I enjoyed Bioshock[1], and that was while I still considered myself a libertarian. Heavy-handed political narratives don't preclude decent storytelling, charact

I enjoyed Bioshock[1], and that was while I still considered myself a libertarian. Heavy-handed political narratives don't preclude decent storytelling, characters, and (in this case) gameplay. Sure, I thought the delivery was a tad blunt and I didn't appreciate the message until later but it made me think and in hindsight it probably put the first few fractures into that worldview. In any case, Bioshock doesn't commit the same literary sins as Ayn Rand. It doesn't monologue excessively, the villain of its political narrative isn't a negative caricature (instead: "brilliant but tragically misguided," which works even better). The game would probably stand on its own merits without the political undertones, even if the latter is what makes it "great" as opposed to merely "good." The same can't be said for Rand's work, but I can't help but feel that there ought to be a place for political narratives in popular fiction. [1] A first-person shooter set in a zombie-infested underwater failed libertarian state led by a man named Andrew Ryan. Subtle, no? Well, the nuance comes in the form of backstory that you get while fighting the survivors. Briefly, after construction of the city was complete demand for unskilled labor tanked and unemployment exploded. Nascent genetic engineering entered the scene, the market forced desperate laborers to "splice" in order to remain competitive even though it was known to be a Faustian bargain with psychological side-effects, and the predictable tragedy of the commons ensued. The craziest, most spliced-up, "fittest" citizens survived, and those are what you fight as the game progresses. On a macroscopic level the plot begs the question "how can this be a good economic system when it can't even handle mundane declines in growth rate or overcome tragedies of the commons that everyone sees coming from a mile away?" On a microscopic level, you listen to audio journals and ask yourself "this is supposed to be freedom?" or "this is what the market considers 'value creation'?," an exercise which transfers well to real life.