Lost and Found and Lost Again

From Whence They Came: Island Utopia Traditions

Islands are places that are generally seen as distinct from mainland territories. This distinction is commonly described geographically, as islands are places surrounded by water, but this definition is lacking in many ways (Olwig, 2007). Geography itself is not as clear cut as this description would imply. But it is not the definition of an island that is interesting; rather, it is the concept of the island that captures attention. An island is not fascinating because it is surrounded by water but because of the various aspects that come together to form the unique concept of island. While all are agreed that the mystique of islands is derived from this construction, the various aspects to this social construct present differing and sometimes contradictory images of islands.

One important aspect that seems at first to follow directly out of the physical geography is the conception of islands as singular, bounded, and complete (Anckar 2007; Hay, 2006; Lowenthal, 2007; Royle, 2001; Steinberg, 2005). Islands are seen as self-contained units of land, perfect units that can be owned, understood, and possessed in ways that mainland states can never be. Following from this, islands are also considered to be on the periphery, isolated, sometimes abandoned (Depraetere, 2008b). They seem to be insular in the worst sense of the term: alone, backward, and lacking opportunity. They are seen as inaccessible, or at least less accessible than mainland areas, even in an era of lengthy connective bridges and air traffic. Because they are considered so, they are often used as dumping grounds for things mainland states wish to hide, from prisoners as in the historical use of Tasmania and other Australian islands to dirty money through the use of offshore banking havens like the Cayman Islands and other Caribbean states.

Because of this dual conception as a complete, isolated whole, islands have long served as a metaphorical tabula rasa for mainland imaginations. Islands become reflections of our wants and desires as well as our fears (Gillis, 2004). They are at once distant and removed from us, as they are connected figuratively through these projections, these desires and dreams that are thrust upon them by the rest of the world. Islands are areas that can be designed and improved, a testing ground for new ideas and opportunities.

The cultural image of islands as interesting places where man can be isolated makes them perfect settings for artists and visionaries of all sorts. The island setting has been used in iconic works by western writers like Defoe (1719/1994) and Shakespeare (1610/1998) and is popular as a location for stories where any man can be a king. This useful aspect of the island setting was picked up later by films and then by video games (Nyman, 2013). In fact, the singular figure of the character on the deserted isle makes islands especially suitable for video games, where the player character is usually the most important person in the game’s entire world. In fact, the player character, the protagonist whose actions the video game player controls, can have powers that makes Robinson Crusoe’s look mild in comparison. Whatever the setting and plot of a game may be, the world’s advancement usually rests on the player character’s actions (or lack thereof). Factions in civil wars wait on his or her decision, battles remain unfought until she or he moves to fight them, and/or the world may come to a standstill until the player character takes action.

But islands are not only convenient settings because they play to these long-standing stereotypes, they are also useful for game developers. Games have to designate particular settings and among these settings are limitations on the scope of the game’s world. This world has to be large enough to be interesting but small enough to fit within the technical capabilities of the platforms they play on (whether these be personal computers, home gaming systems like Sony’s Playstation, or handheld devices like Nintendo’s DS). These are understood limitations, if the game world were created to be infinite, then the game would never be finished and could never be played on a household machine. At the same time, boundaries can be resented by players. When they are seen as arbitrary, such as when a player runs into what is known as an “invisible wall”—a barrier that keeps the player character from further progress in a direction without any warning signs or logical reason—then players can be surprised or annoyed with these boundaries. Thus, the boundaries of the world must be clear and reasonable. Since islands are seen as having fixed boundaries by nature of the ocean that surrounds them, they allow game developers to limit the scope of their created world while avoiding unnatural checks to progression like the invisible wall.

These games are set on islands precisely because these places are seen as remote and isolated, and because, in the words of one game designer, “water is often a better alternative than other boundary options” (c.f. Totilo, 2009). It is more acceptable to players who have grown conditioned by years of seeing these settings in games and now understand that it is not unusual for player characters to be unable to swim or island hop freely. These island settings then ring true for a large cross-section of individuals of all ages, reinforcing their desirability to game designers as logical settings for their stories of creation and disaster.

