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Intro
0:00:08 PageUnder Podcast
0:00:34 Typhoid Mary Plagiarism
Feature
0:03:00 Tom's PC Build, Final Update
0:04:30 You say Bios, I say BIOS.
0:05:55 MSY and Consumer Law
0:09:08 Hot Hot Hot
0:23:41 First Impressions of Windows 10
0:29:30 What Games did Tom Install First (and ray Tracing)
0:37:33 Manuals and Gew Gaws
0:41:40 Epic Games Store First Impressions
0:47:46 Xbox Gamerpass First Impressions
0:53:33 Streaming Over Wifi
First Impressions - Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019)
0:59:57 Preamble/ PC Controllers/ Forza
1:08:05 Respawn
1:09:35 Throwing Shaders
1:10:25 The First Level, and Dick Cheney
1:17:50 Level Design
1:23:19 Guns
Final Impression
1:32:57 Neo Cab - Notes Left Out of the Review on Gameunder.net
Sky's the Limit
1:39:00 That Game Company's MMORPG (Sky for iOS) Continues to Improve
Transcript
Tom: Hello and welcome to episode of the Page Under Podcast, Australia's premium vegan book podcast.
Tom: I am Tom Towers, and I am joined by the bibliophile Phil Fogg.
Phil: Hi, everyone, and welcome to episode of The Game Under Podcast.
Phil: Podcast.
Tom: We're coming to you coast to coast.
Phil: With our pod of game-undering.
Phil: Well, this is obviously Australia's premier, longest-running video game podcast.
Phil: I am, of course, your co-host, Phil Fogg.
Phil: Hello, Tom.
Phil: So we're finally going to do it.
Phil: We're finally going to get down to our Bioshock Atlas Shrugged Book Club.
Phil: This episode.
Tom: That's what we're claiming.
Phil: We gave the listeners one more week to finish Atlas Shrugged, which I think is a -page book.
Phil: We disputed that a while back, but I'm pretty sure it is.
Tom: You claimed it was pages.
Phil: No, no, no.
Tom: I corrected you that it was close to
Phil: Yeah, it just feels like
Phil: Before we get into that, you've been continuing to play Call of Duty Modern Warfare.
Phil: But the one thing I'm most happy to be not talking about is Death Stranding.
Phil: I've been listening to various podcasts and reading reviews of Hideo Kojima's game, and the conversations about the game are absolutely painful.
Phil: So we've picked a good week to talk about Bioshock and Atlas Shrugged.
Tom: The game itself looks absolutely fascinating to me.
Tom: And a lot of people are rather apprehensive about it, but to me this looks like potentially the game we've been waiting for from Kojima after the creative difficulties he was facing in having to make Metal Gear Solid after Metal Gear Solid after Metal Gear Solid.
Phil: Yeah, he had to get it out of his system.
Phil: I think if this had been a game from Platinum, like if he had been able to be unable to make a game at Platinum Studios and it'd be a game with less attention, it probably would have been healthier for him because I'm not quite sure where he's going to go after this sort of response.
Phil: But I think for the most part, there's been a lot of perfect scores for this game.
Phil: So he'll probably be okay, but I just don't think his games are going to sell anywhere near the magnitude that he had, obviously, with Konami behind him.
Tom: And the franchise of Metal Gear Solid.
Phil: Which he built with his reputation, of course.
Tom: I think it's more than his reputation.
Tom: I think the major thing there is the brand of Metal Gear because Zone of the Enders, I don't think sold nearly as well, did it?
Phil: No, no, except of course when it had the demo for Metal Gear Solid
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: You know, as I said, I'm kind of sick of listening to people contemplate their navels while talking about Death Stranding.
Phil: Like I said, I probably am going into this hoping that it's not as good because I've just not been interested in it from the very start.
Phil: So I'm actually probably more inclined to buy it and play it now than not, just because it does seem to be something that's gonna be at the very least interesting.
Tom: Absolutely.
Phil: So speaking of which, I wanted to ask you if you had gotten your, we know now that your PC is up and running, if you've got all of the parts, replacement parts in and operational?
Tom: The replacement parts are currently on their way.
Tom: So the RMA process with MSY has so far been successful.
Tom: The items were sent back to them at their cost and they inspected them and concluded they were indeed broken.
Tom: So offered me a refund or replacement parts.
Tom: So as long as the replacement parts are working, then that will have been a successful warranty issue sorted out by MSY.
Phil: We were talking about MSY and the ACCC while you were talking about your RMAs, which is hilarious, I think, that we just throw around RMA, you know, which is of course what?
Phil: What does it stand for?
Tom: You will have to tell me, but this is the term they like to use.
Phil: Return Merchandise Authorisation.
Phil: There we are.
Phil: So, yeah, yeah.
Phil: So I'm glad that your RMA has been approved.
Phil: It's, um, but this week, the ACCC dropped the bomb on Zenimax.
Tom: What is the ACCC, while we're at it?
Phil: The Australian Anti-Corruption and Crimes Commission, or something like, Anti-Competitive something Commission.
Phil: So you've, I'm hoisted on my own petard.
Phil: The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, they've dropped the bomb on Zenimax, makers of Fallout because people wanted to return the game, because it was broken, and Zenimax was basically, being a US organization was like, no.
Tom: What the fuck do you mean, you can return a broken product, huh?
Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can, in Australia.
Phil: And Zenimax was fined and forced to refund consumers for the game.
Phil: They acknowledged that they are likely to have misled Australian consumers about their rights for a refund when they experience faults with their Fallout game.
Phil: So, they have to provide refunds to people who had contacted them between th of November and the st of June of this year.
Phil: So, a good months of people can get a refund had they contacted ZenimX during that time.
Tom: Justice has been served.
Phil: Other things that have broken and fixed, I presume, are you back on your BMX?
Tom: I am indeed.
Tom: The crank was replaced, and the new crank is slightly longer than the previous crank.
Tom: So, you get more torque at low speeds or going uphill.
Tom: And because BMX is other than the gear, which the chain is attached to, are gearless, it also essentially means you have a longer gear, meaning that it now has a higher top speed as well.
Phil: Alright.
Phil: Well, more torque at lower speeds is probably a good description for this podcast as well.
Phil: Boy, your BMX doesn't have a name, does it?
Phil: You don't have a name for it?
Tom: I think it got a name recently, but I can't recall what it is.
Tom: So until I remember what its name is, it doesn't have a name.
Phil: What about BMX gonna give it to you?
Tom: No.
Phil: Um, no.
Phil: I thought it was called like the Crimson Marauder or something like that.
Tom: But it's white and silver.
Phil: I thought it was gold.
Tom: No.
Phil: Well, you'll have to come up with a name for it.
Tom: You hoped it was gold, but unfortunately, of the rare metals, it only has a silver colouring on it.
Tom: But the silver part does a glitter very slightly.
Phil: I'm sorry to hear that.
Phil: Speaking of glitter, have you gotten off your Halloween costume yet?
Tom: I don't have a Halloween costume, but Halloween is now a thing in Australia.
Tom: But it's a little weird, because last year, there were very few children trick or treating on our street here, as far as one can tell, because you can usually tell from the sound of children screaming outside, which I presume means that Halloween in Australia is truer to the horror spirit than either the chocolate and candy eating spirit, or is there a spiritual or other or historical meaning to Halloween in America?
Tom: Or is it entirely about dressing up and the consumption of sweets?
Phil: For as long as I was there, when I got there initially, it was more about dressing up your house with as much electronics as possible and little kids going around getting candy.
Phil: Then towards the end of my time in the US, it just became an excuse for people to dress in loose ways that they ordinarily wouldn't be allowed to.
Tom: But on the day, is there some meaning as opposed to how it is now expressed?
Phil: I doubt it.
Phil: I don't know.
Phil: No, I don't know.
Phil: I don't know how Halloween got started.
Phil: I think it wasn't from a US origin.
Phil: I think it initially was from Europe.
Phil: But there's no real meaning of Halloween as it pertains to how North America celebrates it.
Phil: It's just about going door to door to get candy.
Tom: I'm looking this up out of interest because I feel like I at some point knew what its real meaning was.
Tom: And it is indeed a Christian feast for All Hallows Day.
Tom: And All Hallows Day I am familiar with.
Tom: But this year, and in spite of last year, there being a few children screaming outside, we put on the veranda a variety of sweets, none of them poisoned.
Tom: At least that's what I'm claiming.
Tom: And for two hours to three hours, there was a constant stream of screaming children.
Phil: Well, that's good.
Tom: So who knows what's going on, but for some reason this year, there was a major influx of children.
Tom: Perhaps it's in some way related to all the American political propaganda graffiti around today.
Tom: There may be a correlation.
Phil: I think it probably has more to do that you live in a fairly toney area, which for our North American listeners means he lives in a very rich person type neighborhood.
Tom: I do now.
Tom: It didn't used to be.
Phil: So I think probably what's happening is kids are being bussed in from the poorer towns because they know your type of people are going to give out better candy because you can afford it as opposed to those poor people out in the slums.
Phil: So that's probably what's going on.
