Levine said he could not win that argument by providing counterexamples of a similar mechanic done well. 'As it turns out, it doesn’t matter whether you do either - the game throttles the rewards either way.' Levine said he had initially wanted players who rescued the Little Sisters to 'really feel' the impact of their constrained flow of ADAM, but he got pushback from his publishers, who argued that it was 'design anathema' to have a branching narrative path that makes the game harder for the player. 'As it turns out, it doesn’t matter whether you do either - the game throttles the rewards either way.'īlow’s observation has since become viewed as conventional critical wisdom about BioShock, and writer Chris Suellentrop recently asked series creator Ken Levine about it in an interview for Rolling Stone. 'It's supposed to be a big ethical dilemma,' Blow said. But this mechanic came under harsh criticism from Braid designer Jonathan Blow in a presentation he gave at a conference in late 2007. Why is that a problem?īioShock was released to universal acclaim, and reviewers did not zero in on the economics of saving Little Sisters as a problem at the time of release. That means the difference between harvesting and saving Little Sisters only amounts to about 10 percent of the total amount of ADAM, and players who save the Little Sisters will still get all the upgrades they need as they play through the game. Harvesting a Little Sister yields 160 ADAM, and saving her will only yield 80, but the gift contains 200. However, if the player chooses the rescue option, the Little Sisters leave a gift for every third child they save. Or they can harvest the slug and claim all the ADAM for themselves, killing the child. Once the player defeats a Big Daddy and captures a Little Sister, they get a choice: They can destroy the sea slug and rescue the little girl, but this causes the player to lose the precious ADAM, which is a currency that they use to buy upgrades to health, energy and their plasmid powers. They’re extracting ADAM from the corpses of dead splicers with giant syringes under the constant supervision of their monstrous, technologically-enhanced protectors, the Big Daddies, who serve as the game’s minibosses. The player encounters these implanted children, the Little Sisters, skittering around in the rusty, creaking underwater ruins. Luckily, competition for scarce ADAM was already breaking down societal structures and creating a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, so there were plenty of orphans for Rapture’s scientists to round up. They discovered they could exponentially increase a slug’s ADAM production by implanting it into the body of a child, at the cost of turning the children into creepy zombies. The abuse of this technology eventually transformed most of the people of Rapture into mutant junkies, but before that happened, their uninhibited pursuit of power led the Rapturites to perform some truly barbaric experiments.įoremost among these atrocities was the creation of the 'Little Sisters.' ADAM was produced by sea slugs, but the slugs weren’t making enough of it to satisfy the needs of Rapture’s power-mad gene splicers.

Within this objectivist paradise, unencumbered by laws or ethics, Ryan’s acolytes learned to hack their genes and give themselves superpowers using a substance called ADAM. Little Sistersīioshock takes place in the city of Rapture, a massive, leaking underwater boondoggle of a city founded by a lunatic millionaire named Andrew Ryan who took Atlas Shrugged way too seriously. It suggests that our pursuit of our highest potential might turn us into monsters.īut it sadly pulls its biggest narrative and thematic punch. It posits that individual agency is an illusion, both in games and in life, and that we are subject to manipulation by forces we may not even perceive. The 2007 classic BioShock, which 2k Games recently remastered and re-released as part of BioShock: The Collection, explores a lot of heady themes and big ideas.

Bioshock power to the people