Bioshock Infinite- Through the Tear

Table Of ContentsTitle Author Page

Bioshock Infinite: Thematic Analysis Winky 4

An Attempt to Understand Bioshock Infinite's Brilliant and Bizarre Ending

Paul Tassi 13

The Vigor Of Oz: Bioshock Infinite’s Wizardly Parallels

Alec Meer 22

5 Awesome Flaws in the New 'Bioshock' Game

Robert Brockway 30

Opinion: Violence Limits Bioshock Infinite's Audience — My

Wife IncludedChris Plante

47

Elizabeth Made Me Feel Like a Monster

Dean Takahashi 51

Bioshock Infinite: A Deconstruction of the Nature of the Video Gaming

Mediumawchern

53

Bioshock Infinite' Makes Great Art from America's Racist Past and

Political PresentBen Popper

59

Seeing Through the Eyes of a Bioshock Infinite Villain

Tina Amini 63

Bioshock Infinite' Review - Part Two: A Closer Look At Gameplay And

StorytellingErik Kain

66

Bioshock: Infinite on Organized Religion and Politics

Aaron Ploof 73

Shocking, isn’t it? Clifford Bleszinski 76

Bioshock Infinite: Through the Tear

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Title Author Page

“There’s Always A Man, There’s Always A City…” Rich Johnston

82

Is BioShock Infinite Really For Everyone - Or Just For Gamers?

Michael Rundle 86

Time Interviews: Ken Levine Matt Peckham 90


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Bioshock Infinite: Thematic AnalysisBy Winky

http://peripsuche.blogspot.com/2013/03/Bioshock-Infinite-thematic-analysis.html

" Having just been released last Tuesday, the first wave of players will be watching the credits roll in Bioshock Infinite about now, and I assume for the most part their faces will be slack with confusion as they attempt to piece together the events that transpired over the course of the game. I don't intend to give my review of the game here, though suffice to say I found it entrancing enough to warrant a lot of thought, nor do I intend to work through the many mechanical ambiguities of the dimension traversing narrative (by the very nature of the story it's excessively hard to tell what's a plothole and what isn't). Rather, what I recognized to be the most compelling component of the game wasn't the admittedly uneven plotting and characterization; it was the degree to which these things actually fit into an overarching metaphor. Despite what appears to be evidence of the plot of the game changing significantly over the course of its development, all the pieces end up fitting together into an incredibly pleasing thematic whole, and I feel like both the degree to which the choices made in the design of the game are influenced by the intended social commentary and the originality of the presentation are both completely unprecedented in games as a medium." I've already witnessed a number of complaints from people who seem to believe that the social commentary aspect of Columbia is dropped half-way through the game when it begins to shift its focus onto the more personal story of Booker and Elizabeth. I'd argue that the first half of the game is simply setting the stage for the actual social commentary to follow. I imagine that many, if not the majority, of people who play through the game will fail to understand what Bioshock Infinite's message is. The game has a number of very clear and jarring statements that it makes, particularly


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http://peripsuche.blogspot.com/2013/03/bioshock-infinite-thematic-analysis.html






concerning racism and wealth inequality, but the threads that actually tie these various aspects together into a cohesive message are orders of magnitude more subtle. I don't think that this is necessarily a failing of the writers and artists; the fact that the message is subtle and that you're never beaten over the head with it is a virtue, and I have an inkling that making this message overt would have possibly damaged the studio's reputation due to it rather directly attacking a modern political movement. There is, of course, the significant possibility that I'm reading too much into the story that we're presented with, but I hope to produce enough textual evidence to convince you that if this message wasn't explicitly intended by Ken Levine, that it might as well be safe to evoke death of the author." To stop beating around the bush; Bioshock Infinite is an indictment of modern conservative thought that glorifies an idealized American past that never existed, and does so to the detriment of America's future. This political message is, however, interwoven with a deeply personal tale of redemption and the human desire to take the easy way out of facing the sins of your own past." To explain, I'll start where the game both starts and ends: baptism. Baptism is the central recurring motif throughout the game; the gorgeous introductory scene to Columbia is centered around a baptism that all who enter the city must go through, upon rescuing Elizabeth for the first time Booker is plunged beneath the water in battleship bay, Comstock's plan is to use Columbia to baptize the world in fire, Daisy baptizes herself in Fink’s blood, Booker kills Comstock by drowning him in a baptismal font, songbird is killed by being drowned deep beneath the sea at Rapture, and of course the final moments of the game reveal that the deciding factor in Booker becoming Comstock was whether or not he accepted the baptism after Wounded Knee." The use of religious symbolism here is blunt, but the intended message is perhaps less so. I have seen a number


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of people mistake Bioshock Infinite’s message for a blatant denouncement of religion. I disagree." The fact that accepting the baptism turned Booker into a monster is contrary to what one would expect, but deeply tied into Infinite's central theme. Booker sought the baptism because he was haunted by the ghosts of those he killed at Wounded Knee and those he oppressed as a Pinkerton. In accepting the baptism, a symbolic gesture of rebirth, the Booker who became Comstock was able to distance himself from his own actions. What Booker was seeking from the baptism was not a way to atone for his past actions, but rather a way to relieve himself of guilt. Free of remorse, the baptized Booker went on to look back at these events in his life not with pain and regret, but with solemn necessity or even glory. They were idealized in his mind, and rather than horrific atrocities they became exemplary feats to which he constructed monuments. It's for this reason that he would go on to found a city that would accentuate all the worst aspects of his own past. Free of regret, Comstock became a monster. In one of Comstock’s voxophones he asks “When a soul is born again, what happens to the one left behind in the baptismal water? Is he simply … gone? Or does he exist in some other world, alive, with sin intact?” Comstock intends to reference the Booker who was not baptized, but unwittingly references himself: he fails to understand the notion that merely accepting a baptism does not make one pure, that the sinner continues to exist inside of him. You should note that outside of the Wounded Knee baptism scene, Jesus or Christ are never mentioned in the game, nor is there a cross to be found anywhere in Columbia. This is to distinguish between Christianity and the superficial, warped religion of Comstock. To the religion of Comstock, baptism is simply a way of white-washing your past." The Booker that rejected the baptism recognized that such a symbolic gesture would do nothing to free him of guilt for his past actions. He views himself as completely irredeemable. He would go on to live the rest of his life


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dwelling on past mistakes and digging himself into a hole of debt and alcoholism, until he is given another chance to "bring us the girl and wipe away the debt”. As with the baptism, Booker is initially seduced by the offer but at the last second tries to back out. This time he fails, however, and is further forced to spend his days steeped in regret for his mistakes. Until, finally, the Luteces come back to give Booker one last chance at redemption." The inscription you see as you’re lowered into the chapel at the beginning of the game reads:“Why would He send His savior onto us,If we will not raise a finger for our own salvation,And though we deserve not His mercy,He has led us to this new Eden,A last chance for redemption”" Booker is transported to Columbia, a monument to his sins, and forced to relive them. Each area is a mirror into Booker’s past: Monument Island reflects his neglect of his daughter, the Hall of Heroes reflects his past of violence and racism, Finkton reflects the economic oppression that he took part in. One issue that many have with the game is that the amount of violence that Booker perpetrates in pursuit of his goal of rescuing Elizabeth is excessive. I would argue that this is an intentional reflection of his own violent past, and is meant to strike the player as just as disturbing as it strikes Elizabeth. There is perhaps a bit of meta-commentary going on when Booker makes a statement to the effect of “It’s one thing to hurt someone because you need to, it’s another thing to enjoy it”; possibly a direct stab at the player who’s gleefully eviscerating their foes with flaming crows." Many have also found it questionable that the final battle of the game is not against Comstock, but against the Vox, in a way that discordantly seems to suggest that they are the greater rather than lesser evil. I’ll get into how the Vox fit into the overall theme later, but I should point out that the final battle may not be what it seems. Note that the “big bad”, Comstock, is already dead, and yet the game goes on.


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Instead, for the final fight you are standing in Comstock’s place, using Comstock’s tool of subjugation (the songbird) to defend Comstock’s airship from the people who are revolting against Comstock’s oppression. It’s meant to illustrate that for all the differences between Booker and Comstock, they’re both fundamentally the same person. Just because Comstock is dead doesn't mean things are over, because Booker and Comstock are one in the same, and both men were created by the same evil past." Finally, Elizabeth reveals the secrets of the multiverse to Booker, leads him to realize the truths he was trying to suppress from himself, and drowns him to prevent Comstock from ever existing. What many might not realize about the final scene of the game is that this is Booker’s true baptism. Booker accepts that he would rather face oblivion than allow the future sins that he would later commit to come to pass. He is willing to die, and does not resist as he allows Elizabeth to dunk him under the water (for this baptism she serves as his priest)." There’s many ways to interpret the after-the-credits scene. This is how I prefer to view it: due to this final act of true remorse, Booker experienced a true rebirth. He has awoken in another timeline and is given the chance to live out his life with Anna, and to do things right this time." Now, how does this tie into the political commentary that I am claiming exists behind the plot of Infinite? Booker and Comstock represent two different ways of looking at the American past. Comstock represents an America that has forgotten to regret the atrocities of its past. Booker represents an America who has clung to regret and allowed it to consume them. The fact that they inhabit two entirely different parallel universes is no mistake. They reflect the different schools of thought in American politics that are so separated in perspective that they appear to inhabit entirely different worlds." Columbia is Comstock's creation, and it, itself, is an idealized version of turn-of-the-20th-century America. Our


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introduction to Columbia up to the raffle is a fantastic example of the game's message in microcosm: You walk through gorgeous vistas set on cobbled streets in the sky, a quaint town fair awash in symbols of a simpler time. The world seems wholesome, and is a joy to explore; all up until the raffle. Then the curtains are drawn back and the entire picture falls apart: suddenly you realize this world is brutal and unjust. The entire sequence is an incredible gut-punch. It's because you've forgotten; the American past hides a rotten underbelly. I might also add that it may be no mistake that the imagery used to deliver this blow is one of marriage inequality." The mainstays of Columbia are meant to reflect on the beliefs of modern conservatives. Their religion is a cult of personality based around worshiping modern political leaders and in deifying the founding fathers as infallible. It borrows aesthetics from Christianity while ignoring the messages of tolerance and kindness found in the New Testament in return for Old Testament morality and the apocalyptic imagery of Revelations. They glorify war, xenophobia, isolationism, and American exceptionalism. They accept economic inequality as just, even explicitly deserved. They've even seceded from the actual political entity of the United States because of their “more American than thou” attitude." Columbia is the idealized world of white picket fences that embodies the conservative dream. The fact that one must be baptized (in this game, symbolic of white-washing your own past) in order to even enter Columbia emphasizes its status as the image we create when we attempt to envision a bygone America but forget the pain of its past." Moreover; Comstock's grand plan for Columbia is to bring it into the future, and there rain down fire upon modern America. Those who were paying attention will note that when a brain-washed Elizabeth uses Columbia to attack New York, she does so in 1984. It could be an errant reference to Orwell, or, as I'd like to believe, a reference to Ronald Reagan's landslide victory over Walter Mondale: the point signifying the


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absolute height of GOP power. Columbia, this idealized conservative past, seeks to break through to our present day." Which brings me to Elizabeth: Elizabeth represents America's future. Booker and Comstock struggle over who will get to control her and thus America's fate. She was the child of Booker, but Comstock lays claim to her as his own, and in a moment of weakness Booker gives her to Comstock in order to "wipe away the debt" (I shouldn't have to expand upon why debt is an important concept for the relationship between American political parties). Some small part of her was left with Booker, however, and thus she became caught between worlds. This gave her an amazing power; because she exists in both worlds at once she is able to pass between them at will: to see the world from many different possible perspectives. This is the foundation of Bioshock Infinite’s multiverse: each world contains a lighthouse, a man, a city. Each universe centers around a city founded on the principles of one man’s ideology, with a beacon that draws others towards it (but, rightfully, should warn them away from it). As Rapture explores objectivism, and Columbia explores American conservatism, each universe represents the natural extension of one perspective towards viewing the world." The game opens with the exchange “Are you afraid of God, Booker?” “No, but I’m afraid of you.” Both Booker and Comstock fear Elizabeth’s power. Comstock so much so that he has gone out of his way to try to limit her ability to peer between worlds; to prevent her from seeing perspectives he doesn't want her to see. Despite this, he can’t prevent her from finding and pulling open “tears” in his reality; literal holes in the universe in which Columbia resides. Each of these serves as a “what if?” for Columbia’s fate driven by Elizabeth’s wishful thinking. The universe in which the game starts shows us a Vox Populi that is hounded by Comstock’s forces and not equipped enough to fight back, allowing Columbia to remain a relatively stable oppressive society. However, step through a tear and you see a Columbia that is


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being razed to the ground by bitter, ruthless revolutionaries whose burning ire was created by Columbia’s unjust system." I should take a moment to address the Vox Populi, which I feel tie into the greater theme of the game but were still somewhat clumsily handled. Daisy Fitzroy’s arc is truncated, and the game’s statements suffer for it, but I don’t think the game was intending to just blindly equivocate the cause of the Vox with the cause of Comstock. Rather, Daisy is intended to be another example of how absolving yourself of guilt can come to a destructive outcome. Daisy’s cause is fundamentally just, but she uses this itself as an excuse not to feel remorse for her actions. Daisy baptizes herself in Fink’s blood, and symbolically she means to indicate that any sins on her part are justified by the sins on his. Using this logic she can rationalize any crime. It’s in this manner that she’s a fitting counterpart to Comstock. The Vox Populi are also meant as a reminder that such revolts in the past have often shared horrible atrocities with their oppressors, and we shouldn't white-wash the actions of progressives either." For Booker, his trip through Columbia is a journey through his past sins so that he might ultimately seek redemption. For the American player, then, this trip through Columbia is a journey through the past sins of our nation so that we might ultimately seek redemption as well. Your final act is to destroy the siphon, the device that limits Elizabeth’s powers to view alternative worlds: allowing her to see through every door, to see the Infinite paths that America may be led down as a nation. The millions of other Bookers and Elizabeths you see going through the same experience are representative of the millions of other individual Americans who must follow a similar, but different path with their own daughters (and sons) to come ultimately to the same conclusion. The final revelation that the player must experience is the truth that Booker and Comstock are ultimately the same man. While they view it from opposite perspectives, they share the same history, and America’s future isn't safe while it’s still allowed to be controlled by


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America’s past. Booker recognizes his sins and allows Elizabeth to drown him, just as the yoke of America’s past must be thrown off by America’s future, breaking the “Unbroken Circle” of history." Then, following this rebirth, America’s past may be given a second chance to influence America’s future in a positive way.


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An Attempt to Understand Bioshock Infinite's Brilliant and Bizarre Ending

By Paul Tassihttp://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/03/27/an-attempt-to-understand-Bioshock-Infinites-brilliant-and-bizarre-ending/

" I couldn’t sleep last night. It was the first time in as long as I can remember that I sat down and finished an entire single player game in one day. I’d done it before with six hour Call of Duty campaigns, but that’s not really the same, and doesn’t compare to what just happened with Bioshock Infinite." All in all I spent about 10 hours with the game, 12 if you count an extra few that had me rummaging around in the darkest corners of the map scrounging for loose change and attempting to find just one more Voxophone that would give me just another scrap of the plot to analyze." I couldn’t sleep because after finishing the game, my mind was swirling attempting to properly sort out the brilliant, bizarre, beautiful ending of the game. " The city of Columbia is stunningly beautiful, but I will say I liked it more before it was all blown to bits and in flames after the fighting starts. At that point, it becomes like most other FPS landscapes. Combat is decent, but there are other games that do similar systems better. By the end, nearly every fight was reduced to me launching my enemies up in the air and blowing them apart with a shotgun blast each as they remained suspended and helpless. I’d occasionally use the shield to get out of a jam, or possession to take control of a particularly beastly bad guy, but really, power and gun switching is mostly done out of boredom, not necessity. Looking back, it may have been nice to fight from a less utilitarian perspective, and try to have a bit more fun combining other vigors and skyline jumps and the more obscure guns. But it’s not actually necessary to progress." I stand by my statement that I think the game could benefit from creative puzzles using the litany of powers at your disposal. But what we have instead is a game that hands


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http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/03/27/an-attempt-to-understand-bioshock-infinites-brilliant-and-bizarre-ending/




you a key and tells you to go find a lock, or gives you a cipher and tells you to go find a code. It’s a lot of walking around and searching the same areas over and over, and these side quests don’t qualify as true puzzles. Similarly, as I’ve mentioned, combat is hardly a problem solving exercise either, though that may change on the highest difficulty levels." I wondered if Bioshock would turn from a great game to a legendary one by the time I was through. I’ve had countless people ask me to cut through the crap, and say whether or not this sea of starry-eyed reviewers giving the game perfect scores are just blowing smoke, or if Bioshock Infinite is truly something to behold. A generation-defining game.

