SitS

* See also Mark_Meltzer
* See also BioShock_Games ( A promotional Effort for BS2 )
* See also Hacking & Mini_Games ( Something In The Sea was Online Browser run - had Puzzle games )
* See also The_Surface ( Much of it takes place Outside Rapture )
A Web Page Flash game promotional Story, put out on the Internet before Bioshock 2 was published. 
http://www.rapturearchives.org/php/sits.php ( archived content of the SitS 'game' )
It was also coupled with some Real World/LIVE Interactive Events ( and included Collectible Mailings )
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SitS - Details Do Matter :
Submarines ( probably something much more substantial than a "Bathysphere" ) do not usually ride upto the Ocean shore ( Ocean shores being shallow, where a sub gets stuck or worse -- Yes, there would have to be Big Sisters in Rowboats ). Beyond that - IF there's not the problem of how the Big Sisters get out and get to land ( via there diving suit etc ... ), THEN THER STILL IS : How do they get the Children they are Kidnapping back to the Sub without accidentally drowning them ? 
?? Put em in a rubber-bag/sealed-boxSitS Kidnapped Children back to the Sub -- Hmmmmm' - A Child-sized "Pet Carrier" ??? ... , and haul them back out into the water to the waiting Sub ? (( Amazing how Sofia Lamb might sustain actual operating Submarines capable of long distance missions being accomplished with those ADAM_Addled remnants she manipulated and ruled over. A MMORPG Flashback would be done (at least) for one of those kidnapping missions. ))
Or, like the Luteces, a Rowboat is provided ? ( Military Submarines actually DID have collapsible/stowable small boats/ inflatable-dinghies ). 
Consider how many of these unfortunate children were mishandled and got killed or maimed in these kidnappings -- AND what happened to parent/adults/wrong children who 'got in the way' ... ( It is not like Sofia Lamb cared, and the Big Sisters likely were somewhat 'heavy-handed' ). 
AND WHY were all these DIFFERENT countries kidnapping from ? How much more trouble if the Little Sizster conditioning requires a Spanish translation or French or Finnish or ... These kids don't necessarily speak English, so how do they get their Harvesting Orders or talk to Big Daddies ??? ( Authentic Diversity has its very stupid side too ).
HOW MANY children were Kidnapped at once ?? You'd think it would be more effective to snatch a dozen children at a time. With the likely casualties of the conversion process, many children would have to be taken.
Of course this all ( game developer written SitS story ) was not really a game -- It was all an Advertising/Promotional Gimmick. But then, the effort of a little thinking can go along way to prevent the writers from looking like idiots (( Unfortunate that such little thinking effort was expended )).
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Something in the Sea ... A Bit Too Intricate ??
Look at the evidence - How did a 7 year old who was turned into a Little Sister create all those coded messages which they have in this web-story sequence ??? Big Sisters allegedly left these clues/messages for Mark Meltzer ? - WHY? ( If they want to be found, WHY not just leave a proper map ?? If they wanted to allay suspicion by Sofia Lamb -- As if leaving 'coded' clues is any LESS suspicious ). Lil Cindy should have convinced Big Sister to kill the Wicked Witch of the West (Sofia Lamb) instead ... ( Maybe there's a Flashback story in this episode to be made for the MMORPG - possibly dealing with Sofia Lamb's distrust of the Big Sisters, some of whom may have tried to kill her in the past ).
Such 'Bit Too Fancy' coded messages ??? (Listen to how most Little Sisters talk, what they say ... They ARE 7 year-olds ... They are supposed to compose all this message stuff ???)
How much 'a precocious child' can survive the warping/conditioning they did to Little Sisters to turn them into those cute Wandering Ghouls ??? We cannot really be sure of any motivation for Big Sisters to cooperate to do such things. I t all does seem a bit over-fabricated to me. But then, it all had to be transmitted thru Web Pages and Flash interactions, and had to stretch on across months.
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The Mark Meltzer SitS Materials - List of Kidnap Locations and Victims - The Foreign Langauge Issues :
Look at all the locations where children are being kidnapped from  -  The list of beaches ? Or at least mentioned all the other newspaper evidence Mark collected of the kidnapping incidents...
How many languages will they (Sofia's minions) have to train the new Little Sisters in ??
An awful lot of travelling around by long range submarine ( slow and potential exposure to Cold Warhttps://www.conservapedia.com/Cold_War navies and civilians ) when they all probably could have been taken from just a few English speaking locations in a very short period.
Seems also a bit complicated, scoping out victims on land, from the water, to locate their house to steal them away from at night,  and getting them into the sub without some significant number drowning ( that would be a story in itself -- Heh, a mini-game - "The Big Sisters Roadtrip" Mini-Game ).
More mysterious I guess than having a gang of Lamb's least spliced-up goons do a mass kidnapping from a few coastal towns, and then get them out to a sub or even just a boat.  Massacre anyone who got in their way - Sofia Lamb's Delusion Must Be Achieved - to turn Humanity to Borg !!!
