Bathsheba, and Uriah the Hittite.  Nathan tells David the story about a poor man who had a sheep, whom he loved and cared for deeply, until a rich man came and took the sheep away, and ate it in a meal for his friends.  And when David heard this, his anger burned hot, and said that the rich man deserved death, at which point, Nathan says one of the great lines of the whole Bible:  'YOU ARE THE MAN.'

David had stolen Uriah's wife.  David had gotten Uriah killed.  And after all that, David was living fat and happy, with his new wife in his big palace, assuming that everything was, and was always going to be, fine.  He couldn't see his own problems until they were pointed out to him by a story, by a parable, by seeing that the standards of behavior he was expecting of everyone else, those weren't the standards that he was obeying.  He had in mind how people should act, he could see how other people weren't meeting up to that, and then he had to see only through a story, through a narrative, that he wasn't doing what he thought everyone should be doing, or living the way he believed everyone should live.

Now, next week. we'll be getting into what you do with that information.  When Walker, at the Gate, finally comes face to face with his own sin, what does he do with that information, and how is that an awful lot like what we do with that self same information?

See you next time,

PJ.

The waters of life

Fallout 3 had an ending.  It just wasn't any good.

Massive spoiler warning, obvy, but the game concluded with you having to brave massive radiation in order to purify the water in the DC area, making aqua pura avaialable for everyone at the cost of your own life (or Sarah's life).  Why is this such an annoyance?  It's an annoyance because the lethal dose of radiation that would absolutely kill you, that would drop you into a body bag, would not harm at least three of your companions.  Three of your companions who are standing by idle, waiting for you to die in the radiation that would not possibly hurt them.  You have a robot, or a super mutant, or a ghoul in your party, and they're not susceptible to radiation at all, yet they still refuse to enter into the memorial, and purify the water.

That was stupid, and it set up one of the silliest endings in video game history, that you had to choose between dying and sending someone else to their death, while you had companions standing idle who refused to enter for no good reason.  Now, eventually the good producers of the game smartened up, and changed the game.  For you see, Fallout 3 is an open world game, and you can go wherever you want, from the republic of Dave all the way to Arefu, and as an open world game, there's not really and
end, per se.  And after they released downloadable content, they got rid of the end of the game.  After you purified the water at the Jefferson memorial, the game didn't end anymore, at least not at that point.  There was still fighing to be done against the enclave using Liberty One, and the broken steel add-on meant that you could continue the fight.  But after you destroyed the Enclave at their base, ruining any chance they'd ever have of coming back, the game keeps going.  You could move onto new DLC, you could go to Mothership Zeta, you could go to the Pitt, but the game didn't have an ending proper anymore.  The credits never rolled again.

So what to do?  You see, the game will point you in key directions for quite a while, helping you to see and to experience the wild wasteland, but all the quests are over at that point.  There is nothing specifically left for you to do.  It never really ends.

It's funny that the Book of Revelation comes up intensely in the game, up to and including the point where the game calls the final quest 'the waters of life,' directly referencing Revelation, and the end of all things.  And this, this is important.  It's important because the Bible ends at that point, when the sky rolls back and everything grinds to a halt.  And when that happens, history is over.  And the game does seem to have an Alpha and an Omega, it does seem to have a beginning and an end.  Just like Christian history has a set beginning in Genesis, and a set end in Revelation.  And when Jesus talks about himself as the Alpha and the Omega, he does so to say that there was nothing before him, and there will be nothing after him.  And yet, after they revised the ending to the game, it didn't have an alpha and an omega anymore.  Oh, sure, there was still a beginning, but there was no conclusion.  After you finished the story mission, the game just keeps on going.  That's what we call an open world game.

But the Christian life is essentially like an open world game, because expected progression only gets you so far.  If you're like the average North American protestant, you get only so far, and they you stop.  You get through Sunday school, you get through Confirmation, you get through the relative progression that leads you to 'um, now what?' The story missions are all over, and now you get to explore the open world of it all.  The big, enormous open world.  And then what do you do?  What do you do if nobody's telling you what to do anymore?

