Hardwood Paroxysm presents: When the NBA and video games collide

Tom Thibodeau is Andrew Ryan

by Brian Schroeder (@Cosmis)

 2007’s BioShock is, among other things, a divisive game. Seen by some as a new benchmark in interactive storytelling (and as evidence of video games as capital a Art), seen by others as a tacky, misshapen mess of a shooter that tries to do too much and hides a myriad of flaws behind its lofty, pretentious premise and interesting setting. It is, in some ways, both of these at once.

Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau is, among other things, a divisive coach. Seen by some as the preeminent defensive mind of his generation and by others as an implacable taskmaster who runs his players into the grounds and ruins their careers. He is, in some ways, both of these at once.

The aforementioned lofty premise of BioShock is thus: the only survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic, the player character (referred to in the game files as a man named “Jack,” which is not important) stumbles upon a solitary lighthouse and eventually discovers a bathysphere leading to the hidden city of Rapture, founded by industrialist Andrew Ryan. Ryan, who fled Russia after the Bolsheviks came to power, found himself increasingly frustrated by governmental oversight in his adoptive land, eventually endeavoring to create a city where, in his words, the “great would not be constrained by the poor.”

(In a weird way, Administrator Breen and Andrew Ryan both fulfill a very obscure video game archetype, the loquacious, intelligent, measured administrative figure eventually revealed to be venal, petty and cowardly.)

Initially coming across as a cheap (if charmingly voiced) Ayn Rand composite, Ryan’s character deepens and eventually leaves his mark as one of the great antagonists in video game history. When the game begins, Ryan comes across very much as one of his “great men,” before the denizens of the ruined city (some living, some dead) reveal the truth: Andrew Ryan is as petty and selfish as the rest of them, his “Great Chain” ideology less a universal creed and more a way for a powerful man to consolidate his power. Faced with losing control of his city to Jack and those who give him orders (I’ll leave that one alone in case you haven’t played), he fails to live up even to the shoddy morality of his own ideologies and decides that, as he famously says “a man chooses.” He opts to destroy his city rather than let anyone else control it, eventually dying for his ideal in an ill-fated attempt to change Jack’s mind.

Tom Thibodeau, on the other hand, is no industrialist, though he often sounds like he works for one. His great construction is less an entire city than the image of one, of a tough Chicago ideal he inherited from Mike Ditka, one that is no less fanciful than the objectivist utopia envisioned by Andrew Ryan. Tom Thibodeau’s critics have accused him of everything from negligence to rigidity to outright cruelty, yet still he plugs on. Still he insists that the Bulls “have enough to win.” Soon enough, the hounds will come for him as well, and while his severance package is likely to be a lot less fatal than Andrew Ryan’s, it will no less acrimonious. Yet, there’s a certain honor in it. In refusing to change in the face of overwhelming opposition. In dying on a hill of your own creation, crushed by the depths of the ocean, forever lost beyond the sea.