Fictional islands in video games are thus heirs to a tradition that links island spaces with creative and alternative forms of governance. This linkage dates back to the quintessential work on the subject, More’s Utopia (1516/2003). Islands are often idealized as places of freedom, with political freedom being an imperative. The characteristics of islands lead to this union in imagination, linking these spaces with political autonomy. During the medieval period, the biblical paradise the Garden of Eden was situated on an imagined island in maps of the Atlantic Ocean (Johnson, 1994). Today, since the world is mapped with no abandoned natural islands left unclaimed by states, political separatists consider the possibility of artificial islands that could be anchored in international waters and thus free from any existing state influence (Mieville, 2008; Steinberg, Nyman, & Caraccioli, 2012). Such thinking has bled over to video games, with the creation of artificial island spaces as the perfect setting for new artificial societies.

Virtual Worlds and Sliding Morality Scales

With the development of new video game technology and expansion of its consumer base, have come games that seek different and newer ways to engage a possible audience. In addition to creating as stimulating and engaging environment as possible for the gaming public, game designers have begun to utilize their medium to push the players, throughout the course of normal gameplay, into situations that will force moral engagements with ethical dilemmas. Games such as inFAMOUS (Sucker Punch Productions, 2009) and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (BioWare, 2003) allow the players to decide if they will embrace the concepts that designers establish as “good” or on the side of right, or those that are “bad” or viewed with nefarious intent and disregard for the moral compass of the society. Although the simple times of playing the characters of Mario and Luigi, who are responsible for rescuing Princess Peach from Bowser’s evil clutches, are not nearly past, many new games muddy the clarity between what is right and what is wrong. Indeed, if, in many aforementioned games, a player chooses a path of “evil,” they are rewarded with similar power-ups and in-game abilities as if they would have chosen the “good” side.

Mangling a clear distinction between right and wrong even further are games that present either a utopian or dystopian society in which the player will conduct themselves. In these games, the very definitions of good and evil may be completely switched, based upon the context and content provided by game designers. Games like the System Shock (Looking Glass Studios, 1994) and Fallout (Black Isle Studios 1997) present a post-apocalyptic dystopia where players navigate through gameplay that promises some kind of recovery of a society of old in the midst of chaos. The success of these morally ambiguous virtual worlds has allowed game designers to create more profound utopias and present more chaotic dystopias with depth and detail that was previously impossible. In a more recent example, The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012), players are tossed into an environment with a complete absence of governmental authority and must determine right or wrong actions based upon their own feelings. Whereas in contemporary reality murder is viewed as wrong and a crime against civil order, in games like The Walking Dead, without the constraints of an established legal system with clear repercussions, a player can choose to kill another game character for any number of personal reasons. When the trappings of civil society drop away, the protection of food, family, supplies, transport, or lodging can become reason enough to execute another game character who may not be clearly “bad” or even necessarily physically threatening. These dystopian worlds, like those in the works of literature that came before them, are meant to be just similar enough to the player’s society to invite comparison and critique (Hall, 2009, p. 78).

And just as those earlier works, video games rely on the same utopian and dystopian tropes. Video games are by their very nature isolated and bounded, due to the restrictions of technological capacity. This is often then built into the games through the use of an island setting, a feature now with a double benefit for the game designer. The island setting creates a naturally bounded atmosphere but it also creates the sense and feeling of isolation needed for a would-be utopia or dystopian nightmare. These islands can be natural, but in many utopian/dystopian works, they are artificial instead—to mimic the unnaturalness of their society. Utopia itself is a created island, after all, a peninsula that was manually separated from the mainland for the purpose of preserving its isolation. Thus, even while video games break new boundaries and push our understanding of immersive entertainment, they still utilize the same shortcuts and tropes created by centuries of world building before them.