" In the end, I believe it is. Yes, I have my gripes about gameplay, but that shouldn’t be held against the title too much. After all, looking back to some of my favorite titles over the years, most had their issues with gameplay. Mass Effect was a mediocre third person shooter at best across all three games. Heavy Rain and The Walking Dead were my favorite games of those years, even though actual “gameplay” was nothing more than dialogue choices and rather painful quicktime events." What all three of these game have in common is their story. Each had interesting characters and a fantastic central plot that elevated them past the issues they had with actual gameplay. Conversely, you can have a game with great mechanics, but if the story isn’t there, it’s not usually enough. I’d put Dishonored in that category, for one, and perhaps a few of the Assassin’s Creed games as well. Sometimes a great plot and fantastic gameplay come together as one, an honor I would give to Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Portal 2.Bioshock Infinite’s story is simply phenomenal, and it’s the ending of the game that really brings home what an unreal experience it all is. So, rather than do a simple part two review where for fear of spoilers I’d have to say something like “And just wait to the end, it’ll blow your mind!” I wanted to


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actually discuss it with those who have beaten the game already, or those who are simply curious. It’s so complex and layered that it needs an incredible amount of analysis, and I wanted to help facilitate that discussion." I’m not the best person to do this of course. I have relatively little knowledge in fields the game discusses like Quantum Mechanics or String Theory, and can’t add much from an actual science perspective. But I can talk about what we saw unfold, and try to extract a coherent series of events from a story that is a purposeful jumble." First, it’s probably a good idea to talk a little bit about the “Multiverse.” It’s the core concept of the game, and is where the “Infinite” in “Bioshock Infinite” comes from. The idea is that there are Infinite universes out there, based on everything that ever could have possibly happened in the history of time.We are living in one of them. This world, this universe, is the one we all know and tolerate, and there’s no way for us to get to or even see any of the other ones. But somewhere, there’s a universe where Adolf Hitler fell off a horse as a boy and died, and the world changed because of that. There’s one where a meteor missed the earth and the dinosaurs still roam free." But it’s not just big events. There’s a universe where you had toast instead of cereal this morning. There’s one where you took the side streets instead of the freeway on the way to work. If you’re trying to imagine what it’s like if there’s a universe for every choice or random occurrence that happens across our entire planet and universe, it’s impossible to process. That’s where “Infinite” comes in. There are Infinite possible universes, and Bioshock focuses on a few of them with one man as the center." That man would be Booker DeWitt, whose strings you’re pulling in the game. To recap, you’ve been sent to the floating city of Columbia to find a girl, and bring her back to New York to pay off some old gambling debts. When you arrive at this city in the clouds, you find that it’s run by an


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egomaniacal old man, Father Zachary Comstock, and the girl, Elizabeth, has the unique ability to tear holes in the universe, and traverse space and time, making her a very valuable commodity indeed." Then the parallel universes start. Elizabeth takes you through “tears” in the fabric of space-time and you cross over into new universes that either already exist, or that she’s creating herself. For example, you want a weapons dealer to make guns for the revolutionary force of Columbia, the Vox Populi. In your universe, he’s dead, but Elizabeth opens the door to a possible one where he’s not, and the now-armed rebels storm Columbia and set it ablaze. In this new universe, you learn that you, DeWitt, also existed, and were killed as a martyr for the cause." The end is where things start to get all twisty-turny. Elizabeth is snatched up by Comstock, and you walk through a tear into a possible universe where you never got to save her. In this one, she’s effectively brainwashed by her father (or not-father, but we’ll get to that later) into becoming even more of a monster than he was. A vision you’ve seen earlier comes to pass, the zeppelins of Columbia rain fire down on New York City (in the 1980s) as an elderly Elizabeth looks on. “You can stop this” she says when you find her, and gives you a key to changing the past, the ability to control the monstrous Songbird to ensure Elizabeth is safe and Columbia never wrecks havoc on the planet below." You’re ripped back into the old universe (or a new one?) and you’re able to save Elizabeth from her fate. You hunt down and kill Comstock, but before he dies, he tells you to explain the truth to Elizabeth. To tell her why it is she lost her finger and how you’re the cause of all of this." This is when Elizabeth understands, and the insanity ramps up to an even greater degree. She takes you through another tear, and you end up in Rapture. Yes, the underwater city from the original Bioshock. At this point I assumed some twist was coming like I was actually Andrew Ryan or something, but that’s not what it meant. Rather, it’s explained


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that Rapture exists in one of the Infinitely possible universes. It doesn’t have anything to do with the story of Columbia (from what I can tell), other being perhaps a tangential cautionary tale about a nutcase who wanted to rule over a ridiculously placed city. You emerge in a sea of lighthouses which Elizabeth describes as doorways to every possible universe out there. It’s how you first got to Rapture, and how you got to Columbia as well. It’s how you get anywhere, really. You could interpret this in a meta way, and look at each lighthouse as a portal to a new game. If there was a Bioshock one, maybe there’s a God of War one, an Uncharted one, a Halo one. If you see it that way, it starts to feel a lot like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series." But sticking with just the Bioshock universes for now, we go through some more doors and discover the truth about DeWitt, Anna, Elizabeth, Comstock, and the whole lot. We learn that at least in the DeWitt-we’re-controlling’s original universe, what happened was that he sold his baby daughter, Anna, to pay a debt he owed Comstock. We also learn that in another universe, DeWitt actually becomes Comstock himself. This is where most people’s brains are likely to break." The pivotal moment in DeWitt’s history that causes this paradox is his baptism after the battle of Wounded Knee. In one set of universes, he refuses to be baptized. He simply learns to live with his sin, atrocities he’s committed against the Native Americans and across other foreign battlefields. In these universes, the man he becomes is Booker DeWitt, a Pinkerton muscle man tasked with the Columbia mission, the one who sold his daughter, and the one who eventually led the Vox Populi to victory over Comstock." But in another collection of universes, he accepts the baptism. He is cleansed of his sins and reborn a new man, taking the name Zachary Hale Comstock. He goes on to build Columbia and do all the terrible things we’ve experienced in the game." In the game’s universe, Comstock is sterile because of prolonged exposure to space-time tears, and therefore


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orders the collection of his own child from another universe, Anna DeWitt, who would later come to be known as Elizabeth. In the other universe, a non-Comstock, post-Wounded Knee DeWitt gives Anna up as a baby, but changes his mind at the last second. In the attempt to retrieve her, the portal between worlds closes, lopping off her tiny pinky finger in the process." Enter the Luteces, the twins who aren’t really twins at all. In DeWitt’s original universe, Robert Lutece is the man who collects Anna from him. In Comstock’s universe, Rosalind Lutece was born a woman instead, and uses her knowledge of physics to loft Columbia in the air. Only when the siphon starts opening doors and windows between universes, are the two able to be together. They’re eventually killed by Comstock in his universe for knowing the truth about all this, and then go back to get DeWitt to come to Columbia and bring Comstock down. DeWitt’s mind forgets the truth, and because of the transition, invents this new memory about being tasked to retrieve some unknown girl from this floating city. They take him to the lighthouse, and there our story starts." I love the Luteces in the game, and they provide some of the most interesting examples of the multiverse theory. They’ve clearly mastered it themselves, and have the ability to pop in and out wherever and whenever they please. At the beginning of the game, they ask DeWitt to call a coin flip. It’s heads, and a tally board shows that the last hundred or so flips have also been heads. It’s an example of a possible universe where yes, a coin did come up heads 100 times in a row. It’s unlikely, but still possible, meaning it is one of the Infinite universes in which the game takes place." I feel like I missed something with another Lutece choices soon after. They have you pick whether you want Elizabeth to wear a bird or a cage broach. I picked the bird, and once I figured out the multiverse theory, I thought at some point I would see en Elizabeth wearing the cage, instead of the bird. Even at the end, when all the Elizabeth’s assembled


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at DeWitt’s final baptism, I didn’t see any of them wearing the cage. Perhaps I missed an occasion when this took place, or maybe it never did at all." Even after a hell of a lot of thought, some things still remain unclear to me. How did Comstock know that DeWitt was coming? He knew that the “false prophet” would come to try and take his “lamb” away. He even knew the mark he would wear, “AD” for “Anna DeWitt,” something Booker carved into his hand for penance." At first I thought that this was because Comstock had lived that life before, and knew it was coming. But he hadn’t. When he becomes Comstock after the baptism, he does not have DeWitt’s life after that point. They share their past, the battle at Wounded Knee and so on, but nothing past that." So rather, did Comstock look through a window created by Elizabeth or the Luteces, and see what was to come? It seems like he was shown the universe in which Booker comes to save Elizabeth, kills him (Comstock), but fails to rescue Elizabeth. Comstock sees the universe where Elizabeth grows up to be molded into his image, and eventually rains hellfire down on New York City, exacting revenge on the nation that deserted him. This is the universe all his prophecies fit into, particularly the one about “destroying the mountains of man.”" I’m also not quite clear on who exactly Elizabeth is. Yes, she’s DeWitt’s daughter, stolen by parallel universe Comstock because of the prophecy he foresaw, but how did she get her powers? Why is she this key conduit that has the ability to tear holes in space and time? The Luteces can do it with machines, but not like she can. Did she gain these powers because she made the transfer between universe at such a young age? And what is the siphon exactly? Was it created by Lutece? Was it a natural phenomenon they built the city around? Did it give Elizabeth the powers?" I feel like I’m missing some things because despite searching every nook and cranny I could find in the map, I ended the game only hearing 50 out of 80 possible


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Voxophone recordings. It seems odd to me because I explored what I thought was every corner of the maps for hours, but I fear I may have missed some important plot points because of the recordings I missed. Most weren’t particularly relevant, but a few gave key details that allowed for greater understanding of the story." In the end, despite all the multiverses, one thing was clear in all of them. The man formerly known as Booker DeWitt had to die. If he stays as DeWitt, refusing baptism, he becomes our “hero.” But this hero slaughters hundreds on Columbia as the character we control, and hundreds more as the leader of the bloodthirsty Vox Populi in a universe we only see the aftermath of." But if he becomes Comstock, that’s even worse. Columbia is bad enough with all its racism and fascism, but the universe where Comstock trains Elizabeth to attack New York City and god knows where else is probably the worst of all possible universes. And that was with DeWitt even attempting to stop Elizabeth from doing so." None of these possible universes happen if DeWitt doesn’t become either man. If he simply doesn’t emerge from the water, and drowns instead, none of these scenarios play out. There’s a relevant quote early on in the game I can’t quite recall verbatim, but it’s something about being both a sinner and a saint when under water during the process of baptism. If he doesn’t ever emerge, he never has to be either. In the final scene, he’s drowned by parallel universe copies of his own daughter, and as he dies, they fade one by one because they never existed at all. The camera cuts away before we see if the final Elizabeth, our Elizabeth, disappears as well." After the credits, there’s one more scene. It’s a universe where DeWitt is back in his seedy PI apartment. He opens the door to his nursery, calling his daughter’s name. Is she there? Isn’t she? Which universe is this? It’s a Schrodinger’s Cat scenario." Why is Bioshock Infinite an incredible game? Well, I honestly can’t remember when I’ve written three thousand


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words about the philosophical and scientific concepts behind any other video game. It’s something that’s still making my head spin, and I just want to talk and talk about it until I can make it all work inside my head. I almost have a handle on it, but I’m sure there are plenty of you that have your own thoughts and theories about the game and it’s complicated ending. And I’d love to hear from you in the comments." Bioshock Infinite would have been cool if it was just another crazy man running an impossibly placed city like the first Bioshock. But what Irrational has done here is downright transcendent, and I’m putting my full support being the idea that the game is indeed a legendary feat of storytelling.


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The Vigor Of Oz: Bishock Infinite’s Wizardly Parallels

By Alec Meerhttp://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/04/Bioshock-Infinite-wizard-of-oz/

" The following theory is not true, but it could be. It’s surely no accident that Bioshock Infinite often evokes The Wizard of Oz – there’s even an early stage of the game named after it. Even so, the similarities, be they deliberate or coincidental, run deeper than a turn-of-the-century character being mysteriously transported to an amazing world of technology and magic. Once I started down the yellow brick road of looking for parallels between Dorothy’s adventure in Oz and Booker’s adventure in Columbia, I couldn’t stop – I identified what seemed to be dozens of them. Am I onto something, or am I projecting? It doesn’t matter – this is purely a thought experiment, not a claim to accuracy, and I’m entirely sure you could achieve a similar effect by comparing BInfinite to Star Wars or the Bible or Peppa Pig. I’m doing this for fun. Mostly." As I say, the major and entirely obvious parallel between Irrational’s game and the L. Frank Baum book / Victor Fleming movie is the concept of the lead character being uprooted from early 20th century America and dragged through the sky to a fantastical place. Then again, time period aside, that’s hardly unfamiliar territory for videogames. It was when playing the game for a second time (in 1999 mode, but that’s another story) that I began to pick up on further apparent similarities." My first trigger for this was Captain Cornelius Slate, the Shock Jockey-wielding army man holed up in the Hall of Heroes level. Amidst the rhetoric he bellows at you throughout your battles with his soldiers and browsing of acutely racist museum exhibits is an oft-repeated refrain – “tin soldiers.” In the game’s narrative, this relates to his desire for his men and women to not become slavish conscripts of


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http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/04/bioshock-infinite-wizard-of-oz/








Comstock (who also staffs his forces with literal tin soldiers, the Iron Patriots), their military deeds obscured by his lies, and instead embrace heroic death in battle with Booker. It’s no great stretch to interpret tin soldier as Tin Man, the metal woodsman who sought a heart when he joined Dorothy in her adventure along the Yellow Brick Road." Tin Man imagery abounds throughout the game, in fact – the aforementioned Iron Patriots, but also the tragic Handymen, flesh and blood transposed into hulking metallic form. The Handymen even sport pulsating, glowing ‘hearts’, the Tin Man’s fondest desire, and it’s these you should shoot in order to rapidly end these unhappy souls’ Frankensteinian unlives. As well as fearing transformation into another of Comstock’s tin soldiers, Slate too wants a heart – to die feeling proud and beloved by his troops. He seeks to meet his end at the hands of a real soldier, not servile and brainwashed by a liar. Thus, choosing to kill rather than spare him is the ‘right’ decision, else he winds up lobotomised and tragic in Fink’s dungeons. Have a heart, and grant the old bully the release he so craves." If we take Slate to be the Tin Man, what of Dorothy’s other two companions, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion? This line of thinking is where I switched from feeling silly to slightly startled. We/Booker face three major male ‘bosses’ before the later, more climactic triumvirate of Daisy Fitzroy, Lady Comstock and Father Comstock. Slate/the Tin Man is the second; before that we have the Fraternal Order of the Raven and their apparently unnamed leader. After Slate is that amoral man of industry/slavery, Jeremiah Fink." The Fraternal Order of the Raven, also known as Zealots of the Lady, don’t really address the player as do Slate and Fink, rendering it difficult to tell if the apparent leader we battle at the climax of our journey through their decay-riddled, bird-infested frathouse is any different to the Zealots, or Crows, we face irregularly throughout the rest of the game. However, an Audio diary found in their headquarters was recorded by the otherwise unmentioned


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and unseen First Zealot, so I’m going to work on the assumption that the setpiece nature of the first bird-summoning foe we face, and the one whose death grants Booker the Murder of Crows vigor, is said First Zealot. He’s a scary Crow. He’s the Scarecrow, the first of Dorothy’s companions." I’m probably being over-literal here, but the Order of the Raven’s deathly hallow is one of very few sequences in the otherwise colourful and fantastical BInfinite where it attempts open horror. Their manor is filled with rotting fruit, flayed bodies and lurking ravens, while the First Zealot’s appearance is preceded by the sight of a man being torn to pieces by crows, popping up unexpectedly to cause a start. The Zealot himself can appear out of nowhere, and wears a coffin strapped to his back. Scare-Crow indeed: but what of the brain Dorothy’s Scarecrow so desired? Here I have to reach, but the Zealots’ hero is John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. Booth shot Lincoln in the head – point-blank in the brain – in the hope that the great emancipator’s death would help defend the racial purity that he – and the Zealots’ – so desired. The Scarecrow wants a brain, so he idolises the man who took Lincoln’s." Following the order in which Dorothy meets her companions, we rather neatly get First Zealot as Scarecrow, Slate as Tin Man and finally Fink as the cowardly Lion. Jeremiah Fink is Columbia’s captain of industry, and he sure is cowardly even by the standards of such a cruel, bullying society. He flees from Booker in their earliest encounter, at The Raffle (itself a deeply cowardly event which exists purely to demean and abuse Columbia’s ethnic minorities), and later encounters have him only ever addressing us by radio from afar, hiding unseen in some safe place. Meanwhile, he flies Comstock’s colours but does so purely from cynical financial opportunity, not belief. He even attempts to recruit Booker to his side, as head of security, rather than have to face him – and sends legions of men to die in his stead in order to achieve this.


