What a loss for me, a typical game consumer, game nerd, open eyed recipient and artist. I have a big ego in this, but I do really try to care about immersion if you reading this so that you can feel what I´m trying to express.I am not so good with words but I try:

I never thought that lessons in behaviourism referring to human history presented by 3D animated characters based on someones thoughts about capitalism can be so amusing in my age and deeply immersive too, but based on the fiction of divisive author Ayn Rand it seems like a strange karma now, that Irrational Games has become now its own "Old Man Winter frozen legend" in the halls of history concerning amazing handmade immersion, if because of money or just too much pressure in general I cannot estimate. If it was monetized success or not, like a film which is hard to remake again, not because only the time the film went to release it opened a community window for a large amount of recipients but also for its special artwork of immersive computer animated entertainment, where others had come to a AAA-stop (for me) and here was BIOSHOCK, the first "film noire" in gaming.

Instead of wal-marting through hordes of stupidity and unmotivated scripting, environmental failure (..and what´s even more worse: No stories that I actually wanted to manage, only Half Life 2 gave me a bit of fulfillment in this period of 2004 - 2006 ) BIOSHOCK came with a trustable reason to defend my skin in the digital materials and textures that where technically possible for a full identification with my nameless Avatar,..I suddendly remember the dark water, the plane crash and the reach of that lighthouse in the Ocean. Already when I climbed the stairs it wasn´t any avatar-character following scripted orders through WASD-MOUSE-MODE, no: It was only m e on m y way down to RAPTURE the only "clean" human left, that will go through a modified horror-story-suspense-future of it´s own based on "what if..".

R A P T U R E..! (Speak it whispering. You hear the howling wind through the tunnels ?)

What a name for a under-water-city. What a sound when you speak it. Its like spitting on false humanity goals it is more: "homo homini lupus". That is the untold sur-name of all the big metros, with all the human monsters that eat people in the name of their urban life goals. RAPTURE. I really, really wanted to see it and I traveled with a stylish unit "downwards". We reach the welcome point and the first thing that happens let me shit in my pants: SPLICERS, those are the creatures I´m dealing with in the next months. Perfect hunters, killers, human Velociraptors waiting for me, lurking in the dark, smelling my fear, getting ready to taste my blood.

Cut. I read RAPTURE the adaption by John Shirley from BIOSHOCK in Oct. 2013. What a book ! It was again exactly that feeling I had, when I went downwards in the 3D immersion some years before. The confusion and the revolution had not only eaten their children, their blood and the corpses where spilled all over the place, blood of those people who had lived here, everyday ready to follow a sect-like fashist and his false promises. All that felt so real to me again. It was left by family-life and filled with pain, but also full of sorrow for the so much wanted positive vision to deliver a secure living in its threatening barriers of the ocean, a mistaken genetic experiment where mankind should have never gone to those borders at this time.

When I think about it now, it was the total opposite of my thoughts about "Lord of the rings", which I read first, including "The Hobbit" and always missed the atmosphere in the following filmadaptions. They where not true to the expectations of real people living in a believable environment which Tolkien invented and narrated.

Cut. I tried to immerse with ALAN WAKE twice. I bought the collectors edition with the book by ALAN WAKE and I still have no clue about the character, his deeper goals and to tell you the truth: I don´t care so much. It will rest at the pile of shame for a while.

FONTANE and RYAN are pretty clear to me now after studying them with great curiosity in the game and the book. And I truly felt them long before I started the game, long before I know about the book, the franchise and Irrational Games, Ken Levine and his amazing team. The main-characters of RAPTURE and all their sidekicks live on this planet for so long I think it´s the word ARCHETYPE we´re dealing with in this deeper levels of gamestructure and the well researched narration of a hilarious filmstoryteller, a lesson in identification and timeless greatness for a 2D (display) but 3D medium (presentation), a deeply irrational entertaining way to follow and a selfplotdriven character development that unfolds when I push the buttons,the right and the wrong ones and when I choose the right and the wrong decisions, because in BIOSHOCK there is no "right" or "wrong" ... it´ll always keep me in its claws.