Tom: The slums literally three streets away.
Phil: Yeah, well, I think with the economy starting to falter, people in their own communities in the suburbs probably don't have the sort of candy that you'd be able to lay out.
Tom: But if you wanted a different sort of candy that is a lot more expensive, you'd be bussing to the slum several streets away.
Phil: Is that right?
Tom: Yes, but that's all year round.
Phil: Yeah, well, I mean, in Australia now, we're following Halloween, we've got Black Friday.
Phil: All we need to do now is start observing Thanksgiving, thanking the pilgrims for discovering America and freeing the slaves, that being the indigenous people, from the shackles of no taxation.
Tom: Of not having a concept of property rights, I think.
Phil: Yeah, which is something we will get into when we start talking about our book report.
Tom: We will indeed, but another American topic we have to bring up before we move on.
Tom: I did mention that this is also Australia's premier vegan podcast.
Tom: And I had the opportunity to try the Rebel Whopper, which I assume isn't a vegan burger because Hungry Jacks, which is the Australian branding of Burger King because a restauranteur in Adelaide had copyrighted Burger King in Australia before Burger King came to Australia in the s.
Tom: So it couldn't be called Burger King here, and is in fact called Hungry Jacks.
Tom: They sell what is specifically referred to as a vegan burger, so I assume their Rebel Whopper is merely a vegetarian burger.
Tom: But unlike the vegan burger, the Rebel Whopper is in the style of a soy-based patty that is meant to be similar to a meat patty, I believe.
Phil: Yeah, I've actually had this myself.
Phil: I was at the Sydney Airport, and they were advertising as a vegan cheeseburger because it has a protein-based patty, a plant protein-based patty, and then cheese made out of coconut oil, essentially.
Phil: I gave it a try, and what did you think about it?
Phil: Because I'm a connoisseur of veggie burgers, obviously.
Phil: I make my own veggie burger.
Phil: Insofar as where I was concerned, I gave it a out of because most veggie burgers you get in Australia are probably a out of
Phil: And I think with this one, at least, it achieved its goal of being an average fast food type burger.
Tom: Yep, I'd say that's a fair analogy.
Tom: The only two vegan burgers I'm familiar with, and I can remember the brand of the...
Tom: I think it was mentioned on a previous show, the patties you buy to add to burgers yourself, Tally Ho, I believe it is.
Tom: And that's the gold standard for vegan burgers that I've tried.
Tom: Second to that would be the Lord of the Fries burger I've tried.
Tom: And third would be this.
Tom: And to me, it was probably of a similar sort of quality to the beef patty in terms of its taste, fillingness and energy that it provided, which is, as you said, a mediocre fast food burger.
Tom: And again though, it does have the advantage of not being coated in the rancid fat.
Tom: Well, it would get rancid fat from the grill, but the rancid fat of the animal itself.
Phil: Yeah, I'm not sure if they have a separate grill or not.
Phil: Hungry Jacks and Burger King have for a long time been pretty progressive with providing vegan options, though not advertising it ostensibly.
Tom: So it may also have the advantage of a vegetable oil that would be less reused due to having to avoid the slop that they use for the chips and burgers.
Phil: Yeah, I mean, most organizations do use vegetable oil as a matter of economy and cleanliness.
Phil: But, you know, even...
Tom: But again, it gets mixed with the fat of the meat.
Phil: Yeah, and that's exactly right.
Phil: And you can't always assume, going into a place to get French fries, that they're going to be vegan because, I mean, McDonald's puts like a beef sort of flavoring into their French fries as well.
Phil: So, but yeah, I mean, it's good.
Phil: It's good to have these options.
Phil: There's no hungry jacks around me, but I must say, every time I drive by one, it's not like I feel compelled to go in and try it, but I at least thought it was good.
Phil: And they've launched it at the most controversial time because vegans in Australia used to be called animal activists, but now they call them vegans.
Phil: And so for people like me who just don't eat meat because I...
Phil: not for animal activist reasons, it's a bit difficult.
Phil: But in terms of going to normal restaurants in the capital city in my state, it is impossible to not have vegan options all over the menus these days.
Phil: So it must be something that's emerging as a popular thing.
Phil: But that's neither here nor there as it relates to this video game podcast.
Phil: Now, we did feature Sneaker King in our top games for hardcore gamers list at Game Under.
Tom: Or Sneak Jack as it was known in Australia.
Phil: Are you kidding me?
Phil: You are kidding me.
Phil: Yes.
Phil: Hey, the other thing I've got to tell you, it's been a part of my family law that Burger King had to call themselves Hungry Jacks because my mother's cousin, who we affectionately called Uncle Bobby, had a restaurant in North Queensland called Burger King.
Phil: And he was featured prominently in the press.
Phil: He wore a crown on his head, and he had a double decker hamburger he was famous for.
Phil: And he was of Swedish origin and brought the concept over from his time in World War II when he had been to the United States and gone to a McDonald's in California.
Phil: And then he brought that concept back over here to North Queensland.
Phil: So I'm going to have to look into this Adelaide interloper.
Tom: That's what the internet sources that I've seen suggest.
Phil: Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's fine.
Phil: I mean, that may well be the case, but like I've still got stuff from his restaurant called Burger King from the s.
Phil: When did Hungry Jacks come over here?
Tom: I think or
Phil: Yeah, would have predated that.
Phil: But anyway, it's not really an original concept.
Phil: Burger King had been around in the United States for a very long time.
Phil: Again, neither here nor there.
Tom: But he just visited at McDonald's.
Phil: Yeah.
Tom: He'd never heard of Burger King.
Phil: Well, he may not have been around at that point, but he should have just called his restaurant McDowell's, and he could have escaped all of those kinds of issues.
Phil: So if we can attack this however you want to, but I wanted to go over the plot of both of these first, if that's okay?
Tom: You may indeed.
Tom: Will, I just give you a very brief commentary on Burial at Sea, because we will be returning to it, not in this episode, but at a future date.
Tom: But I started Burial at Sea, which is the DLC for Bioshock Infinite, and is set in Rapture.
Tom: And this was towards the end of my use of my previous computer, and I ran into huge issues in getting it to run, which were unrelated to the computer itself.
Tom: I ran the original Infinite perfectly fine.
Tom: This was an issue that a lot of people on Steam were having.
Tom: But the funniest thing was that I gave up on it in a moment that is very fitting the really just completely bizarre and surreal theme park style of Infinite, which we've mentioned on our podcast.
Tom: I was in an area where you were meant to be getting a magical power.
Tom: I've forgotten what they call them in Infinite.
Tom: Salts.
Tom: You were looking for a salt that gave you the ability to freeze things.
Tom: And after many, many, many crashes, I eventually managed to get to the boss who had this salt, who you were, I assume, going to kill and steal it from them.
Tom: And just as I finally got up to the boss, you know, I think a skating rink or something to that effect, with everything frozen around me, rather than the game crashing, the computer froze.
Phil: And that's when you gave up?
Tom: And that's when I gave up.
Phil: Were you very close to the end of the game?
Tom: No, this is, I think, about halfway through the first episode of the DLC.
Phil: I'd like to be quite honest with you here.
Phil: There are games where I'm playing them, and I get to the point where I no longer enjoy them, but I've put enough time into them that I feel, okay, I'm going to beat this so I can say that I've beaten it, and then it'll be done, and then I can close the book, you know, and at least I can tell people I don't like it.
Phil: There was a God of War spinoff that wasn't a numbered title.
Phil: I think it was called God of War Ascension, that I was in this situation, and I got to a game-ending bug, and I felt like I had gotten off the hook, you know?
Phil: It feels so good to go, hey, I was trying to finish it, but there was this game-ending bug, and therefore I finished the game.
Phil: I beat it.
Phil: It's done, and finished with.
Tom: I'm slightly tempted to not continue, but I also want to continue because the game looks amazing, first and foremost, and it is a Ken Levine game, so it is fascinatingly insane.
Tom: And before we do begin, I have to bring up one other thing, because in preparation for this, I listened to our trilogy of Bioshock podcasts, which is some of the greatest podcasting in history, and I've got to highlight a few things that were said in that podcast, because one of them at least relates to Ayn Rand, and at that point, I believe, neither of us had read an Ayn Rand book in full, but this statement was on Infinite, but I think could potentially be applied to the previous Bioshock games as well.
Tom: You described it as fluff based on fluff, I believe, so it will be interesting to see whether that statement holds up with our dive into Ayn Rand.
Phil: Yeah, with the scales pulled from our eyes, I think we can go back into these games and have a look at them again.
Phil: In fact, I started playing Bioshock again, and I felt quite the idiot having not read Atlas Shrugged, and then going back to play Bioshock again.
Phil: I had started Bioshock, I think, three or four times.
Phil: You've listened to the podcast, so you'd know better than I before I finally stuck with it and finished it.
Phil: So the start of the game is very familiar to me.
Phil: But I just want to describe to you what I think the plot is of the game.
Tom: I've just got to mention the one final thing, because other than your wonderful insight in describing Bioshock Infinite as a synchronized cleaning simulator or something to that effect, I think you described the look of the characters as Japanese anime style sex dolls.