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" His final appearance, slain by Daisy Fitzroy (herself guilty of a cowardly act against an unarmed man and, after that, a child), is behind bullet-proof glass, once again out of Booker’s reach. Later, we learn that he also arranged the assassination of the Lutece twins, and doubtless numerous others too. He’s a damned coward, in every respect – remotely destroying the lives of others, profiting from poverty and misery, having those who try to rise up tortured or killed, while forever keeping out of harm’s way himself, protected by hired thugs." And what of the lion? Just listen to Fink’s canned propaganda and rhetoric during our first arrival in Finkton, as black and Irish workers miserably, rhythmically perform their slavelike construction duty for him. They, he says, are Cattle, while natural born leaders like him are Lions. Like Slate and tin soldiers, this is an oft-repeated refrain. As for the bravery the Cowardly Lion sought, perhaps that’s Fink’s fatal encounter with the living avatar of everything he sought to oppress. Finally, after all that cowardice, he comes face to face with his victims, his crimes. Daisy Fitzroy shoots him in the heart, forever pinning a medal of blood to his breast. His death also presages what could be argued to be the game’s bravest act, Elizabeth’s endangerment of her own life and sacrifice of her innocence to save a child by slaying Fitzroy. The scary crow, the tin soldier, the oh-so-cowardly lion. Encountered in Dorothy’s order, all of them clearly proclaiming the imagery of their Ozian analogues. They may not be companion figures, but Slate and Fink at least both make some claim to being Booker/Dorothy’s friend, while all three inadvertently aid him/her with either Vigors or progress upon their defeat. Coincidence? The truth of it doesn’t matter: if the cap fits..." There’s another trio in the Wizard of Oz, of course, and they too have eerie parallels in Columbia. The Wicked Witch of the East, the Wicked Witch of the West and the Good Witch of the North – the three powerful women of Oz. In Bioshock Infinite, we have Lady Comstock, Daisy Fitzroy and


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Elizabeth/Anna DeWitt. The Wicked Witch of the East dies essentially off-camera near the start of the Wizard of Oz, and so it is that Lady Comstock had been murdered some time before we/Booker arrives on Columbia. (She later reappears as a ghost, of course, although we learn that this isn’t really Lady Comstock as such, but instead a conjuration of Elizabeth’s guilt and anger. The good witch, so closely related to, and responsible for, the wicked ones)." Whether Lady Comstock is ‘evil’ is a matter of some debate, given she’s as much a victim of Comstock’s brutality as anyone else in Columbia, but audiodiaries reveal that she was indeed considered ‘wicked’ in her wanton past, by her own admission." Vox Populi leader Daisy Fitzroy, meanwhile, becomes the witch of the West, the hectoring villain who repeatedly delays Dorothy in her journey to meet the Wizard and return home. In the game’s strangest and perhaps most controversial narrative choice, the plot quickly transforms its only high-profile black character from freedom fighter to murderous, merciless thug (and with it rendering the entire Vox Populi faction ultimately unsympathetic). No matter how noble her purpose, and the more nuanced information in the audiodiaries, the core narrative ultimately treats her as a villain." I don’t know if the Wicked Witch of the West ever thought herself a freedom fighter, but certainly her primarily motivation is vengeance – only for Dorothy’s accidental murder of her sister rather than to overthrow a racist despot. Though we can argue that Booker is an accidental racist despot, Comstock of course being his alternate-reality self, and thus he created Fitzroy-as-villain much as Dorothy created West Witch-as-villain. Speaking of racism, if you want an analogue for the West Witch’s army of flying monkeys, perhaps that’s how Columbia’s horrifyingly prejudiced whites envisage the primarily airship-transported Vox Populi who invade from the skies to terrorise them. Please, I speak here


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http://superopinionated.com/2013/04/03/booker-dewitt-and-the-case-of-the-young-white-lady-feels-a-bioshock-infinite-review/




from their unpleasant point of view, and the Columbia-wide words and pictures of hatred, not from my own." Which leaves us with Elizabeth/Anna as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. I had toyed with proclaiming Elizabeth to be Dorothy, due to the overt visual similarities of the young woman in the blue and white dress (and with a fondness for song and dance, no less), but have since settled on this as either a red herring or an allusion to the Wizard of Oz’s most famous imagery, something that couldn’t be achieved with Booker unless this were to be a far more progressive videogame." Glinda makes more sense, anyway – the eternal helper, the innocent in a family of evil, the most overtly magical character and the only one who ultimately knows, and can control, what’s really going on. It’s Glinda who revealed that Dorothy could have gone home all along, and it’s Elizabeth who demonstrates the choice, that baptism which birthed Comstock, the event which could have meant Booker never left New York and never lost what remained of his family. Dorothy had to realise for herself that there’s no place like home, as Booker had to realise for himself that what he truly desired was to undo the terrible decision to sell his daughter, to return to a world in which that did not happen." As an aside, further and perhaps more overt Oz imagery comes in the late-game scene where Elizabeth, her powers finally unrestricted, threatens to destroy the facility which had imprisoned her with a scene of what might very well be a Kansas farmstead in the midst of a tornado. There’s no place like home indeed." So we come to Bioshock Infinite’s male leads. Comstock as the Wizard of Oz himself is an easy fit – the liar, the charlatan, the frail old man behind the curtain. For all his bluster about power and knowledge, he’s a powerless geriatric dying of cancer, an all-too-Earthly man transported to this magic world and to quasi-godhood by chance (that being the quantum physics experiments of the Lutece twins), hiding a terrible secret and incapable of doing anyone much good.


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We first meet Comstock in the form of a giant, intimidating projection, an attempt to hide his true, underwhelming form, while Dorothy’s first encounter with the Wizard has him as a booming, disembodied voice. Finally, Comstock’s eventual appearance in the flesh has him adopting a surprisingly kindly manner (to Elizabeth at least), much as Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs eventually proved to be a genteel, benign fellow." Booker as Dorothy completes our set of major characters. The visitor from another world, carried away through the skies, wandering confusedly through a magical land full of familiar faces and places, now distorted into new forms and unsure what is and isn’t real. No yellow brick road, perhaps, but shining steel skyrails at least. All he wants is to get home, to normality, even though that rancid, empty apartment is an unhappy place – much as Dorothy’s home life was apparently a meagre one. When we see Booker in his office, in those flashbacks and post-death scenes, it’s in near-monochrome, as was Dorothy’s Kansas. When he’s in Columbia, it’s a wash of over-saturated colour and impossible architecture, much like Oz." Most of all, Columbia is essentially a creation of Booker’s own imagining and mangled memories, as the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie implies Oz was of Dorothy’s. In the Comstock reality, Booker’s post-war trauma mutated into hatred and puritanism, creating Columbia as a representation of the people and events of his past. So too does Dorothy repeatedly encounter the faces of people she knew and parallels with her apparently tornado-lost home. (Songbird as the tornado, perhaps? Or Toto, given its tendency to follow the player? The Lutece twins as Dorothy’s pair of magical, reality-hopping ruby red slippers, formerly in the service of an evil character?) It’s all his fault, it’s all her fault. After all that disaster and all that death, they both get to go home in the end – her to Kansas and to her family, him to New York and to his long-lost daughter Anna. It was all a dream. Or was it?


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" Oh, and the civilians of Columbia, those unconvincing, credulous pantomime-people, are the Munchkins. I’ve no objection to Irrational using that line if ever they want to defend their game’s greatest failing." For a further, even more eerie parallel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum also wrote a novel called Sky Island. It concerned a magical country in the clouds, locked in civil war, and whose rulers espoused racism and hated the world below them. It was published in 1912, the year in which Bioshock Infinite is set.


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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Island_(novel)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Island_(novel)

5 Awesome Flaws in the New 'Bioshock' GameBy Robert Brockway

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-awesome-flaws-in-new-Bioshock-game_p2/

Part 1" Bioshock: Infinite came out last week, and everybody is talking about it for one simple reason: It's easily the best game in recent memory. That doesn't mean it's perfect, however. There are a host of issues that might scare you away from Infinite before and even while you're playing it. I want to address those issues as somebody who shared those same concerns. And I will spend the first page of this column doing so." Beyond the page break, however, spoilers shall abound. On the second page, I'm going to try to piece together what really happened in Bioshock: Infinite, and for that, I'm going to need your help. Listen, I'm a genius -- I know that because my mom told me so, even though she was furiously air-quoting at the time -- but I still have a slew of unanswered questions about the story of Infinite. Looking around the Internet, it seems like I'm not alone. So here's my proposition: I'm going to put down my questions and theories on the second page, and if you have the answers -- or just better theories, which is entirely probable if you're not an air-quote genius -- go ahead and post them in the comments. I'll edit the second page throughout the day, putting up the most intriguing, helpful, valuable, or just balls-out trippy information that you guys put forth. Together, maybe we can headlock this beautiful work of art and force it to puke up some answers." But first, here are a few things wrong with Bioshock: Infinite, and why they're actually not wrong at all. If that sentence throws you, then stay far, far away from this game -- there are much worse paradoxes in store. Remember: This page is spoiler-free, but the definition of "spoiler" varies widely. I'm not going to reveal anything not already covered by a synopsis or a review from a game site, but some people


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http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-awesome-flaws-in-new-bioshock-game_p2/




will get furious if you so much as mention the protagonist's name. If that's you, you might want to stay away from this article, the entire Internet, other people, and possibly small children, because it sounds like you've got some rage issues.

5. It's Just More of the Same

" One of the more common complaints about Bioshock: Infinite is that it's just retreading the same ground as the first game. There is a lighthouse, there is a man, there is a city. Columbia -- the impossible flying city where Bioshock: Infinite takes place -- has seceded from the world. Just like Rapture, the people mindlessly follow the influence of a megalomaniac, and the mighty utopia they've built is all set to crumble. Just like Rapture, there are steampunk weapons, strange sci-fi monsters, potions that give you superpowers, and lots and lots of cranks to turn." But Bioshock: Infinite, unlike Bioshock 2, knows that it is repeating the structure of the first, and it is doing so intentionally. Infinite plays with its past in a very clever way that, once you realize what it's doing, makes for a fresh and rewarding gameplay experience. Also: You get a claw that lets you zip around on a citywide network of gondola lines. You can even leap off said lines and plummet six stories with your fist outstretched while an enemy below stands frozen in terror at the world's most telegraphed comet-punch, which is exactly as awesome as it sounds.

4. The Combat System Is Boring

" If you played the first Bioshock, you remember that it was a pretty light combat system. One hand for magic powers, one hand for weapons. No cover systems, squad-based combat, or combos -- just the interplay of powers and weapons. Infinite is the same thing: If you want to take cover, you stand behind some boxes. If you want to pull off a bitchin' combo, you shoot a guy ... twice.


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" But don't let that dissuade you. The aforementioned skyline combat is very satisfying, andInfinite adds both a gear system -- equipment that changes and augments your abilities -- and a more substantial upgrade system for the powers, any two of which you can switch on the fly. By playing with upgrades, combos, and gear, you can tailor the fighting style much more to your strengths. For example: I am terrible at shooting games, but excellent at punching people until their heads explode. So I focused my gear on rewards for melee kills, and my powers on protection from ranged damage and quickly closing gaps. A common complaint is that people found the shooting sections boring, to which I ask: What shooting sections? I fired about 10 bullets that whole game, and spent the rest as a living hurricane gale with electric fists. I was Patrick Swayze up in that shit: I'm like the wind, I'm out of your reach. Also: I'll tear your goddamn throat out.

3. It Looks Like a Mod

" Infinite is a very pretty game, but most of that is due to novel level design and lighting effects. Outside of those, yes, Infinite does look quite a bit like a reskinned Bioshock. Enemies, weapons, powers, and even environments will feel very familiar to people who've played earlier games in the series. This was so prominent that it really bothered me for the first half of the game. I frequently paused and marveled at the beauty and authenticity of their world design (always a strong suit of the Bioshock franchise), but I kept passing through great halls and cramped little houses that gave me intense deja vu. Did they just put a different book texture on this library wall, because I swear to God this place was in the first game. And there's a big mechanical guy around this next corner -- yep, there he is, just like in the first game. Right?Right." But -- without going into any spoilers, you're just going to have to trust me on this -- Bioshock: Infinite has a way to turn all of this around for the player. Just when you


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start to feel disappointed that the level design is so familiar, the game wipes out all of your complaints retroactively. I was seriously about to give up on Infinite, feeling like I've played it all before, but I struggled through to the halfway point, and it was all worth it.

2. Is This Whole Game a Fucking Escort Mission?

" Yes. Bioshock: Infinite is Resident Evil 4, but you're with Ashley all the time. I know that sounds like a tenth circle of ironic hell reserved for obsessive co-dependents, but the second you meet Elizabeth, your companion, the game very clearly spells out in giant text across the screen: "YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF ELIZABETH." She can't be damaged, and she's not part of the fight. She has some unique, if somewhat ... obtrusive ways of helping you during a battle, but there's not a single instance where you have to fight off waves of attackers coming for her, or shoot the guys that are dragging her away, or reload because you accidentally emptied a clip into the back of her head when she suddenly ran off to chase butterflies in the middle of a fucking firefight. Nobody's pointing fingers, but we're all pointing shotguns at your sassy little bangs, Ashley.

1. It's Really Short Though, Right?

" Well, yes, but no. In terms of gameplay time, the story can be completed in a dozen hours or so. But that's if you're the kind of player who, when dropped into a breathtakingly complete and immersive world full of subtle detail and hidden exposition, immediately takes off in a dead sprint after the objective arrow, barely pausing to shoot anything that moves in the balls. If you burn right through the game as fast as you can, you can finish Infinite very quickly. But if you do that, you're going to be very confused by the ending, because you didn't stop to collect half the story.


