Obsessed with Bioshock

I've always been interested in video games that it's a bit funny that I ended up marrying a video game artist. Mostly, the video games that I play are games like The Sims, Animal Crossing, and Cooking Mama. Games that are exploratory, interactive, and I'd hate to say it, but girlier. Recently, S introduced me to a game that I fell in love with called Bioshock. It's a first-person shooter game which I normally don't go for, but the world in the game is so gorgeous that I could watch S play for hours. I don't play it myself because, like I said, when it's time to shoot and blow things up, I have no interest in that kind of gaming - curse my double x chromosomes. 

The most recent game of Bioshock released takes place in "Columbia" in the 1910's, a city in the sky. Are you swooning already like I am? The buildings are on balloons and sway with the winds and the clouds. There is a rollercoaster-like rail system that sends carriages around the city as way of transportation and everything has a bit of a steampunk feeling. Buildings shift to meet other and to form a bridge. When you begin the game, you're exploring Columbia on foot looking for a girl named Elizabeth. Around the city there are fair and carnival activities going on like the booth games in which you have to hit your target. The city itself is a floating fair and resembles a travelling World's Fair which is such a romantic notion to me. How charming would it be to have a travelling World's Fair with games and carnival food and the old Americana feel? I bet fireworks look amazing from that view.

But of course, as glamorous as it sounds, the city is a dystopia with political issues and civil wars. In this scene of when you wake up in Columbia, you can see that our founding fathers are idolized like gods. You collect "voxophones" that are voice recordings of people journaling their experiences. They play back with the fuzziness and warmth of old tube radios. 

In previous Bioshock games, they take place in a city underwater called Rapture. It's also a dystopian city with civil war in the 1940's. A city underwater seems just as romantic with gorgeous views of the ocean life instead of the clouds.

If heaven exists, I would hope that it looks like Columbia without the civil war and False Shepard. For now, I will just hope to visit these places in my dreams.

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