Phil: Oh, and do they?
Tom: Do they what?
Tom: Are they Japanese anime style sex dolls?
Tom: You were the one that described it as them, so I cannot confirm or deny whether they.
Tom: That's an accurate description or not, but I thought I'd bring it up.
Phil: This Phil Fogg sounds like a shock joke to me.
Phil: Alright, so I'm going to go through the plot of Bioshock first.
Tom: It sounds a little bit like Tom Towers, but it was Phil Fogg.
Tom: That may well be why we were confused for one another on a recent episode by someone, but continue.
Phil: And what I was going to say is, feel free to interrupt me.
Tom: I always do.
Tom: I don't know why you need to say that.
Phil: Okay, so you...
Phil: Basically, I'm not going to describe what happens beat by beat, but basically the story is, you are...
Tom: You should probably say this will have spoilers for...
Phil: This one.
Tom: Not only our struct, but also the Fountainhead, and possibly several of her philosophy books.
Phil: I don't know why we spend so much time making sure our mics work before we record every week.
Phil: You could just talk.
Phil: All right, so you start the game...
Tom: Well, we need to make sure my microphone works.
Phil: Clearly.
Phil: Well, I think we need to make sure your speakers work.
Phil: All right, so you start the game...
Tom: Why is that?
Phil: As a fish out of water, or rather a fish in water, as you're evidently in a plane crash in a body of water, which looks like it's in the Atlantic, to me at least.
Phil: You're not going to ask why?
Tom: I'm just politely listening.
Phil: Okay, so you basically are in a...
Phil: I'd describe it as a post-World War II era DC-type plane, and you've crashed into a body of water, which I believe is the Atlantic.
Tom: But again, it's definitely set before the Second World War.
Tom: Well, this was actually a point of contention on our trilogy, but I am correct, and it was not set post-Second World War.
Tom: The Bioshock was, and that was one of the important differences between the original and the sequel, was the setting, in that it was set some years after the original.
Phil: Yeah, I'd go for that.
Phil: And you come across a lighthouse, you're quickly brought into the lighthouse, and then essentially trapped in there, where someone starts speaking to you, and is giving you advice as to, could you please help me and my family?
Phil: There's this madman here, and on and on and on.
Phil: You discover that this land, this dream land has been created, this utopia, by a man named Andrew Ryan.
Tom: And can I just point out, which is, I think, a potentially controversial thing to say, but you've got Ayn Rand, one of the most interesting and comical, female, quote, intellectual, end quote, of her era.
Tom: You get a game supposedly commenting on her works, and the major antagonist in it is not a highly entertaining and potentially crazy, or to use a more offensive term, hysterical woman, but a generic s man named Andrew Ryan.
Phil: Yep, who looks a bit, not a little bit like Walt Disney, but a lot.
Phil: And Walt Disney himself, I think, I haven't researched it, but he created Disneyland, which was his own little form of utopia, so I think there's something there, and there's something to the animatronic nature of Disneyland in some of these Bioshock games as well.
Tom: And he had even more interesting political ideas than A-Rand.
Phil: Well, I don't know if they were political, but they were certainly...
Phil: He was a German sympathizer, wasn't he?
Tom: Yes, he was.
Phil: Yeah, yeah.
Phil: And probably had some great interest in geneticism and all that sort of thing as well.
Phil: So back to the story.
Phil: You're a stranger who's landed in this place, which is very clearly a utopia that was created by a character named Andrew Ryan.
Phil: The utopia obviously has taken a turn for the worse, and it is in a complete state of disrepair and, in fact, horror.
Phil: And as you help a man named Atlas, who you cannot see but only hear over a microphone, he's guiding you through this place, at first to help his family, but ultimately to, I don't know if it's stated overtly, to kill Andrew Ryan.
Phil: As you go through this world, you'll come across these large robotic security guards, essentially, in these large boiler suits that look like diving suits from the...
Tom: And I just need to add, because it is an interesting corollary with Atlas Shrugged, I believe his motivation for killing Andrew Ryan was not philosophical or anything, but predominantly revenge.
Tom: He's using political rhetoric to get you to act out his plan that is merely a revenge plot.
Phil: Right, but as for all we know right now, at this point in the story, Atlas is just a sweet-hearted Irish-sounding man who you're just trying to help.
Tom: Yes.
Phil: As you go through this fallen utopia, you come across people and you discover that a lot of the population, if not all of them, were in some way addicted to using these plasmids, which were a way to enhance your body and your mind and gave you special abilities, like the ability for telekinesis, to shoot electricity, fire.
Tom: To freeze things?
Phil: Freeze things, exactly.
Phil: So from a video game, we're not again talking about the gameplay, we're just talking about the plot.
Phil: You're eventually driven to find Andrew Ryan, and he's sitting in his office saying, I knew you'd come.
Phil: He's just pleasantly playing golf.
Phil: To this point, Atlas was going to make you think that Andrew Ryan was going to be some sort of evil dude out to kill you.
Phil: But in fact, Andrew Ryan is quite calm.
Phil: He then describes that you are actually his son, and that you were kidnapped by his nemesis, Frank Fontaine.
Phil: You were prematurely aged to the age that you currently are, and are subject to his control.
Phil: Now, Frank Fontaine, we find out, is actually someone who was leading a rebellion against Andrew Ryan under the premise of an uprising.
Phil: But in terms of his true motivation, he was actually just motivated for criminal gain.
Phil: He faked his own death, started calling himself Atlas, and then became a civil rights figure to fight against Ryan.
Phil: At that point, Atlas, who's now known as Frank, asks you to kill your father, Andrew Ryan, by using a hypnotic cue that he's been using throughout the course of the game.
Phil: And so he's been saying, would you kindly, along the whole course of the game, in fact, at that point, after you've killed Andrew Ryan, you realize that you're under his hypnotic control.
Tom: And importantly, again, in relation to not so much Atlas Shrugged, but because this is absent suspiciously from Atlas Shrugged, but the Fountainhead, before you kill Andrew Ryan, he gives a speech about the Nietzschean concept of the slave and master.
Phil: Correct.
Phil: And I think one of his direct quotes is, a man chooses, a slave obeys.
Phil: So at that point, you go the rest of the game.
Phil: Frank Fontaine now wants to kill you, of course, because you've done your job.
Phil: A ragtag assemblage then saves you, and then basically you're directed throughout the rest of the game to get your revenge and try and kill Frank Fontaine.
Phil: With the help of the little sisters, these little girls, well, they're not little girls there.
Phil: They're made to look like little girls, but they've got this atom in them, A-D-A-M, which powers the plasmids.
Tom: Well, I think they are little girls, but they've been brainwashed and are also controlled by the atom slug.
Phil: Okay, so we'll probably get back into that later.
Phil: To finish out the story, it ends in basically a boss battle.
Phil: You challenge Frank Fontaine.
Phil: He takes a boatload of atom, turns into this really stupid-looking...
Phil: Actually, I think he's supposed to look like the Atlas statue from Atlas Shrugged at the end of the game.
Phil: And then the game ends and is either a good ending or a bad ending, depending on whether you decide to harvest atom from the little girls or not harvest the atom from the little girls.
Phil: So the plot itself, there's lots of elements in it, but it really comes down to player choice, because you go through the game the first time you're playing it, and you think that you're doing things for a certain reason, but then you find out that actually you're being controlled the entire time.
Phil: Having known the game the second time I played through it, the first time that Atlas says to me, would you kindly, you know, activate the elevator, I said, I wonder if there's an Easter egg in here, you know, so I just sat there, and I didn't do it, you know.
Phil: I just was like, no, I'm going to choose not to.
Phil: I will not kindly activate the elevator, and I'll just wait and see what happens.
Phil: And I expected at some point something would happen, but I think he just keeps repeating himself.
Phil: And there's no other choice.
Phil: I let it sit there for about minutes, hoping that they'd just go, okay, well, I guess this isn't going to work.
Phil: Go back out into the ocean, you know.
Tom: Which is essentially the basis of the majority of manipulation, which is making someone believe that they do not have a choice in something.
Phil: Yeah.
Tom: So that's clearly yet another very deep bit of commentary there from Ken Levine.
Phil: Yes, and Ken Levine didn't say that he was influenced only by Atlas Shrugged.
Phil: He said he was also influenced by Logan's run and by
Tom: Well, how he can have been influenced by I can't really say.
Tom: Other than maybe the time period it's set in or the lack of realism or pointlessness.
Tom: The writing's certainly better than
Phil: Yeah, maybe the pointlessness of it, just the fact that it doesn't really matter what you choose is really only going to, you know, you're going to be doing the playing of fate or of others, I guess.
Tom: I meant the pointlessness of the book itself.
Phil: Oh, okay.
Phil: The plot of Atlas Shrugged by Anne Rand, I'm just going to describe it, not the plot, but I'm going to describe it.
Phil: Basically, a bunch of capitalists decide they're going to destroy the world by removing themselves from it.
Tom: No, no.