It's a good question, and one that regularly stumps our confirmation graduates.  As they get to the end of their story based missions, the main missions that drive the plot, then the game no longer holds their hands and tells them where to go.  The game is still running, the world out there is still what it used to be, and there are many quests that are repeatable perpetually, but there is no more straight logical progression.  And this is where we lose people, almost every time.  The main story is done, the missions that lead one to another have stopped, the exclamation marks on the map are all gone, and that seems to be all there is to it.

Now, here's a quick question for those of you playing along at home.  Once the kids have been confirmed and have disappeared, what is the very next time we're likely to see them?

Spoiler alert, it's this one.

What happens in the meantime?  Who knows, really.  The kids who disappeared, and who are only around for confirmation, marriage, and to baptize their babies, they're the ones who can't really work with an open world, in which the conditions for moving forward aren't spelled out for you.  You have to find your own quests to complete, you have to find your own places to go, and your own experiences to level up with.

You see, if you spend some time in the world, you'll find your own quests to complete.  You'll find a way to extend the life of the game outwards.  You'll find your own responsibilities to do and to accomplish.  One of the best ways that Fallout did this was to insitute a couple of factions roaming

around the wastes, who had their own goals and objectives.  One of my personal favourites was after rescuing a squad of mercenaries from the rooftop of the statesman hotel, you can be enlisted into their ranks.  You become one of Reilly's Rangers.  And Reilly herself will offer you a suit of their battle armour to wear, and gives you a permanent, perpetual quest to map the wastes, giving you money for each location visited.  And it wasn't about the money.  It was about finding a way to take on that role and responsibility, about making this world my own.  And I loved that armour, too.  It was great to instead of wearing random pots and pans cobbled together from raiders, to wear something that marked me as part of a cohesive team.


This is vitally important to the way the game works, as it changes it from something that drags you around, shiny spot to shiny spot, into a world in which you believe that you have sincere agency.  If you remember my discussion about Bioshock, that game revealed itself as being a game in which the central theme was that you didn't have control.  You were led about, as a player character, from checkpoint to checkpoint, almost as though it was a racing game, and not an FPS RPG.  You know how racing games work, which is that you're in a car (or kart), and the other racers are in similar cars

(or karts), and you're moving on a set path to a set destination. And there may be shortcuts, but they just take you back to the main course after a tiny deviation.  And that's what Bioshock was about.  It was interesting, full of life, a very pretty game with a heaping tonne of atmosphere, but the gameplay itself was linear progression through checkpoints.  Now, contrast that with the way Fallout works, in which you have key quests to accomplish, but thousands of other little quests in the meantime.  You can find yourself bringing water to beggars, collecting fingers for the regulators, giving money to the church on Rivet city, or any number of thousands of things that make this into a world in which things happen, and people live.  And you have a choice, which is to either blaze through the game as quickly as possible, or to find pleasure in the sidetracks, and find your own reason for doing what you do beyond just what you're told to.


As I said earlier, the Christian experience, with its clear progression then open world, is like that.  There are set checkpoints to attain, baptism, Sunday school, Confirmation classes, confirmation, then..... what? Then, with the open world set up before you, you get to decide your own level of immersion.  There will no longer be any stars on the map, any exclamation points, instead, it's up to you to decide how deep your involvement goes.  You can take on your role in Reilly's Rangers by joining a board or committee.  You can become a regulator by being an elder or a trustee.  You can upgrade your stats and level up in Bible study, but know that the main story quests wrapping up isn't the end of the game.  It just means that you have been equipped, you have leveled up sufficiently to explore the major content before you.  You are now able to take on the challenges of the open world before you.  The world both of the church, and of the world itself.