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" Bioshock: Infinite is as dense as your inbred cousin who needs a cheat sheet to work the microwave. There are serious rewards for taking your time, exploring every offbeat path, and collecting as much as you can. If you play through Infinite once in 10 straight hours, that's fine -- you'll probably have fun. But it is definitely worthwhile to go back and play it again with that endgame knowledge in your head. On my first playthrough, I went very slowly -- even taking notes, because I'm a giant hemorrhaging dork -- and it took me 20 hours. If you played it like that, then first things first: Can we be friends? We can swap geeklogs! But second, you probably don't need to play it again. However, if your first playthrough took 10 hours, you've got another 10 hours in replay that will be richly rewarding."

Part 2

" Let's start with the most important questions that I didn't necessarily find a definitive answer for while playing through Bioshock: Infinite:

How many main worlds do you think there are?

" I know that the ending, and the title, suggest Infinite variations, but do you think each tear led you to a different world? Or was Elizabeth shifting you back and forth between two or three worlds as your actions changed them?""To respond to "how many main worlds do you think there are?" I think the biggest clue lies in what Elizabeth said: "It's a form of wish fulfillment." It's not like they're jumping from one world to the other, rather when Booker and Elizabeth hit a plot dead end she "finds" a world that has the right conditions for them to continue on. She does warn Booker every time a jump tear presents itself, saying that you can't go back. There aren't any main worlds, rather an Infinite (eh? eh?) branching


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out of worlds where all choices exist simultaneously." -Maui Mauricio

" Ah, so every single manipulation Elizabeth makes, from bringing a crate of med-kits through to shifting Chen Lin's tools, isn't just creating a tear to another world at that point in "your" world, it's shifting the pair of you over to an entirely new world where those conditions exist. I assumed the "Infinite" in the title was referring to the revelation at the end -- that, generally speaking, there are any number of combinations possible -- not that you, the player, have gone, or can go, through Infinite variations depending on what you bring through in combat.

"There are as many world as there are players. Every person playing the game is playing a different Booker, the developers of the game said that your decision's in the game would change the story, but they never did until I realized it changed every players story by making me a separate Booker." -Protolore

What was up with the coins?

" Rosalind and Robert Lutece introduced the concept, at the very beginning, by having you flip a coin. It came up heads for me (was it different for you, depending on how you called it?), and when Robert turned around, his sandwich board showed that it always comes up heads. However, during the game, every coin Elizabeth tossed me came up tails. Is that what happened for you? What do you think that means?

"The Lutece-coin section was significant to show that they were testing the constants and variables. Each Booker flipped heads at that point every time. It was a constant. But when you pick the brooch for Elizabeth, they remake that they thought you would pick the other, a variable. They were likely


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trying to use those decisions in their quantum calculations or if this Booker would be successful. I never considered Elizabeth's coins always being tails, as I assumed it was just the one animation." -Ben Cobb

" See, I totally did not pick up on that. I thought the coin-flip was an experiment they were doing with other fair-goers. But the Luteces are pan-dimensional: It makes sense that every one of those tally marks on Robert's board was some version of Booker coming to flip the coin.

"Playwright here. An actual explanation for the coin flipping: This is an allusion to Tom Stoppard's Absurdist play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which the titular characters also flip coins and have them always come up heads (if I'm not mistaken it happens exactly 113 times in both stories (yes, I counted (and yes, triple parentheses--mind blown much?)))." -Al-xHaslett

" My mind would have been blown, but you nested parentheses so all of your opinions and thoughts are invalid.Why could Booker handle his own death when Chen Lin and the guards went all time-blinky? We saw that stepping through a tear into an alternate world where you've died severely fucks up your mind, and Booker is dead in Voxworld. But there's only one brief moment where his nose starts bleeding (well, that, and a few callbacks during the ending). Why could Booker handle it when Chen Lin and the guards went all time-blinky?

"Regarding why Booker can handle being dead, but other characters can't: The exact circumstances that drive Chen Lin (and all the Vox and police that you inventively murder trying to GET to Chen Lin) insane are never actually applied to Player Character Booker. All the NPCs die, and then someone near them who is not them jumps through a Tear.


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They don't go themselves. Booker is always the one going through the Tear." -Antilles

Are Booker DeWitt and Robert Lutece from the same world?

" Rosalind and Robert Lutece are alternate-world versions of the same person. It's clear that Rosalind is from a world with Columbia and Comstock, but is Robert native to Booker's world? In other words, there doesn't seem to be a Columbia in Booker's world, and that makes sense, because he never became Comstock to start it -- but is there a Columbia in Robert Lutece's world? Or did he step through to Rosalind's world when they opened the first tear, and then they both collectively went to a third world, Booker's, to get Anna? If so, what was the significance of the statue? At the start of the game, the very first time-shifting moment you witness is the statue of Rosalind Lutece twitching -- it's shifting between Robert and Rosalind versions. Why is Columbia already in flux?

"Seeing as there isn't a Columbia in the world booker is from, and the dissenting city becomes rapture, it is fully possible that Robert was the designer that worked out the equal pressures needed for rapture to not collapse under the weight of the ocean." -AmielDavis

" That's a good point: The whole game is constants and variables. The man, the city, and the lighthouse are all constants, so if Booker doesn't become Comstock, there has to be a different man, city and lighthouse. That would mean Booker is from Rapture's universe, just earlier on, before it exists. If Booker has to be an ancestor of Ryan to be able to bypass the genetic locks on the bathyspheres, then could Booker's Anna, the one that was never taken, be Andrew Ryan's mother? Remember: "The seed of the prophet shall sit the throne, and drown in fire the mountains of man." Booker is/was/will be the prophet, so his seed is not only Anna, but


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also Ryan, and therefore Ryan's son, Jack, the protagonist from the first Bioshock. Did you ever get the "bad" ending in the first Bioshock? You let the splicers loose. You, the "seed of the prophet" effectively "drown in flame the mountains of man."

In response to Brockway's Stupid Theory

" "It's an impossibility for Anna to be Ryan's mother. Ryan was born in Russia. Andrew Ryan isn't even his real name. It's Andrei Rianofski. He was around to see the Bolsheviks in 1917 and moved to America in 1919 where he changed his name. This means that Ryan would have had to have been at LEAST 16-18 at the year 1919 to move to America on his own and change his name. Making his birthdate about 1901-1903. Anna Dewitt was born in 1892. She would have had to give birth to Andrew at the EARLIEST age of 9. Making a direct relation between Anna and Ryan impossible. What makes a bit more sense (things making sense a bit relative in the Bioshock universe) is that there is always a man, always a lighthouse. Booker is an alternate version of Jack. Simply existing in universes where the variables changed. Like the Luteces being essentially genetic matches up until the chromosome change. Booker shares Jack's genetic traits. Thus sharing Ryan's. Thus being able to use the bathyspheres." -TrashboatJones

" Well, shit. My idea was way cooler, though. I'm going to split off into my own alternate world where I'm right and you shut up.

Did anybody else get inside Fink's Magical Melodies?

" If so, why was that one single tear a different color pattern? It was red/gray instead of blue/gray. All the other music in the game was an alternate, old-timey cover of some anachronistic song, but the tune playing through Fink's red/


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gray tear was the unaltered original version of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." Was that the only portal into our (the player's) universe, and if so, why was it a different color? Were there others that I missed?

"On the tears- there was a tear in Finkton near the Chen-Lin place and that club that was the same color and had the original CCR version of "Fortunate Son" playing through it? I think Booker made a comment about having not heard that song before and then Elizabeth said she didn't think anyone did." -Mark

“I wonder how many others there were. Were all the red/gray tears just playing song versions from our universe? Is that the only significance: We get special color palette treatment because our universe is the best? Hell yeah! Suck it, other universes."I assume the red tears are ones that Albert Fink opened and failed to close. Since his tears were only there to poach music from our universe." -quicksignup

" That's an interesting idea: That there are unclosed tears, or that there are tears that differ in their fundamental nature somehow. Maybe Fink's tears - the red/grey ones - were just voyeurism. Like one-way mirrors, you could only see but not interact. But Elizabeth's tears, the blue/grey ones, allow you to step through, pull through, generally interact. I really like this explanation, because it's very similar to the way the time-travel drugs in my book work, and I love me some me.

Who is the Angel Columbia?

" It's explained that Comstock's powers of prophecy come from him peering into alternate universes, but if that's the case, who is the Angel Columbia? The Angel tells him the early prophecies, before the tears. She tells him about the


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flying city and to find Rosalind Lutece to make it happen. She also tells him that "the city will only survive so long as the seed of the prophet sits the throne." It can't just be pure religious madness, because all of that came true. Is Columbia the final version of "our" Elizabeth, after you collapse the siphon? Is she guiding Comstock to help make sure the events of the game unfold as they do, so she can be "born again" with full powers?

"Rosalind Lutece? Comstock using religious rhetoric to get followers?" -silentstone7

" I like the idea that Columbia is a post-accident Rosalind Lutece guiding Comstock into the events. It almost makes sense: She's shown that she would do anything, including kidnapping, to be with her "brother." Robert threatens to leave her if they don't save/stop Elizabeth, but they'd probably never be together without Comstock. She explicitly says that his funding is the only thing that enables her to create a tear so she and Robert can be together. But it seems like a lot of people are saying "nah, it's just bullshit that Comstock is making up." I did not get that sense from his character: Sure, he's shown as merciless and manipulative, but he always seems to take his faith seriously. The baptism is the event that splits Comstock off from Booker, it's extremely important to him, and I think it's the one thing he's not cynical about. Plus, the game is written with a lot of care. I would be very surprised if you asked an Infinite writer who Columbia was, and their answer was "oh, that? Nah, that's just some bullshit."

Does Booker have Quantum Powers?

" In the 1984 universe, the one where Elizabeth becomes the Lamb and fire-bombs New York City, she explains that she's training people to use Quantum Magic or whatever. The Boy of Silence (the horn-headed dude) clearly


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has the same powers as she does, just lesser. The inmates in the Founder masks are immune to damage until they're alerted. They're twitching and involuntarily shifting through worlds like Chen Lin, which Elizabeth explains in a Voxophone is because she "exposed them to every version [of their own minds]." So they're scattered across the universes, like the Luteces, but they can't handle it. When the Boy of Silence sounds the horn and all the inmates are whole again, they can hurt you and be hurt. So is he calling their scattered consciousnesses all back together into one universe so they can act against you? If so, it's implied that Elizabeth got her powers when the Luteces brought Anna through a tear. Now Lamb-Elizabeth is making other Quantum-powered beings, presumably by pulling them through other tears? If so, why doesn't Booker develop these same powers? He crosses through multiple tears with Elizabeth through the course of the game.

"Elizabeth gained quantum powers, I believe, because she existed physically in two dimensions. One as a pinky and one as the rest of her. It seems like that was the event that started this whole thing." -MajicWalrus

" Seems to be generally agreed that Elizabeth has powers because she lost her pinky between universes. So Lamb-Elizabeth is creating the Boys of Silence and other quantum-manipulating beings by putting them partway between tears and severing their body parts? That's fucking awesomely dark. Makes me wonder what's under that helmet. But if it was that easy, why isn't Comstock building an army of pinky-less universe-manipulating magical racists?

"Yes. If you're as terrible a player as me you have died a handful of times. Usually when you die you see a cut scene where Elizabeth gives you the whole "Don't you fucking die on me" treatment and you're back in the action. However if you have died in a spot in the game where Elizabeth isn't


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around to pull your ass out of the fire you end up back in your dingy apartment office. All you do there is open the door and you are back to the spot before you died. They explain when you "die" when you come back the enemies heal. Do they? Or is it that you never shot at them (or in some other cases used your arm can opener to introduce their brain to the sun). The entire tear jumping all the different Bookers have done all starts from the central point in his office when he gave up his daughter. It's possible that under extreme duress Booker can take himself briefly back to that point to allow himself to recover. He can't do this all the time or at will because in his timeline the exposure is a recent (although enumerable) event. Elizabeth can because she has been dealing with it since she was a baby." -Mike Gilbert

" Booker's got functional Quantum Immortality then: He can, subconsciously, manipulate probabilities that ensure the universe "our" Booker is in is the one in which he doesn't die...

"I don't think Booker has quantum abilities. I think when he dies without Elizabeth there you aren't reviving as "your Booker". You are becoming a Booker who didn't get his brains smashed in by a Handyman, opening the office door is just that Booker taking the deal then embarking on to Columbia. Basically cutting out replaying everything up to that point. Thus in this new reality, Booker has yet to be killed by the enemy, and has made different choices in combat leading to less damage done to said enemy. Also when Elizabeth heals you, I don't think she actually heals you, she brings an undamaged Booker into her reality, and your minds must combine and reconcile the events, thus fake memories of Elizabeth stabbing you with a giant needle and "reviving you". Oh and she takes the chance to steal 100 bucks from you in the process, or the other Booker is poor." -JohnWilliamThurston


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" Well there you go, Elizabeth is using her Quantum Powers to pickpocket her own father. She's just a magical little pixie version of a teenager stealing $20 dollar bills from mom's purse to buy weed.

Speaking of the Boy of Silence ..." How hard, in newton meters, would you say you shit yourself when you closed the door and turned around to find him standing there?Were the events of Infinite caused by Booker's drowning at baptism, rather than concluded by it?

" The priest says you'll be "born again in the blood of the Lamb," which is the alternate name for your daughter, and asks you to wipe your past away by "cleaning the slate," in the "name of the Father." Sure, the Lamb and Father references can be explained by Comstock referring back to his own baptismal terminology, but "clean the slate"? Slate, the old military colonel, represents your past in the game. The references to "cleaning the slate" can't just be Comstock naming stuff after his baptism experience -- Slate exists prior to those events. If this whole thing turns out to be Booker's dream as he's dying, I'm flipping the board and storming out of this bitch.

"Slate says you were at the boxer rebelion, but Commstock had to have been as well because he used Columbia during it, as seen in the kinetoscopes. Is it possible that Commstock/Booker in that universe was living a double life, one as a holy man trying to run from his sin, and another that was still a soldier." -Protolore

" Wait, what the fuck? Is he right? Did Slate remember that Booker Dewitt was at the battle of Peking? I Can't recall - I thought he only mentioned you being at Wounded Knee. Comstock was certainly at the Boxer Rebellion in the Columbia-world, it's a pivotal moment of the game's history. If


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so, either both Booker and Comstock were there with Slate, or Slate is somehow remembering the alternate history of a Booker he never knew.

" Answer: Nope! Slate doesn't say Booker was at Peking. Either I misunderstood, or somebody mistyped, or we have all jumped into a parallel universe where the game is fundamentally different in this one small, insignificant way. Dang, I was hoping for the three-titted universe, too.

Does Elizabeth become the Lamb?

" At the end, the alternate Elizabeths disappear one by one after Booker is drowned at baptism -- before fathering her. So the alternate versions disappear because they never existed, but the screen fades out before the last -- "our" Elizabeth -- disappears. The last note struck on the accompanying piano music, after the screen goes dark, is wrong. That seems to imply that "our" Elizabeth still exists after Booker dies. Rosalind Lutece says she's seen the alternate histories, and that they can't stop the girl because "time is an ocean, not a river." Does the wrong note being struck, her being freed from the siphon, and the snuffing out of all the alternate versions imply that "our" Elizabeth will become the Lamb now anyway? The Lamb's destiny, as 1984 Elizabeth explains over the PA, is to wipe out not just our universe, but all alternate universes. She can only do that when she destroys the siphon, which you just helped her do ...

