Video Games

Peter Suderman | From the February/March 2026 issue

There aren't many video games about political philosophy. Even fewer are about Ayn Rand and the outer limits of Objectivism. But BioShock is exactly that.

Released in 2007 to huge sales and near-universal acclaim, the first-person, science fiction shooter went on to become a touchstone in gaming, bringing moral and philosophical nuance to a genre defined by lowbrow shoot-'em-ups. The game is an interrogation of the notion of choice, giving players a sense of moral agency while toying with the formal conventions of video games in ways that reveal how empty many interactive game choices really are.

BioShock was created by Ken Levine, one of gaming's most elusive figures. He has sometimes described himself as both an individualist and a capitalist, and he says the game was inspired by Rand's uncompromising vision for society—and a question about what would happen if that vision were taken to a dystopian extreme.

In October, Levine spoke with Reason's Peter Suderman about how video games have changed, whether he'd be able to make BioShock now, and just how he ended up making a game about Rand in the first place.

Reason: How did you come to make a big-budget, first-person shooter video game about libertarianism, Objectivism, and Ayn Rand?

Levine: I had just read The Fountainhead. I wasn't particularly politically tuned into anything. I didn't really realize who [Rand] was and her larger philosophical mission.

But Rand writes a great potboiler, right? It's a great story about this architect and everybody's trying to destroy him. He stays true to his principles, and he's handsome and charming, and there's this woman who's just in love with him. And it was a great story, but I started to get the themes, which I thought were certainly interesting—her notion of altruism being a negative thing. That's obviously very different than what you're sort of brought up with, but I just found it a really interesting thought experiment.

The challenge I saw in the books is they were very much written by somebody who wanted her side to win, and therefore the characters can be a little one-dimensional. You have the architect and then you have the critic character—who's an amazing villain, who bribes him, blackmails him to change his work and to give up his artistic principles and he just won't, even to the point where he burns down an architectural construct he built rather than compromising it.

Also Rand, she's just a great speaker. She's a great character when she talks.

For those who don't know, the game takes the Rand idea and brings it to its extreme, very similar to what you see a lot of people talking about with seasteading and wanting to build a city on the ocean or underwater. I said, "Well, let's do a bit of a fantastical story about an Ayn Rand–like figure who does try to build a society where everybody adheres to her principles and nobody's going to come take that away from them, a sort of ultra anarcho-capitalist society where there are no limitations on growth, there are no limitations on creativity."

She had given me—just through her voice—such a great persona that I was really able to just transliterate that voice into this character, Andrew Ryan, who had a very similar background to her. Was born in czarist Russia, but then the Soviets came in and destroyed his family, just like what happened to Rand's family. I definitely thought that was a great origin story about somebody who was just constantly terrified of the Bolsheviks showing up at the door and turning his life upside-down again. I got that as a human being, and I'm like: "OK, let me see if I can try to tell a Randian-like story, but try to do it where the people are more like people I know, real people who have flaws." But I had no interest in saying, "Oh, screw Objectivism. I'm just going to make fun of it." I really want to engage with it, but how it intersects with real people rather than characters in a book.

Do you view the first BioShock as a critique of Objectivism?

No, I don't think it is particularly. I never set out to take down Objectivism or libertarians. Just the whole concept of this very interesting worldview: Can you make a better world if you really focus on just yourself and improving yourself?

And the idea, going back to Adam Smith, right? The baker doesn't bake bread because he wants to help other people; he bakes bread because he wants to make money to feed his family, but when doing so, he feeds the entire community. I just wanted to start with that principle, which is kind of true and brilliant. It's market economies, and I'm a big believer in market economies.

But then we said, "Well, what if you took the regulatory structure and you just completely destroyed it?" And of course, it's a video game. If I was writing a novel, I might've used a little more subtlety, but it's a video game. And so—because a player is not reading text on a........

© Reason.com