Now, a quick aside before I close the book on Fallout 3.  The game itself is perhaps as close as I've ever come to a genuinely immersive experience, mainly because of the open ended nature of what it asks you to do.  You can talk your way out of problems instead of fighting your way out of them.  You can use science and medicine to accomplish your goals.  You can choose to go from main quest to main quest, or you can explore why there are an alarming number of dead bodies in a certain burned out shack.  You can free slaves or make them, you can destroy towns or save them, and all the way through, the options are almost as wide open as they are in life.  It's the real definition of an open world, and the only question to you as a player is how deep do you want to go, because the game, the church, life, goes as deep as you want it to.

Tenpenny tower

Ugh.  I don't want to write about this.

I don't want to write about this, because video games aren't supposed to give you choices like this one.  They're supposed to give you easy choices.  Think back to the choices that you were given going all the way through video games in the '80s.  You are Mario.  You jump on goombas.  And that wasn't even really a moral question, since if you didn't jump on a goomba or a koopa they'd just happily walk right off a cliff anyway, without even slowing down.  Well, the green shells, anyway.  Pac-man ate ghosts, that was his job.  And all this stuff was really simple, and framed in the good guy / bad guy framework (or the Lucas Simms / Mister Burke framework if you'd rather).


But then comes Tenpenny Tower.

Tenpenny Tower is where the moral nature of the game kicks into overdrive, and if you've ever played it, you know exactly what I'm talking about.  On first glance, it's not a complicated question.  Allistair Tenpenny is a bad man.  We know that from first talking to him.  After all, he was the one who wanted Megaton destroyed, and all its inhabitants killed, because it was an 'eyesore.'  He sits on his balcony at the top of Tenpenny Tower, and looks through his sniper rifle and blasts away at ghouls and wildlife, and human visitors, in what he calls a 'wasteland safari.'  This is the textbook definition of someone that you should want to execute in the game. For further proof of that, type 'Allistair Tenpenny' into the search bar in youtube. Try to find a single video that isn't a compliation of him getting murdered.  He doesn't attack you, but he's obviously up to no good.  He's a bigot, and the type of person who would end lives because the people who stand in his way are inconvenient.

Although there's a quest given to you from a ghoul in Underworld to kill Tenpenny, you don't have to, at least not right away.  But in the areas around Tenpenny Tower, there are bigger things happening.  For you see, sentient ghouls are living in the subways around Tenpenny Tower.  And they're not real happy about being second class citizens.  As they shouldn't be.  Their spokesman, Roy Phillips, wants them to be let into Tenpenny Tower as paying residents.   The ghouls are people too.  People who look a little bit different, people whose skin has been wrecked by radiation (Ghouls call humans smoothskins), but people nonetheless.  And these people want the same access to the luxury of Tenpenny Tower that any other paying guest would want.

And so the stage is set.  The die is cast. Chief Gustav, Tenpenny's head of security, offers you money and guns to kill all the ghouls in the subway beneath the ground.  When you get there, the ghouls tell you their demands.  And this seems like an easy choice.  Obviously the ghouls should be allowed to enter, right?  They're people too.  And the whole thing smacks of not-so-veiled racism.  But the ghouls under the city don't exactly have a great plan either, in that they want to let a bunch of feral ghouls into the Tower to kill all the human residents, and then move into the tower after all the humans are dead.  So, in the one case, you murder all the ghouls, and then get money and guns for your trouble from the bigot humans.  In the other case, you help the ghouls to kill all the humans, and then they move into the Tower and take over, trying to forget all the murders that they committed to get there.


If only there was another way.  Which there is.


You see, Fallout is not a shooter, or at least it doesn't have to be.  You are not required to go into every situation guns blazing.  When there are puzzles to be solved, the solution isn't always 'use bullet on

man.'  There are alternatives to fighting.  When I was making my character for the game, I put a lot of points into charisma, speech, all those things that I feel as though I would have to rely on in the wastelands.  And when presented with this choice, I was relieved to find that instead of murder on one side and murder on the other side, there was an option to deal with diplomacy.  You can, if you work hard enough and are convincing enough, get the humans to be less bigoted, and to let the ghouls move in alongside them.  This is obviously the best of all possible solutions, in which the right thing happens.  The ghouls get to enter the Tower alongside the humns, and everyone learns an important lesson about life.


