BioShock: Infinite or, Infinite Worlds, Zero Choice

What's happening True Doomers!

This week I'm going to talk about another one of those BioShock games, this time BioShock: Infinite. What's the final word, you ask?

Well, let me put it this way. For a supposed "thinking man's shooter" this game is actually quite offensive to thinking people everywhere.

Let me tell you why.

The story in BioShock: Infinite starts out promising. You're Booker DeWitt, a former Pinkerton agent tasked with retrieving a young woman from the fantastic flying city of Columbia to wipe away a gambling debt.

Columbia is a city founded by white supremacist religious zealots, led by the prophet Zachary Comstock, who have seceded from the Union. The people there regard George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as mythical hero figures to be worshiped. It floats by way of some kind of quantum technology developed by a famous physicist and her brother.

The game takes place in 1912 and much like the 1912 of our world black people and the Irish were at the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole. In Columbia they occupy such positions as janitors, servers and day laborers.

In addition to the themes of racism and nationalism the game also adds a heaping helping of class-based oppression. You play as a former Pinkerton agent. You know, the guys who the big companies paid to come in and beat up striking miners and other laborers during that period of labor unrest during the age of the turn of the century, robber-baron capitalism.

Also, part of DeWitt's backstory is that before joining up with the Pinkertons he was in the Army and fought at Wounded Knee, where the U.S. Army massacred what was left of American Indian resistance, including the women and children.

So it sounds like the game has all the pieces for an interesting, perhaps even intelligent story about America, her history, class divisions and racial relations. The game even leads you on for a good while letting you think this is what's happening.

After DeWitt finds the girl, Elizabeth, the goal becomes escape Columbia and get Elizabeth back to New York. Elizabeth is unique by any standard. She's a Disney princess who can open up the fabric of space-time itself to bring through objects from other dimensions.

Eventually she leads you both through a tear into an alternate Columbia, one in which the black and Irish underclasses have banded together to form a militant revolutionary front called the Vox Populi. The goal of the Vox is to overthrow the prophet Comstock and take over the city.

During the revolution Booker and Elizabeth both comment on multiple occasions that there is no difference between Comstock and the Vox's leader, a woman named Daisy Fitzroy. It's about at this point you start to realize the game doesn't actually care about the themes it employs, such as racism, nationalism, populism, etc.

Instead of trying to say anything intelligent about race or class relations in America, then or now, the game just uses these themes to tell a pulpy science fiction story about quantum physics.

You see, the bit with the Vox Populi is just an excuse the game's writers came up with to have Columbia burning in flames. We start out seeing the city in full glory, by the mid point we get to see it in ruin. That's all.

After that point the story closes it's focus in on Booker and Elizabeth, and their relationship. The final few hours of the game are a whirlwind of confusing plot twists that try to make sense of the rest of the game.

It turns out that the reason you don't have any choice in the game regarding any of the instances where the game presents a false choice, such as at the beginning where you're supposed to choose to throw a baseball at an interracial couple or the announcer putting on the show in which the couple is the target of the crowd's amusement, is because quantum physics means there is no actual choice just the appearance of choice.

By the end of the game you discover that Elizabeth is actually Booker's daughter who he sold to Comstock when she was a baby to pay off his debts. Comstock wanted her because she had the magical ability to create tears in space-time and build bridges to other worlds. Comstock and his scientists used a big machine to siphon off her power to build Columbia.

You learn all this as Elizabeth takes you through a multitude of different universes during a lame deus ex machina moment at the end of the game. I'm assuming the writers were just trying to get the game finished and out the door at this point. You make a quick stop in Rapture from the first BioShock because, well, I guess just because. Also as foreshadowing for the Burial at Sea DLC in which Booker and Elizabeth return to Rapture for some reason.

Oh and also it turns out Comstock is just Booker but from a different universe. So by killing Comstock Booker is just killing himself, or something. I'm sure it's supposed to be symbolic of something but I can't quite figure what that something is supposed to be.

So the story of BioShock: Infinite starts quite promising. You think it's going to make an actual political statement about things. Instead it just teases you along before veering into ugly false equivalency territory and then desperately tries to convince you it was really about the quantum physics stuff all along.

It's a real hot mess, all right.

In other respects the game is pretty fun. It's still a shooter where you have superpowers. The guns aren't as fantastic as BioShock 2 but the gunplay itself is a good sight better. Sight and sound are excellent as they should be for such a large production.

The art and the art direction are quite lovely. The city of Columbia is just as beautiful and fun to move through and look at as Rapture was in the other two games.

The game is quite linear for the most part. There's a bit of backtracking and exploring to do if you want to find everything and some of the levels open up a good bit but for the most part you're just plodding along from point A to point B, blasting enemies and mechanized George Washingtons.

