Well, this is a pleasant surprise. Bioshock creator Ken Levine has been nominated to earn pride of place in the 2012 edition of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.
Now, there is some biased involved in me demanding your attention. Bioshock is one of my favourite games of all time, and hopefully the upcoming Bioshock Infinite will reflect the same whimsy and wonder the original did half a decade ago. It’s a bloody ingenious piece of work that truly showed what this generation of games can do. Hell, it’s the game that snapped my career hopes in place and made me want to get involved with the industry.
In broader terms, it’s exciting to even have a figure in the gaming industry grace the shoulders of Barack Obama and Mark Zuckaberg. The only other prominent figure in the industry to do such a thing is Zynga CEO and Farmville God Mark Pincus. It’s easy to see why that was, casual gaming has a very strong influence on the market nowadays, but Bioshock was the first game I played where everything creatively merged perfectly together. It’s the foundation of where I would hope gaming would build upon to improve itself tenfold, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one on this. It was also the very game that kicked off the whole ‘Games as art’ debate, merging fantastic storytelling, wonderful artistic design and creative combat to show what games could truly do.
There are many other gaming icons I would wish to get on this list, and hopefully in years to come they’ll earn their place. At the moment of writing, Ken is 40 ‘Yes’ votes behind Barack Obama, and his chances of earning a spot on the list are rather good. So, if you want to help this incredibly prominent figure of the industry reach a phenomenal milestone, click on the link below and vote before Friday, 6th April. It’s either Game Informer’s ‘Storyteller of the Year’, or LMFAO making it onto the list. There’s another incentive for you.
www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2107952_2107953_2109982,00.html