And again, that's the way thing are supposed to go.  Jesus tells us 'blessed are the peacemakers,' and that's a wonderful thing to aspire to.  The desire when approaching a situation like Tenpenny Tower is to want to make peace, to enter into this world as the savior of the wastes, as the one who is able to
smooth out differences and disagreements, as the one who is able to make everything better and to make sure that people can both live, and prosper.  We are told that throughout the scriptures, that one's goal ought to be to encourage, to help and to change the hearts of stone of those who are resistant to the word of God.  He desires that all men be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.  Jesus tells us that there is always the chance to turn things around, to do the right thing, that nobody ought to be considered to be too far gone as long as they yet draw breath.


So you go, you talk to all the residents of Tenpenny Tower, you discuss their dreadfully bigotry, and you convince them one by one to let the ghouls move in.  And after talking to all of them, they allow, through a great deal of conversation, the ghouls to be equal residents of the Tower.  The solution is there, and everyone is happy.  You shake hands with Roy Phillips, and walk away, safe in the knowledge that you did the right thing.

But if you go back to the tower, if you leave and then go back, you will find something strange.  The humans who lived there are nowhere to be found.  For some reason, it's all ghouls all over the place, all the time.  It's surreal, that place that was inhabited by humans is all deserted.  And this was the space in which you were sure that you smoothed things over and made it all better by talking nicely to everyone.  It is only after talking to Roy Phillips that he tells you that he and the human residents had a 'disagreement,' and that's that.  If you keep exploring the tower, you'll find where all the people went.  Their bodies are all crammed into basement storage.


After all your effort of trying to make sure that the humans and the ghouls could get along, they still don't.  Someone's still going to die.  There will be blood in this mission.  And the saddest thing of all is that after you spend forever and ever trying to convince the humans that the ghouls are people too, that they're not bad, that they're not any different than they are, that they're safe and fair and just people, and even then, the ghouls end up slaughtering them en masse, and hiding their bodies in the basement.


Bottom line:  There is no good way to complete this quest.  It's not even like 'Wargames' where the only way to win is not to play.  If you refuse to play, if you refuse to participate, then the bigots will continue to live fat and happy in their luxury, and will be confident in their offensive oppressive nature. But if the ghouls win, the people end up dead.  Whether you kill them or someone else does, they end up dead.  And knowing that, there's not a good way to complete the task so that everyone prospers. Someone will lose, someone will die.


As a Christian, this is the hardest decision that there was to make, because I felt personally responsible for the outcome.  I wanted to do the right thing, I wanted to do what was good and proper, I wanted the bigots to change their minds, and for them to live side by side with the ghouls, and it didn't happen.  And so the question is, how much responsibility do you bear for the decisions of other people?


This is something that Christians need to consider.  Your issues are your issues only.  Your decisions are your decisions only.  That whole proverb that tells you that you can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink, that's true.    You can make all the correct decisions you want, you can bring people together, but it's not up to you to live their lives for them.   You can do all you want to give them the best information possible, to make it so that they would make good quality decisions, you can discuss things with them, you can help them to see how things ought to be, but you can't take full responsibility for what they do.  That's not your call to make.


This is one of the most difficult of all Christian teachings to deal with and to bear, that you are just responsible for your own morality.  You can call out and punish evil, you can look evil right in the face and call it out for what it is, you can present people with all the morality you have, but their decisions
are ultimately up to them.  Each one should bear his own load.  This is what separates, or should separate, a Christian nation from a 'Christian' nation.  The first is the one in which the majority of people internalize, live out Christian principles.  The second is one in which the government will or will not allow individuals to do things based on a perception of Christian principles.  You see, the Bible says that you shall not kill, and it's right to do so.  No murder.  But you can't kill people based on future murder that they might commit. You can't pre-emptively pull a minority report and assume that you know who will or will not turn on their fellow man.


