BIOSHOCKS 1+2
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Both of which were fantastic video games, and certainly both great examples of finely engineered Neuro-Linguistic-Programming in action, blending symbols and associations in such a way as to presumably achieve a desired effect in the player
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Maybe to elevate him from the status of mindless splicer, and yes clearly most “gamers” are definitely mindless trained animals, to a Daughter of Sofia, so to speak, endowed with free will and lucid self awareness
Or maybe the programmers are writing off the majority of the gaming public as lost causes and letting them do their robotic plebian thing, and the games’ real target audience were those of us already enriched by the uh, Akashic Records, minds strangled with information and laws, perhaps hoping that the lethal subconscious lessons hidden in the subtext will slice through the mental chains that bind us enabling us to move freely in this machine language world, past the impossible pessimism and horror that the truly logical and rational mind can never really quite shake off
OR, and this is the possibility that has me buggin’, the games are a kind of Honey Trap for the free thinking mind, a digital O’Brien leading us further into this nearly infintely large (and growing every day) mind maze, perpetually categorizing and defining even more twisty corridors to get distracted down, designed to strip the searcher of conscience and consciousness so that those of us clever and unfortunate enough to fall through the cracks during the usual conditioning get utterly wiped of ego so that we don’t accidentally or purposely rock the boat and endanger the integrity of The System, always in a transitional stage yet designed to be static for eternity
You know, the gamer as a captive audience, totally unaware that a few variables and values and bits in his mind are being tweaked and rewritten here and there, a few drives and desires imperceptibly altered, leaving the gamer thinking only “fuckin game was badass dude, shit was awesome you gotta get it”
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and i’m not even stoned :((
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Also i’m not sure which of the game’s freudian nightmares it is that I… inexplicably relate to more…
Bioshock 1’s “The bastard son of a brilliant robber baron/dictator and a whore, spirited away to a behavioral training laboratory at birth to avoid scandal, where he is mentally engineered to be a mindless remote control zombie slave, where he is of course stolen and utilized by a sleeper cell crime element to murder his father and overthrow the empire only to eventually develop consciousness and defy his programmers to plunge the utopia into apocalyptic cataclysm.”
or
Bioshock 2’s “Genius Savant daughter of the dictator in absentia who, (through science) has the entire collected body of human knowledge and intelligence and history and philosophy available to humanity at that time uploaded into her brain with the intent of engineering a perfectly selfless and unaware ombudsman mediator and leader of humanity, until of course she is given consciousness and self awareness by the player (her “Big Daddy”) and plunges the utopia into apocalyptic cataclysm.”
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VIDEO GAMES AM I RIGHT?
I just wanna play Duke Nukem and get blowjobs and shoot aliens into bloody pulp! Is that so much to ask for!!! Why do I got to watch out for LESSONS hiding around every god damned corner!