A “Bio”shock to the System: Welcome to Rapture (And Later, Columbia)

To trace out the impact of islandness and artifice in the realm of dystopian video games, we focus on the BioShock series. Particularly, we look at the first game in the series, BioShock, a libertarian community set on the artificial underwater island of Rapture, and BioShock Infinite, which was set in a steampunk floating world called Columbia.

In BioShock, players are transported to an underwater setting whose in-game creator, corporate billionaire Andrew Ryan, has envisioned an individualists’ paradise, a perfect utopia that would exist outside of the constraints of governmental or societal regulations. However, by the time the player character arrives in the undersea megalopolis, given the name “Rapture” by Ryan, the city has fallen into a dystopian state. The player, throughout the course of the game, is then left to discover what Rapture was supposed to have been, what it actually was, and what became of Ryan’s vision of perfection.

The mystery begins with the entrance to Rapture—a lighthouse on a large concrete island with an elevator down to the actual city, which is completely underwater. This elevator ride not only introduces Jack, the character controlled by the player, to the city but also serves as a political propaganda film promoting the libertarian doctrine on which the city was founded. Ryan’s beliefs and political philosophy manifest in both the plot of the game and the look of the city (Crecente, 2008). Slogans such as “No Gods, No Kings, Only Man” are found on banners throughout the city, and Rapture itself is on the brink of collapse because of factional infighting and extremism.

It is no accident that the city under an island is home to a political separatist group, and according to the game’s creator, Ken Levine, the setting came first out of a desire to create an interesting environment that would confine the player in a more natural seeming way (Crecente, 2008). It was only when Levine started to wonder who would live in this setting that he decided that Ryan and his followers would be political partisans: “I started thinking about utopian civilizations … You have these traditional utopian notions. I’ve always been a fan of utopian and dystopian literature. The more I started thinking about making a compelling place and compelling villain, someone who had a real concrete set of beliefs made sense.” (c.f. Crecente, 2008). In other words, when contemplating who would live in an underwater city, Levine was influenced by the idea of the isolated island as existing as a political tabula rasa, and the game was thus born.

In a recent interview with the authors of this paper, Levine confirmed this thinking.

When we started working on BioShock … the island theme came up right away. It’s a limitation of games [to have bounded settings], so the island was good. The political thing came out of me saying, well, why would people be on this particular island? … What would make people go to an island?

Mirroring the introduction to BioShock, main character Booker DeWitt reaches Columbia by traveling to a distant location (also a lighthouse) and taking a lift up to the floating city. His goal is simple: to rescue a girl named Elizabeth, who has been imprisoned in a tower by Comstock. Things go horribly awry, of course, in part because of Elizabeth’s mysterious magical powers but also because of an insurgency movement called the Vox Populi that are nearing open rebellion against Comstock’s regime. Comstock’s city is a theocracy built around worship of America’s Founding Fathers and features the institutionalized racism and elitism that would have been seen during their period of history. The opposition revolutionaries, the Vox Populi, on the other hand, consist mostly of Columbia’s oppressed working class and minorities who have violent objections to this philosophy.

The choice to build a society around America’s founding fathers was likewise a deliberate one, meant to evoke a certain kind of historicism and way of looking at the world. To Comstock, America had strayed away from his interpretation of the founders’ ideals. Columbia then was an escape from and an alternative to “the Sodom below,” the America that lost its way. According to Levine, this was based on the way that real world dictators like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin appealed to a mythology of their countries’ past but taken even further.

I think a lot of times historical figures are co-opted.… It’s very easy to co-opt them, to make them be representative of what you want them to be.… I thought it would be interesting for Comstock to not just simplify these figures but to turn them into deities. We presented early on these statues of them [in Columbia] and [Benjamin] Franklin is all buff. They have to idealize these individuals even in their physical forms.

