During the launch party for Irrational Games' (now 2K Boston and 2K Australia) BioShock, I sat down with creative director Ken Levine for a long talk about the game, which had already been garnering rapturous reviews. The first part of that interview was published last week, but a considerably longer portion was locked away in the Shack vault for safekeeping.

I have finally succeeded in hacking that vault by way of a video game-like pipe-arranging puzzle game, and now we can present to you the remainder of our epic interview with Ken Levine on BioShock. If you want some in-depth discussion about the world of Rapture, its creator Andrew Ryan, and its various antagonists from the man who conceived it, this is the interview for you--in all likelihood the only interview of its kind. But first, a warning:

WOULD YOU KINDLY STOP READING IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED?

Please, only continue reading if you satisfy at least one of these two conditions: you understand the clever game reference embedded in the above imperative, or you do not care about having crucial story elements presented to you. The first question is a buffer containing no real spoilers, but beyond that we will not be held responsible!

Now, if you have the context to continue, read on!

Shack: Do you think you gave Objectivism short shrift at all? I'm not an Objectivist, I'm just curious as to how you'd respond to that.

Ken Levine: I'm fascinated by Objectivism. I think I gave it--I think the problem with any philosophy is that it's up to people to carry it out. It could have been Objectivism, it could have been anything. It's about what happens when ideals meet reality. If you had to sum up BioShock's story, that's what it is.

When philosophers write books, when they write fictional works like Atlas Shrugged, they put paragons in the books to carry out their ideals. I always wanted to tell a story of, what if a guy wasn't a paragon? What if his intentions were really good, but at the end of the day he was human? I think that's where the problem is.

It's not an attack on Objectivism, it's a fair look at humanity. We screw things up. We're very, very fallible. You have this beautiful, beautiful city, and then what happens when reality meets the ideals? The visual look of the city is the ideals, and the water coming in is reality. It could have been Objectivism, it could have been anything.

Shack: The plot really has a major dynamic shift from Ryan to Fontaine in the last third of the game. Is that part of a suggestion that it's not the philosophy that's fundamentally at fault as much as a failure of all its participants to play along?

Ken Levine: They're really both extremists if you look at it, Ryan and Fontaine. Ryan believes in this thing completely, and Fontaine believes in nothing. At the end of the day, they're almost equally dangerous. [Fontaine] is a nihilist, all he cares about is himself. He has something missing in him that makes us human.

Fontaine is the only real monster in the game, because he has no ideals at all, and all Ryan has is ideal. I play with this a lot in all the games I do, whether it's back to Thief where you have the pagans and the fundamentalists, and you feel sort of in the middle. I think Fontaine's an empty human. That's what happens when you have nothing.

Shack: It was interesting to meet Ryan, who has been pushing all these plasmids, and see that he's just a normal looking guy. What was behind Ryan's exhortation to the player to kill him? Was he trying to draw out the player's humanity?

Ken Levine: That was a really controversial decision, Ryan's "boss battle." What's the player's justification at that point? Fontaine's set you up to go kill that son of a bitch, and he's been mocking you and tormenting you, and what do you expect people to do? I told people, "Not only are you not going to have a fight with you, he's going to make you kill him."

Shack: And it's out of your control.

Ken Levine: And it's out of your control. At the end of the day, everything he had to do had to be about his ideology. Nothing was more important to him, even his life. When Ryan goes out, you may think he's nuts, but you have to give the guy props for his convictions. It was more important for him to show you he was the master of your will than to live.

I think that it was really the ultimate insult to the player, that he chooses to die but you can't choose to do anything. You have no will at all. The rest of the game after that is to establish your will in the world. Will is a very important thing in video games. What will do you have?

Shack: Valve has toyed a bit with that in the Half-Life games as well.

Ken Levine: Yep. But in BioShock, I wanted to take it to the point where the player was doing things that were, in retrospect, out of his control. He was being mind-controlled by someone else, doing things that are usually done in a very mind-controlled fashion in video games. You know, "Go do this thing," then, "Okay, I'll go do it because the game tells me to."

I always say I want to change how people talk about shooters. This is one of those things. When someone's telling you what to do, I want you think, "Well, what's his agenda in this situation?"

Ryan sort of had to show you, as a character, that there are things more important to a character than winning the fight. He could die as long as he died with his ideology intact, and while showing you that you had no ideology, that you were nothing. To him, that was more important. It was really controversial, and getting that scene right took a long time.

Shack: A few years ago, BioShock was reported to be set on an island with Nazis. What happened to the Nazis?

Ken Levine: [laughs] You know, I wish I could say I have my ducks in a row earlier than I do, but I don't. People were coming, I needed a story to tell them, and I came up with that. I didn't know I was going to change it, but I also didn't know...

There was another story before that about a cult deprogrammer. I don't know if you know what a cult deprogrammer is; it's someone who goes to take people out of cults to deprogram them so they no longer believe in it. It's a weird thing, because they're basically kidnapping people.

[There are] people who hired people to [for example] deprogram their daughter who had been in a lesbian relationship. They kidnap her and reprogram her, and it was a really dark person, and that was the [kind of] character that you were. It went through a lot of changes. That wasn't really fleshed out, we just needed something, and I said, "Maybe I'll develop this, maybe I won't."

(Update: Ken Levine has contacted Shacknews to clarify that the player in the prior revision of BioShock's story did not necessarily reprogram a lesbian character; such actions are merely examples of the sort of tasks actual deprogrammers are hired to perform in the real world. Irrational's earlier story was more political in nature, with a deprogrammer being hired by a senator.)

Ken Levine: But for us, game design always comes first. A lot of the game design elements stayed the same. Story changed radically, but gameplay always comes first for us.

Shack: So on New Year's Eve, that was Fontaine's attack, right?

Ken Levine: Yeah, that was "Atlas'" attack against the haves. The have-nots swarmed out of Fontaine's Home for the Poor and armed themselves with plasmids and weapons, and attacked Ryan's people, the rich and powerful. That's how the civil war started. That was basically told through McClintock, Ryan's girlfriend. She sort of gives you the story of the civil war from Atlas' side, and McDonough gives you the story from Ryan's side.

Continue to the next page for confirmation of the protagonist's origins, the importance of contextual storytelling in games, and the thinking behind the game's memorable "boss" characters.