Grandma and BioShock part 1: A Series of Vague Spoilers

Grandma finished her first run-through of BioShock last weekend. There's still a lot she wants to accomplish, so we're not quite calling this game 'destroyed' yet. From what she's told me there are something like three different endings one can get; not to mention she only has about half of the possible achievements. For a single player game, this just isn't acceptable to her. She needs to get everything she can before setting it aside to the cabinet; to pull out later as some fantastic little piece of nostalgia from way back to that late summer of 2007. You guys know Grandma by now, that's just the way she is.

I've been working a lot lately. That's great for me but it creates a strange interruption of game cognizance that Grandma just can't explain, saying simply "you haven't played it yet; you wouldn't understand." I leave for work one morning and she's chasing around some surgeon who had tried to turn his patients into works of Cubist art. I come back from work late that night and she has motherfucking bees flying out of her arm.

When I came home Friday night, she was beating Andrew Ryan with a golf club and I thought "well fuck, she's already done with the thing and I haven't had time to post!" As it turns out, however, she still had a ways to go. Not so much a ways that she hadn't seen the somewhat jarring first ending by the time I finally dragged myself in from another full weekend at work. First she was harvesting the Little Sisters, next she was saving them... I still don't know what the hell is going on. I haven't had time to play it! Her explanations are completely lost on me.

Hearing Grandma try and explain to me the purpose of ADAM and The Little Sisters and what a Big Daddy really is, well... that's like listening to someone explaining congressional points of order to a six-year-old standing at the front of a tour group that keeps pushing ahead. I just get that stupid look on my face that says "I have to go eat lunch with the other kids by the big Washington Monument thingy."

All I know is- she wants to talk to somebody who's as deep into the thing as she is, namely you folks.

I'm no help :)

So ask whatever you like about BioShock. Talk with Grandma about it. I'd love to discuss the art style, the implications of major ethical questions brought about in the game, the philosophy of Rapture, the ignominy of Jack's decisions, the anachronisms throughout the underwater city of the 60's... But I'd be lying if I said I was as up to speed as the rest of you and Grandma. I'm just not there yet. I am one confounded gamer.

Game on!