bioshock

No Gods or Kings: Objectivism in BioShock

By: Brian Crecente

The sunken city of Rapture, a world of art deco aesthetics, neon sales pitches and looming architecture, is home to more than just murderous splicers and lumbering Big Daddys, it's also a surprising breeding ground for introspection.

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.

"My son has to find his own way in life," he said. "There are certain games I wouldn't want him to play, like Grand Theft Auto, games that celebrate criminality. But a game that might lead him to think and have him challenge his ideas, I'm fine with.

"Luckily for me he doesn't agree with the game, he still seems to believe in objectivism"

Objectivism as a central theme in BioShock was actually the result of a confluence of ideas and happenstance. The heart of the game started, as do most of Ken Levine's games, as the answer to a problem.

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mobile gaming

iD Consummates Mobile Marriage

iD Software has announced a partnership with Fountainhead Entertainment to create a new mobile games division, iD Mobile. Id and Fountainhead had previously worked together on Doom RPG and Orcs & Elves.

Carmack comments, "We are operating on the assumption that mobile gaming has a potential for huge growth," but one can't help but wonder how much of the success of iD's mobile games (together Doom RPG and Orcs & Elves have sold around 1.5 million copies) has to do with iD's name and not with actual marketplace growth. In any case, iD Mobile certainly demonstrates that iD plans to do this for the long haul.

Id takes its gaming Mobile [USA Today]

vacation

Carmack Codes On Honeymoon, And Every Vacation

John Carmack is one of those legendary industry legends who is known because he's ubertalented, but even more importantly, ubercrazy. Fellow id vet/wife Anna Kang fills us in on Carmack's exact level of geekdom:

The really funny thing is, for our honeymoon we had to ship two computers to the hotel so that he could work! It's one of the endearing parts about it. He can't be without his computer, because he just loves to code, so he must code every single day!

But this wasn't just an isolated incident. More »

gc07

Orcs & Elves DS Hands-On Impressions

Maybe mobile gaming isn't that bad. The id Software port of its Orcs & Elves dungeon crawler, born on the mobile platform now on the Nintendo DS, may force me to reevaluate playing games on my cell phone. After getting what I thought was a second string hands-on assignment from Crecente, I realized that I'm more into first person dungeon crawling RPGs than I had originally thought. Having experienced only a handful over my amateur gaming career—Shining In The Darkness, Phantasy Star, and a handful on Texas Instrument computers whose titles escape me—I realized that a straightforward dungeon hack might be just what I'm looking for next on the Nintendo DS. More »