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"Something In The Sea" - Too Contrived Details By Far :
* "1967 Mark Meltzer is starting to piece together the pattern of Child Kidnapping around the Atlantic Ocean." Notice the events ( in his newspaper articles ) are from many different countries, with children kidnapped in onesies. Wouldn't you think that taking several children at once would be ALOT more efficient ?? - as well as getting ones which spoke English ( Well enough so their conditioning/training didn't have to be done in 6 different tongues, AND for their later communications to their 'Protectors' ) ? 
* Isn't this kindof late for Sofia to be requiring new Little Sisters ?? -- Suddenly, she needed lots of ADAM for her delusional Utopian project, OR perhaps enough just to keep all the Splicers from imploding and under her control ? Otherwise, it leaves the available time interval ridiculously short for the needed schedule for complicated Research ( It should have already gone on for years ). And Big Sisters apparently won't "spit up" ADAM like they used to (??)
* Perhaps there had been many kidnapped previously to the Sits event. But WHY hadn't THOSE been similarly reported up on The Surface ( And YES, available Surface newspaper accounts WOULD cover such things IF they happened in the previous years, AND Meltzer did seem intent enough to find such evidence. ) (( The game writers were the ones tying all these stories together, and they seem to NOT care much whether they actually fit. ))
* The previous Little Sisters got older since BS1, changing into Big Sisters who don't generate ADAM (?) That had slowly decreased the ADAM-Sucking Gatherer numbers, and so thus decreased the available ADAM production proportionally. 
* The general lack of fresh corpses ( unless Sofia 'made sure' more corpses were made available ) meant that the Little Sisters were largely left with generating new ADAM themselves. As time went on, there would be fewer of them doing so. Eventually, degradation/entropy would make less and less ADAM exist. Perhaps the number of Splicers under Sofia's control, who needed ADAM, had decreased (died-off) significantly to compensate ?
* Perhaps the other surviving parts of Rapture - those NOT under Sofia Lamb's control, were able to stop Sofia from Kidnapping THEIR children by having Big Sister and Protectors of THEIR OWN. People who likely coordinated strong measures to isolate Sofia's troublesome little Collective from themselves ).
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That Record of "Rise Rapture Rise" that Meltzer got in SitS with 'Secret' Message at its End :
Wouldn't it have been REEEEEAAALLLYYY ALOT EASIER to just use an AccuVox for the message - this was post-'civil-war' Rapture, and it seems like alot of hoopsabsurd complications to jump the Little Sister through. ( In their Little Sister Delusion, wouldn't they see the record making machine (vinyl record press) as a "Happy Merry-go-round", much like the centrifuges the technicians used to separate raw ADAM from the Little Sister vomit in the 'recovery' process at the Little Sister Homebase ?? )   So supposedly they ( Cindy & Big Sister "X" ) managed to 'cut' their own "Rise Rapture Rise" 'disk record' with an added 'secret' message ( using the original 'gold' master first, as per the normal record disk making process, to be able make a MODIFIED "Rise Rapture Rise" record ? ).  
Why even does any all of this have to be so ridiculously hidden ?? Seriously, 1000 messages in bottles of "Help!!! We are kidnapped children who have been trapped in an underwater city at the following coordinates ... Please come save us !!!" 
Well, Web Flash Promotional Gimmicks fall even lower on the foodchain than DLC for Canon writing consistency and logic and reality (discounting Infinite BS from the theorem). Its just the way it is.
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SitS ( Something in the Sea ) Empathy Stuff was Laid On a Little Too Thick :
All that bizarre stuff a 'Big Sister' was doing for Cindy to contact Mark Meltzer ( instead of doing something useful like getting her the heck out of Rapture ).  Secret Codes from a Lil Sisterized 6/7 year old ??  (a kid that smart might have been too hard to 'condition'). BTW, did you ever wonder what Sofia Lamb did with all the rejects, or how many were maimed in botched kidnappings, or the operation stuffing that Sea Slug down their throat ( or worse - disposed of after failed conditionings) ?? ) Sofia Lamb appears to value human life even less than Dr Suchong.
I understand SitS was an extended 'Flash' web game, and a Publicity/Promotional Stunt. But the company was even less particular about vetting the material generated (In the end, it is all part of a customer sales pitch, all done for $$$ ).  Being Flash web graphics, it was NOT made up of a horde of terribly expensive combination/integrated game Assets.  There was (potentially) much more a chance to have the text story descriptions ( the written notes/documents/newspaper articles, etc ... ) be better checked/examined/reviewed/corrected, and possibly be (post)modified to make them all a bit less fantastical/incohesive/reality-deficient/illogical, AND have its story details/plot be better.
I don't know their development process. How short a production schedule they had or other limitations. The story and its details DO seem to have been put together from a brainstorm session committee ( meeting at a Denny's,  and writing it out on paper napkins ) who all HAD to have their pet ideas included.
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Secret Messages Being Passed :
Cindy ( the precocious tyke, now a Body-fluid-Sucking Little Ghoul ) presumably used this too-fancy/over-complicated 'code' to leave the markings on the outside of the Lunchbox Puzzle ( Versus some child scrawling a plain note with her crayons, or that new 'pencil' thing they might have learned to use ... )." 
