BioShock is (as both Levine, the PR people, and the designers reminded me every 20 minutes), a first person shooter.
"OK I get it. It's a kick-ass shooter."
This is PR code. 2KGames, Irrational-the-company's owner and publisher of BioShock, has mixed feelings about the game's place in genre-space. Early on, the press pigeonholed BioShock as a "hybrid RPG/Shooter." This scared the crap out of them, and for understandable reasons -- shooters sell, especially pretty shooters. And in a pre-Oblivion world, there was little evidence that a flashy RPG designed for both the PC and Xbox had a shot. So they've established an inviolable PR hook -- it's a kick-ass shooter.
. . . with undenied hubris, Levine's trying to do the same thing with BioShock, while still delivering a game 16-year-old cheese eating high school students will want to play. "We have these philosophical notions, but you've got to deliver. You gotta bring home the monsters. You gotta bring home the superpowers." In short, he's become a commercial realist.