Tom: You're missing the first part, and one of the things that makes, I think, the Fountainhead more interesting than it otherwise would have been, which is that it actually begins with a bunch of capitalists deciding they're going to form a trust to destroy the major power in what is clearly a thinly veiled reference to what was the name of the major oil tycoon that was limited in what he was able to do by the introduction of antitrust laws.
Phil: Oh, you mean in the real world?
Tom: Yes, yes, because it begins with basically the standard libertarian interpretation of those events.
Phil: Yeah, okay, so standard oil was established by John D.
Phil: Rockefeller.
Phil: And Rockefeller had, he had vertical integration, which is now illegal, which is, so we don't have to get into that, but the basically is there was a time when you could do absolutely whatever you wanted as a business and you could control it, you could collude on pricing and all the rest of it.
Phil: And a lot of that stuff still goes on.
Phil: And I mean, so basically in the Supreme Court had a landmark case against standard oil, which started to break down the trusts.
Phil: And Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, president, Roosevelt was the trust buster who came in and started, you know, disabling companies from doing whatever they wanted.
Tom: Typical disabled president to disable things, but I think this was his father, not the following one.
Tom: He was just mentally disabled.
Phil: Yeah, Theodore, I've got my own views on him, but FDR was a cousin, a distant cousin of Theodore.
Tom: Have there been any American presidents that are not part of a royal family?
Phil: Yeah, he would get that impression, but I won't waste your time by going into that.
Phil: So, from my perspective, I looked at the book at Leshrugged, and these capitalists that wanted to destroy the world were doing it because they could start to see their power being curtailed.
Tom: Well, as I said, before that, you get the protagonist works for her family business, which is the standard oil version, is standard oil but in the railway business.
Tom: And the competing companies who can't compete with them due to their superior business acumen decide to form a trust and destroy her family's company.
Tom: Following this, capitalists, other capitalists who weren't part of this pro-trust lobbying begin to disappear.
Tom: And as the story unfolds, you discover that they are engaged in a terrorist campaign against the government, essentially.
Phil: The governments of the world.
Tom: Well, it gradually escalates as the story continues due to the creeping nature of communism in the mind of Ayn Rand.
Tom: So if it gets a foothold at all in America through an antitrust thing, within a couple of years, the entirety of the world are ardent communists, essentially.
Tom: So their terrorist campaign moves from being directed at the United States to the rest of the world.
Phil: But the main plot point is basically that these guys want to take...
Phil: They take their ball and leave.
Phil: And basically say, you guys think we're so bad?
Phil: Fine, we'll leave.
Phil: And they go form their own utopia in the Rocky Mountains.
Phil: And the society starts to break down with the absence of...
Tom: But again, and this is what is...
Tom: There is one quality that Ayn Rand has as an artist, and that is she is surprisingly honest.
Tom: And one quality she utterly lacks is imagination.
Tom: So her concept of the book is, and her philosophy, is essentially that any socialist ideals or altruistic ideals inevitably lead to the total collapse of society.
Tom: Now, she can't actually come up with a reason why this is true, either in her philosophy or in her fiction writing.
Tom: And I have had the misfortune of reading, let me count them, one, two, three, four, five Ayn Rand books.
Tom: And not in any of them does she logically demonstrate why this altruism inevitably leads to the problems that she sees it leading to.
Tom: But unlike in her non-fiction, where she just avoids this question whatsoever, or lies by obfuscating it with another point, in her fiction she is honest, and her fiction is written in good faith.
Tom: And so what can she do?
Tom: And I'm not saying that she is necessarily wrong, but her basic concept is altruism inevitably leads to the apocalyptic collapse of society.
Tom: So she has an antitrust thing destroy the biggest company.
Tom: Now, that should be the starting point.
Tom: If you want to demonstrate that this sort of action inevitably leads to this conclusion, what you can't then do is introduce a terrorist campaign that is actively destroying the socialist policies, because the type of terrorism that they are doing is sinking aid ships, destroying social programs, social program infrastructure left, right and center.
Phil: Indeed, in fact, there is a situation where there is industrial farming that the government has set up to stave off hunger, and they completely undermine that.
Tom: Yep, so what we're seeing is not that these things are destroyed by themselves and their own policy, but that they are destroyed by the terrorist campaign of the major businessmen.
Tom: And this is kind of absolutely hilarious to me, because this is, and you don't, it depends on the era, but this is a classic, not a classical liberal, but a classic liberal argument against communism at various times, is okay, fine, so take the example of Vietnam.
Tom: All right, we're willing to accept that all the problems with Vietnam may have been partially caused by the complete destruction of the infrastructure when France said, fuck this, we're going home, and America said, well, if you're not going to do business with us, you're not going to do business with anyone.
Tom: But the very fact that France and America were able to so easily destroy much of the Vietnamese infrastructure is in and of itself a great argument against communism.
Tom: So what we're getting from this libertarian, famous supposedly countercultural and edgy philosopher, is just a classic liberal dumbing down, watering down, I should say, version of Might Is Right.
Tom: And Might Is Right is an actual book and is hilarious and well worth reading and does actually contain that idea and other ideas similar to it, not in a watered down form as it is presented in Ayn Rand.
Phil: Yeah, I've got to say several times throughout the book she undercuts her own story and philosophy.
Phil: And then ultimately when the book ends, it's completely deflating because you are hoping that she was going to wrap it all back up together again and do something great because why else would people always be reading this book and treating it...
Tom: The funniest example of her undermining her own point is the train disaster where she puts all the characters she doesn't like on a train and the scene is just there so that the author can just enjoy killing them.
Tom: But it's also meant to demonstrate how our regulations inevitably will lead to major disasters.
Tom: But what is actually presented in the book is a catastrophic failure of a command structure because there is a massive lack of regulations.
Phil: Yeah, and this goes on throughout the book.
Phil: And yeah, I mean, the characters that they're fighting against, the guys who are lobbying the government and the people in government positions, you know, obviously they're weak, willed people who aren't very competent and all the rest of it.
Phil: They're not sympathetic at all, but they're not the same level of monster as the people who are deliberately tearing apart the society.
Tom: Well, to me, neither of them are in any way sympathetic.
Tom: And this is a really bizarre thing following on from the Fountainhead because in the Fountainhead, I'll get to that in a minute, but just on that point, the entire book feels completely pointless from a narrative perspective because one, the supposedly impressive billionaire businessmen and great entrepreneurs don't do anything interesting.
Tom: The ideas they come up with, the crap science fiction ideas, you don't get to follow them on any journey where they make some interesting discoveries or they're fighting against issues because the book begins with their shit being destroyed.
Tom: So all you get is words of self-pitying whining.
Tom: And the bad characters, that is the average person, well, the one thing you can say for them is they're not so self-pitying as these fucking pieces of shit, but they're in no way sympathetic or interesting either.
Tom: So by the end of the book, I was just thinking, personally, I hope that the socialist world starves to death, then these fucking retards realize that, okay, there's a bunch of several billionaires, and with the honesty of Ayn Rand, this would occur.
Tom: They realize, well, okay, there's several people here, what the fuck are we going to do?
Tom: We're just going to have to go back to subsistence farming, or we won't be self-sufficient and we'll starve to death.
Tom: And so then they either become subsistence farmers and they can't enjoy the freedom of non-subsistence farming to come up with all their wonderful inventions, which they employ the silly masses to produce for them and the government grants to fund their research.
Tom: And they end up starving or living in a state of, I believe Ayn Rand will call it, primitivism.
Phil: Yeah, but if you look at what they did in their own utopia, they did go back to subsistence farming.
Phil: And she made herself subservient to being basically a housemaid for this John Galt fellow.
Phil: So for all of the talk, and that was the other thing that was annoying about the book from a feminist perspective, is for all the talk about how she was so great because she wore pant suits and acted like a man, and that made her a superior feminist, the book spends probably a few hundred pages talking about how utterly sexually addicted she is to three of the main male characters in the book.
Phil: It's pathetic.
Phil: It is absolutely pathetic.
Tom: And the disappointing thing about that again, and we are going to have to get to the Fountainhead, but one of the brilliant things about the Fountainhead is certainly not feminism, but its weird sadomasochistic love triangle is just absolutely brilliant, and the woman at the center of it is simultaneously one of the cruelest sadists in fiction and one of the greatest masochists.
Tom: And it is some sad level brilliance.
Tom: In this, all of the weird perversion is gone, and you've just got a shitty nymphomaniac who falls in lust with these three complete doofuses and spends the entire time self-pitying, whining about how other people have sex without having the same level of passion as I have.
Phil: It's terrible.
Phil: It's absolutely terrible.
Phil: And talking about doofuses, look at John Galt.
Phil: He's apparently this really intelligent guy who is absolutely a creepy stalker.
Phil: Everyone thinks he's so great, but he's spent the last, what, years or so living in some crummy apartment just so he could spy on the main female character and somehow brush against her from time to time.
Phil: It's pathetic.
Phil: Anyway, you talk about sadomasochism, and that's what those billionaires were all doing back in their utopia.
Phil: It's like, oh, what did you do today?
