BioShock is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, March 26, 2023. Below, we take a look at how its DLC, Burial at Sea, attempted imperfectly to find synthesis between its various worlds.

BioShock's Rapture is a place of necessity. The novelty of its underwater setting comes out of a practical concern: Why wouldn't a player character just leave a dangerous place? The game's thematic concerns came out of these gamey considerations. Give Big Daddies Little Sisters so that players are incentivized to attack difficult enemies to get resources. A world without regulation means that players can buy ammo from vending machines and shoot lightning out of their hands with "plasmids."

Even the game's preoccupation with objectivism comes from these kinds of practical considerations. In director Ken Levine's own words, "we wanted a very believable reason why they would be there." Rapture's founder Andrew Ryan (a thinly veiled stand-in for writer Ayn Rand) cannot imagine a place where he can build his ideal, objectivist world on land, so it must be done in the sea. Though BioShock's narrative ultimately, tepidly, condemns him, it also finds some nobility in his mission, in the purity of his vision. Maybe that's because his goals were similar to the designers'. They too built Rapture out of necessity, a world constructed out of gameplay constraints, that could only exist digitally.