I focus on the story so much in this review simply because in BioShock: Infinite that's pretty much all we have to work with. There is no multiplayer, for instance. So all the time spent working on the game, from the release of the first BioShock (BioShock 2 was developed by a different team) up to the game's release last year, was spent mostly in service of telling this particular story.

And this story just makes no goddamn sense, no matter how you slice it.

Maybe it's too much to ask a major Triple A studio and publisher like Irrational Games and 2k Games to make a mass market FPS that tries to say something meaningful about the human condition or whatever. Because either the people primarily responsible for BioShock: Infinite's story, Ken Levine and the four or five other people he had writing with him, were either incapable or unwilling to do so for fear of alienating their audience by injecting "questionable politics" (i.e. any kind of overt political messaging) into their manshooter.

It's offensive to the intellect precisely because the game bait and switches you. It presents itself as having Important Things to Say About Important Issues and sells itself on that premise when really it has nothing of value to add to the discussion about race and class, other than to present "both sides" as strawmen to shoot down as being identically biased, just in their own respective directions.

I think the best criticism I've read about the game is from an internet acquaintance, who said "Just ask yourself 'What would Frederick Douglas think about the fact that the end of this game is about quantum physics?' and then throw up in a corner."

In reality there are never just "two sides" to complex issues like the ones the game should have been about. There is always a wealth of voices from all angles of those kinds of issues, some of them have more value than others and some of them are in fact more "correct" or "right" than others. Sometimes reality favors a particular "bias". I'm sorry but that's just how it is some of the time!

So instead of being political the game is in fact anti-political. It discourages discussion of real political issues like America's basis and foundation of white supremacy or the social caste system which no one is allowed to recognize, let alone speak about.

Instead it encourages players to see people who are passionate and believe in things as either extremists or hopeless idealists, not fit to handle the burden of running a society. In both BioShocks brilliant cities were forged out of and ultimately doomed by passionate idealism. The message here is clear: Don't pick sides, stay in "the middle" where it's safe, shut up and keep your head down unless you've got the alternative already planned out and ready to implement.

I doubt any of this was intentional on the part of the game's creators. This is just my reading of their work and what it suggests to me, as I understand things. There are many ways the status quo perpetuates itself and much of it is kind of an automatic process.

So BioShock fails as cultural criticism, as being not just a game but aspiring to be something more, something artistic, unless we're taking it to be a reflection of the culture that birthed the games themselves. In that case, the criticism via the games speaks for itself.

However in reality I suspect this is just another product of capitalism, of giving us what we want. For some time now voices in the video gaming community have cried out for video games to aspire to something more than just mindless manshooters, to tackle topics and issues that concern the thinking people of our times.

So the system heard us and gave us what it thought we wanted. A video game that aspires to be more than just a mere manshooter, that tries to tackle topics and issues that concern the thinking people of our times. The only problem is the Triple A system is only good at producing the things it is already good at producing, namely mindless manshooters.

It is certainly nice and heartening to see that there are Triple A developers out there that are listening to the community and want to try to make something better. But I feel if we're looking for real changes we're going to have to turn to the Indie scene and probably even make them ourselves. Trying to get the profit-driven leviathans of the Triple A industry to do it is like asking a giraffe to not be a giraffe for a while.

So those are my thoughts on BioShock: Infinite. Not bad if you approach it as just another mindless manshooter. Quite terrible if you approach it on the terms laid out by the marketing, as something more than just a mindless manshooter. Very pretty game either way, but they say beauty is only skin deep. I think that means focusing just on the looks is shallow, which is a good word to describe much of what comes out the Triple A sector.

Shallow, not deep.

As for quantum physics? Always a fascinating subject. But there's a bit of a split amongst people who study it. There's a big push to say that the more we learn about the quantum world the more we should buy into the notion that hard determinism is true and free will is just illusory. It's a very conservative notion and it's not hard to see why someone might want to believe this is true.

Free will is kind of a philosophical problem for us. Things would certainly be much simpler if we were not actually "free" in that sense. If all our actions were in fact already predetermined, not by a god so much as the hard, physical laws of the universe.

It's a debate that's been going on for a few millennia now and probably isn't going to die down any time soon. Unless we figure out how to break into other quantum dimensions like Elizabeth from the game and figure out for ourselves, once and for all, The Truth.

I don't really see that happening any time soon but I'd love to be wrong about it.

BioShock: Infinite seems to say that out of all the infinite universes and infinite choices and decisions we make in all these universes none of them are actually free and that in a multiverse of infinite universes not one of them is a universe that contains free will.

So maybe there really are political statements being made by this game and I just don't happen to like any of them? I certainly hope there is free will, but hoping doesn't make it so. Then again, this game seems to hope just as hard that there is no free will.

Or maybe it's just a not-so-subtle commentary on the nature of modern Triple A video games. After all, players are presented with the appearance of choice all the time in these games when in fact their only real choice is to continue moving forward according to the game's script or not play at all.

And me? I'll choose play over the alternative, any day of the week.

Thanks for reading.