Document Type
Article
Abstract
In this paper I look at the failure of video games to effectively offer resistance to dominant neoliberal ideology. Working from the observation that contemporary culture is fascinated with narratives about the destruction of capitalism, I investigate why such fantasies consistently end up reiterating the beliefs and principles they set out to question. As one of the most prominent examples of resistance to capitalism, I look towards the video game BioShock to provide an answer to this question. On the one hand, BioShock resists the dominant neoliberal paradigm by citing the neoliberal utopian fiction of Ayn Rand to construct a dystopian capitalist fantasy. On the other hand, the game reuses much the ideology that informs late capitalism both in its gameplay and in its narrative denouement.
In this paper I propose that the inability of games such as BioShock to effectively resist dominant neoliberal ideology is the result of their use of destruction. Disaster, calamity and destruction, I will demonstrate, have been consistently used as justifications to spread Chicago-style economics and to out-source state-controlled services to the private sector. In this way, destruction has become strongly associated with market deregulation and the spread of neoliberal ideology. I will propose that, by applying physical, destructive forces to neoliberal constructs, narratives such as BioShock are unable to complete their fantasy of the destruction of capitalism. The use of destruction, I will argue, activates paradigms of market expansion before it can effectively resist neoliberal ideals.
Repository Citation
van den Berg, Thijs. "Playing at Resistance to Capitalism: BioShock as the Reification of Neoliberal Ideals." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 12, no. 2, 2012, pp. 1–18. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol12/iss2/9