"no gods or kings. only man."
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"No Gods or Kings. Only Man."• I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man
not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
• Rapture is an underground city founded in 1946 and strives for a utopian ideal based on individuality unrestrained by government, religion, or any other higher-power entity. With scientists, artists and everyone alike unrestrained, the city flourishes until Man gains too much power and becomes a tyrant itself.
A Modern Game in a Past ContextAside from an artistic move, the fact that the writer chooses to place the setting of the video game in the past (1960’s exploring a city founded in 1946) first of all emphasizes the rapid progress that was made in a short time period while the rest of the world was far, far behind. Second of all, it shows how progress can deteriorate just as rapidly as it was made. This point is made with the nature of Adam (which is what allows genetic modification) and shows how the very thing that allowed society to progress is also what destroyed it:Adam acts like a benign cancer, destroying native cells and replacing them with unstable stem versions. While this very instability is what gives it its amazing properties, it is also what causes the cosmetic and mental damage. You need more and more Adam just to keep back the tide.”
-TenenbaumAnd of course, because Adam comes from a sea creature, it is not an unlimited resource. At this point, Rapture slides down the slope toward extreme dystopia.
Moral Decisions as a Player
As a player, you are faced with this experience of gaining more power at the expense of morality. As a person in this modern world, the consideration one takes into actually harvesting a small child illustrates the frailty of ones own morals when placed into a different context. Nonetheless, many people choose to rescue the little sisters and are rewarded for it in the end. Video games as a type of fiction where the decisions of a player are reflected in what happens in the narrative gives the player this same amount of control and freewill, or at least the illusion of it, that Rapture stands for.
FreewillIf we were to modify the structure of our commercial plasmid line... to have them make the user vulnerable to mental suggestion through pheromones, would we not be able to effectively control the actions of the citizens of Rapture? Free will is the cornerstone of this city. The thought of sacrificing it is abhorrent. However... we are indeed in a time of war. If Atlas and his bandits have their way, will they not turn us into slaves? And what will become of freewill then? Desperate times call for desperate measures.-Andrew Ryan
Freewill
Freewill is the foundation of Rapture, and since man is completely unbound, technology flourishes for a while and people have access to genetic technology that essentially granted them super-human abilities. Yet this power caused man to become a tyrant in and of himself and the society collapses under its own ambitions. Andrew Ryan attempts to maintain this ideal of freewill by taking that very thing away. "Smugglers", or people who communicated with the surface countries, are sentenced to the death penalty and Andrew Ryan simply states that "a few stretched necks are a small price to pay for our ideals."
Freedom is Slavery
So Andrew Ryan gains too much power and goes against his own ideals to try and control everything. In a sense, he himself is no longer master, but a slave to his own ideals. This is also the case for those scientists and artists who have come to Rapture seeking freedom. If someone is not a slave to someone else, they are a slave to their own mind, their own idea of perfection:I am beautiful, yes. Look at me, what could I do to make my features finer? With Adam and my scalpel, I have been transformed. But is there not something better? What if now it is not my skill that fails me… but my imagination?
-Steinman
You choose whether to rescue or harvest little sisters and your decisions affect what happens in the game. In fact, everything you do controls aspects of the game, like where you will run into opponents or other sisters. You can choose how to upgrade your weapons optimally and what plasmids and other genetic modifications you will have and how you will use them. As a player, you have control, you have decision-making power, you have freewill. Or at least that’s what you think…
When the player faces Andrew Ryan for the first time, Ryan reveals the player’s true nature. You find out that you’re “a genetically designed monster programmed by Fontaine for the task of seizing control of the city.” Furthermore, the simple phrase, “Would you kindly,” is a trigger to make you do anything. This puts you, as the player, at the same level of all those big daddies, little sisters, and splicers that you somehow set yourself apart from. Indeed, you are just a slave with the mere illusion of freewill.
Illusion of Control and Freewill as Player
What this all means in relation to Diversity
• The death penalty for smugglers shows that there’s no room for diversity, i.e. no room for anything Andrew Ryan doesn’t agree with, no room for other perspectives. Although it seems like diversity would flourish in a society where people are supposed to have the freedom to be whatever they want to be, this intense self-interest is actually what destroys diversity. The strong, composed of a few people, take over the weak, composed of the majority, and since the strong got to where they are by following their own self-interest, they are not about to try and understand anything that is different from their own views. The weak, the vast majority of Rapture’s citizens, all amount to the same thing—slaves.
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Universalism
• You run into multiple characters in the game who are striving to fulfill some sort of universal perfection. For Ryan, it’s his political ideology. For Steinman, it’s an aesthetic ideal. For Cohen, it’s a masterpiece of art that ends up being composed of dead bodies. Perhaps the point is, then, that this search for a universal ideal is in our human nature. Despite this, the search becomes endless and turns to insanity because there’s no possibility of reaching any universal ideal, at least that’s what’s illustrated in the downfall of Rapture.