"I'm not so sure about this one. The first that should be noted is that none of the Elizabeths that drown Booker is "our" Elizabeth. If you look closely, none of the are wearing the bird/cage pendant from the beginning of the game. Also, Booker says something along the lines of, "You're not Elizabeth... who are you?" As for the "time is an ocean. not a river" thing, I'm pretty sure Elizabeth took care of all that. She drowned


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Booker before he could become Comstock, thus preventing all other Bookers from being baptized. Columbia is never created, and Anna is never taken. The siphon was destroyed, but after the final events of the game, the siphon never exists in the first place." -Aaron Cohen

" Interesting. Can anybody confirm that Elizabeth isn't wearing the pendant at the end? That, to me, doesn't say she can't be the Lamb. It says she already is: She's not "our" Elizabeth, she's some other version that Booker did not save, and thus did not choose the necklace for her. If true, the Lamb is tricking you, killing everybody that kept her chained up after using you to free her powers...

"The clip at the end of the credits suggests that Elisabeth only killed the versions of booker who accepted the baptism. if she killed all the versions of booker, then he never would have been in that office, and without the existence of comstock, there was no one to take anna away from him in exchange for his debts, so, because we see a crib still there, then as long as nothing else happened to anna, and booker found another way to settle his debts (which he probably could), he gets to have a normal life with his daughter." -Mr. Nickman

" That's a good interpretation of something I forgot to mention: Don't skip the credits. There's a scene afterward where Booker is in his office and hears crying. He stands up, goes to the door, and asks "Anna, is that you?" However, if all Comstocks are eliminated, then Quantum-powered Elizabeth wouldn't exist - there was nobody there to steal her to start it all. It's likely that she's become scattered across dimensions, like the Luteces, and so isn't necessarily affected by the continuity of timelines, but then - why does Booker ask "is that you?" If these events never happened, and only Quantum Elizabeth is left to remember them, why would Booker ask his crying infant daughter if it's really her? Two explanations: A. The versions of Booker that aren't drowned at the baptism


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have some memory of the events of Infinite because their timelines have been artificially altered, leaving psychic remnants of the experience. B. Booker was really drunk, and forgot how many babies he had.

General Mindfuckery and Miscellany

"As far as Booker goes, I noticed my second time through, he gets a nosebleed as he arrives in Columbia, which we are told through the game that nosebleeds signify multiple memories existing in the same spot. It is easy to overlook this early nosebleed when first playing through. But it also means that this Booker has memories of another Booker or Bookers going to Columbia." -Mscrizzle

"You can make the argument that everything that happens before Booker wakes up at the feet of the three founder's statues never happened: - In the lighthouse, there's a bowl of water to wash away his sins, he refuses (like the baptism). - The sign on the stairs says "To Thine Own Land I Shall Take Thee" telling Booker he's going to his own (comstock's) land. - The code to activate the rocket to Columbia is 1-2-2, and Booker has already been to Columbia 122 times, this is time 123. - The preacher is the same from both Baptisms.-As other sites and people have pointed out, the Bathyspheres in Rapture were coded to Andrew Ryan's DNA. There's an audio diary in Rapture in Bioshock 1 that says the bathyspheres were locked down and could only be controlled by Andrew Ryan's genetic code, meaning him, and "siblings, cousins, really anyone related". In Bioshock 1, Jack can control them because he is Andrew Ryan's son and/or clone. Atlas/Fontaine cannot use them. In Infinite, Booker can use the Bathysphere, and judging from the destroyed Welcome Center, it does take place after or during the events of Bioshock 1, when the lockdown is in place. That's a lot of coincidences, and I'm sure there's more I missed. It seems


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like Booker is using his previous life experiences to explain how he got to Columbia." -silentstone7

" And here's a pretty excellent response video by the pretty excellent Norm Scott!"There is a theory that has been posted below a few times that you can hear the Songbird die in the original Bioshock when Coheen kills Fitzgerald, the apprentice playing the piano. There are some videos floating around where you can hear the Songbird's cry during the scene. If it's real, that... displays a shocking level of planning by the designers." -gstop825

"Here's a thought... Is Elizabeth really as innocent as she appears to be? What if the entire plot of the game is just one big time loop that Elizabeth sends Booker through "Infinitely" as part of some larger plot? Think about it! The game mentions that Booker created false memories the first time he traveled across dimensions. What if everything before Booker wakes up in the Garden in Columbia (the 1st baptism) is just a false memory that Booker created, and the beginning of the game is actually the last scene where the Elizabeths drown Booker (the 2nd Baptism)? So, the Elizabeths drown Booker and send him back to Columbia. He frees a new Elizabeth and destroys the siphon, thus allowing the new Elizabeth to become aware of the multiverse and the other Elizabeths who exist outside of it in the Lighthouse Room. Now there are 8 Elizabeths instead of 7. They drown Booker and send him back through to the start of the loop to free another Elizabeth and grow their Interdimensional Elizabeth Army. Wash, rinse, repeat.

" No, you have to be wrong, because I'm pretty sure that's the plot of the Resident Evil movies and the Resident Evil movies are functionally retarded. You just…you just have to be wrong. I ask that you accept it now.


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http://youtu.be/_c2LM-xIvSg

http://youtu.be/_c2LM-xIvSg

Opinion: Violence limits Bioshock Infinite's audience — my wife included

By Chris Plantehttp://www.polygon.com/2013/4/2/4174344/opinion-why-my-wife-wont-play-Bioshock-Infinite

" My wife was excited to play Bioshock Infinite, the new first-person shooter from haloed developer Irrational Games. Her video game experiences are few, mostly the easy-to-play shorts made by thatgamecompany. But Infinite and its inescapable ad campaign piqued her interest. A video game about American exceptionalism, religious zealotry, the limitations of science and poor parenting sounded to her like a great book or film. The first 15 minutes enthralled her, as she took the fantastic voyage into a city in the sky, and then protagonist Booker DeWitt buried a steel claw into a police officer's face, and proceeded to shoot grapefruit-sized holes into the heads of another dozen human beings." I'd assumed complex controllers kept newcomers from first-person shooters, requiring the use of two thumbsticks and a half-dozen buttons, but for the first time — and I can only imagine I'm late to this party — I see how repellent the violence in shooters has become, specifically to the uninitiated, who haven't spent the last decade roaming shady corridors and unloading rocket launchers. I can stomach a thousand headshots in exchange for an engrossing story, but that says more about me than them." In Bioshock Infinite, you have the ability to pop heads, burn flesh, torque necks, puncture eye sockets and break bones, often one after the other. Elizabeth, your companion, occasionally reacts negatively to your cruelty, before snapping back to her chirpy self, cracking wise about picking a lock as she loiters next to a pile of fresh corpses. If violence is necessary to confirm Booker's status as villain, the first dozen kills more than get the message across. This degree of violence is new to the Bioshock universe, which previously only allowed players to contort bodies, not dismember them.


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http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/2/4174344/opinion-why-my-wife-wont-play-bioshock-infinite




http://www.polygon.com/game/bioshock-infinite/2779

http://www.polygon.com/game/bioshock-infinite/2779

http://www.polygon.com/franchise/bioshock/510

http://www.polygon.com/franchise/bioshock/510

" There's an argument to be made that, one for one, a murder in Bioshock Infinite is no more graphic than a murder in a film, like Tarantino's Pulp Fiction or Malick's The Thin Red Line. Violence serves these films: Pulp Fiction is a commentary on abuse; The Thin Red Line a voyeuristic view of war's dulling effect on our humanity. Bioshock Infinitehas little to say about violence. The story of Elizabeth, Comstock and Booker is one of personal dramas and familial traumas that owes more to 1960s American theater than 1990s independent cinema." Irrational's writers, led by Ken Levine, have cobbled together that rare venue in video games in which characters are allowed to speak. Via audio recordings, we learn the closely held secrets and desires of Columbia's locals and uncover the motives of Elizabeth, Comstock and the tragic Lady Comstock. But the meat of this dramatic sandwich is the murder of hundreds of people impeding the characters from their dramatic conclusions." The magnitude of lives taken in Bioshock Infinite, and the cold efficiency in doing so, is unfamiliar to even the most exploitative films. Perhaps the rampage would be worth it for a few no-holds-barred human-to-human conversations. Elizabeth, Comstock, Lady Comstock and Booker deserve their own group therapy session, a chance to work through years of personal drama. Instead, they get guns. The majority of personal dramas play out as such: Elizabeth has an epiphany about her relationship with an individual; you shoot that individual in the face a couple dozen times until it's dead. The exception to the rule is the ending, in which Elizabeth tells you directly what all of this meant. No conversation, just exposition." That such an information dump isn't just interesting, but emotionally affecting is a testament to how well the story's been built and how little dramatic payoff's been given till this point. If you squint hard enough, you can almost make out an argument that the entire game purposefully builds to a conclusion in which the violence is sponged away, as if by


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holy water and forgiveness. The argument assumes everyone makes it past the dozens of sticky and explosive headshots — and doubly assumes that we need yet another violent video game about how violent video game players are. The best attack on violent games, after all, is not making violent games.Violence doesn't serve Bioshock Infinite. It distracts from it." Levine has been outspoken about his ambition to please both the meathead and the brainiac since the release of the original Bioshock. But what about my wife? What about the people who can stomach only so much aggressive violence and unchecked cruelty? Defenders of the game's violence have compared Bioshock Infinite to Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, which melded together the cerebral indie aesthetic and the mind-numbing blockbuster spectacle. But every comic lover knows the difference between Booker DeWitt and Batman. Batman doesn't kill people.


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http://www.polygon.com/game/bioshock/4054

http://www.polygon.com/game/bioshock/4054

Elizabeth Made Me Feel like a MonsterBy Dean Takahashi

http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/02/in-bioshock-infinite-elizabeth-made-me-feel-like-a-monster/

" I killed a man in front of an innocent girl today. She had never seen nor experienced death before. She was locked in a cage and never had to fully embrace the idea of “death” — that people die, waste away, and are killed. In cold blood, I ended not only a man’s life but also a girl’s innocence. She had to experience that, and it’s all my fault. From that point on, every execution brought a horrified gasp or a phrase of terror for a while, but, after a bit, they became fewer and farther between. She witnessed every grisly act I performed while rescuing her and, while I was doing it for a good cause (her safety and the clearing away of my debt were pretty high on my sainthood list), I couldn’t help but feel like a monster." Bioshock Infinite, the newest venture from creator Ken Levine and developer Irrational Games, takes you through the floating city of Columbia as Booker Dewitt, a former soldier and currently indebted gambler tasked with saving a girl named Elizabeth from the clutches of the city and its prophet. Elizabeth is the prime example of a home-schooled girl — self-educated, naive, and, more than anything else, incredibly innocent." As the game’s protagonist, you ruin that innocence in a way that made me, at least, feel like a terrible person with every scared and horrified comment she made. Anytime you perform an execution or anytime you make a choice that ends in grisly death, you’ll get Elizabeth’s feedback — usually a gasp, a small sob, or questions that dig into your moral fiber just like your skyhook (a device used to traverse the skylines around Columbia — it also becomes your melee weapon) cuts deep into a man’s skull or throat. It’s a visceral experience, and one that Irrational Games made me feel terrible about enjoying.


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" But that guilt is a testament to the incredible storytelling done through this game. It’s a phenomenal experience to actually care, if even for a moment, about how your actions affect a secondary character. In this game, there are a few “choices” you get to make (typical at this point for any heavy, storyline-driven shooter), but it isn’t clear if you’re making the right decision or not. Infinite does a great job of showing you both sides and that what you might consider to be a good decision can always have incredibly bad consequences." It’s also, sadly enough, a stark contrast to most games I’ve played lately. Companies like Blizzard, which are known for their epic stories and characters, have lately produced massively budgeted sequels and expansions upon formerly deep and fulfilling stories that have, at times, felt incredibly lackluster in their player experiences. It seems that lately money has been tossed more at multiplayer and cinematics than the actual stories that propel them forward. StarCraft — Blizzard’s strategy game that revolutionized the genre and had an amazing story filled with love, deception, and invisible alien robot ninja assassins — feels bland and generic in its current expansion, and the same goes for Diablo III." It seems like strong storytelling is becoming extinct in video games — like companies no longer care about having an important story to tell, only that they can hurry up and get it over with so they can release the good stuff. Honestly, that’s a damned shame because it’s the one reason why I keep playing games. I may not care if they’re art, but I certainly care that they’re an amazing medium for conveying a message or tale." In a world where few people finish single-player campaigns, where endings are disappointing and low-budget, and where multiplayer makes millions of dollars, Bioshock Infinite was able to make me feel like a monster, and that’s a good thing.


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Bioshock Infinite: A Deconstruction of the Nature of the Video Gaming Medium

By awchernhttp://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1bcu8e/Bioshock_Infinite_a_deconstruction_of_the_nature/

“We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.” ― Rapture

" You know, you gotta hand it to Ken Levine and the Irrational crew. They really know how to deliver great games with strong themes and story coupled with amazing gameplay. But, what they really do well is take apart the concept of a game and work that into the story itself, creating a meta experience that causes you to sit and think." Ken first did it with his underwater spiritual successor to System Shock 2 (which admittedly did a lot of things that Bioshock did as well, so more like second). Bioshock, for those who did not know, is a deconstruction of single-player games. What this means is that the elements that make Bioshock a game were used to weave the story. Basically, the game questioned whether or not you actually had a freedom of choice." So, how do you make a sequel to a blockbuster hit without failing hard? Ken did it by making an Infinite number of sequels.

The Twist is Booker is Comstock

"That idiot priest needs to learn the difference between baptizing a man and drowning one." -Booker DeWitt

" Alright, I'm going to explain the twist ending of Bioshock Infinite. You were warned in the title, so don't yell at me about spoilers. I'm going to summarize this as quickly as I can. A better, in-depth look at the ending is here. Basically, if


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http://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1bcu8e/bioshock_infinite_a_deconstruction_of_the_nature/








http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/28/understanding-bioshock-infinites-ending-ending-explanation/

http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/28/understanding-bioshock-infinites-ending-ending-explanation/

it's a little hard to wrap your head around, just think Looper or 12 Monkeys." In the beginning, after the trauma of the Battle of Wounded Knee, Booker chooses to baptize or not baptizeIf he doesn't go through with baptism, then Booker and goes on to become a thug for the Pinkertons, although he manages to father a young daughter, Anna. However, he loses his daughter to Comstock, whether by deal or by force. 20 years later, Booker crosses over to the Comstock timeline to get his daughter back with the help of the Lutece twins. However, upon doing so, his memories get muddled up and thus believes he is simply undergoing a simple retrieval, which leads us to the beginning of the game. Whatever the outcome of Booker's adventures in the game, Booker realizes that with Infinite worlds, there will always exist Infinite Comstocks. He then goes back to the point where he makes the decision whether or not to be baptized. But, by doing so, his memories become muddled, and again he arrives at this two fold situation, creating the Infinite loop. Each loop will have different events that occur, but it will always come back full circle." If he goes through with baptism, he becomes Zachary Comstock, who goes on to create his fantastical city-in-the-sky and uses dimensional tears to further his own ideals. Comstock then crosses over to the Booker timeline where he takes Anna away from Booker. However, upon doing so, he kills Lady Comstock and attempts to kill the Lucete twins. However, the Lutece twins instead begin to exist outside of the timelines, thus allowing them to see the loop they created and their decision make things right. Their solution is to go get Booker from that other timeline." The only way Booker is able to break out of this loop was to realize that he becomes Comstock, and thus allows the multiverse Elizabeths to drown him, ending the pathway that leads to Comstock and closing the loop.Bioshock asked us if we truly were free to make choices.


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Bioshock Infinite asks us if whether or not the choices we make matter.