Ultimately, what Tenepenny Tower tells you is that you are responsible for your own actions.  If you got a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realized what had happened, it's because the game is too smart to give you a simple black and white choice, of letting you choose the good option and eschew the bad option.  Both options are bad, because both sets of people are bad.  They've all got problems.  Nobody leaves Tenpenny tower with all their morals and scruples intact.  Or if they do, then they lose all their blood.  Back in Megaton, there were good guys and bad guys.  Simms and Burke.  In Tenpenny Tower, you only have bad guys, and whichever pony you back, someone's going to do bad things.  All you can do, as the player, is to do the right thing as much as you can, and to let the consequences for that rest on those who committed the crimes.


If I had to reload the save, and start over, I would not even touch Tenpenny Tower at all.  If they want to sort this all out, they can do it on their own.  But I think I still would deal with Mr. Tenpenny myself.  He is my responsibility.



Tune in next week as we wrap up Fallout 3, talking about how to end an open world game that never ends.

Making good decisions in Fallout 3

For those of you who don't know, here is some background into the fallout series.  Some really brief background.  The nuclear war that we were all terrified was going to happen?  It happened.  October 23rd, 2077, the war began.  Most of humanity were wiped out, of course, with us still having enough nuclear weapons to wipe us all out several times over.  But there were people who survived, a generous number of whom were living in massive underground vaults, which would protect the inhabitants in case of nuclear war.  That they did, leaving the massive fireballs and nuclear fallout to reduce the world outside to essentially rubble, and leaving the people outside the vaults to either die in the conflagration, or die of radiation sickness, or turn into ghouls.  Ghouls are humans who survived the nuclear war, although not without some side effects, as they have lost their hair, their skin has decayed to make them look like walking corpses.  And most of them have turned feral.

The world outside still has the vague image of the world that was, but by the time you get to it, it's all broken.  The world that humanity made, with its humorous 1950s robots, its industry, its homes and

airplanes, it's all broken now, all smashed. The people who are left outside, they're essentially living day to day, and just trying to scrape by. There are good people and bad people, and all sorts of morally dubious people, and it is this world that you come to, and decide how you're going to play.

Now, spoiler alert, I played this wrong.  When your vault opens, and you are able to leave, you are sort of supposed to go towards the massive obvious town just past the vault.  That's the town that sprang up around the vault, hoping one day that the vault would open back up, and they'd be let it.  It was also the town built up around an unexploded bomb, Megaton.  And I gleefully walked right by it, and into the wasteland.  And yes, I got all kinds of lost, and turned around, and ended up fighting enemies way too difficult for me.  And that was fine.  But after stumbling back to the place where I was supposed to go in the first place, the moral dilemmas begin.  Because, you see, there are good and bad options available everywhere.  There are thing to do that are both right and wrong all over the place, and usually they're pretty simple to figure out.

The simplest of all happens in Megaton.  It's easy primarily because of the whole white hat black hat dichotomy that is so popular.  Let me introduce you to Mister Burke.  Here he is.  Did you notice his black hat and shifty eyes?  He is wearing a suit, has a black hat on, and is essentially offering you money to blow up the town of Megaton, killing everyone inside.  Now, this is obviously, cartoonishly evil, really.  There's no good reason to go along with his plan to murder everyone in the town by setting off the atomic bomb, but that's the offer on the table.  The only reason for blowing the town up is that Alistair Tenpenny, the ruler of nearby Tenpenny tower, thinks that it's ugly.  Yes, that the town of Megaton is a blight on the landscape.  A post-apocalyptic landscape that looks like this:

It really couldn't look any more blighted, but there we are. So you've got a guy in a black hat offering you money to blow up a town because it for some reason looks uglier than the rest of the blighted landscape, and that's the whole motivation.  And the guy that you'd have to get rid of and stand against to blow the town up is Lucas Simms, mayor and Sherriff of Megaton.  There he is in his cowboy hat and sherriff's badge, looking the part. And looking at this, it's pretty obvious which choice is the one that you're going to make with a good character, and which one you're going to make if you're trying to build up an evil character.

