Bioshock and FPS Violence

This week, we talked in class about games like Bioshock and Gone Home from the perspective of control. While we thoroughly explored the first-person shooter genre as a way of creating control and mastery for the player, we only touched on one of the most frequent contexts in which first-person shooters are discussed: violence. While Gone Home is devoid of physical violence, Bioshock is arguably the type of game that glorifies it. The main moral choices of the game are based around the decision to be non-violent towards the little sisters, but outside of those moments the player is shooting their way through a world that presents few other options on how to proceed.

However, I would argue that Bioshock presents a more complex and nuanced idea of violence than the stereotypical first person shooter. (This argument comes with the caveat that, as the genre as a whole isn’t my favorite, I’ve only played a few other fps games, and few of them fully.) Bioshock’s world of Rapture is a world experienced primarily through violence, but the game both seems to de-glorify the actions of violence itself and offers several moral tiers of violent action in order to provide a more thought-provoking portrayal of violence in a video game context.

We continually referred to Bioshock in class as fps, and this is the primary mode of play. But it isn’t the only mode- the player’s first weapon is a wrench. The wrench itself is a good weapon from the start in-game. I would argue it’s even superior to the pistol which replaces it; the pistol uses ammo, has a small clip size and a medium reload time, and is hard to aim. The game supports the use of the wrench as a valid weapon by providing tonics like Wrench Jockey that support both wrench use and close combat. The downside to the wrench is that violence using it has a sort of physicality and visceral nature that gun violence lacks. When you fire a gun in Bioshock, there’s some kickback and the sound of shots, but the gore and consequences are far from the player. With the wrench, the consequences of violent action happen mere feet and inches from the player’s camera/eye. By encouraging wrench usage, Bioshock makes glorifying violence more difficult by making its consequences unavoidable.

Bioshock also provides moral tiers into which its violence falls, forcing the player to think more carefully about when it is appropriate to be violent in game and what the consequences of any particular attack might be. The most basic level of in-game violence is attacking splicers. Splicers are constantly aggressive- if one sees the player, they attack immediately. It’s not hard to justify this sort of violence in-game, as it basically amounts to self-defense. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the choice of whether or not to spare little sisters. The game forces the player into an obvious choice between violence and increased resources or mercy and fewer resources. The brutal imagery that accompanies harvesting a little sister makes it clear that violence, though central to the game, is not universally glorified. Between these extremes lies the act of violence against a Big Daddy. Unlike splicers, Big Daddies aren’t aggressive unless attacked. The results of violence in this case are less clear cut: Big Daddies carry lots of money, but if left alive they will often lead the player to little sisters. This less forced dilemma over violent behavior prompts the player to consider the mechanics and consequences of violence more deeply than the usual FPS game.