Now Let's Get Meta

"He doesn't row?" -Robert Lutece"He DOESN'T row." -Rosalind Lutece

" In every timeline, there are Constants, and there are Variables. Constants are events that will always happen. Booker will always pick #77. Booker will always flip heads. Booker will always lose Anna and hunt down Comstock.Variables are events that will always be different. Booker will choose between the cage or the bird. Booker will choose to demand tickets or draw his weapon. Booker will choose to kill Slate or spare him. Booker will stun enemies with Shock Jockey or blast 'em to bits with the Volley Gun." But no matter what choices Booker makes, it always returns to the same constants. Each universe, while Infinitely different, will always converge at certain events or choices.In the same way, every playthrough of Bioshock Infinite mirrors this idea. We will always begin the game at the lighthouse, and we will always end the game at the baptism. But we will always have different experiences with the game because we all will make different choices at each crossroad, and for every choice we make, we also create a reality where a different choice is made." Let's talk about games where making choices is seen as a huge plus for that game. The Walking Dead is a good place. If you guys don't know, this game is all about choice. Each decision you make has huge ramifications for the story, and every justification and experience will always be different. However, no matter how many times you play, you are always asked whether to have Clementine kill you or not. Even in sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto or The Elder Scrolls,


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http://www.reddit.com/spoiler




both games boasting player freedom, you are still confined within the same scope, the same choices, but with an Infinite amount of player experience." Bioshock Infinite is the the deconstruction of what a game is. It frames our experience with games in a narrative of dimension/time traveling. Each game is forever stuck in a loop, going over the same events, but with each playthrough there will be a different experience.

Let Go Deeper

"There's always a lighthouse, there's always a man, there's always a city" -Elizabeth Comstock

" Ok, I explained what a game is, but why did I mention sequels? I must not be very good at this. Let me take a few steps back and define what a sequel is. A sequel, as defined by TvTropes, is a story that takes place after the first story, or, in case of prequels, before. The sequel can continue the story, as seen in Bioshock 2, or it can use the same themes, as seen in Bioshock Infinite. Bioshock Infinite shares many themes with Bioshock.

• There is a mad dictator (Andrew Ryan and Zachary Comstock)

• There is a perversion of an extreme ideal (Objectivism and Exceptionalism)

• There is an ideal city set to ruins (Rapture and Columbia)• There is a mechanical guardian you must fight (Big Daddies

and Songbird)• There is a girl you must save (Little Sisters and Elizabeth

Comstock)• There is a lighthouse at which the game begins

(Bathysphere and Rocket)


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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Sequel




• There is a protagonist who is begins seemingly unrelated but ends up being pivotal in the narrative (Jack Ryan and Booker DeWitt)

• There is a substance that grants powerful abilities (Plasmids and Vigors)

• There is a single, trusty melee weapon (Wrench and Sky Hook)

" What is really interesting is that instead of simply having the same themes, Bioshock Infinite uses this idea as part of the plot. Because of the ability to open and observe tears, people like Jeremiah Fink were able to use these tears to peek at other dimensions to create the wondrous technology (used to invent vigors and Songbird). Furthermore, as Elizabeth guides you from Rapture through the Infinite lighthouses, she mentions that there are always three constants.

• A Man• A City• A Lighthouse

" This means that in every timeline ever, these three things always happen. In one timeline, it's Columbia. In another timeline it's Rapture. Like a single game experience, there is an Infinite number of possibilities that can occur for any timeline. We can then think of a set of timelines being linked by these themes, thus each set of timelines will feature a different iteration of the themes." A lot of sequels are exactly this, even ones that are simply continuations of the story. Every Final Fantasy will have Fire-Fira-Firaga and airships. Every Warcraft will have Orcs and Humans. EveryHalf Life will have G-Man and Headcrabs. Every Uncharted will have fragile ruins and cursed treasures. EveryMonkey Island will have pirates and monkeys. Every Grand Theft Auto will have explosions and gangs. EveryElder Scrolls will have exploration and racial


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issues. We identify a series of games as sequels based on their genre, themes, and mechanics. If a game breaks away from this, it is no longer considered a sequel and is completely considered to be a different game. Thus, not only are the games we played stuck in a loop of choices and events, but also even a series that a game belongs to exists in the same loops of themes and mechanics. " However, each experience with a game will always be different, thus each playthrough is a different universe, a different possibility amongst the Infinite ways that exist.This is what makes video games a truly amazing medium.

A Final Word

"Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, by and by? Is a better home awaiting in the sky, in the sky?" -Christian hymn

" I've played this game twice. Both were completely different experiences, despite the fact the story always stayed the same. In the first playthrough, I spent most of the game scavenging trashcans for Silver Eagles and food. In the second playthrough, I had a tighter focus on gameplay as I quickly decided which weapons and abilities to focus on. What mark will your playthrough leave on the game? Will your DeWitt be a merciless killer, or a leader of change? We all have the potential to leave our unique mark on a game. All of these possibilities can happen if we would kindly make the choice to play.


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'Bioshock Infinite' Makes Great Art from America's Racist Past and Political Present

A fun first-person shooter also succeeds as a meditation on the evolving nature of America's original sin

By Ben Popperhttp://www.theverge.com/2013/4/2/4170256/Bioshock-Infinite-making-great-art-from-americas-racist-past-and

" I find myself awake, in a mysterious rowboat, heading to a lighthouse, surrounded by the sea. Walking inside, verses from the bible tickle the back of my brain. Sin and the search for redemption. And then, with a burst of light, everything changes. I ascend to a heavenly metropolis perched among the clouds. The air is full of music and the streets ripe with bright colors. Children are laughing, frolicking in the park. I join a crowd playing at a raffle, hoping to win a prize. And suddenly I’m staring down the barrel of American history, face to face with brutal bigotry, on the run from the law, seeking some answers at the end of my gun." I picked up a copy of Bioshock Infinite this week, and it got me thinking. Are video games art? It’s a tired question with an easy answer. Ever since Marcel Duchamp put a urinal on a pedestal, the definition of art has been rapidly expanding. From graffiti on a subway car to a beautifully crafted armchair, we have come to see fine art all around us. If you’re looking for some kind of official statement, perhaps the Museum of Modern Art’s addition of video games to its permanent design collection will suffice." But there is a more interesting question still in play. Most video games, like novels, TV serials, and feature films, are narrative art made for mass consumption. And increasingly, video games are the most popular of the bunch. Like films, they reach tens of millions of individuals and generate billions in sales. That means studio style productions that require years of labor and hundreds of millions in investment capital to make and market. In that environment, is it possible to produce work that is


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http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/2/4170256/bioshock-infinite-making-great-art-from-americas-racist-past-and




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)




http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/29/3707640/moma-video-game-installation-announced

http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/29/3707640/moma-video-game-installation-announced

http://www.vg247.com/2013/03/22/bioshock-infinite-cost-2k-around-200-million-analysts-say/




simultaneously an economic and critical success, fun to play, and also an important piece of art with a deep, resonant effect?" With Bioshock Infinite, my answer is yes. The game is aesthetically magnificent and a joy to play, introducing some innovative game mechanics to the well-worn genre of the first-person shooter. Its narrative is rich and subtle, a perfectly paced trail of breadcrumbs that keeps you eagerly moving forward. And the art and design, from the moment you enter the floating city of Columbia, is breathtaking." Beyond the aesthetics, what really stood our for me was the stark and intelligent treatment of deeper themes: racism, nationalism, and religion in America. The story may be set at the turn of the 20th century, but it forces the player to ponder the same questions about immigration and tolerance that helped decide our most recent presidential election and, just this past week, vexed our nation’s highest court." The basic storyline is a classic tale from myth and video gaming: a hero must save a princess from a tower. Luckily, Bioshock Infinite complicates things quite a bit. Our hero has elements of American film noir, a jaded detective, down on his luck, with a dark past he would rather forget. In this case, the main character is a former Pinkerton, adding another wrinkle of social and historical consciousness. And the woman he's rescuing is no Princess Peach. Not only can she hold her own in combat, but more often than not, she's the one saving his hide." What made the original Bioshock, released back in 2007, such a classic was the way it immersed you in a compelling world that borrowed from American history without simply aping it. In that first game, the key ingredient was the philosophy of Ayn Rand, fleshed out with anachronistic art deco design and period piece jazz. While this Randian milieu was a historical throwback, her ideology has become increasingly important in modern American life, especially our politics, giving the game a timeless quality.


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http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/29/4161510/facebook-marriage-equality-movement-pink-equal-sign




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_Government_Services

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_Government_Services

In Bioshock Infinite, the creators again present a funhouse mirror of American ideological history. Comstock the Prophet and the citizens of the floating city of Columbia meld strains of religious fervor, anti-government rhetoric, jingoistic nationalism, and a twisted worship of the founding fathers, all carefully lifted from historical events at the turn of the 20th century, but simultaneously satirizing the Tea Party movement that has roiled our politics for the last six years." Venerable film critic Roger Ebert argued that video games can never be art, because like football or chess, their primary purpose is a framework for competition, not a medium for expression. While I disagree with his larger point, his logic is worth examining. A lot of video games fail as great art by falling into the trap of heavy handed morality plays, where the characters move along a fixed narrative arc, but are given the illusion of choice, usually an obvious one between good and evil." What makes Bioshock so artful is the way it undercuts this sense of control. The game upends the moral calculus of your rote choices by constantly shifting the reality under your feet. A benevolent decision one minute becomes a vile one the next. Quantum mechanics are the logic behind this fractured center, where time and space can easily unwind, much as it did for modern authors like Barthelme and Pynchon. Like a reader with his novel or a viewer of a film, the gamer playing Bioshock Infinite is traveling through a carefully wrought narrative that is more powerful than the mechanics of shooting, jumping, or choosing between doorway A and hallway B." So why bother offering players a choice at all? Because participation is one of the inherent strengths of video games as art. You may realize if you play the game a second time through that your choice doesn't impact the storyline, but when you're given the option to go along with Columbia's horrid racism or stand against it, the impact of the narrative, especially as you first experience it, is that much deeper.


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http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html




" Bioshock Infinite is the product of 200 people working for more than four years at the cost of more than $100 million. But it is also the brainchild of Ken Levine, the founder and creative director of Bioshock developer Irrational Games. The story’s epic conclusion feels like the work of a single, strong voice, at once mind-bending and emotionally resonant, by far the most satisfying piece of art, in any form, that I’ve experienced in a long time.


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http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.polygon.com%2Ffeatures%2F2013%2F1%2F10%2F3853198%2Fken-levine-bioshock-infinite-vgas&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGhUYVSsny5axoVroiyT1I5sTR6WQ

http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.polygon.com%2Ffeatures%2F2013%2F1%2F10%2F3853198%2Fken-levine-bioshock-infinite-vgas&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGhUYVSsny5axoVroiyT1I5sTR6WQ

Seeing Through The Eyes Of A Bioshock Infinite Villain

By Tina Aminihttp://kotaku.com/seeing-through-the-eyes-of-a-Bioshock-Infinite-villain-464782887

" The first time you meet him is before you even see him. It’s the shrill call that grabs your attention, a striking pitch that you know can only mean imminent danger.The first time you meet him, you know that this is an enemy. Your brain files this big, red-eyed mechanical bird as something to run away from. But as sure as you are that Songbird must be taken down given the chance, your more compassionate, human side might recognize an important distinction. Songbird is a lot more complex than your typical villain." For what is basically a machine, Songbird carries a lot of emotions in his two-tone eyes. They are either red, meaning that he is on alert and prepared to attack, or a yellow/green, meaning that he is calm. Loving, even." Songbird responds to music as command cues. He was built by inventor Fink—who manufactures a ton of other things the city Columbia relies on—to keep an imprisoned young woman named Elizabeth under harsh security, locked up in her tower. The inspiration for Songbird's design comes from the world of Rapture, an underwater world that Fink gained access to thanks to tears that step into alternate universes. Songbird shares more than just mechanical similarities to Rapture's Big Daddies—the brutish but also loving protectors who guarded the Little Sisters in the original games. The Big Daddies presided over the young girls' security, but in a protective, fatherly way (hence the name). Songbird's desire to protect Elizabeth comes from similar motivations." As far as Songbird (and a Big Daddy) is concerned, he was built to protect a delicate, young girl. She is at danger, in need of protection. What Elizabeth comes to determine as


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http://kotaku.com/seeing-through-the-eyes-of-a-bioshock-infinite-villain-464782887








her prison, Songbird sees as her home. What Elizabeth sees as a rescue, Songbird sees as kidnapping." For you, playing as Booker DeWitt, Songbird is the enemy. He’ll kill you to get Elizabeth back. He's aggressive and asks no questions, shows no signs of backing down. That's what Songbird looks like to us, from the outside. But let's take a moment to consider Songbird's side of the fight. Stepping into his big, mechanical, clawed shoes—if you played as Songbird—you’d recognize Booker as the enemy, too." Songbird doesn’t understand the context behind Elizabeth’s imprisonment in the tower. He only understands that he must care for her and protect her at all times. Songbird’s purpose, in Songbird’s eyes, is the equivalent of a parent or at least a guardian. And so like any wild animal would do for their child, Songbird protects Elizabeth at all costs. Or at least protects her in a way that he understands that obligation to mean. He sees intrusions on their territory as threats, and he does not hesitate to expel them." Elizabeth mentioned something about halfway through the game that stuck with me. She noted that even she used to consider Songbird a close companion and protector. She said that his chirps were something that would excite her. Songbird is indeed a powerful enemy, but when he wasn't bursting into buildings somewhat more menacingly than the Kool-Aid man, he offered Elizabeth company. He cared for her. For a child, that basically equates to a loving relationship." Eventually Elizabeth grew up and realized that Songbird was her warden, not her caretaker. But through that, I think Songbird maintained the perspective of a parent. Songbird isn’t capable of maturing like Elizabeth did. He may not understand that guarding Elizabeth and keeping her in the tower was actually hurting her, but he never guarded her out of malicious intent. To his knowledge, Elizabeth is only safe in the tower. He was programmed to think this way. But he also feels compassion, not just loyalty, to Elizabeth.


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" That’s why he responds to her cry to leave Booker alone. In this scene, she says she wants to go back home. That she never should have left. Songbird’s eyes soften to a yellowish hue. All he wants is his family back where they belong.But Songbird is difficult to control if you don’t know the proper songs to summon him as your ally and not your enemy. And so Elizabeth is eventually forced to kill him.But even as she does, she reaches out to him to console him. His panicked frustrations subside, the red glow brightens to a green, and he reaches back out for her. To the end Songbird’s loyalties are with Elizabeth. And whether or not he understood that she sent him to drown, he loves her unconditionally." This was an awful scene to experience. I couldn't help but empathize with Songbird. His entire life, and his entire existence was dedicated to keeping Elizabeth safe. And his last moments are spent looking at her from behind an unbreakable glass wall while his brain shatters from the inside out. He looks across at her with love in his eyes for as long as they can handle the water pressure before the green shatters into broken pieces. And then he dies."" I definitely choked up while watching this happen. Is Songbird really such a villain? A misinterpreted one, maybe. As far as Booker DeWitt, the player, and video game tropes go, Songbird can effectively be categorized as a villain for most of the game. But the (virtual) reality of it is so much more complicated than that. Because Songbird is perhaps one of the more caring creatures in Bioshock Infinite, and can someone who fights out of love and a desire to protect really be considered an evil character?


