Rapture is only the beginning

‘Who is John Galt?’. With this immortal query and the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world-and did, Ayn Rand found the perfect artistic form to express her vision of existence, a philosophy known as Objectivism, which turned out to be the 1957 novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’. The freedom to express one’s qualities and the proper moral purpose of one’s life being the pursuit of one’s own happiness. Not punishing, but rewarding a man for his skills. Such a world, Ayn Rand found, was the perfect world, and as most perfect worlds are, an impossible one. A utopia.

Three years after the release of ‘Atlas Shrugged’, a plane crashed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a few hundreds of miles south-west of Iceland. All the passengers died but one man. This man went down into the dark depths of the sea where he found Rapture, a sub-aquatic elysium created and envisioned by Andrew Ryan, the eventual fusion of reality and fiction. A man who thought, just like his real female counterpart, that a man should be entitled by the sweat of his brow. A man who thought that the current world could not hold place for such a world, such a society that he imagined. He built a city that was not a collection of buildings, but a spectrum of ideas, ideas that turned out to be nothing more than a utopia, just like the Ayn Rand envisioned. A utopia that turned out to be Rapture, the most horrible place on earth and underneath it.

In 2007, 2K Games released Bioshock, a game that would live to be more than just a First-Person Shooter, it would be regarded as an idea. With its utopian architecture, and with as an initial concept Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, Rapture was the ultimate playing ground for gamers who wanted more out of their virtual worlds than just enough places to hide in and shoot from. In the first Bioshock, players explored the vast depths of the sea, surrounded by the squeaking windows and rattling floor-boards of Rapture, travelling to places like Fort Frolic (that will always be remembered as one of the greatest gaming moments of our time) and Arcadia. It was the consensus that Bioshock was not only a great story of an idea that turned out to be one’s downfall, but also a story of betrayal and freedom (or not), which, as most critics agreed one, was one of the most innovative and influential stories ever to be written for a videogame.

When in 2008, 2K Games announced that they were working on the sequel to Bioshock and that it would be released in 2010. While the rumor mills were spinning loudly, gamers all over the world talked about what was the most important question of all. How can one make a sequel to an almost-perfect game. A game that, as message boards all over the internet shouted, did not need a sequel.

However, after the release of Bioshock 2, on February 9, 2010, gamers all over the world dove down into the dark depths of the Atlantic Ocean to the utopian city of Rapture once again, this time as a Big Daddy. On the fateful night in 1958, the beginning of the end, as one might say, the Big Daddy known as Project Delta is forced to commit suicide by the hands of Sophia Lamb, the mother of Eleanor Lamb, your Little Sister. When you wake up 10 years later, it’s your duty to get back to Eleanor and save her from her mother’s protection for you cannot survive without her, for unless he reunites with her, a fail-safe will trigger which will put him into a coma.

In the years of Project Delta’s absence, Sophia Lamb has taken over Rapture through a cult called The Family. Lamb, being the entire opposite of Andrew Ryan in all her beliefs and philosophies, saw the death of Andrew Ryan by the hands of his own son (which you witnessed in the first game) as a gift from God. She took over Rapture and sent the now-older Little Sisters as newly-designed Big Sisters to the surface to kidnap little girls from all around to the world. At this exact moment, Project Delta wakes up. Through visions of Eleanor, the player will explore all-new parts of Rapture in search of his daughter, while dealing with members of ‘The Family’.

Standing in the shoes of a Big Daddy is one of the most paradoxical situations I have been in. While Big Daddies seem almost invincible, if we look at the battles in the previous game, Project Delta seems as weak as Jack was in the first Bioshock. However, when the player Big Daddy gets out his giant drill and rips open an annoying splicer’s ribcase, it’s hard not to feel excited. The feeling of enormous strength and power, while also sensing the inevitable danger of Rapture that you definitely should be afraid of, is in a sense that what Bioshock 2 is grounded upon.

Just like in the first Bioshock, players have access to not only a large collection of Art Deco-styled weaponry, but also a vast selection of so-called plasmids. These plasmids range from simple fire bolts, that seem to just have come strolling from an Oblivion-type game, to the brilliant Telekinesis, which pulls pretty much everything in sight, ranging from a corpse to a hat, right up to the player to use against Rapture’s most gruesome inhabitants. This time around, the plasmids are upgradeable, just like the weapons are, which makes for some strategic choices in terms of the kinds of splicers you will encounter and what kind of environments you will encounter them in.

