A Mother and Her Gun: Trust in BioShock

Entering the world of BioShock, you are alone, confused, and scared for your life. You’ve just seen a deranged looking man kill someone who was begging for their life, and then attempt to break into your sub and assumedly kill you too. Your one potential ally is a simple voice over a radio and you follow them blindly just to survive. Your adrenaline is high and you’re suddenly blasting lightning from your fingertips. But regardless of all the action, you have a lot of questions… and you start to wonder who you can trust.

As it is later revealed, the voice on the radio is actually Fontaine dictating your actions and taking advantage of you. If at any time you trusted that seemingly helpful and knowledgeable voice on the radio, you were betrayed. Yet, the game supplies plenty of opportunities to break down your trust in surface level details. To delve into this, I want to discuss a particular enemy during the beginning stages of the game, the mother next to the baby carriage.

This enemy comes soon after gaining lightning abilities and hearing about how the radio voice, Atlas, wants you to bring his family to safety. The player steps out an elevator and hears crooning in a tunnel, along with the shadow of a woman over a baby carriage. Life has taught us that a baby carriage signifies a baby, and that the woman is probably a mother talking to her child. The woman’s mutterings about mommy and her precious darling solidify that idea, leaving the player with a choice. Do they attack the mother, committing an act that is objectively terrible, or do they just try and run past. The beauty of this choice is that the carriage does not contain a baby… it contains a loaded pistol. If the player trusts that the women is just an innocent, albeit suspicious-looking, mother, they get attacked and decide to be less trusting of future game characters/enemies. If the player chooses to attack the woman, any guilt they have is immediately stripped away and turned into relief when they peer into the carriage. They feel justified in their pre-emptive strike and justified in their lack of trust, after all, it just saved them.

Whether you trust someone factors a lot into the choices you make regarding him or her. In a game that stresses the importance of choice, (famously: “a man chooses, a slave obeys”) trust can play an important role in determining your decision. By creating situations that erode the player’s trust in everything around them, BioShock is creates a mentality that leans towards “kill first, trust after.” And it is Atlas, your “master” in a sense, that tells you to kill.