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'Bioshock Infinite' Review - Part Two: A Closer Look At Gameplay And Storytelling

By Erik Kainhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/04/03/Bioshock-Infinite-review-part-two-a-closer-look-at-gameplay-and-storytelling-pc/" Bioshock Infinite has received widespread critical praise, but does the game’s gameplay and storytelling hold up to scrutiny?" There’s been an interesting backlash to the heaps of critical praise Bioshock Infinite has received—including my own very positive review. I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with much of this." For instance, there was a comparison betweenInfinite and Half-Life 2 circulating that purported to show how much less hand-holding goes on in Valve’s shooter compared to Bioshock: Infinite. You can’t fall off every ledge in Infinite, for instance, whereas you can in HL2." Of course, you can fall off many ledges in Infinite, so I’m not sure the compare and contrast is particularly accurate, but that’s neither here nor there. I would simply argue that Infinite is not a terrific example of the theory of helicopter-parenting game design in action. Linearity is not necessarily a bad thing in a video game—Half-Life 2 is a fairly linear game, for instance, that still gives players a great deal of control." Bioshock Infinite doesn’t give us a terrible amount of open-ended control, but I think there’s a trade-off involved. Half-Life 2 had a perfectly fine story, but I was never quite as curious about what would happen next as I was during Infinite. And Infinite doesn’t really take away that much control either. It strikes a balance." The helicopter-parenting theory of game design is basically the critique I leveled at the (still quite good) Tomb Raider reboot. Games hold our hands too much these days, they don’t let us fail, and they present us with too much of the same thing. In the case of both Tomb Raider and Infinite, that “same thing” is killing. Heaps upon heaps of killing.


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http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/04/03/bioshock-infinite-review-part-two-a-closer-look-at-gameplay-and-storytelling-pc/






http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/04/03/bioshock-infinite-review-across-the-multiverse-pc/




http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/03/12/tomb-raider-review-just-sit-right-back-and-youll-hear-a-tale-a-tale-of-a-fateful-trip-pc/




" Instead of focusing on what makes both games great—exploration in Tomb Raider and story in Infinite—we’re tasked with wave upon wave of gun-wielding bad guys. Neither game has good enough enemies to spend so much time on them. But unlike Tomb Raider, I also never felt that Infinite engaged in too much hand-holding. Perhaps this is simply the different expectations I hold for each game.So let’s take a closer, more critical look at both the gameplay and the storytelling in Bioshock Infinite and try to determine whether it falls into the same trap as so many other games this generation.

Storytelling

" Bioshock Infinite utilizes a number of techniques to convey story. Environmental elements, such as signs, shops, and the very city of Columbia itself, convey the weird, racist world we find ourselves in. This can be, admittedly, a bit heavy-handed at times. As I mentioned in my review, I wished the world had been more gilded, that it wasn’t so obviously a bastion of racism and freaky cultishness. Sometimes less is more, and Columbia is anything but subtle." You can also find voxophones and old black and white films which tell little bits of the city’s history and the backstory of various characters. True to video game dissonance in general, the voxophones especially only exist because this is a video game. I still enjoyed listening to each one and found the story each contained really terrific, but it is a little weird that all these recordings would just be lying around." Similarly, in Tomb Raider, you’d find journals of your companions in all sorts of bizarre places. Why are these just lying around? Why hasn’t anyone bothered to keep these recordings safe? It makes sense if you find a recording in someone’s personal apartment, but we find them everywhere. Because…it’s a video game. Because even in a really smart game like Infinite, really lazy game design choices get made.


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" Indeed, this is a symptom of “Because it’s a video game” rather than “helicopter-parenting game design.” Sometimes I can forgive “Because it’s a video game” and sometimes I can’t. I’ll freely admit that it didn’t bother me so much with Infinite because I actually cared what those voxophones had to say. Could that information have been conveyed in a more realistic way? Sure. Through overheard conversation, for instance. Through voxophones only found in locations that make sense. It’s just laziness and a lack of imagination that kept this from being achieved, but it doesn’t really detract from the fun of the game." The story itself is compelling in a mystery-thriller sort of way, though (as I mentioned in my review) it ends in such a way that the real human elements of the story become overshadowed by the “Infinite worlds” multiverse science fiction. I would have been happier, I think, if the mystery behind Lady Comstock’s death, and the enigmatic Lutece twins, and the “who is Elizabeth?” question had all been answered and the multiverse stuff only ever hinted at. Less is more, sometimes." Finally, I think the revelation that Booker is in fact Elizabeth’s father and that he sold her to Comstock was enough of a twist, enough of an awful revelation, that there was no need to explicitly state that Booker was in fact Comstock in a parallel universe." How does Infinite compare in terms of storytelling to other video games? Well I suppose it depends on what you’re after. I often hold up Dark Souls as a masterpiece of video game storytelling. It tells a story almost entirely without dialogue. Little clues are conveyed through item descriptions, brief snatches of conversation with NPCs, and the world itself. Level design and the monsters you encounter comprise a huge portion of the storytelling. There are no cut-scenes (or very few) and no long, drawn-out moments of dialogue and dialogue trees a la Dragon Age or The Witcher 2." For my part, this sparse style of storytelling is perfect. When the narrative is constructed via gameplay, I’m a happy


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gamer. This is hard to do in most single-player games, however, and so we often get rather bad attempts at “cinematic” games with movie-like stories." Maybe one reason I enjoyed Infinite’s story so much is the fact that I’ve recently played Tomb Raider and Crysis 3 and Gears of War: Judgment. Compared to these games, Infinite tells a much more interesting, mysterious tale. But it is still heavy-handed in a way that video games so often are. Our villain is still motivated by typical villain motivations, and in particular megalomania. Nothing new about that. I would love to see villains motivated by less boilerplate, more surprising things. Booker is a far more interesting protagonist, in the end, than Comstock is a villain." Still, I’m not sure I’d opt for a sparser story or for the Dark Souls approach with Infinite. I think I’d get bored if every game attempted to tell their story the same way; nor do I think every game could do it justice.

The Gameplay

" A lot of people have described the gameplay in Infinite as too limited. We’re tied to a rail and sent down the tracks, blasting our way through corridors and following a story that is too predetermined, too lacking in meaningful player choices." As much as I love it when games get choices right and give me a world open enough to set my own course, sometimes I don’t actually want that out of a game. Sometimes I want to just make my way through a more straightforward world. Infinite’s world is beguiling in that sense, however, in that we are given a rather obvious villain and a rather linear game experience, but are then presented with a surprising ending that shakes the foundations of what we believed to be true leading up to that point." Would more interactivity have made the game stronger? Probably. We had a plethora of powers at our fingertips, all of which could have provided meaningful ways


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http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/03/06/crysis-3-video-review-cryteks-beautiful-boring-first-person-shooter-pc/




http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/03/23/gears-of-war-judgment-review-part-one-shields-cleavers-and-grubs-oh-my/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/03/23/gears-of-war-judgment-review-part-one-shields-cleavers-and-grubs-oh-my/

to interact with the world around us outside of combat. Unfortunately, vigors are nothing more than combat magic. That’s a shame. I said in my review that we could have traded a lot of combat time for more puzzles, and I think this is also true. There was this great opportunity for vigor-based puzzling and platforming that was completely missed out on." But would an open-world, sandbox approach have worked? I don’t think so. I think it would have killed pacing, and for once I think pacing was fiercely integral to how the game is played and enjoyed." Then again, sandbox isn’t the whole story. What about the ability to fall off every cliff? What about the ability to have meaningful failure? On these notes, I agree with the skeptics. You can fall of some cliffs, but not others. This is an inconsistency that makes no sense in the game world. If I can fall off one cliff, I should be able to fall off each cliff. When I do fall, I shouldn’t respawn immediately at the top, I should face the same penalty as I do when I die." The shooting mechanics themselves were nothing to write home about, but I also don’t quite understand the backlash. I would have traded weapon variety for more weapon capacity, quite frankly. And the whole shooter aspect probably could have been tightened up and sped up to make combat more fun." I suppose part of the problem here is that I’m not that entranced by the first-person shooter genre anymore. So I found myself paying attention less to the gunning down of enemies, and more to things like riding about on the skylines or just exploring the really cool flying city I was running through. Purely as a shooter, it’s no Crysis 1 and it’s not as interesting as Counter-Strike; there aren’t any really cool innovations like the skiing and jet-packing from Tribes: Ascend. And it’s not as open to experimentation as it ought to be, as a game like Half-Life 2 is." So purely as a shooter, the game is average. It’s not bad at all, and while I did think there was too much combat, I never felt like the combat was at all atrocious. It


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wasn’t exhilarating either, but I’m very rarely impressed by shooters these days. At least in Infinite I found myself in a world that fascinated me, with characters I found interesting and a story I was curious about." I think this is where the game transcends from good to great. I very, very rarely care about the games I play. I enjoy them, but I don’t care about them. I rarely care about the characters or the outcome. And by rarely, I mean almost never." What Infinite did was present me with a story and characters who I really did care about. That, in and of itself, is what I think lifts this up as a game that expands upon the medium and not just the genre. Creating a story and characters that matter to the gamer is extremely hard, and I’m terribly picky. But when Elizabeth goes over to the Dark Side (for a spell) I was genuinely upset. When I learned that Booker had sold his own daughter to resolve a debt, I was horrified. I cared about these people and their story. I rarely do. I even felt bad when the Songbird died; and a part of me felt a pang of regret watching Columbia burn." Of course, it could have been a better game. They always can be. It could have done a better job at weaving together the story and the gameplay. It could have been less heavy-handed and had better combat, better puzzles. To say a game is great is not to say it’s without flaws. Infinite has many flaws, many shortcomings, many imperfect game design decision. But for all that, it’s still a game I had a tremendous amount of fun playing." For me, that’s ultimately the most important thing about a video game. Was it fun to play? Did it move me somehow, either through its story or its combat or its puzzles? If it managed to tell its story through its combat and puzzles and exploration, that’s even better. But most importantly it needs to be fun. Simply being fun doesn’t make it good, but the reverse is also true. Simply being good certainly doesn’t make something fun. I think Infinite is both, good and good fun.


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" Does a game like Bioshock deserve its own helping of criticism? Of course it does. So do games like Dark Souls! My favorite games are often the ones I critique the most. But criticism and praise are hardly mutually exclusive.


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Bioshock: Infinite on Organized Religion and Politics

By Aaron Ploofhttp://www.explosion.com/26837/Bioshock-Infinite-on-organized-religion-and-politics/

" The Bioshock series is no stranger to social criticism. The original installment featured a thinly veiled critique of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. Andrew Ryan (a thinly veiled anagram of the famous philosopher’s name) embodied all that was wrong with this particular self-centered way of living. If one removes the ethical boundaries and laws contained within the social structure, selfish individuals (like Fontaine and Ryan) will elevate themselves to the status of gods to have their way with the so-called “parasites” of society. In their efforts to overcome the ethical laws imposed upon them by existence itself, both individuals turned Rapture into a dystopian hell-hole. If God truly is dead, as the famous Romantic philosopher Nietzsche so boldly declared, these two men were definitely not fit to take the mantle. And neither is Comstock." Bioshock: Infinite’s main antagonist has wrapped himself so tightly in his own ego-driven mania that he believes himself to be a prophet on high, one who has been granted the privilege to speak for the Divine himself. Somewhere along the way, after Booker’s baptismal rebirth, it seems as if he developed a strong hatred of those who he killed at Wounded Knee. In an effort to enforce his judgement (or self-hatred), he fancies himself a figure-head for God and declares himself infallible. He never truly forgives himself for his sins. Instead, he builds a city in which he can enforce his xenophobic, racist, fear based religion. In an effort to control the people of Columbia, he builds a belief structure around a certain holy child, Elizabeth. He keeps the truth of her existence, the essence of her relationship to the Cosmos (the secrets of religion) locked away in a tower. And the one that will lead her astray, the alternate version of himself, the


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http://www.explosion.com/26837/bioshock-infinite-on-organized-religion-and-politics/




antichrist, is our own Booker Dewitt. He’s created his own version of Christian Fundamentalism." Organized Religion, when employed correctly, serves as a means for mankind to better itself. But when harnessed for evil and control of the masses, it benefits no one. When one’s beliefs are specifically tied to some form of Dogmatism, judgement inevitably enters the picture. For Comstock, this judgement manifests itself in the labeling of young Booker Dewitt as a ”false prophet,” or “anti-christ” meant to lead the “lamb of Columbia” (read Jesus) away from her holy duties. What’s ironic here is that our Booker is just an alternate version of Comstock. Comstock is essentially projecting his own inability to forgive himself upon his past alternate existence." As everyone who’s finished the game knows, the moment that determines Booker’s future existence is his baptism (or the non-existence thereof). It is at this moment that Booker’s two timelines split into two alternate Bookers: a self-pitying Dewitt, or a self-righteous hateful Comstock. But there’s a third option here, and it’s one that Booker deliberately chooses of his own free will. Allowing Elizabeth to drown him is the ultimate form of self-sacrifice and release of the ego. It’s a transcendent form of baptism and re-birth that leads towards the one true authentic Booker. One might argue that this particular Booker’s existence becomes null after the drowning, but they’d be missing a critical clue. After Booker’s drowning, the camera pulls back in an almost “floating” like fashion, revealing that this Booker’s soul rests easy in the immaterial realm. He’s been reborn in the truest sense; he’s cast off the physical and made peace with God/The universe/What have you." So what does this all mean? That religion should not be bound to a certain set of ideological principles. When one attempts to bind God to one’s own perception of the world, judgement and destruction inevitably ensue. It’s only when one embraces self-sacrifice to the fullest extent and devotes him/herself to Love itself that one truly understands one’s role


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http://www.explosion.com/26837/bioshock-infinite-on-organized-religion-and-politics/#

http://www.explosion.com/26837/bioshock-infinite-on-organized-religion-and-politics/#

in the Cosmos of the fabric of existence. If Infinite exists as a critique of modern day America, then it does not hesitate to expose the hypocrisy of the self-righteous religious fundamentalists of the world that would use something as beautiful as faith to engage others in lifestyles of destruction.


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Shocking, isn’t it?By Clifford Bleszinski

http://dudehugespeaks.tumblr.com/post/47064613574/shocking-isnt-it-Bioshock-spoilers-ahead

" I finished Bioshock Infinite today and I’d like to burst out some thoughts while they’re still in my head.I’ve always been vocal of my support of Bioshock and, yes, even Bioshock 2 was a solid experience even though it wasn’t the original team. One of my old blog posts on www.cliffyb.com was an extensive rant about what I loved about the first game. If you had told me that a game with a giant diving suit on the cover would go on to sell millions then I would have laughed at you. What we got was not only a critical success but, thankfully, a commercial hit. (Remember, this is a business, and if folks don’t buy games like this then we won’t see many more of them!)" So the credits have rolled, I’ve read the threads dissecting the narrative, I’ve seen Youtube videos praising and also attempting to shred the plot holes they perceive in the game. See, in this day and age it’s not enough to just enjoy an entertainment experience, you have to get online and share your two cents about it. I can’t count the number of movies I’ve seen opening weekend only to find that by Sunday there are a myriad of posts and videos tearing it apart. We now have “plot hole and continuity error discovery by way of crowd sourcing.”" Whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen. On one hand this sourcing can make you think “Maybe I didn’t enjoy that game/movie as much as I originally thought” yet on one hand hey, any press is good press and you’d rather have people discussing your product than not, right? That’s part of the problem with the Internet. Everyone’s out to prove how fucking intelligent they are under the guise of anonymity." Back to the game. I’m not going to do a study on the branching paths or what it all means. I’m going to talk about


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http://www.cliffyb.com/

http://www.cliffyb.com/

my experience as someone who loved the first one, followed the development of the sequel closely, and also happened to have made a few games in my day. Also, please keep in mind that I range from close personal friends to drinking buddies with a variety of members of the team that worked their asses off to make this game, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I’m going to gush, but I’m also going to nitpick, because hey, I’m also out to prove how fucking intelligent I am. I’m just not afraid to attach my name to it." First off, I love the world. For starters, the original Bioshock felt claustrophobic, dark, and oppressive. I felt buried in that game and, while it added to the atmosphere and world I can’t help but wonder if it steered a few people away from the world. The shift to a city in the sky is a brilliant move; hell, just gorgeous skyboxes and vistas are half of the battle. (Hello, Halo!) The vibrant colors. The sunny skies. It’s a world that I want to go off the tracks and live in." Until you start to realize how very ugly it is. I’m going to let you guys in on a little secret as a white male. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s relevant to this article. There’s a certain type of white person that, when there are only white people around, pull the “You’re racist like me, right?” card. My response is always that I’ve met as many black and hispanic cool people as I’ve met assholes, and the same goes for white people. (This gets worse when you’re around a certain type of white person with money, but that’s another blog entirely.)" By the time I got to the infamous “throw the first ball” moment I had such conflicted feelings about the world. This is a country that has constantly been at odds with its own xenophobia. I rarely talk about politics because I’m afraid that I’ll only reveal how ignorant I am about them. There’s always that one friend in the room who makes it his or her job to spend more time studying them that will one up you with their facts. (You can always find a study to support whatever it is you want to believe.)


