BioShock Infinite

Irrational Games

Major spoilers for Bioshock Infinite and to a lesser extent the series as a whole.

images c/o MobyGames (Xbox 360 version)

Once in a while there’s a game that’s so important, so landmark, that’s been hyped to such a frenzy, and yet — when you play it, it’s the emotional equivalent of one of those giant inflatable rubber ducks slowly deflating. Bioshock Infinite is one such game. I’m not sure where to begin to talk about it, to be honest. Rarely does a game this hyped fall so short of nearly every promise it makes and yet still succeed, and I think its status as a critical darling says more about the critics than it does about the game. All I can really conclude is that Ken Levine believed his own hype, and a credulous, uncritical and quite frankly professionally compromised gaming press and gamer culture believed it with him.

We might as well start with the name. The original BioShock was marketed to old-school PC gamers as a spiritual sequel to Irrational's earlier game, the cult classic System Shock 2; to everyone else, it was marketed as a nuanced treatise on objectivism and laissez-faire capitalism. Were you to glance through old threads on the Through The Looking Glass forums (which I do not recommend you do) it was more successful at the latter goal. There’s really no need to get into a point-by-point comparison of System Shock 2 versus BioShock 1; firstly it serves no purpose, secondly it requires ignoring that design ethea can and do change over the years, and thirdly the difference isn’t as drastic as the change from BioShock 1 to BioShock Infinite.

Where BioShock 1 succeeds most is as a broad examination of the politics of Ayn rand couched in themes of hubris and hypocrisy. Surface-level nuance and fumbling attempts at a point about player choice don't diminish this. But it’s that surface-level nuance that would plague Ken Levine throughout the series; BioShock 2, which he didn’t direct, goes deeper with its themes, but by the time Infinite rolls around, we’re back to ham-fisted social commentary — and it’s even worse this time.

BioShock Infinite starts off rather humbly enough. You play as Booker DeWitt, private investigator (plus Wounded Knee veteran and former Pinkerton — all in all, a spiritually and morally bereft guy who’s been involved in some really bad shit.) Booker is hired to rescue or kidnap (or both, if necessary) a young woman to pay off gambling debts. He soon finds out it involves going to a breathtaking floating city, Columbia, much to his surprise, given that it technically isn't supposed to exist. Columbia is run by a charismatic self-styled prophet named Zachary Comstock. While at first glance it’s gorgeous in that 1893 Chicago World’s Fair kind of way, it’s obvious that they take “white city” a little seriously — and that they view Booker as the Antichrist.

While we’re in a completely different locale from Rapture, Infinite is very much both a sequel and a prequel to BioShock 1. While it’s set in 1912 (48 years before BioShock 1), it deliberately sets out to evoke the original game. There’s a lighthouse, there’s the introductory amusement-park ride through a fantastic city, etc. Other elements from the original BioShock include a kind of functional sci-fi magic (plasmids in the original, “vigors” in this), vending machines, weapon upgrades, it’s all here, though vigors are totally unexplained despite confirmation in the game’s Burial at Sea DLC that they’re the same thing as plasmids. Actually, given how important plasmids were to the plot in BioShock 1, it’s curious how vigors are totally detached from the storyline, and are only the game’s versions of plasmids. So, the name “BioShock” doesn’t really seem to connect here, but it’s a feint — more on that later.

Where BioShock 1 and BioShock Infinite truly differ, however, is that Infinite eschews the traditional slow-paced survival horror gameplay of exploration and small-scale intimate combat in favor of what’s essentially a semi-linear Call of Duty-esque clusterfuck, where tight level design takes a back seat to arena combat. All else aside, the gameplay alone is incredibly frustrating because it feels incoherent. The semi-linear narrative and emphasis on fast-paced, “chaotic” (read: disjointed) combat keep getting in each other’s way, diminishing both.

Speaking of narrative, this is a game that revels in its own shallowness. Nearly everything it tries to do — the social commentary, the multiverse stuff, even the much-hyped character of Elizabeth — it’s all shallow. It’s margarine spread too thin on untoasted white bread.

Let’s start with the social commentary. This game is weird to play in the era of Trump, MAGA, and the current moment of state-sanctioned bigotry, abuse of power, and the utter perversion of science and technology in service to the wealthy, because it’s so in-your-face with commentaries on race, class and American exceptionalism in a way that honestly feels a little creepily prescient… but at the same time, utterly cynical. To be clear, Comstock is not Trump. He’s not a populist bomb thrower regurgitating racist doggerel to win over Joe Fuckface Sportsbar; he’s an articulate mix of quasi-fascist, televangelist and cult leader, and he’s got people praying to him and God in equal measure. If anything, he's Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church.