Being a Big Daddy, one of your duties is to take care of Rapture’s Little Sisters. While in the first game there was a choice of either harvesting or rescuing them, now the player can still harvest the Little Sisters, but you can also put her on your back and bring her to the nearest vent or letting her actually collect ADAM. This, though, is not an easy task. It consists of a few parts, first of which is to actually find a body with enough ADAM to harvest. When the body is found and the Little Sisters is harvesting the ADAM, the player Big Daddy has to protect her from the incoming splicers that try to protect their dead friend. This can at times be quite hard, but nevertheless fun, for it brings some challenge to the table that both Bioshock and Bioshock 2 at times lack.

Bioshock 2 is in no way as innovative as the first game was, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t brilliant. The story, graphics and sound (which is brilliant, not only because of the perfect sound effects but also because of the amazing score by Gary Schymann) are as good as in the first game. While Rapture’s second story has a bit of a struggle to pick up pace, when it does, it is gaming-wise pretty much the best thing out there. The last two hours are two of the most exciting and impressive sixty minutes I have ever experienced in my life and the game’s finale, as opposed the horrible boss-battle from the first game, is one of the most beautifully crafted interactive moments I have ever had the pleasure of playing. Bioshock has always been more than a game, with questions that outgrew the boundaries of gaming stories, by bringing up questions about love, death and sacrifice.

When Ayn Rand wrote ‘Atlas Shrugged’, she knew that the world she was describing was unable to ever exist. We can only wonder if Andrew Ryan was aware of this as well. Maybe he knew that all of this was coming, that his perfect empire was soon to be crumbling down. But maybe he also knew that Rapture was a gift, not only to his inhabitants, but also to us, players of this wonderful saga. See, though Rapture might have been a utopia, Bioshock certainly is not. Bioshock is everything a game should and can be. Though the perfect world itself cannot exist, images of the world can, and that is why I think 2K Games has all the right to be proud. Bioshock might just be the perfect tribute to Ayn Rand and for that we should be thankful.

Innervisions of a Higher Ground

I believe that Stevie Wonder is the greatest artist of all time.

There, I said it. The word is out. Many will disagree with me. Many will say that most of his songs are too alike, that it’s just music and isn’t ‘deep’ enough. Many will say that ‘X’ or ‘Y’ are better than Stevie Wonder for they had a bigger impact on music in general.

A few years ago, I think when I was 14 or 15, I decided to buy a Stevie Wonder album. I knew a few of his songs, like “Isn’t She Lovely” and “I Wish”, but that was pretty much it. Of all the albums I could’ve chosen, I bought Songs In The Key Of Life, his 1976 album that changed the face of music forever. I don’t think there was a better album for me to buy at the time, for I already knew two songs and on the album were a lot of songs that I knew, but where I wasn’t aware of the fact that they were, in fact, by Stevie Wonder. “Sir Duke”, “I Wish”, “Isn’t She Lovely”, “As”, “Another Star”, “Pastime Paradise” and “Knocks Me Off My Feet”. I knew all of these songs, but I just didn’t connect them in my mind to the artist Stevie Wonder.

A month after buying Songs In The Key Of Life, I went back to the record store. I went to the, as I called it, Stevie Wonder section, and flipped through the albums. Because I knew none, I decided to just go with the album cover that I thought looked best, which turned out to be Innervisions. Innervisions is arguably Stevie Wonder’s best album. It was his first album that consisted almost entirely of songs that featured social commentary. A prime example was the mega-hit “Higher Ground” which, as you would know if you would read the lyrics, was more a message to the leaders of our countries than a song by itself. “Higher Ground” I also knew, but I wasn’t aware that it was a Stevie Wonder song. The same goes for “He’s Misstra Know-It-All” and “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing”. The great thing about Innervisions, apart from being such an influential album, is that it’s one the prime examples of Stevie Wonder as a brilliant musician. In most of the songs, Stevie Wonder played all of the instruments, except maybe one or two, which was often the guitar. He played the percussion, piano, he did the vocals and backing vocals. He crafted every song as carefully as he did the other and that’s why every single song on the album was a success.

