BioShock: Evolving Past the Apocalyptic?

I recently had (or am currently having) a discussion with Jim Groom, a former Tech Fellow who is now an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington. He wrote a post on his blog about two rare Atari video games based on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween horror movies and how, when they were distributed 25 years ago, their violence (however lo-fi) caused enough of an uproar that they were pulled from shelves. It struck me that the games and the movies -- and the reaction to them -- had something to do with apocalyptic thought.

I recommend clicking here to read the original blog post and conversation about videogames and apocalyptic thought. In part of his response, Jim mentioned a newer game called BioShock, which is billed as a philosophically sophisticated game whose results depend on the player's moral decisions. It's set in 1960 (height of the Cold War) in a post-cataclysmic, underwater city created after WWII and called Rapture. There's a group of characters called the Little Sisters, whom you can either save or harvest (kill); both methods work to your advantage in different ways. The game was programmed with two different endings. If you save all the Little Sisters, you get to see them grow up and have productive, happy lives, and they all return to comfort you on your deathbed (patriarchy, anyone?). If you destroy them all, then the Slicers (the minions of the Enemy) overtake a nuclear submarine, implying a threat to end the rest of the world. What I don't understand is the ending. According to the wiki page, the Slicers overtake the sub no matter which outcome you achieve -- it's just that the narrator relates the events in an angrier voice if you kill the Little Sisters instead of saving them.

I don't know. Based on the description of the game -- I haven't played it -- it still seems to have a binary moral structure with only two possible outcomes. You can either bring the Little Sisters to the "in" group and "save" them, or you can eradicate them by turning them to the "other". I stress the phrase possible outcome, since it's not clear just what the outcome is, given that the Slicers perform the same feat at the end. Does the game thereby explore the question of whether free will and morality can exist in a deterministic world? Or does it perhaps negate the notion that what we do matters, since the particulars of the end are inevitable? And if the narrator’s voice (the voice of moral conscience?) relates the same story, just with an angrier tone if you eradicated the Little Sisters, what does that say about the locus of moral agency?

[added later: While setting up my coffee machine just now, it occurred to me that perhaps the way to make a true philosophically and morally sophisticated videogame would be either: (1) to create a variety of endings that reflect the complexity of the moral choices made over the entire course of gameplay or, since that would still be highly deterministic, (2) to hire a philosopher like Daniel to devise a sophisticated and cool moral-philosophical algorithm that dynamically generates an outcome based on some set of moral attributes of gameplay. Then the game really does become a play-object, and also possibly a literary one that merits repeated readings.]

Since I haven't played BioShock, I really can't comment on how these questions would be answered by the particulars. If I had time, I'd love to get my Structuralist hooks into that game. Have any of you played it?

By the way, I'm sure Jim would love it if some you jumped in on the commentary beneath his post.