A Utopian Ideal Becomes a Dystopian Reality

In both BioShock and BioShock: Infinite, the player is presented with visions of utopian systems developed by the protagonists in direct reaction to the political world that surrounds them. Their island societies, Rapture under the water and Columbia in the sky, directly reflect the utopian ideal being presented. In our interviews, Levine commented that “Columbia in the sky came from a Loftiness of Ideal, and an Angelic and Heavenly nature to what Comstock was protecting, whereas Rapture was about hiding from what Ryan perceived to be parasites.”

In this way, BioShock and Rapture specifically are escapes from the constraints of society, both governmental and individual. The city exists in island isolation to allow its citizens the ability to flourish, and, through this freedom of self-determination, society would have limitless potential. Therefore, Rapture is a direct heir to the thought that Utopia must be an island (metaphorically and physically), existing outside the bounds of governmental constraint or any of the ties of society, morality, or religion. Rapture allows the individual to express themselves in ways that they might not be able to in any other setting. Each is responsible for his own creativity and invention. Through these innovations of art, music, thought, and science, Ryan believes that Rapture will thrive and prosper more than any of the other current governmental systems. Those who are incapable of their own self-development and seek to live off of the work and effort of others are viewed by Ryan as drains on society, no better than parasites. Rapture is not a place where the common good is the end goal. There is no Rousseauean General Will, where the good of all is placed before the good of the individual. On the contrary, the individual and singular development is the most important aspect of Rapture. It is just as much Berlin’s negative liberty and “freedom from” government intervention and individual constraints, as it is the positive liberty and “freedom to” do whatever the residents of Rapture desire.

Ryan’s focus on the evolution of the individual also entails a very specific focus on a Lockean Labor Theory of Value. Property, ownership, and the ability to hold sole possession to what one has built, imagined, or created is central to Rapture’s operation and a core part of the utopian ideal. In explaining a park and forest (Arcadia) built in one section of Rapture, Ryan explains that “On the surface, I once bought a forest. The parasites claimed that the land belonged to God, and demanded that I establish a public park there. Why? So the rabble could stand slack-jawed under the canopy and pretend that it was paradise *earned*. When Congress moved to nationalize my forest, I burnt it to the ground. God did not plant the seeds of this Arcadia—I did.” This is indeed the enablement of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of property” that Locke views as core to societal development.

This focus on the empowerment of the individual is seen in the plot and weapons provided to the game character as well. As part of the plotline, Jack (the player’s character) visits plastic surgery clinics, elementary schools, and department stores, all of which reiterate the utopian ideal of individual flourishing. The plastic surgery center, for example, continually runs ads for self-improvement and deliverance from the norm. The weapons that a player is equipped with, “plasmids” as they are known in the game, give the player superhuman strength and nearly superpower abilities in their endeavors. These different endowments were created in Rapture through individual invention and made available to the populous to alter their physical and mental states as they saw fit. There is no overriding manifesto, other than self-aggrandizement, that Rapture’s citizens need follow.

Although the focus of Rapture is individual fulfillment and realization, the invention of plasmids and the innate human desire for braggadocio leads to Rapture’s sudden and violent transformation from utopia to dystopia. In our interview, Levine explained that this collapse was inevitable in his view because “The flaw is not in the optimism and utopian ideals in the philosophy, but with the people who will occupy the utopia.” In fact, Levine chastised Ryan a bit, in his hope of maintaining a perfect society. He suggested that “The human condition can get better or worse, but it isn’t going to be solved by a change in scenery.” This plays out in Rapture as the plasmids cause conflict over sales and supplies and the citizens of Rapture become more and more addicted to self-improvement through them, much to their detriment (Tulloch, 2010, p. 28). The result is that the city under the waves falls into chaos and any hope for an enduring utopic society is drowned with its citizenry. The downfall of Rapture “thus represents what has been called a ‘critical dystopia,’ a historical inventory of utopian styles, plans, and technologies that self-consciously critiques the notion of utopia itself” (Aldred & Greenspan 2011, p. 484). In addition, the fall of Rapture forces the player to reconcile the utopian goal with the dystopian reality and to decide for themselves if this story, and indeed the very tradition of utopia itself in a sense, is always and inevitably doomed to such failure.