Columbia itself is beautiful at first look; unlike the drowned Rapture of BioShock 1 and 2, this is a sun-kissed city floating in the sky, and much of the game is set during daytime; where Rapture is (ostensibly) an experiment in a truly free market society, Columbia is a monument to American exceptionalism. The fetishization of Americana is everywhere — from the worship of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin (and, conversely, the demonizing of Abraham Lincoln) to the preponderance of red, white and blue banners with stars and stripes. But all this hides a murky underbelly of racism and classism; non-whites (which includes people of Irish descent) are demonized, stereotyped, portrayed negatively in art, and viewed as suspicious at best. This racism is ubiquitous: everywhere you turn, there’s racist artwork. While the game sells this as deliberately evoking America’s racist history, here it feels more like a museum of racist memorabilia — like the Jim Crow museum but without a nuanced historical perspective. If I were feeling less charitable, I'd say it feels like an excuse by Levine to make his art team draw racist doggerel so he can say “this is all bad stuff, RESPECT MY GENIUS.” What’s curious is where they draw the line. For example, ethnic slurs abound, but the “really bad ones” like the N-word are absent — for reasons that are probably obvious, but given how bold the game is with the less-controversial slurs (which, I remind you, are still slurs!) it feels like it’s trying to make a point while avoiding the subject it’s trying to make a point about.

Barred from the upper-class society that is the front-facing image of Columbia, the ones not lucky enough to work as servants are relegated to back-breaking work at the Finkton manufacturing complex, which embodies every Gilded Age robber baron trope you ever heard of. It’s obvious that tensions have been building for some time; Daisy Fitzroy, a black woman previously employed as a maid in Comstock’s mansion before being accused of murdering his wife, has emerged as a leader for the downtrodden. Her group, Vox Populi, reflects a lot of the tropes of a left-wing/communist movement, using a lot of red and themes of cooperation, anti-racism and fighting for worker’s rights — but also of bloody, indiscriminate vengeance, even evoking the Khmer Rouge’s anti-intellectualism.

And that’s one of the core issues with BioShock Infinite: it’s milquetoast, whitewashed bothsidesism bullshit, pushing a message about rebellions being “just as bad” as the oppressors that’s glib, trite, undifferentiated and ahistorical. It hits you over the head with an incredibly shallow message about racism that fails to examine the deeper aspects of how racism and American exceptionalism tie into each other, and then paints the response to that as extremist and violent. What the fuck?

Then there’s the worst part: all of this, all of it, is merely a springboard for a mediocre story about alternate universes that’s a ripoff of an old Adam Warlock storyline from the 1970s. While it’s presented in a pretty cool way that ties in with BioShock 1, I can’t help but resent how it uses this alternate universe horseshit as an excuse to throw Daisy’s characterization under the bus. Gone is the intelligent woman who stages an uprising — when the game shifts into a world where the VP has weapons, she’s a bloodthirsty monster.

The Vox Populi, always an underground, persecuted movement, has suddenly exploded into a violent, genocidal revolution and Columbia is turned into a warzone. But even though we’re supposed to understand that this is a “different” Vox Populi, the underlying message — that violent revolutions are bad — is still there. Fitzroy’s final scene, where she murders Fink (who deserved it) and then is about to murder Fink’s young son, is not meant to be the culmination of her character arc or anything. Nope, she’s just used for character development for the game’s local Disney Princess.

LET’S TALK ABOUT THE DISNEY PRINCESS. Elizabeth.

Oh, Elizabeth. How you irritate me. How you are just as corrupt as Booker.

Irrational spent an enormous amount of time hyping her up — how she would interact with the player, be akin to a real, living person. it all smelled faintly of implying she’d be a virtual doll. It was creepy, man. In the actual game however, she’s little more than an NPC who follows you, occasionally says things, and randomly supplies you with money and items. Where she stands out is the effort they put in to make her extremely expressionate, but now she stands out against the other NPCs. She doesn’t even look like she belongs in the game, her model is an order of magnitude better designed than everyone else’s, even other important NPCs. It gets worse when she cuts her hair, as her hair model stops being a plastic helmet and now flows freely.