Phil: I learned how to invent this new sort of brass cleaner and look at this brass.
Phil: I cleaned it up real well.
Phil: It only took hours, but I...
Tom: That was definitely your euthanism, by the way.
Phil: Yeah, I did it by my own hand, so to speak.
Tom: I polished my brass by my own hand.
Phil: Yeah, yeah.
Phil: You keep saying we've got to get back to the Fountainhead.
Phil: I thought we were only talking about Atlas Shrugged.
Tom: We are, but also in the context of Ayn Rand, because, and we're also going to go back to the romantic manifesto, but Ayn Rand, to me, as I said, she is very original in some areas, not in her philosophy, because, as I said, in her version of Might is Right, it boils down to the lamest liberal justification for imperialism.
Tom: And that is essentially the most middle-of-the-road, centrist bullshit you can possibly come up with that has been the same shit said in a million different ways since the invention of empire, perhaps since the invention of humanity itself.
Tom: And it gets its edgy versions, like Ayn Rand, for instance, that completely ignorant fuckwits, who have read absolutely nothing divergent in their life, believe is some sort of original edgy shit, because it's saying some basic dogma that they've heard a million times, so they're able to understand it, because they're so stupid, they can only hear stuff they've heard said themselves before many, many, many times, so that's stuck in their head in a slightly different way, and suddenly it's some original amazing thing.
Tom: But Ayn Rand did actually have some slightly divergent and interesting ideas and some original aspects to her character.
Tom: But if you read several books over her career, you get the impression that she is gradually committing intellectual suicide, and Atlas Shrugged, one of her final works, that and Philosophy Who Needs It as well, both of those are particularly in Atlas Shrugged, because she is at no point a good faith non-fiction writer to a large degree, not necessarily because she is being deliberately bad faith, but because she is such a poor writer and such an even worse philosopher.
Tom: But if you read The Fountainhead, The Fountainhead is essentially exactly the same themes, a very similar plot as well, but it's about a sculptor.
Tom: And this sculptor is a tortured genius who wants to go his own way against society and just build what he wants to build.
Tom: And in this book, which I think reflects very badly on Bioshock, there is a character called, I think, Gail Wyman.
Tom: And Gail Wyman is this great newspaper tycoon who is the antagonist of Owlsworth Tooe, who is a socialist architecture critic who has plans of world domination.
Tom: That's right, he is a socialist architecture critic who has plans of world domination.
Tom: And doesn't this already sound a million times better than Atlas Shrutt?
Tom: But it does.
Tom: But Owlsworth Tooe is a genuinely interesting character, and he is the major evil character.
Tom: And there are genuine bits of not socialist philosophy or thought, but certainly socialist aesthetics and commentary styles in him, unlike anything socialist in Atlas Shrutt, which is in entirely the fantasy of a paranoid capitalist.
Tom: But so you first of all got a antagonist and a dangerous power who is a character written as complexly as everyone else, whereas the socialist characters in Atlas Shrugged, they have like the brother of the protagonist.
Tom: He has absolutely no philosophical ideas whatsoever, and that's the point of him, which is libertarian projection, because libertarians take their names from the original libertarians, which were socialists.
Tom: So if you're putting in as a libertarian a socialist character, and you are going to be completely dishonest and not bother to attack the ideas of socialism, which should be precisely what you're attempting to do, what you're going to end up with is pure projection.
Tom: So you end up with someone who has no ideas of their own and just lives their life attempting to get ahead as much as possible, which is what the average libertarian ends up simply defending.
Tom: And by this time, Ayn Rand had degenerated to being your average milquetoast libertarian.
Phil: Yeah, I did get the sense that she was committing philosophical suicide in this book, and it's shocking to me why so many people who were interested in the early internet are going to be libertarians, because, you know...
Tom: And I was going to preface this whole discussion by saying that one of my best friends at GameSpot is and was a...
Tom: I don't know if he still is, but he was a libertarian.
Tom: And he actually recommended that I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and lots of people say, this is a book you should read in your youth, and I think I was still a teenager then.
Tom: And so I borrowed them both from the library.
Tom: I read the first sentence of both of them and laughed profusely and decided if I were to read this, I would soon not be friends with him.
Tom: Not because I would not want a libertarian friend.
Tom: I couldn't care less what my friends believe, which I don't know if that came out right.
Tom: But because if I made any comment on the book, he would immediately disown me, because I had previously read and I had described to him precisely why contains no connection to reality whatsoever.
Tom: And therefore, as a supposed warning of where society may potentially be headed if things go wrong and you let totalitarianism take hold, it's a complete and utter failure and is at best going to have the effect of making people needlessly paranoid and frightened.
Tom: And if something is going to allow totalitarianism to take hold, that's kind of the basis of totalitarianism control, and most control is fear.
Tom: So it's probably not a good idea to hold this up as a great book to read if you want to have, develop some sort of political autonomy given that all it offers you is a nightmare scenario that bears no relation to any workings of politics whatsoever.
Tom: There are a couple of lines in it that may be good as a basic commentary on certain aspects of fear control, such as, for instance, the object of torture is torture, which is to say the object of torture is not to get information from anyone as anyone who tortures people will tell you it is.
Tom: But beyond basic lines, it's complete trash, and this nearly ended the friendship.
Tom: So it was clearly advisable not to read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shroud so as not to destroy a friendship and also waste or hours of my life.
Phil: So what I was saying is that everything that was foretold in that would come about because of a totalitarian state has come about and ultimately existed in quite the reverse.
Phil: It's come from liberal, free enterprise democracies.
Tom: I believe the term is inverted totalitarianism.
Tom: But the interesting thing is, and again this is potentially very dangerous grounds for a games podcast, but fascism is actually the...
Tom: inverted fascism would be a more accurate description because fascism structurally is essentially defined by an alliance between the state and the cooperation with the state being the more powerful partner between the two.
Tom: And one interpretation of many societies today would be an alliance between corporations and the state with the cooperation being the predominant partner.
Phil: Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
Phil: If you could look at the military-industrial complex and say perhaps that would be the ultimate play out of that.
Tom: Well, any military, as long as it isn't a complete crap one, due to the massive power it inherently holds is always, by default, a major partner in the power of any society.
Phil: Okay, so when you were talking about liberals before too, you were talking in the traditional political sense, not meaning the American sense, which would be a leftist.
Phil: You were talking about the concept of liberalism.
Tom: I'm talking about in the traditional sense.
Tom: In the American sense of liberal, it would be a rightist, but in the American sense of leftist and rightist, it would be a leftist.
Phil: Yeah, and I think that was important to point out because most of our listeners are in the United States.
Phil: When we talk about liberals, we're not talking about leftists.
Phil: We're talking about people who are promoting individual rights and free enterprise and democracy.
Tom: Correct, yes.
Tom: Leftists in America would be one of the groups that would reject that justification of imperialism and argument against left-wing societies, being that they don't necessarily have the military power to defend themselves.
Tom: Which is an interesting point, because it then means you need to either conclude that the Soviet Union was not a leftist society or that in fact a leftist society can defend itself from the greatest military power in history.
Tom: So it's not a logically consistent argument.
Phil: No, it's not.
Phil: The thing that gets me back to libertarianism, and again, I'm very sympathetic to it.
Phil: I'm sympathetic to most political persuasions, but...
Tom: I like them all.
Phil: Yeah, and I do as well, and a lot of people I know have been libertarians.
Phil: But I just want to know why libertarians and why someone like Alan Greenspan would promote or hold up Atlas Shrugged as anything to do with libertarianism.
Tom: Well, if you listen to Alan Greenspan, I can...
Tom: and this is going...
Tom: I mean, this is either going to show that I'm a complete moron, or Alan Greenspan is a complete moron.
Tom: But it makes perfect sense that libertarians and Alan Greenspan or any other major proponents of the Fountainhead would choose the Fountainhead over Atlas Shrugged as they go to biblical text, because they're either extremely stupid or they want an extremely stupid market, and they want people who they can easily manipulate, again, either because they're genuinely stupid, so they think that this terrible argument makes any sort of sense, or they want to use this against people that they believe they can control.
Tom: And Alan Greenspan, well, it could go either way.
Phil: Wait, did you just call him Alvin Greenspan?
Tom: Alan, no, no, I said Alan.
Phil: Because that would be funny.
Tom: That's not a joke, because the fountainhead, other than its great length, and that is perhaps an attractive part of it, if you want to believe in its ideas, it gives you, it doesn't give you the actual ideas, it gives you a fantasy of those ideas, which are beyond critique because they are not based in reality.
Tom: And it presents you arguments against them that don't actually exist.
Tom: They're entirely invented by someone who believes in the idea that they're arguing against.
Tom: So they're obviously bad arguments against it.
Tom: And the only difficult point is, again, that Ayn Rand is an honest artist.
Tom: So all the issues in terms of the plot and the narrative occur.
Tom: But most people that want to read this story that is presenting their ideas, they're just going to ignore that, or they're not going to be literate enough to notice it, or because it's pages, they're not actually going to read the whole thing.