In comparison, in BioShock: Infinite, the protagonist, Zachary Hale Comstock, proposes his own utopian ideals based off of religion and the founding fathers of America. Recognizing what he views as the rising problems with existing society, Comstock creates a floating city in the sky, Columbia, as a haven for its citizens. This vision of utopia is again one of separation from the morally bankrupt governments and people on the planet below. Just as individualism was key in Ryan’s vision of utopia, religion plays the main role in unifying Comstock’s view of societal perfection. Indeed, Columbia is not just the idea of a man but was directed by a heavenly vision. Comstock sees Columbia as a refuge for believers in his specific and divine inspired theology. In fact, the ideal of this religious foundation for the utopia of Columbia is reiterated at the outset as the player cannot even begin the game until he proceeds through a church and partakes in a baptism from the church of Comstock.

The utopia Comstock constructs does not rely wholly on existing religious traditions, however. In fact, it involves a divination of the founding fathers and worships Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson as near deities. These “founders” do not include all presidents, however, as the deeper utopian ideals of Columbia rest on a much more nefarious view of other cultures, religions, and especially races. Comstock observes that “when the angel Columbia gave unto The Founders the tools to build the new Eden, they did so without hesitation. For Eighty-Five years, they prepared the way of our Lord. But when the great Apostate came, he brought War with him and the fields of Eden were soaked with the blood of brothers. The only Emancipation he had to offer, was death.” Here we see the true purpose of Columbia. In an age of the freeing of the slaves and the equalizing of the races, Comstock feels that an intermingling of racial Caucasian purity is not only inconsistent with the views of the founders, but also with God’s.

Just as Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin are deified, Lincoln is seen as the major impetus for Comstock’s separation from the governments and societies that lie far beneath Columbia. Abraham Lincoln is lambasted as the bringer of the end of the founding ideal of race separation and Caucasian predominance. The society that Comstock creates is then a mix of the religious and the racist. It has monuments to Indian massacres and separate bathrooms for the “coloreds and Irish.” From the outset, where the player character, named Booker, has to intervene in the public stoning of a couple accused of miscegenation or race-mixing, there is no question about what kind of society Comstock would prefer and what kind of utopia he proposes.

Similar to the fall of Rapture, the plot of BioShock: Infinite plays witness to Columbia’s transformation from utopia to dystopia. A major difference between the two is that in BioShock, the player arrives after the fall of Rapture and slowly puts the pieces of what occurred together for the game plot. In Infinite, however, Booker becomes a leader in the revolution to overthrow and kill Comstock. Indeed his central role in the “Vox Populi” revolution forces the player to come to terms with the society created by Comstock and examine what kind of governmental structure will be replacing it. “By presenting its critique of egoistic ideologies in the context of a historical narrative, BioShock reveals how an ideology that initially seems to guarantee utopia is fundamentally flawed when it is put into practice” (Schulzke, 2014, p. 327).

Note that both of these games have their critics. Most of the critiques of BioShock and BioShock: Infinite are beyond the scope of this study, but some have a direct bearing. Most relevant are the many critiques that note that neither game really allows for players to choose and act in accordance with their own philosophy. In BioShock, the player character may act as though he sympathizes with Andrew Ryan and may even adopt his ideals, but he cannot act to save him because he cannot overthrow the plot mechanism that requires a conflict between Ryan and the player character (Hocking, 2007). Likewise, in BioShock: Infinite, the player character is allowed, encouraged even, to be horrified at Comstock’s racially pure society but finds that the minority Vox Populi rebels are equally violent in turn and must then also be your enemies (El-Sabaawi, 2013; Thompson, 2013). In these games, the player is asked to think on these utopian fantasies, but then the mechanism of the game prevents them from choosing their own answer. Whatever the player may think of utopia, it would seem that in the world of BioShock it is an endeavor certain to fail—for it has in many ways been deliberately designed not to succeed.

