User blog comment:Willbachbakal/Singleplayer Gene Tonics/@comment-3567720-20110703141443/@comment-1330314-20110703231519

I don't see how a game, which tries to be contantly fun and entertaining, would ever actively encourage standing stock still in a puddle for five minutes. That's like a school test that encourages you to repeatedly bang your head against the wall for extra credit: it's not educational and will probably give you brain damage, yet by your reasoning it would be the "price" for passing your grade, as opposed to actually studying (which, in the contest of BioShock, would be to scavenge for resources).

Also, I'm not making a personal statement here. Check the article for BioShock both here and on Wikipedia, and you'll find it says the game incorporates elements from the survival horror genre. The dev team, mainly Ken Levine, said as much during their interviews. This is supposed to be a game about limited resources. You can, obviously, go full retard and repeatedly throw yourself at your enemies until you wear down their health without using your EVE and guns (which, as far as I know, don't get supplied by the Vita-Chamber), but that's not how the average gamer would play. Yes, you can respawn ad infinitum, but that doesn't remove any of the game's challenge, unless you really do enjoy dying more than actually fighting.