Bioshock and the legacy of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was an important American philosopher of the mid-twentieth century. She preached that each man (by which she meant generic
human) should be judged only his productive ability and should own the fruits of his labor. She could be very persuasive.

Why then was her philosophy not adopted by the common man? Why then do we languish in a world of socialized medicine, public schools and national parks. It is because it is widely believed that her philosophy has been refuted. How has it been refuted? Was it the great depression?
Was it the success of TARP? Was it the way Google recently changed
its algorithm? No! It was refuted by a video game called Bioshock! To see the refutation, you have to go to the tenth comment in the above link, by Aesthete.

The video game
Bioshock is a first-person shooter. This means the player
sees the game from the point of view of the hero. The hero
has been involved in a plane crash in the mid Atlantic in the year
1960. After swimming away from the scene of the crash, he finds
the entrance to an underwater city called Rapture. It was founded
by a man named ANDrew RYAN, the capitalized letters of whose name are an anagram for AYN RAND. After finding an elevator into the city,
the player is treated to a short video explaining Ryan’s idea for
the city.

Here’s the transcript: “I’m Andrew Ryan and I’m here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow? No,
says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God. No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone. I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.”

How then does Bioshock refute Ayn Rand? It demonstrates convincingly that if such a city were to exist, it would necessarily, in short order, through the operation of market forces, become overrun by zombies!
The hero would then have to wander the city, hitting the zombies over the head with a wrench and then ransacking their corpses for unused medical supplies.

This is a future no one could want. One could easily become disoriented and even a little nauseous. This is because it is in fact quite difficult to navigate reality using only
a Playstation 3 controller.

A version of Bioshock which runs on the PS3 can sometimes be obtained
in the Walmart remainder bin for ten dollars. It does seem a more philosophically coherent game than some of its competitors like
Kingdom Hearts
or Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of two worlds
or the critically acclaimed
Robot Unicorn attack.