Booker and Elizabeth’s relationship is Disney-perfect and Disney-shallow, going through all the classic narrative beats of distrust, trust, betrayal, loyalty, but never really dwelling on any of it in favor of pushing through the next few gunfights and moving the story forward. The only real depth to Elizabeth’s character is that she’s a hopeless romantic who frequently seems to forget that the world is a horrible place. She’s a Disney princess, but she’s deluded herself into thinking that means anything. This is a sharp contrast to Ellie and Joel in The Last of Us, a game which came out the same year and has a similar dynamic. There’s plenty to discuss regarding that game’s story, but their relationship just feels altogether more real.

Then there’s Booker. Other than being an archetypal detective in terms of attitude and appearance, Booker’s violent, unsavory past is also barely touched on. The things that happened at Wounded Knee, and Booker’s participation in it, play an important role in his character, but it’s almost entirely undiscussed. At some point he meets up with Slate, a fellow veteran of Wounded Knee, who rages against Comstock for turning his experiences into a theme park (evoking how Americans put US troops on a pedestal while ignoring the reality of their experiences.) Slate and his men have holed up in the Hall of Heroes, a sort of theme park monument to important events in Columbia’s history. The Wounded Knee massacre is portrayed in the requisite racist fashion, a haunted house ride full of “savage Indian” stereotypes. A major part of Comstock’s character is he claims have been at Wounded Knee, and his experiences there supposedly led him to the baptism that made him the man he is today. Slate denies Comstock ever being there, and Booker also says Wounded Knee didn’t happen the way the exhibit puts it. But none of this is ever actually touched on in any real way. Wounded Knee wasn’t a battle, it was a genocide. Between 250 and 300 men, women and children were murdered by the United States Army’s 7th Calvary. For such a violent, shameful turning point in Booker’s history, we hear very little of it. Even less important is Booker’s history as a Pinkerton strikebreaker. It gets touched on briefly when discussing how labor agitators are imprisoned and tortured, and then completely forgotten. Given the game’s messaging on labor rights this feels… incomplete.

One of the more frustrating elements is the illusion of choice. The game frequently presents you with seemingly innocuous choices to make — “bird or cage,” for instance. This ties in with BioShock 1’s fumbling commentary on player choice, but is even less meaningful here. It’s as if Levine felt we all didn’t get the brilliant point he was trying to make, as if the sixty million thinkpieces on BioShock 1 and the term “ludonarrative dissonance” — that is, the disconnect between what the story is trying to say and what you actually do in a game — literally being invented because of that game simply didn’t happen. So he reiterates his point and fumbles even worse. The game’s major revelation at the end is that Comstock is an alternate universe version of Booker who was never able to come to grips with what happened at Wounded Knee. Instead, he gets religion, meets a young scientist, and builds Columbia. Columbia is thus implied to not actually exist in Booker’s world, but due to the weird alternate universe shit (tied in with some guff about quantum physics), Booker enters Columbia and by doing so steps out of his own reality into Comstock’s.

So we come to this, where the entire game is predicated on a divergence of time, where in one universe, Booker takes the baptism, sheds his past and his name and thus his responsibilities, and in another, he doesn’t, and learns to live with his violent past — or at least tries to.

BioShock Infinite doesn’t even give you the illusion of choice. None of the choices you make affect the game in any meaningful way, and worse, the game is also mostly a linear arena shooter. But perhaps taking away player choice in a story about choice is some kind of point in itself? But that’s dumb. We’re playing a game where all the choices have been made for us; it puts a roadblock between us and Booker. The entire game is predicated around the choices Booker made in his past life… but we have no say in his present. What is even the message, here?

For a game that was as hyped as BioShock Infinite was, it’s a disappointment on every level. It’s a monument to shallowness, to a weak, white, liberal understanding of America’s history with racism and an unwillingness to actually engage with it, and to Ken Levine’s own ego. Infinite was levine’s magnum opus, yet it didn’t sell as many millions as he thought it deserved. In response he shut down Irrational and laid off dozens of employees, citing how stressful it is to make games like BioShock and how he wanted to go back to a smaller scale.

It’s galling to me how we live in a world where someone can simply shut down a workplace and fire everyone because they got bored. Whatever, Ken, the best BioShock was the one you didn’t even work on.

BioShock Infinite is a gilded turd; it has a lot to offer, but none of it is worth taking. "Bird or cage?" What a pointless question: we're all birds in Ken Levine's cage. 

-june❤