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While wandering through the submerged city players will often see hulking ’Big Daddies’, creatures of enormous power, whose humanity is fundamentally open to question, protecting Little Sisters. It is here the player is thrust into the Objectivist philosophy in an interactive and inescapable way. The player must collect the ADAM the Little Sisters hold within their bodies to stand a fighting chance.

The player first encounters a Little Sister alone without the protection of a Big Daddy and is given the choice of killing her, as advocated by Atlas, or saving her, as advocated by a previously unknown doctor, with the promise of future benefits.

The ’Little Sister’ after all is a monster, surviving on the ADAM of the dead, not a human child (though we’ve already seen certain violent game critics up in arms about the morality of the subject). No matter which ADAM extraction method you chose, subsequent Little Sisters prove far more difficult. While the Big Daddy is present (often), he’ll become aggressive toward any who threaten his charge, so the challenge of disposing of the Big Daddy is a primary concern. After doing so the player must decide whether to harvest from or rescue the Little Sister.

Rapture is the dream of one Andrew Ryan, a philanthropist who constructs the hidden community to take the best minds of the world away from the people who would exploit them, and to allow them to better the world by working toward their own ends. Each scientist, engineer and artist in their own way participates in Ryan’s concept of a “Great Chain”.

Entering this world is the protagonist, a mysterious character whose identity raises questions to the player from the start. Players will notice the tattoos of chains on the character’s wrists and wonder of their significance. Perhaps the single strongest connection the player has to the character they control, and indeed the world of Rapture, is the use of plasmids.

I did it all for the Plasmids

Plasmids are forced upon the player somewhat, certain doors can only be opened with Electro-bolt or Incinerate plasmids, for example, and so the protagonist’s genetic purity slips away, and he becomes more like the creatures he’s forced to kill.This very passive implication creates a huge sense of pity for the Splicers you’re forced to destroy.The lack of choice can be a little irksome, especialy if players wish to maintain the square jaw and wide-shouldered posture of a good and noble hero.

If all of this seems a little familiar you may have read ’Atlas Shrugged’, Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, a massive work of fiction. It details Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, including the discovery of a sanctuary for Objectivists found by the main character after a plane crash. Objectivism places the moral happiness and advancement of the individual at its peak, individuals achieve great tasks and profit from them, which leads to communal stability. From this philosophy (which all citizens of Rapture follow) comes a great sense of individuality, an individuality that is corrupted and lost because of their pursuit of perfection, physical, mental and even moral, through ADAM.

The collapse of Andrew Ryan’s version of the Objectivist ideal is evident throughout Rapture; deranged Splicers sob "They made me and everything around me," repeatedly, and audio logs detail the decline and fall of the Ryan empire, all from the point of view of the citizens of Rapture.