All the Lutwidge stuff is its own bizarreness. Isn't it a bit TOO Contrived that Lutwidge and Cindy ( and a Big Sister ) all coordinate the various complicated happenings together so well ???    All a bit too much to swallow 
(( "Too much to swallow" - a Clumsily composed 'story', with 'whatever sounds 'right' to the Player-morons' -- IT being 'good enuf' to just stuff quickly into this half-arsed promotional project. )).
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Puzzleboxes : Easy for Web Content Storytelling, But Unreal Absurd Complexity :
BioShock Rapture originally was based on Real-World-ism, not the Magical World of SnozzSomething I just made up -- Much like what some of the game writers heavily leaned on for their settings/scenes/plot.
Did Lutwidge ever say that these things were booby-trapped ? SO Not Booby-trapped ?? Booby trapped things have a nasty chance of 'going off' if you just 'Look at them Wrong', let alone any clumsy handling - and that even when the person who made them has skill.
An easy way to solve these sealed 'boxes' can be to carefully cut them open - maybe look at the mechanism first ( careful pair of tiny holes then bright light in one and look in the other ). A doctor friend with an X-ray machine would be pretty useful too. ( "Uh, its shielded in lead" -- Yeah riiiight ... NO. )
There should have been at least one that got damaged, wouldn't function, and Mark Meltzer was forced to pry it open ( possibly to get some help if he was 'mechanically challenged' - and the Puzzle would be solving the mechanisms guts instead of the claptrap gimmick on the outside ). 
Actually, if they were booby-trapped and Lutwidge was a known 'nut', then many people (Meltzer included) might be rather wary of having anything to do with these toys -- as the criminally insane 'nut' might try to prove himself 'Superior', by intentionally killing whoever tried to play his demented games - instead of someone just cutting them open and defusing them as HE (the smart guy) would/should have done.
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I'll have to go back and look at when Lutridge made up these Puzzle things ( They mention one strangely being sent to Meltzer when Lutridge was supposed to be in the Loony-binMental Asylum ). If by the time Ryan had rejected Lutridge ( assuming this is not Lutwidge's imagination about dealing with some functionary ), he may have been ( in the way unhinged people sometimes are ) trying to prove to himself that HE was the smarter(est) one, and not caring about leading anyone to Rapture anymore - rather sending something like a 'booby-trapped' kaboom devices to anyone else involved. 
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Something in the Sea - Transmuted :
I was looking at the volume of materials associated with "There's Something in the Sea", the Web-based teaser/PR stunt, and wondered that with all the effort put into that project, HOW many more levels might we have gotten for BS2 ? But then I reconsidered that : It was largely written text and some 'era'-style document creation, voice recordings, some pictures and flash games made with a wide variety of (mature and common) media tools ( and some interactive web scripting ) --- Methods not limited to the (old) BioShock game engine's specific requirements. How much effort did it require to create/integrate as compared to the same type of things integrated into the AAA game ( animated real '3D', interactive, operating thru the game mechanics ) ? A significant difference in 'amount of effort' might represent what a MMORPG with a set of good Asset Creation Tools ( and alot of Player's imaginations ) could produce FOR THIS MMORPG GAME, compared to the way game companies are stuck producing games today.
How many people actually were required to produce SitS and how much time ? How much of that time was spent thinking-up/discussing/arguing/adjusting the content to make it fit together ? Did the ideas take longer to formulate in detail than actually to convert them to those simpler media Assets ? How different would MMORPG production be with that same ratio ? Certainly cheaper, or more for the same money.
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Patri-Arkh unit from Utropolis :
Squirrels ? Seriously, Squirrels ... This ain't Narnia.
On the other hand -- INSANE!!!
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Near 'Classics Illustrated' version of "Americus" (Science Fiction- Fantasy book) found in Rapture :
Comic book version of the book. It is about a mysterious floating City called 'Americus' which has gone 'weird' when invaded by aliens. It is investigated by an adventurer named Hooker -- Who eventually, after many endless battles with evil denizens, does something heroic and the city crashes and burns thus saving the World from endless weirdness and eternal darkness. The famous Rod K. Quain was the Author ( likely only 'famous' because there was 'so much less' Sci-Fi/Fantasy published back then as compared to now ).
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Obsession ( From that Promotional There's Something In The Sea and Subsequent BS2 Events ) :
Just think, instead of the storyline of Mark Meltzer's obsession with following those Strange Child Kidnappings, he took up another hobby - Say ... Model Trains, he would not have had that trip to the Loonie Bin, not destroyed his Marriage, not had his Own Child kidnapped by a freak in a Diving Suit, who then got turned into a "little ghoul" mutant, AND while searching, Meltzer himself getting changed into a Cyborg slave - to later be killed by US ( the Player as Delta ) while within a Dysfunctional Undersea City ...
There is a Lesson in that for All of Us ...
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The Sits Interactive Web Interface had a bunch of 'Paper' Assets, which progressively built up the story about the Kidnapping of Children ( including the central character's ) and hints about Rapture and the people in it.
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