Tom: So they're not going to find out that the reason this socialist society collapses is because of the capitalist terrorism destroying.
Phil: I think it's going to be the latter.
Phil: I think a lot of people are just going to read the Cliffnote version of the book and basically assume that the message of the book is that big government is bad.
Tom: And that's why, again, people like Alan Greenspan can promote the road to serfdom, even though the road to serfdom is utterly against to % of Alan Greenspan and libertarian politics.
Tom: But the Reader's Digest version excluded all of the parts of that book that contained any reference to the responsibilities of the state to society.
Phil: Wonderful.
Phil: We've solved that, then.
Phil: So basically, people say that this book is great if you're a libertarian basically because they haven't read it.
Tom: I think that's the only flattering way we can reach any sort of conclusion as to why.
Tom: But back to the Fountainhead again.
Tom: As I said beforehand, it has a fully developed socialist antagonist.
Tom: More important than that and much more impressive, and it's a response to the basic criticism of Ayn Rand, which I think isn't a fair criticism, of this is just Nietzschean master-slave dynamic because it isn't.
Tom: If that were the case, then the billionaires wouldn't have run away to form their little society because they couldn't master anyone.
Tom: And in the Fountainhead, there is a character in the book to symbolise this point, and that is Gail Wyndon the...
Tom: And he is an example of where Ayn Rand's and libertarianism can go wrong, where rather than it being the pursuit of selfish fulfilment, and that means fulfilment that does not rely on anyone else, which is usually ignored by any critics, including Bioshock and why they moved to the master-slave dynamic, where fulfilment is through the.
Tom: Domination or the submission to other people.
Tom: And so it can be fulfilment both for the master and the slave.
Tom: It's not just fulfilment for the master, it's also fulfilment for the slave.
Tom: Here she demonstrates relatively coherently why if you supposedly follow selfish ideals, but you base your power not on what you're able to do by yourself, but what you're able to do by dominating and relying on other people, as Gail Winan does, you're not really being a proper objectivist, and you in and of yourself do not have great power.
Tom: And that's perfectly logically consistent in the book, and he fails logically due to his control being based not on his own power, but on his control of others.
Tom: So when it becomes more useful for the people under him to follow a greater political power, they leave in a logical fashion.
Tom: So that's a, I think, perfectly coherent response to the standard argument against objectivism like you see in Bioshock, which is basically just master-slave dynamic.
Tom: But even in The Fountainhead, where it fails, and my major issue with objectivism, and I think it is because there isn't an answer, because if you bring it into politics, because they will not move to any sort of anarchy or even a new basis for current paradigms of laws, they merely want to continue with the current law, which is based predominantly on property rights, and that is where modern law begins, not so much the Magna Carta, but more so the enclosures.
Tom: Because they want to use that as the basis, they can't come up with a logical, justifying reason for this.
Tom: And this fails again in The Fountainhead, because at the end of the book, the protagonist destroys the perversion of his great masterpiece.
Tom: He built it on a government grant.
Tom: It was basically he was building a public housing establishment.
Tom: And that wasn't the perversion.
Tom: A lot of people also like to criticize Ayn Rand for accepting social services at the end of her life as hypocrisy.
Tom: But she wrote that she was % for people against social services, accepting social services, but against people who were for them because for those people, because they were for the stealing of other people's property, it was theft, whereas because they were against the stealing of other people's property, it wouldn't be theft, but it would be them accepting money they were owed for the money that had been stolen from them through taxes.
Tom: Wow.
Tom: That's logical to me.
Tom: I think that's fair.
Phil: I was wondering where you were going with that, but yeah, when you finished that, it was like, all right, it's pretty small-minded, but you know, if you got...
Tom: It's very petty, but it's logically consistent.
Phil: Yep, yep.
Tom: So that's perfectly fair.
Tom: And again, another bad criticism of Ayn Rand is that...
Phil: Speaking of criticisms of Ayn Rand, you've said that she's a poor writer, and I don't have the...
Phil: Yeah, she's a poor writer.
Tom: You don't need to have any knowledge of writing to know she's a bad writer.
Tom: Basic example.
Tom: Atlas Shrugged is pages long.
Tom: She wrote Anthem, a, I think, or perhaps even less than that page, novella.
Tom: Now, the plot of Anthem is quite literally identical to the plot of Atlas Shrugged.
Tom: And the events that occur in Anthem are with less characters, essentially identical, and it also takes place basically after the socialist thing was already in power, but other than that, it's basically identical.
Tom: And if the plot began afterwards, it would make no difference anyway.
Tom: Again, pages or less, identical plot at the shrugged, pages, identical plot.
Tom: And Anthem is better written as well, not coincidentally due to the length.
Phil: She needs an editor more than she needs writing classes.
Phil: I think with most people, you'd go, okay, yeah, that's good.
Phil: You go out and write your pages.
Phil: But like, I am an amateur, and I could go through her work and cut out probably or pages, maybe not that much, but you could cut a fair bit out of it, and it wouldn't be that bad.
Tom: Well, I think you need to cut out the book entirely because she's writing a book she wrote better.
Tom: That's by far her best fiction piece.
Tom: And if you want a more detailed exploration of her philosophical ideas, there's the Fountainhead.
Tom: This is Atlas Shrugged, only exists because in those books, she took her ideas seriously, and you can read that, and you can attack her ideas.
Tom: In Atlas Shrugged, you can't read that and attack her ideas because there are no ideas in it.
Tom: You can just point out how the plot is fucking stupid and undermines her own point.
Tom: But her points aren't actually indicative of any ideas.
Tom: That's why she wrote it, because she was afraid that her legacy would consist of ideas that could be attacked.
Tom: But back to the Fountainhead.
Tom: That is a failure, ultimately, because he builds this thing, everything goes swimmingly.
Tom: He builds it in the shadows using the artist who could potentially have been a good artist, but decided to instead bow to societal trends and societal pressures and did not take his art seriously, and so fucked up everything, fucked up his career as an artist.
Tom: Again, this logically plays out, so that's all fair, but he still has, due to being a shit artist who sells out, he has some social capital, so he uses him, but he nevertheless goes down in the world.
Tom: But to reinvigorate his career, they make a deal that, I think it's Rourke in this book, will build this government housing as his masterpiece, but use the other dude's name.
Tom: Couple of problems.
Tom: One, everyone is floored by how great this work of architecture is.
Tom: That's the first issue with this idea, because for most artists who do follow such a career path, they'll either never be well loved, or if they do, it's very unlikely to occur in their lifetime.
Tom: The two greatest artists in history in my mind are William Blake and Emily Dickinson.
Tom: And one of them was a joke in his lifetime, that being William Blake, and the other one was so disgusted by the publication process that she published nothing in her lifetime.
Tom: And when she did get published by her family members and was exposed to the public, her stuff was destroyed and introduced to the public in a mutilated form.
Tom: So even when she was immediately exposed and got some credit as a mediocre, generic female versifier, it was not for the right things.
Tom: Then when she started to get some credit during the feminist movement, it's questionable whether much of it is a fair appraisal of her work or not.
Tom: And in the case of William Blake, again, he was adopted by the romantics, and there are certainly romantic parts of his art, but in all romanticism, no matter how religious it is, it is very much an atheist religion, and you cannot get a more mystical version of Christianity than William Blake other than stuff in the Bible itself.
Tom: So even when you get to, I think, the greatest examples of rauc in reality, neither of them are exactly popular names loved by the average man on the street, and in the circles where they do get major credit, it's often for questionable reasons.
Tom: So that's complete nonsense.
Tom: The second issue is even William Blake, who believed that artists who were great artists such as himself deserved to be treated as kings and whose dream was to decorate the greatest cathedrals in the world like the Renaissance painters.
Tom: Incidentally, his hero, Michelangelo, was a shit painter, hated doing the Sistine Chapel, but was nevertheless a great sculptor.
Tom: He had questionable taste in art, but he was shat on in his lifetime, thought to be a joke, and he nevertheless, in spite of all that, fundamentally believed the most important thing was that he successfully did his art to his own and God's, what he believed was merit.
Tom: Now, that's what the character of Rourke does, but he's only justified in the book by the fact that his work is liked and the fact that the people don't like it, don't like it just because they don't understand it or they're jealous.
Tom: Fuck off.
Tom: That is the most merely mouth, disgusting, sniveling, bullshit interpretation of someone willing to ignore society.
Tom: Fuck off.
Tom: Secondly, so other than a moral disagreement there, the book also fails because he blows it up, and he's caught as the terrorist who blew the shit up.
Tom: And he goes to court, he defends himself in a hilarious scene of self-defense.
Tom: His argument, justifying self, has many problems, but it's too complicated for me to go into.
Tom: But you can push that aside.
Tom: What do you think happens at the end of this tortured, misunderstood genius defending himself in court after blowing up a newly built public works?
Phil: That the judge agrees with him and sets him free?
Tom: Yes, the jury finds him not guilty.
Tom: And again, objectivism that supposedly bases itself not on arbitrary power, but on the individual's own power, cannot even justify a fucking artist without the law.
