Rock, Paper, Shotgun

[Metafilter informs me it's been a decade since the release of System Shock 2. Probably best to have a mini-tribute to a perennial landmark in the historical terrain of PC gaming, yes? First, if you haven't read it, here's our Making Of article about the game where we interviewed Ken Levine. Secondly, a piece on Shock 2 I wrote for PCG164 which has been online for a while, but never here. So here's a (slightly tweaked) portrait of Shock 2's villainess, RPS' poster-girl for evil meglomaniacal AI, featuring some frankly disturbingly dense pun-based allusions. Hail the perfect, immortal machine...]

Every videogame has a villain. Not every one has a villain like Shodan. Not every one has one which… well, let’s show her at her best.
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Been online for a while, it seems, but Shawn Elliot’s Tweet-o-thing expose us to the above lovely fanart by Peganthyrus of the ’shipping of ur-AI-hottie Shodan and fairly-ur-AI hottie GladOS. Above is her humourous take on it. And beneath the cut, the more slashy approach. Click through to go to the full images on her deviant-art page at much better image quality.

NSFW? I think it’s fine, but I’m a big old pervert.
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[Since it's Space Week, it's a good time to pull my Edge-commissioned Making Of System Shock 2 feature out of Stasis. The material for this was drawn from the lengthy conversation I had with Ken Levine last year. So, yes, before Bioshock. I'm quite fond of this piece, if only as it reveals the secret origin of the Psychic Monkeys...]

The lights are low. Everyone’s panickedly fighting against a seemingly impossible, oppressive deadline. At every turn there’s a crippling lack of resources. Viewed by any objective criteria, the small inexperienced team doesn’t have the skills to achieve their aims. They’re all crammed into a single room – in fact, half of one, since it’s one room bisected with screens. When you look at where and how Irrational worked on their first game, it’s easy to think of the claustrophobic horror of RPG/Shooter System Shock 2 as a pure product of its environment.
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This is an odd one. I haven’t seen it linked in any of the other blogs – it’s possible I just haven’t been paying attention to the right places though – but I found it when researching something.

(That is, entering random Bioshock related phrases into google.)

Basically, Andrew Russel, an objectivist gentleman drops Mr Levine an e-mail. And Mr Levine replies, and talks candidly about his beliefs regarding objectivism and world politics and hints at his intentions with Bioshock. And then Andrew posts the replies to the objectivist forums he frequents. To briefly set the stage – and it’s worth doing so, as in the UK, Objectivism and Ayn Rand are a lot less known than they are in the States – Bioshock’s setting of the isolated city of genius founded by one Andrew Ryan is clearly a riff off Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and not necessarily a complimentary one. You may have seen Objectvists turn up in some Bioshock comments threads, voicing concerns (at best) and voicing anger (at worst).

As Andrew puts it…

What I am hoping is that BioShock treats the theory of individualism with proper respect. It would be very disheartening if BioShock were to equate individualism with an endless desire to prove oneself superior to others (this being a form of conformist parasitism Rand referred to as Second-Handing), free-market capitalism with making profit as an end-in-itself, or advocate the fallacious notion that laissez-faire is a zero-sum game. As you are obviously aware, Objectivism is often assumed to be wrong, evil, or an engine of societal collapse and disintegration, regardless of the historical evidence in favor of many Objectivist-approved principles.

Ken replies at length, but a couple of bits stick out. Firstly answering Andrew’s questions regarding Shock 2…

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