Three days after the release of Innervisions in 1973, Stevie had an almost-fatal car accident. A log from a truck crashed through the windshield of car he was in, while he was sleeping, and sailed squarely into his forehead. After that he was in a coma for ten days. During the coma, everyone was afraid that even if he woke up, there would be a chance that he would’ve lost all of his musical faculty. The first few days, Stevie did not move nor react to anything people around him did, until a faithful day when his friend, John Harris, who knew that Stevie liked listening to loud music, sang “Higher Ground” into his ear. He noticed that Stevie’s fingers were playing along and that was when he knew that everything was going to be alright. When Stevie Wonder woke up, he found out that he lost all sense of smell and taste, which he never recovered, and feared, just like everyone else did, that he lost his ability to play music and sing. His tour director brought a clavinet, one of Stevie’s favourite instruments, to the hospital. Stevie only looked at it, he was afraid of touching it, for then there was a chance he’d find out that he couldn’t do it anymore. When he finally did reach out and played the intro to “Higher Ground”, he smiled like nobody had ever seen him smile before.

The reason why I tell you this is to illustrate what a spiritual being Stevie Wonder actually is. The accident, which he believed was an act of God, made him only stronger in the sense that he knew he was granted a second chance and decided that this was a sign for him to do something or to do more, which he did. When I went to see him a month ago in Rotterdam, during the North Sea Jazz Festival, he talked about apartheid, about handicapped people, about how we should help everybody in the world, about the United People Of The World, how we are all on this planet together and that we should care for it and for eachother. Although I don’t know him personally, I think Stevie Wonder is the only artist I would hug when I would meet him in person. He is the kindest human being I have ever witnessed and when he shouts to the audience ‘I love you!’, you know that he means it, and that he truly loves every single person standing in that gigantic crowd.

When you turn on the radio, there is a good chance you will hear at least one Stevie Wonder song each day. While it may be a cover of one of his songs or the original version, you can bet it’s written by Stevie for he has written more than ninety percent of his songs by himself. That may be why some people say that his music is too much alike. Those people should listen to albums like Characters, Where I’m Coming From or Conversation Peace. Those are just a few that illustrate that there is also a lot of diversity in Stevie’s songs, but that it’s mostly the fault of the audience listening to a lot of the same kind of songs that make people think his songs are alike.

When I was on that North Sea Jazz Festival, and Stevie entered the stage, I entered another world. A world which I didn’t leave for about two hours. It was a world where there was someone on a stage, that played his music only for me, for my ears. He taught me of love and how to live life to the fullest. Everyone must’ve felt that way. Stevie left us with a thought, one that I will leave you with today as well;

‘Use your heart to love somebody, and if your heart is big enough, use it to love everybody.’

Inner Child

Today a friend said something that kept floating in my mind for the entire day. Me and another friend were discussing comic books, when she said the following:

‘I don’t read comic books anymore. You shouldn’t read them. You should grow up.’

I am now 18, turning 19 in less than a month and I still read comics. Not a lot of them, really. I still get the Donald Duck every week and I recently read the Watchmen and V for Vendetta graphic novels and I want to expand on this collection a bit with a few Batman comics. I also love Pixar movies, play videogames and build LEGO. And I love it, all of it.

What she doesn’t understand is this: you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy feeling like one. In my normal behavior I am quite grown-up, I hang out with friends, get a drink somewhere, go to clubs, all the things you do when you’re my age. This doesn’t mean, though, that after you’ve passed a certain invisible barrier, you cannot enjoy things you liked as a kid anymore. Another friend, who is even a few years younger than me says the same thing, that certain things are for kids and after a certain age you shouldn’t play with or watch them anymore. How wrong is she?

Fact: nearly 80% of the adult Toy Story 3 viewers cried during the movie. Another fact: nearly 70% of the Toy Story 3 viewers was actually an adult. The average age of the average gamer is 32. The number one reason to buy LEGO for your kids is to build it yourself. People who say that all these things are for kids and are not supposed to be dealt with after a certain age are not only wrong, they are missing out on a lot of treats of life.

What do they enjoy themselves with then? ‘Adult’ movies (not those kind of adult movies, you dirty, dirty reader), books (I know for a fact they don’t read a lot of books) or what? The one doesn’t rule out the other, in the sense that I spend a lot of time with my friends but also love a healthy bit of LEGOïng.

It is characteristic for a young child to act like they’re all grown-up. More so than their friends. They find that they’re too old for things, like role-playing with their friends or climbing in trees. The people that criticized me on my love for aforementioned things are the kids themselves. They find that they’re too adult for ‘kiddy’ things. I can only hope that once they see that they’re missing out on a lot of joy, they will too accept that it’s better to have an inner child, that keeps you young, than to turn sour by their adult standards.