Yeah, I know, the game came out seven months ago, and having just finished it last night, that makes me a slowpoke. With that said, if you are an even slower poke (slowpokier?) than I am, then you might want to stop reading now, as there are bound to be some spoilers in here. Everybody else, you might want to stop reading now just because reading is lame. Seriously, who does that?

Anyway, Bioshock came out last year, and it garnered critical acclaim, mainstream popularity, and enough financial success to warrant a sequel due out next year. With that came a ridiculous amount of discussion, and since I hadn't played the game yet, I avoided it all, so this may have been brought up previously. But given the major theme of the game, there was something I expected out of it that just never showed up. Let's step back and take a brief look at the so-called meaning of Bioshock.

"We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us. --Andrew Ryan

This is the final line in the monologue given by Andrew Ryan during the title screen cut scene, and it highlights the main theme of the game: choices.

The player spends the first half of the game aiding Atlas, a man who seemingly wants nothing more than to get his family out of Rapture. To the player, Atlas takes on the role of the intelligence character, and in the same way that the player listens to Cortana's advice in Halo or Anya's directions in Gears of War, he follows Atlas's commands, even as they become increasingly malevolent, culminating with the order to assassinate Andrew Ryan.

"A man chooses; a slave obeys." --Andrew Ryan

It is in this final meeting that Ryan utters the words above, and that the player realizes he was not acting on his own accord to this point, but that he had been literally following orders without knowing it.

And so the main theme of the game is clearly about free will and making choices. The unfortunate misstep is how minimally choice-making comes into play during the game.

There is the obvious introduction of choice in the gameplay: what to do with the Little Sisters. These monsters hold the ADAM that allows the player to grow stronger, and for each he is given a choice; will he kill the girl and harvest all of the ADAM, or will he rescue the girl and receive less ADAM in the process?

For me, the choice was simple. I almost always choose the "good" route over the "evil" one in games, and so I decided to save each Little Sister.

The thing is, there really aren't negative consequences to this choice. Even though the player receives less ADAM immediately, he gets paid back in full and then some through the gifts that Tenenbaum leaves for saving the girls.

Now I didn't know about the gifts beforehand, and admittedly, they are delayed a bit, but with this information, there is no reason anybody would harvest the Little Sisters other than to be a dick. Regardless, it lessens the weight of the decision to endure hardship in order to save the girls when the hardship is eventually nonexistent.

But I digress. I didn't start this blog to talk about whether you ought to rescue or harvest the Little Sisters. I started it because there was one choice whose consequences I felt should have been included in the game: the choice to utilize Plasmids and Gene Tonics.

Imagine this: you have stumbled into a strange underwater city, you learn that everything has gone to hell, and that all of its citizens have basically lost their minds because they "spliced too many Plasmids." Would you then willingly inject these things into your arm, knowing that despite their great benefits, they come at such a cost?

The Splicers found all around Rapture are terrifying in that they are unreasonably aggressive, out of touch with reality, and physically deformed. Over the course of the game, I fully expected to become one of them, considering the sheer number of Plasmids and Gene Tonics that I spliced into my DNA. I expected my skin to deteriorate, my vision to blur, and my character to do absurdly malicious things. But none of this ever happened.

With so much emphasis put on the choices the player makes, it really surprised me that the choice to splice Plasmids is given almost no thought, despite the explicit consequences presented in the game. Imagine how much more pertinent the message would have been had the player's splicing habits had any sort of negative consequences. Some may choose to play through the game splicing anything and everything, making for a much easier experience than if he had chosen to splice nothing, but ultimately ending in insanity.

What do you guys think? Should this have been implemented, or am I way off base here? Was the simple "good or evil" choice you are given with the Little Sisters enough for you, or were you expecting more out of a game whose main theme is so obviously focused on making choices?