Video Games and Utopian/Dystopian Ideals

BioShock and BioShock: Infinite act as exemplars of the island utopian and dystopian visions that they force players to come to terms with. BioShock “continues a broader dystopian world-building within popular culture, constructing a historically disjunctive retro-future that simultaneously interrogates and celebrates utopian notions of technological progress and free will” (Aldred & Greenspan 2011, p. 481). These games were largely the brainchildren of Ken Levine, who expressed in our interview that, with the development of the technology and capability of interactive gaming, “there was a vacuum in games to be filled because nobody was talking about that stuff in games.” Andrew Ryan and Zachary Comstock both present utopic ideals that engage the player and force a coming to terms with the deeper philosophies that they present. These games “can create enormous worlds that that display the myriad dimensions of dystopias, they show dystopias as dynamic places that change over time, and that often force players to become participants in the causal processes responsible for producing dystopia” (Schulzke, 2014, p. 331).

Ryan created Rapture as an individualist haven from religion and government, while Comstock used religion and the founding fathers as the basis for his extremism and racial hatred. Our contemporary society has seen many of these utopic tenants played out in violent and political ways even very recently. Racial problems and discrimination, as seen in Ferguson, Missouri, and the Zimmerman trial, have divided country and sparked protests in cities across the nation. States struggle with debates regarding the legalization of gay marriage, the legalization of marijuana, and what kinds of privacy laws should govern cellphones and their use. Political parties rise and fall each election, claiming that they best represent the true will of the founders and asserting that their election to office will usher in a new “era of good feelings.” Video game “worlds encourage players to consider the problems responsible for producing dystopia and serve as warnings against allowing these problems to exist in the real world” (Schulzke, 2014, p. 331).

These dynamic moral and ethical questions with which we are faced cannot be ignored and demand some kind of engagement by the citizenry. Movies have their place in political satire and social commentary and critique. However, video games and virtual worlds have become platforms with which game designers can, in effect, force players to acknowledge these issues. “Players are left with a contemplative game that encourages a comparison of real life events and what might have been” (Lizardi, 2014, p. 8). Levine felt that video games specifically are excellent engines for the reexamination of utopian and dystopian systems. He stated that “The value of fiction is it allows you to use metaphor to allow people to get past their own set of beliefs.” In fact, in a utopian society in a fictitious story, “socio-political metaphors that are used lets people feel their values and beliefs are not being questioned or assaulted as much.”

Although video games that include plot lines and environments that contain examinations of societal issues are not necessarily the norm, as the average gamer age advances and a new cadre of game designers enter the industry, games like the BioShock series may become more widespread. As Jackson notes, “games impart meaningful metaphors of communication for expressive value, and they do so by appealing to a player’s cultural ethical situation” (2014, p. 142). Levine also suggested more games of this engagement depth will emerge “As people coming into the gaming industry have more diverse interests, the games will embrace more diverse subject matters.” A better understanding of how these settings work in video games provides us with traction on the perpetuation of island and political stereotypes and affords insight into one filter through which the millions of video game players worldwide view these locations and their inhabitants. It likewise helps illustrate the degree to which these tropes resonate within individuals, as game developers created their worlds with a large amount of conscious choice, with consideration about the nature of their settings and plots.

Also, the propagation of these deeply philosophically engaging video games seems to be something that will continue in the near future, at the very least. Several game theory scholars have suggested that “developers should focus on presenting players with ill-defined problems that demand ethical thinking and creative engagement as part of the gameplay experience” (Sicart, 2013, p. 28). To tease out these implications, we considered the early development of island separatist thought, the relation of the artificial island to these older ideas, and their acceptance into the new medium of video games with emphasis on the BioShock game series and its artificial islands. The analysis demonstrates that this is not a new development; instead, video games are just the latest heirs to a longstanding tradition of portraying islands, utopias, and dystopias in a certain way.