But one of the things Fallout does and does really well, is to be exceptionally hard.  Not hard in the sense of traditional gaming, which is to say that if you don't press buttons at the right time, then you'll die and have to start over.  No, the game is straightforward to progress in.  You have guns, mines, and a hilarious method of pressing a button to pause time and target the individual arms, legs, and torso of enemies.  They don't have that on you.  So, yes, it's a simple enough game to progress in.  What isn't simple, though, is how they set up the moral choices for you.  This moral dilemma of whether to side with Lucas Simms or Mister Burke, it should take you all of five seconds to figure out.  The good option is to side with the Sherriff, the bad option is to side with the cartoonish villain.  But the interesting thing comes up afterwards, and this is where the game shines.  

Lucas Simms is the good guy.  And as the good guy sherriff, there's a good chance that he's going to die in this exchange.  Either you'll blow him to kingdom come with the bomb, or you'll find that when you report Burke to the authorities, Burke will kill Simms before you can get a shot off on him.  Fine fine fine.  And if you tried to, or succeeded at rescuing Simms, Burke dies, the bad guy gets removed, order is restored, and all that.  But then you learn about the bobblehead.

In Fallout, you have stats.  And your base stats are pretty well set.  They don't go up that much.  You can get equipment that helps, and weapons that help, and you can wear outfits that buff you up, and take chems (drugs) to help out, but your base stats are locked for the most part.  But finding bobbleheads changes that.  If you find a bobblehead, your stats go up permanently, and it's one of the few ways to do it.  But this bobblehead is located in Lucas Simms' house.  His locked house.  His locked house that you have to break into to access.  And if you get caught picking the lock, the town will turn against you and try to kill you.  So you have to sneak in, in order to steal from the Sherriff.  

And as I say, this is where the game really shines.  It's not hard choosing sides between Simms and Burke, that part's easy as pie.  Simms is the good guy, Burke is the bad guy, and unless you're going for all out black hat bonanza, you're going to want to steer clear of siding with Burke.  But the bobblehead is something you really want.  It's sitting there, taunting you with its flexed muscles, and you know that the only way to get it is to steal it.  You can search for whatever wikis you want, but there's really no way to break into that house that is clean.  And you realize that these moral choices are muddier than you thought they were .  

Now, you may say that taking this bobblehead doesn't count as stealing, and that's true.  The game's system of Karma won't punish you for taking it directly, but it will punish you for breaking into the house, and for taking anything else in the house, even if nobody's watching.  Oh, sure, if you're really sneaky you can get into the house without anyone watching, and take things without being seen, but you'll lose karma regardless, because karma doesn't depend on who is watching.  Moral actions are not based on getting caught.  

In this sense, Luther's explanation to the commandments is important.  Martin Luther tells us that it isn't enough to not technically steal, but that we should help our neighbor to keep what is theirs, and to work hard to sustain their possessions.  Even if it's something that we want.  And this is the hard part about playing Fallout, that the big moral choices are easy to make, like whether or not to blow up a city, but the small ones are incredibly hard.  And in that way, it mirrors life.  Oh, sure the commandment to not murder is a simple one on the surface.  Don't kill people, easy peasy.  And on the surface, the commandment to not steal is easy too, but then you may ask yourself, if it's something you really want, 'would anyone notice?'  You can easily claim that nobody would see, that you could get away with it, that Simms wasn't using it anyway, and all that.  You could claim that, but every time you hear that 'you've lost karma' noise, and the little devil face shows up at the top of the screen, you know that it's not about getting caught.  It's about doing what's right.  And sometimes, and quite frequently, both in life and in Fallout, doing what's right is a lot different than doing what is easiest.

Next week, we're going to get into the hardest decision in the whole game, which has a lot to do with Tenpenny Tower.  

PJ.

ADAM and Eve's Garden. Bioshock part 3.

