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The video game Bioshock (2007) takes place in the city of Rapture, an underwater metropolis housing the greatest scientists and artists of their time in a sanctuary free from the constraints of traditional city and political life. Rapture is built to be a utopia, boasting the great achievements of modernity in its museums, libraries, theatre, laboratories, hospital, and the spoils of genetic research in food and plant life. Yet when the player arrives in Rapture it is an urban ruin, a world that embodies the failings of the Randian Objectivist philosophy upon which it is based. The ruined environment of Bioshock is an unheimlich (uncanny) space, which enables it to function as both a compelling and unsettling sf world and a metatextual comment on the game world itself. Rapture draws awareness towards the relationship of the game player to the game world through its use of the uncanny, questioning the affordances of this space and the role of the player in choosing their actions. ('Affordances' here refer to the abilities afforded to the player of video games in exploring and interacting with the game world.) Matthew Beaumont writes that the effect of the uncanny in sf can be to disrupt preconceptions, proposing that 'the estrangement effect [... ] can be especially unsettling if it suggests more than simply that the apparently solid culture and institutions characteristic of capitalist society will be different at some scarcely conceivable time in the future, but also insinuates that, incipiently at least, they are already different' (Beaumont 2006: 230; emphasis in original). Rapture presents just this form of uncanny sf world - in its architectural and aesthetic forms, its utilization of the figures of the 'Little Sisters', and its self-reflective choices regarding the player-character of Jack, it brings into question the stability of the game world itself. In its uncanny elements, Rapture operates as an unheimliches or haunted house, and by extension refers outwardly to the nature of the game world as a haunted space.
Anthony Vidler writes of how the uncanny has 'found its metaphorical home in architecture: first in the house, haunted or not, that pretends to afford the utmost security while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror, and then in the city, where what was...