Hacking it up
A post. I’ve had a busy week (believe me or not), so I’ll be getting this done around 9ish.
I finally finished replaying the three Ratchet and Clank PS2 games! I know this sounds like it has nothing to do with anything, but in fact, this means that, A, I can really get into/obsess about BioShock, and, B, that I won’t have to worry about re-adapting to the controls every time I sit down to play. Not that I could not have gotten used to this in time, but this fact removes a slight deterrent from playing the game, just enough so that I am about 60% more likely to play it on a whim. Add this to the fact that I’ve got an excuse to be a lump and play this instead of a social life, and the fact that it now has my full attention, and you can expect me to rip through this game by the end of next month.
I Got to do my first hacking this round! Ratchet and Clank has this, too; it’s an excuse to add a timed puzzle-type mini-game into the main game. In R & C, you have to do it to get through doors. In BioShock, you don’t have to, in fact, there’s a recording - recordings are the way you pick up much of what Rapture was like before shit hit the fan - from the city’s founder denouncing the hacking of vending machines and such. I think this is supposed to give the player a moral pang, but really, I’m way past viewing hacking as morally wrong. Unfair, perhaps, if it directly hurts someone, but that’s obviously not the case in Rapture. Not only has my task been killing murderous crazy people from the very beginning of the game, but in some cases - such as security bots and turrets - hacking keeps you from dying. If that’s not an incentive to go against something’s intended programming, I don’t know what is.
We went over this sort of thing (cheating/hacking) a bit in SI 410 (Ethics and Information). Whether or not the player believes hacking is wrong in the non-videogame world, there’s a good chance they’ll be hacking away in the game anyway. Makes me wonder how much I’ll have to worry about the bigger moral decisions people have assured me are coming up later in the game. But I’ll discuss that when I get there.
In other news, this game is cool! I like the way there’s no music, because that way you can hear people before you see them and prepare yourself. Sometimes it’s hard to hear things if multiple sound sources are going at once, but you generally get the gist, if not exactly what is being said.