The names are unmistakable.  You don't call something ADAM by accident.  That happens for a reason.  ADAM, in game, is the raw, unstable stem cells that are found in sea slugs on the sea floor.  Gross, right?  But it's not just about that, because Adam is what drives the plot forward.  In the world

of Rapture, the residents have become so spliced up with ADAM that they are all addicted, and have begun to fall apart.  Their bodies and more especially their psyches are breaking down.  Most of the enemies that you face, standard enemies at least, are wearing masks leftover from celebrations, or from work.  Very few of their faces can be seen, and when they are, it is horrible to behold.  Their faces are disastrous, holdovers from horrible splicing accidents in which people got so hooked on modifying their own genes that they couldn't stop.  And if ADAM is the raw form of the sea slug stem cells, then EVE is the power that drives it.  The ammunition for your plasmids is known as EVE, a blue syringe that you inject into your wrist to power your plasmid weapons.

ADAM and EVE. You'd have to be napping to miss that this is a Biblical reference, a direct one, but what is it saying to us?  Well, to begin with, it's talking about creation, really.  About remaking creation, and starting again.  

Remember the story of the flood?  Sure you do.  When big budget Noah and his Darren Aaronofsky family drifted away in a CGI Ark (I haven't seen the movie yet, so be nice) and took two of every kind of animal on board?   Well, creation started again after that flood, what with all the animals having to get to work to repopulate, and what with all the human beings having to do what human beings do to repopulate.  But when God either made people in the garden of Eden, or when he saved them through the Ark, he told them to be fruitful and multiply, because they were made in the image of God.  

Well, imagine if you had the chance to improve on that design.  Imagine for a moment if you had the ability to improve on what God had given to you as a human being, and you had the chance to augment yourself.  That's the essential plot of Deus Ex (which we will get to, promise), that there are choices out there to improve on God's design, and to make something new, and perhaps better. The slogan of the plasmid advertisements is 'EVOLVE TODAY,' giving the not so subtle promise that evolution, the system that makes you faster, taller, stronger over thousands of generations, is available to you all at once, all in one injection.  

The allure of ADAM in Bioshock is that it rewrites your genes, and makes you stronger, faster, more dangerous. It gives you superhuman powers, lets you freeze your foes, trap enemies, use telekenesis, and much much more.  In other words, it takes the human, and makes it superhuman.  But at a terrible cost.

What you realize when you walk around the ruined city that is Rapture, is that if there ever was any Rapture in that city, it was a long time ago.  Given the ability to remake creation exactly as we want, given the power and authority to reach into creation and remake ourselves into what we would want to be, we can't stop.  The collapse of the city is neatly summed up in the idea that ADAM is what everyone wants, but only as a means to an end.  The end being human, even superhuman perfection.  But as people kept on swapping parts in and out, as they kept on modifying themselves to make themselves greater, better, faster, something happened, which should have been obvious.  They became less human.  I know, who would have thought that spurning your humanity would make you less human, but here we are.  And as they became less human in appearance, their personalities degenerated as well, and they became monsters, only living to modify themselves again.  And so they all wear masks, to hide what they've all become, and even as they know that they're ashamed of what they're turning into, they can't seem to stop.

So, why are you wearing a mask?  Not a real one, obvy, but a spiritual, moral, ethical mask.  Why are you wearing it?  What are you hiding.  

The people loved darkness rather than light for their deeds were evil.

People have been falling short of God's glory for quite a while, and this is no exception.  The further you fall, the more you have to cover and hide.  And the funny thing is, most of our falling from grace was done to improve ourselves, it was done to make us better, it was done so that we might be more than we are.  Our sins are usually committed for our own benefit, because we feel as though that will make us better.  and you know, it usually doesn't.  We do so many things to try to improve on God's design for our lives, what he would have us do.  We add more rules, we add more ethics, we bend his rules, we decide to break them, and as that goes on, we add more and more and more, and we can't seem to stop ourselves, until one day we wake up, and realize that we can't let anyone see us the way we are.  This goes double for those of us in the church, because Christians can't EVER let other Christians see them for who they are.  The level of scandal attached to that would be immense and intense.  Your only hope as a Christian is to hope that none of the other Christians around you ever figure out what you have turned into.  And so We all wear masks, and the longer you wear masks, the more difficult it is to take them off and walk away.  