Tom: If that book ended with him being arrested, sent to prison for ten years, he's like, fuck this, I'm going to study, I'm going to meditate, I'm going to do push-ups a day.
Tom: When I come out, I'm going to fucking drag a granite block like that fucking French motherfucker who literally built a castle in France while he was a postman, you motherfucker!
Tom: And the world can suck my dick!
Tom: Then that is a brilliant work that justifies itself.
Tom: Instead, no, gotta have the law.
Tom: Fuck off.
Tom: Fucking failure.
Tom: Objectivism, you fucking suck.
Tom: You are the most disgusting perversion of what you claim to be because you are invented by a fucking coward!
Tom: Bullshit!
Tom: Fucking bullshit!
Phil: Yeah, I think it's sad that I was able to predict how that would go.
Phil: And the fact that it...
Tom: In reality, you get fucking postmen building castles in France for their own gratification.
Tom: Yet an objectivist who has a career as a hackwriter cannot have that occur in fiction, which is meant to occur in an idealized world.
Tom: And again, it's the same thing.
Tom: She is too much of a coward to not have justification outside of herself, so she has to go to the law.
Tom: And it's the same in her politics.
Tom: She won't come up with a logical political argument for what a libertarian society would look like, so all she can say is, it is a society based on property rights defended by the army and the police.
Tom: Well, that is a military dictatorship.
Tom: And that's not meant to be a comical argument against objectivism.
Tom: That's literally what libertarians describe their ideal society as being.
Tom: Is it not, as far as I'm aware it is?
Phil: Yeah, it is.
Tom: And there's no other way to describe a society that bases itself on property rights justified by defence, by the military, and by the police, with no recourse to law other than your property.
Tom: That's essentially how most military dictatorships work, without any exaggeration.
Tom: And again, libertarianism to me, I don't have any sympathy for libertarianism, because it has reached new levels of cowardice due to its political correctness.
Tom: Now, in Ayn Rand Day, she didn't beat around the bush.
Tom: She bases it on property rights.
Tom: Well, property rights begins with the enclosures.
Tom: The enclosures aren't really relevant to America, but they've got a little bit more of an even awkward beginning of property rights, because property rights begins for Americans with the idea that Indians don't have property rights.
Tom: Now, why don't Indians have property rights?
Tom: What is the objectivist answer to this and the libertarian answer to this, which they won't ever say?
Tom: What is the answer to this?
Phil: You're going to have to tell me.
Tom: The answer to this is that the primitive Indians, not being human beings, did not have a concept of property rights.
Tom: And it's a bit of circular logic here, because to be a human being, you have to have no conception of property rights.
Tom: So therefore, you can do anything to those people, and they're outside of the law, because they aren't people.
Tom: So therefore, Indians weren't humans, because they didn't have property rights.
Tom: But even this, they're willing to at least admit the reason, but it's, as in Australia, for instance, you can maybe, you may be slightly more knowledgeable of Indian law, but it's questionable, because as far as I'm aware, Indians did have a concept of property ownership.
Tom: Some of it was collectivist, but collectivist ownership is a conception of ownership, and therefore property rights.
Tom: But in Australia, we were able to, in Victoria, quite literally have some of the land purchased, and from my knowledge of American history, a lot of stuff was bought from Indians.
Tom: Now, I don't know if it's possible to buy something from someone without them having a concept of ownership.
Tom: It seems to me that that would be logically impossible.
Phil: To buy something without a concept of ownership?
Tom: Yes.
Tom: I don't see how I'm capable of selling something to you if I don't have a conception of ownership.
Phil: Yeah, I'm just thinking about digital distribution in video games, and Spotify, and that sort of thing, where people have sits.
Tom: Well, the reason they need to hide stuff in their eula is that you have a concept of ownership that doesn't agree with theirs.
Phil: That's true.
Tom: But anyway, the point is, again, on the basic point, this concept that is supposedly based on fearless individuality cannot justify itself outside of an arbitrary collectivist point, and even in its most idealistic works, such as Ayn Rand.
Tom: And look at what the billionaires did.
Tom: They didn't piss off to do their own things on their lonesome.
Tom: They pissed off to create a fucking little utopian society.
Phil: Yeah.
Tom: What?
Tom: What?
Tom: I don't fucking get this.
Phil: I mean, it just continues.
Phil: She just continues to undercut and undercut and undercut.
Phil: The book makes no sense.
Phil: I don't see...
Phil: Well, again, we've already figured out why it was so popular and why people still read it.
Tom: And the last thing I have to bring up on why the writing is bad is, have you read any Soviet realism?
Tom: Sorry, socialist realism, because it's not a Soviet thing.
Phil: I don't know if I have or not.
Tom: Well, I bet you have, because surely you've read John Steinbeck.
Phil: Yes.
Tom: What about Jack London?
Phil: Yes.
Tom: They're both great exponents of the socialist realist style.
Tom: And again, what is this stupid strawman fantasy nightmare?
Tom: John Steinbeck, quintessential American socialist, one of the most important socialist authors ever, one of the most important American authors ever, one of the greatest writers about entrepreneurship and individuality.
Tom: What he believed was his masterpiece and most important book, and he's also one of America's greatest Christian writers, which is about a biblical tale.
Tom: He spends multiple monologues dedicated to the righteousness of entrepreneurship and individual genius, and that individual genius is what drives innovation and new inventions.
Tom: Again, why are you attacking Strawman?
Tom: And you're not attacking his socialist ideas either, but that's beside the point.
Tom: I bring them up because socialist realism is essentially defined by silly monologues and fetishization of the working classes that is, even when it's written by working class people, at least when it's written by working class people, you get a lot of dickheads who work in class, but it nevertheless fetishizes them.
Tom: They're all basically, what is the book where someone takes a female wraith off the streets, teaches her to speak well, and she joins high society?
Tom: Basically, if it's written by a working class person, socialist realism, all the characters of the working class are like that.
Tom: If it's written by a non-working class person, then all the characters have already been transformed into the nice-talking upper middle class person that the author actually loves.
Phil: Yeah, it's patronising.
Tom: But other than that patronisation, there's also a strong trend of self-pity and whining throughout all these books.
Tom: Less so in John Steinbeck's less immediately socialist work.
Tom: So in Grapes of Wrath, there's lots of self-pity throughout.
Tom: But at least in that, it's narratively justified and it feels like it is coming from the characters rather than the author, because John Steinbeck in his own conception of the world is consistently joyful regardless of the circumstances, so he can get away with it.
Tom: But Ayn Rand being Russian, where this originated, really ratchets that up, so the entire thing consists of this nonsense.
Tom: And she's on the level of Gorky to me, and she basically writes Gorky novels, except unlike Gorky, she has only one talent and is an artist, which is honesty.
Tom: Gorky has the greater talent as an artist who writes propaganda, which is dishonesty.
Tom: So if you read a Gorky book, it's going to make sense and produce a convincing argument for something that may potentially be untrue rather than an argument that shows why your shit is nonsense if you even have something to argue for.
Tom: But to me, it is hilarious that this fucking cunt flees Soviet Russia.
Tom: And by the way, there is no greater argument against the Soviet rule of Russia and perhaps even communism itself.
Tom: But one, they emancipated women so that women could go to university.
Tom: And they get fucking morons like this going to their fucking socialist universities.
Tom: Could she have gone into a university that had any sort of standard for picking quality, such as they had to be male or not potentially retarded?
Tom: No, so there's one great argument against communism in a non-communist society.
Tom: Ayn Rand ain't going to university.
Tom: Ayn Rand, once her father's business fails, ain't getting into the middle classes and writing this shit, one hopes anyway.
Tom: Because there are ways around that in any society, unfortunately.
Tom: But she is a perfect hack, socialist, Russian Soviet realist writer that ticks all the boxes for it from the self-pitying to the crappy realist writing that isn't like John Henry.
Tom: What's his first name?
Tom: Another most important American writer.
Tom: Henry James, sorry.
Phil: Yep.
Tom: Yep, one of the preeminent realist writers, because all great realist writers has a prevailing mysticism or surrealness to it.
Tom: So Kafka could almost be described as a realist writer as well.
Tom: But in Soviet realism, they replace that with self-pity and the political monologue rather than the interior monologue.
Tom: And that's essentially what Ayn Rand consists of.
Tom: So this dumb fuck goes to America, where she had the freedom to write in a different style that wasn't this shit, and no, she could not take the communist out of herself and remain a communist in America, which again is why she's popular among libertarians, who as I said, are at their core, collectivists who are such frightened little war flowers that in a place like America where individuality is valorized, they can't admit this, they've got to go into bat for individuality, but they're not actually individualists, so it all goes a bit wrong.
Phil: In what way?
Tom: I described that earlier because none of their justifications for individual power or individuality are based on anything that isn't collectivist.
Tom: They always have to have recourse to the law, or popular opinion and so on and so forth.
Tom: Which as described in the character of Gail Winand, is not individualist.
Tom: But I think that is everything that can possibly be said about Ayn Rand, and we are in hallowed company because I have only seen, encountered one other instance of games criticism commenting on Bioshock that has had any exposure to Ayn Rand.