The beginning of the Christian walk, though, is understanding that although you wear a mask, although you love darkness so that nobody can see your deeds, they're still obvious as all get out.  Everyone knows.  Your mask is not convincing at all.  It sticks out a mile.  From the very beginning of Bioshock, the very first splicer you see is obviously not a normal person, and none of them are.  The mask can cover the face, but it can't cover that the face is messed up, and needs help.  The Christian experience is predicated on the notion that you can't hide your sin behind a mask. Not only can your peers tell, but Jesus can tell.  And what he wants to give you is not a new mask, but to restore your face to the point that you won't need a mask anymore.  

And that was the one thing that the splicers couldn't have.  They couldn't go back, they couldn't go back to be human again.  Every new splice drove them further and further down the pit, and further away from what they desperately wanted after a while, just to be normal. Just to be human.

This is where the story of Bioshock turns around a human element.  ADAM and EVE work together to create a new world, in which you're not bound by anything, no laws, no rules, no morality, and no limits on what you can do to yourself.  You can be whatever you want to be.  And the following of ADAM, of the old Adam, always leads to the same path.  If you can choose whatever you want, you habitually choose nonsense.  If you've ever wondered (and you probably haven't) about the old Norse gods, the old Greek or Roman gods, whoever was in the pantheon, you'll find that they are just human beings writ large. The gods of the ancient world were capricious and rude; dangerous as enemies, and perhaps even more dangerous as friends.  When the ancient people sat down and mused on the possible personalities of the gods, they did so imagining what they would be like if they had unlimited power and could not die.  How would they behave? What would they get up to?

By the time that these things were fully thought out, the only conclusion was that if you had unlimited power, then you'd use it to make incredibly bad decisions.  You'd use it to be a monster in your own world.  And that's what we see happening in Rapture.  All the good intentions, the possible uses for Incinerate, Electro Bolt, Telekenesis, the ads that talk about how they'd be useful for household chores, but the power corrupts, and turns the users into monsters.

So the Christian story isn't one of improvement, so much as it is a story about resurrection, and reformation.  The central thesis of the Christian faith is that Jesus lived, died, and rose again, and in rising again, restored us to righteousness with God.  What does that mean? That means that we are not being re-created, we are being restored to the way things ought to be.  The sin in our lives is a major issue, and it is what Jesus promises to take away, and does so.  In doing so, he doesn't take the human and make it superhuman, he takes the subhuman, the broken, the corrupt, the smashed, and makes it fully and completely human again. Heaven isn't a promise of something magical, something superhuman, but the promise of a restoration to the way things should be.  The Bible ends with a discussion of a new heaven and a new earth, in which people are placed, as they were in the beginning.  A restoration to the way things should be, a restoration to what is good and right.

The final moment of the game, the ending, deserves a mention.  People didn't really like it, and I can understand why.  It seemed like kind of a letdown, but here we go.  The game ends with Jack, the protagonist, returning to the surface, and the type of ending you get is dictated by how you treated the little sisters in the game.  Did you harvest them, or did you save them?  If you saved them, you get the good ending, in which you raise them as daughters, and they achieve normal human lives.  If you harvested them, then you find a sub full of nuclear weapons, and threaten to blow up the world.  That's it, there's really no middle ground.  If you chose to harvest / kill the vast majority of the little sisters, the voiceover will be angry.  If you saved most, but killed many, then you will get a sad voiceover.  But hidden in there is something notable - you are allowed one kill.  If you are moving through Rapture, and you kill the first little sister you find (or the second, or tenth, but it's usually the first), but rescue the rest, you can still get the good ending.  Because there is, in the game, a chance for repentance.  You can live through doing something horrible, and change your mind, be shocked by your own callousness, and repent, and turn from your sin, and still be welcomed into post-game paradise.  The game really only lets you fail if you stop caring, and if you see the weak and helpless as a means to your ends.

Thanks for reading.  Tune in next week for Fallout 3, and moral dilemmas in games.