Phil: Am I glad that I read it?
Phil: I'm glad to have read it because it deflates, it deflates the myths that surround the book.
Phil: And after reading it, I then started researching, by accident, the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States.
Phil: There's a podcast called Congressional Dish, which has an episode about the Federal Reserve, that if you are feeling good about life in general, I'd encourage you to listen to, because it's deeply depressing.
Tom: The Federal Reserve, the libertarian, the most hated libertarian project, staffed yet staffed by libertarians.
Phil: Yeah, you've got to listen to that podcast.
Phil: It's a good prep just for knowledge of the Federal Reserve in any case.
Tom: My experience with reading books like this is the complete reverse to you, because to read something that is so venerated, like Ayn Rand's Body of Worth, and is so influential, and one of the touchstones of, at least it's completely dismissed by philosophy itself, but is one of the touchstones of popular philosophy.
Tom: Reading things like this, and it's not just this, I've read a lot of books recently unfortunately, my reaction is the opposite.
Tom: I would rather not discover that somehow, nonsense like this, people venerate and believe is some illuminating and enlightening text.
Phil: Yeah, I know.
Phil: If it was so easy as to be able to watch movies that were venerated, like I would have loved to have spent two hours with this book and gotten the same thing out of it as having seen some, you know what I'm saying?
Tom: You can apply this to political figures as well.
Tom: For instance, read something by Mussolini, an eminently successful politician, and you read his writing, and okay, he's just a dickhead dude, bro.
Tom: He understands how power works, but that's basically the only thing he understands.
Tom: And the same, I'm sorry to say, to communists, because in communist circles, they don't really differentiate between politicians and intellectuals, whereas in fascist circles, they do.
Tom: So no one's reading Mussolini and thinking this dude's someone with ideas who we need to pay attention to.
Tom: But in communism, perhaps due to its collectivist ideas, if you've written something and you're in politics, you're of note.
Tom: Lenin, for instance, and Lenin, in his defense, was also capable of describing how political power works.
Tom: So he's certainly on another level to Mussolini.
Tom: But I'm not sure he had any idea of what the fuck Marx was talking about.
Tom: Let me put it that way.
Phil: No.
Phil: For the last two years, I've been trying to read as many primary documents by Mussolini, Mao, Marx and Lenin as possible.
Tom: Mao is hilarious.
Tom: I'm not sure he understood how anything worked.
Phil: Which is the amazing thing when you get into Mao and Mussolini.
Tom: He is...
Tom: Mao...
Tom: I don't understand why Mao isn't the hero of the current ridiculous internet political movement, because he is the ultimate troll.
Tom: This is a man who literally told his people that they needed to revolutionary attack his own society.
Tom: Then when they started doing this, he was told by...
Tom: as the revolution started to take place and undermine his political power, he was told by his underlings that...
Tom: we should probably put a stop to this, because we're actually in power, and we're trying to cause a revolution.
Tom: And due to your wonderful rhetorical skills, he certainly did understand how rhetoric worked, actually.
Tom: That's one thing.
Tom: We'll lose power, because you started a revolution.
Tom: It's beautiful, and that is...
Tom: I can't think of something that is any closer to political meme culture than that.
Phil: Well, thank you very much for this discussion.
Phil: I don't think that we can really lend much of the works of Ken Levine to Atlas Shrugged other than the aesthetic.
Phil: Don't you think?
Tom: Well, that's what we have to end on, because is it in any way a critique of Atlas Shrugged or any of Ayn Rand's works?
Tom: And I would have to say no, because it falls into the same trap that any crappy argument against these ideas does, which is it thinks it's Nietzsche, and it is not Nietzsche.
Tom: It is fundamentally opposed to Nietzsche.
Tom: It falls into the collectivist trap through a completely different other way, and Nietzsche doesn't fall into the collectivist trap, because Nietzsche isn't trying to avoid it.
Tom: Again, Stephen Hicks, you fucking idiot.
Tom: It's not a gotcha moment when you claim that Nietzsche is a collectivist, because at no point does Nietzsche fucking reject collectivism.
Tom: So what the fuck are you meant to have discovered, you moron?
Tom: And Nietzschean philosophers don't fucking deny any of the shit you supposedly discovered.
Tom: And that's another objectivist, by the way.
Tom: But it falls into that trap.
Tom: The one interesting thing I think that it does do, which is that it sees, because I see comments all over the place, well, this isn't a fair criticism of a libertarian society, because what happened in Biosoc is they weren't allowed to compete with one another, because Andrew Ryan crushed his competitor for pay by introducing anti-competition laws.
Tom: Well, that's actually true to what happens in the beginning of Atlas Shrugged.
Tom: So as kind of stealing from the plot of Atlas Shrugged, I think it does it better than I expected it to, because it does before the events of The Game, what has happened is that the utopian society hasn't been destroyed by the Nietzschean dichotomy, power, this power thing, but has been destroyed by the antitrust laws which Ayn Rand herself saw destroying a libertarian society, which she believed America to be in its halcyon days.
Tom: So I think it's true to the book in an interesting way.
Tom: And if you take it not as critiquing Ayn Rand from an ancient perspective, but just including it as a related idea, I think it, having read Atlas Shrugged and considering it like that, I have actually slightly more respect for Bioshock than I did beforehand.
Tom: And certainly Ken Levine is in one sense, in terms of theme, a worse artist than Ayn Rand because he has no thematic qualities whatsoever, but he is aesthetically completely insane in a fascinating, fascinating way.
Tom: So they're probably equal artists where they both have one quality that if you want to waste hours on reading something that is ultimately completely hollow and shit, or if you want to read something that undermines its points fundamentally in the end but is otherwise an interesting exploration of its ideas like the Fountainhead, is worth it nevertheless because they do have genuine qualities or rather a genuine quality each as an artist.
Tom: And the best thing that you should read by Ayn Rand, because Ayn Rand is a absolutely hilarious critic, and that's basically her level of intellectual understanding, he says on a Games Criticism podcast.
Tom: That's basically her level of intellectual understanding is as a art critic.
Tom: Read The Romantic Manifesto.
Tom: It is not a manifesto.
Tom: It is basically a collection of her literary criticisms, and many of them are absolutely hilarious.
Tom: And because they're just criticism, she's sometimes great and invective and very funny when all she's doing is writing a review, which is basically the easiest level of writing.
Tom: And if you can't do that, and people in games writing apparently can't do that, I don't know what to tell you, but even Ayn Rand can do that.
Tom: So read The Romantic Manifesto if you want to read Ayn Rand, because that is very funny.
Tom: And if you have to read her fiction, Fountainhead has some things good about it, but is ultimately failure, so I wouldn't recommend that.
Tom: Anthem is basically Atlas Shrugged, condensed into two hours.
Tom: So if you want to waste your time reading one of the seminal texts of American intellectual insanity, just read Anthem and tell people you've read Atlas Shrugged, they won't know the difference, because they're fundamentally the same.
Tom: And they probably haven't read Atlas Shrugged either, but they won't have read Anthem either, so you will be less of a poser than they are.
Phil: And I would suggest that if you haven't played the Bioshock games, just play Bioshock and tell everyone that you've played all three games, and that the third one sucked, and they'll believe you as well.
Tom: Yeah, but they may not if you say that, because that's becoming more a popular opinion, but still not a popular opinion.
Phil: Really?
Tom: Yeah, but it's still Infinite and Bioshock are the two good ones, I believe.
Phil: Yeah.
Tom: And The Nervous Den.
Phil: Well, we liked Bioshock before it was cool to like Bioshock
Tom: And it still isn't cool.
Phil: No, it's not.
Phil: I think we have to call it a show.
Tom: We do indeed.
Phil: So, with that, thank you for the final episode of The Page Under Podcast, and episode of The Game Under Podcast.
Phil: I thought perhaps, if I could just give you some notes, I thought perhaps your presentation was a bit subdued, so we might have to find some other topics to talk about in the next show that you can get animated about.
Tom: Well, we will be going into Call of Duty, Modern Warfare Final Impressions.
Tom: And there is a lot to unpack politically about that game.
Phil: All right, well, I'm actually going to...
Phil: I'm thinking of trying to replay Modern Warfare, and I'm not sure whether...
Phil: I know you're just going to slap your head.
Phil: I don't know whether to buy Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, or Infinite Wars or whatever it's called, because it has the remastered Modern Warfare on there, or if I should just play Modern Warfare on the Xbox and I think we both know the answer to that, because otherwise I'll still be downloading by the time we record our next episode.
Tom: What I would suggest is, buy the remastered version, install it, and play the original version, because then you can, at a later date in the future, play the newer game, without having to sit through it installing.
Phil: Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Phil: Oh, I could be playing the old game while the other one installs, but something tells me that that will still be...
Tom: I think the old one will also have to install.
Tom: Really?
Tom: Probably.
Phil: Okay, well I already have the old one on the disc, so it should go pretty quickly.
Phil: Okay, so with that, that's the end of the show.
Phil: We'll see you next time.
Phil: Bye.