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" So here’s the thing about the tension in this game between the white, upper crust society of Columbia and the largely immigrant working class Vox. In the hands of a lesser visionary and team the game would have simply been “Join the Vox and defeat Comstock!” Scene. But that wasn’t enough. Ken and Irrational then went on to show the uglier side of what happens whenever a regime changes. It’s not pretty. Sometimes the person who led the revolution ultimately proves to be just as bad if not worse than the original fool in charge of the other side." Playing and beating this game I feel like I’ve gone through a tear and I’m in an alternate reality in which this game actually exists. It should not. From reading the turmoil that went over at Irrational, to my old Ninja producer friend Rod going over there to help ship it, it’s a miracle that it saw the light of day. The world itself…themes of racism, the violence, the sidekick aspects, hell a ROBOTIC GEORGE WASHINGTON are you KIDDING ME? I’ve been in publisher pitch meetings. The one where the marketing guy goes “Yeah, so it’s like Call of Duty meets Pac Man with a twist of BMX XXX, right? We haven’t seen that genre do well yet, so we’re not sure if we’re going to market it.” (Same thing from the numbers guy.)" I’m going to let you in on a little secret that Randy Pitchford and I were discussing. When your marketing guy and numbers guy and others are kind of confused about how to market and sell your game, double down on it. It means you have something unique. When you release a copy of a copy of a copy it’s going to feel faded and most customers will call bullshit and ignore it. " So, the guy that brought you a chainsaw gun would now like to get on his soap box about violence. Have fun judging me.This is one of the few games that I’ve loved that I felt the violence actually detracted from the experience. The first time I dug my skyhook into someone I actually winced. I love shocking people in these games (it’s not called


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BioShootBeesAtThem) and I found that nearly every foe I zapped to death had their heads explode, Gallagher style. After the 400th head I was like “come on, already!”Funny, right? That I’d say that? I know, it’s weird. Maybe it’s the fact that they did such a fantastic job of making this nuanced world that hitting you over the head with those moments felt out of place for me. From the initial “meet cute” with Elizabeth I fell for her. She is the first videogame Disney princess that I’ve ever seen or had the joy of getting to know. Towards the end when I heard her screaming for me it drove me mad; I had to get to her. Later when I heard her lamenting how I never came for her broke my heart." With all of the discussion of misogyny in the industry lately, from sexual harassment, to “if you cosplay then you ask for it” mentality to the Tropes Vs. Women question of “Why’s it always the damsel in distress?” I’m dying to know what the women of the industry think of the depiction of Elizabeth. I actually wanted to see her “tear things up” in another way more often. (There’s that Whedon fanboy coming out in me again.) I was hoping for a moment similar to the end of Lunar. (High five if you get the reference.)" Still, the moment when the Songbird snagged her away from me, or when we were cowered behind the desk together, or when she put my hand on her throat and asked me to finish her if she was going to have to go back…I was moved. During the (incredible) ending I had chills. This is the mother of all videogame endings, the new standard by which all will be judged. This is some Looper, Memento, Source Code, Moon, Usual Suspects, Fight Club, M. Night Shyamalamadingdong stuff. Next level work that can only be brought to you by a talented team and one defiant visionary.I’m especially glad that the game also dealt with the fact that Booker (and you, playing) are stone cold killers. And hey, it’s justified because they all shoot at you first! (Uncharted 2 did this at the end, which I loved.) Here’s a game that’s about the nuanced relationship between what is later revealed to be a father and daughter, trying to discover each other again,


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much like the most heart wrenching scenes in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Yes one is father daughter, the other is former lovers, but similar “feels” happened for me.)" Overall, the combat and combat bowls were good, but to be honest, a tad “loose” in spots. There were moments when I went into a space and I could tell when the combat shit was going to hit the fan. I also could feel the pacing of enemies. Start with the fodder, introduce the heavier flame and rocket guys, then end with a Handyman or Motorized Patriot. There were times when the combat just felt a bit too … busy… and I missed the clarity and smoothness of, say, a Halo experience.I digress and I’m nitpicking now. Because overall the pacing of the game was excellent and I’m thinking about going through it as I type this. Pacing is extremely hard to get right in a 14 hour or so experience. There was one moment when I was starting to lose interest, however briefly…when I was getting the guns for the Vox. Right when I was on what felt like the Ultimate Fetch Quest the tables turned due to the tear and the game picked right up and smacked me square in the face. Brilliant." We live in a world of ADD, whereas Twitter sometimes feels too long so we just browse Instagram and Pintrest. I’d wager many of my Twitter followers won’t read this blog. We live in the TL;DR world, as I’ve said before, the alt-tab nation. The fact that such a rich and deep experience exists gives me hope. Hell, I’m thankful that Game of Thrones can still do amazingly well in this world. Ken and co have made a game that you play, you finish, and you then go to pour over the discussions, the theories, and yes, the occasional plot hole or perceived problem with the ride.Finally, I’d like to call out one element that I haven’t seen mentioned much. The use of music in the experience. I haven’t seen mood inducing music used this well since the recent Fallout games. The retro sounds of it…the barbershop quartet…the phonographs… it felt like there was a new song


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right around every corner. I tweeted earlier that I got a “O Brother Where Art Thou” vibe from it. Right at the start, when I’m going through the baptism area, I kept thinking about the Siren and baptism scenes from that film. It sets the scene in Infinite and brings it from a great experience into an amazing, transcendent one." Right at the tail end of a console generation, when the PC is looking sweeter than ever, Ken and his folks have delivered a true classic for the ages. Bravo, bravo, bravo. Now go take a break someplace warm before starting the Next Big Thing. You’ve got one hell of an act to follow, and I can promise you that you’ve made one designer completely rethink what a video game can be.Love,Clifford


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“There’s Always A Man, There’s Always A City…”By Rich Johnston

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/04/01/look-it-moves-by-adi-tantimedh-theres-always-a-man-theres-always-a-city/

" Bioshock Infinite is the latest contender of Game As Art. It’s certainly a must-play game for anyone interested in not just fun, but also how games tell stories, and what kinds of stories games can tell. Frankly, I don’t care whether games are Art or not. What matters is what kind of impact their stories can have, and the Bioshock series certainly try to do something to effect the players with their ideas and themes while using the framework of an elaborate First Person Shooter." The basic structure and format of the games have been established now over three games: you play from the first person a man who has to fight the inhabitants of a city that’s a failed utopia. The city itself embodies a particular ideology taken to extremes and proven untenable, has fallen, whose inhabitants driven mad and desperate and end up killing eat other as the ideological argument plays out to its endgame. Thus, in the first Bioshock, it is the flaws of Randian objectivist ideals of Rapture that have collapsed in on itself, even its founder Andrew Ryan was forced to become a tyrant, having betrayed his beliefs to make deals with criminals to try to keep it going and thus damning the city and himself in the process. Bioshock 2 takes place in Rapture once again (though not written or directed by KEN LEVINE), this time with a socialistic would-be despot having taken over the city and now the fallacy of enforced altruism and collectivity proven untenable and the inhabitants become desperate maniacs consuming each other in a grand conflagration. In Bioshock Infinite, it is the floating city of Columbia embodying an ideal of American exceptionalism with its obsession with White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant racial purity and xenophobia that becomes undone by a violent underclass revolution (modeled after the Russian Revolution,


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the historical touchstone for this kind of thing) whose raging participants kill everyone they consider in the middle and upper classes that exploited and abused them." The Bioshock games inspire passionate and heated debate because they are among the few games that deliberately dramatise ideological deconstruction and debate – you can’t get more visceral than having to fight and kill armies of fanatics who represent the endpoint of a particular political viewpoint who are out to kill you because you clearly do not agree with them. You can’t deny the scope of the series’ ambition, with its meticulously-researched details in the art design and the lore."" And there is one common theme that has dominated the heart of all three games to date: that of fathers and daughters. In all three games, the protagonist you play ends up in a surrogate father-daughter relationship with young girls, and the games are suffused with the anxiety of fatherhood, of the fear of getting it wrong and the guilt of failing. In Bioshock, the protagonist ends up leading a band of mutated “little sisters”, children that have been genetically altered to become a source of supernatural power that everyone wants to harness. You get to choose whether he exploits them for their power or becomes their protector, with a different ending for each choice. The happy ending is one of redemption, of finding peace in fatherhood. In Bioshock 2, the theme is taken further where a new protagonist has to protect a surviving Little Sister while facing a former Sister who has grown up and gone mad, becoming a monstrous Bad Daughter, and in the end, the surviving surrogate daughter will end up evil or good depending on your moral choices throughout the game." In Bioshock Infinite, the central emotional theme is once again one of fatherhood as antiheroic protagonist Booker DeWitt has to get the young Elizabeth away from the clutches of the religious zealot leader of Columbia Zachary Comstock, who plans to indoctrinate her and use her powers for his planned revenge on an America he believes has gone


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soft and lost its way. It’s a mythical battle for the soul of a young woman with Comstock being the Bad Father and the flawed DeWitt as the guilt-ridden father figure trying to right the wrongs inflicted upon her, including those he himself committed. Elizabeth becomes DeWitt’s chance at redemption, and the story plays that thread out by combining the anxieties of Fatherhood with the labyrinthine workings of Quantum Theory that ends up becoming a metacommentary on not only moral choices but also the repeating motifs of games – and specifically the Bioshock series – as a whole." What struck me about the theme of Fatherhood and Daughters is how emotionally charged it is, as lead designer Ken Levine must know since he went to great lengths to make Elizabeth feel as real as a videogame character could possibly be so that the player would become emotionally attached to her and thus feel the full weight of the emotional burden Booker DeWitt comes to experience as his relationship with her evolves in the story." Why a daughter figure and not a son? Is it because a son feels like a young copy of the father while a daughter, being the opposite, carries a different emotional charge and comes to embody more vulnerability and thus allows a male player or audience member to deal more with his emotional and feminine side? I ask this because of the large number of father-daughter relationships popping up in games. Naughty Dog’s upcoming THE LAST OF US also features an antihero protagonist protecting and guiding a young girl through an apocalyptic landscape (and coincidentally also played by Bioshock Infinite’s lead voice actor Troy Baker). I suppose a boy is generally considered masculine and therefore predisposed to fight when a perilous situation arises. In conventional society, a girl is still considered vulnerable and to be protected, even if she’s capable of taking care of herself as Elizabeth is and Ellis in THE LAST OF US is said to be, but the active fighter is still going to be the male protagonist while the girl plays a supporting role in the fights. Elizabeth is capable of ripping a hole into alternate universes, yet she


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doesn’t actively fight. She provides Booker DeWitt with support, supplying him with ammunition, medicine and even extra cash. At a time when gender roles are being discussed in games, this adds another piece to the debate. Maybe it’s part of empowerment fantasy of the Hero’s Plot: to rescue the princess. And here, that princess might destroy the world." When Elizabeth asks DeWitt, “Are you afraid of God?” He replies, “No, but I’m afraid of you.” That answer may not just be about her power to tear holes in reality, but the general attitude of men toward the Feminine." Bioshock Infinite is an amazing game, one of the must-play games of this year for what it does to push storytelling forward, and I’m not going to accuse it of sexism – it has enough complex female characters in it other than Elizabeth after all, including a woman leading the workers’ revolution and a female scientist who invented the machinery that opened the riffs into other universes. What I find interesting is the way genre fiction – in both games and movies – use daughters as the shortcut to explore the emotional vulnerabilities of the male psyche as he ponders fatherhood. Notice how few movies and games feature a mother-son relationship at its core? And in the Bioshock games, the father-daughter relationship is directly linked to sacrifice and mortality. That’s the beauty of melodrama and fiction." It’s probably indicative of the gender politics of the games industry that it’s highly unlikely anyone is going to make a AAA game about Motherhood, even though plenty of successful movies and TV shows have been made on the subject. It might be interesting to have a game where you play the heroic son of a heroic mother, though. That one’s rare even in movies. I can only think of one example, and that’s the Hong Kong martial arts comedy FONG SAI YUK starring Jet Li and Josephine Siao.Still, food for thought.


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Is BioShock Infinite Really For Everyone - Or Just For Gamers?

By Michael Rundle http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/05/is-bioshock-infinite-review-everyone-gamers-nongamers_n_3021100.html

" What is there left to say about BioShock Infinite?Irrational Games' narratively-driven first-person shooter has won near universal acclaim since its release, for everything from its dramatic, city-in-the-sky setting to the quality of its story-telling. The general consensus is that this is a beautifully made, compelling game, and one that ranks as one of this generation's greatest." So complete and overwhelming has the praise for BioShock been, in fact, that anyone with a passing interest in video games or gaming culture knows that they will have to play this game, sooner or later. But… what about everyone else? Is BioShock Infinite really for everyone - even those who don't, generally, play games? Is its story strong enough to deserve their time, and the mechanics strong enough to hook their attention? In 'Columbia' terms, is BioShock Infinite the title to help those people cross the proverbial Delaware, play Infinite through, and form an opinion of the game on its own terms?" First, a caveat: much like Infinite's lead character Booker DeWitt when he arrives at the gates of the startling sky city of Columbia for the first time to 'save the girl, and clear the debt', I enter this tricky area of gaming debate with a sense of dread, and foreboding." For who is a 'gamer', really - and who isn't? It's not obvious. Genuine inquiry aside, it's almost asinine to ask. Not only have console video games never been more mainstream, or more accessible, but anyone with a smartphone who has spent more than five minutes waiting or a train in the last decade has probably played a few rounds of Draw Something, and can thus be considered a gamer, more or less.


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http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/bioshock-infinite

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/bioshock-infinite

" So instead of generalising about Gamers and Non-Gamers, let's just admit that there is a group of people who know already that they should play BioShock Infinite. And there is a group of people who don't, to put it simply, quite get why they should bother." You can understand their concern. As a piece of entertainment, Infinite is pretty lengthy. Inexperienced gamers can expect to invest 12-15 hours to play through the game, perhaps more. That's about a season-and-a-bit of Homeland, or seven films. In some cases it will require learning how to play first-person shooters for the first time, understanding how to interact with the world and dealing with the whole 'killing people' thing, which can be unsettling for new players, and in difficulty-terms alone can become quite trying, even on 'Easy' mode. For a newer gamer, BioShock Infinite will rightly be a pretty intimidating thing to pick up." It is to Infinite's firmly-established credit, then, that if you manage to get someone in front of the game for half an hour, much of this concern should drop away. The game's opening is startling and beautiful. As you arrive at Columbia in a makeshift rocket, and wander slowly into a chapel filled with streaming light, it's impossible not to be hooked. For about an hour or so the game moves slowly, and doesn't hurry you to make quick decisions. Players will have time to take in the details - from the way light plays on the white-stone buildings of this early 20th-century American city, and the subtle introduction to the racism and nationalistic fervour that run in its veins. There's also a tone of portent and menace which is inherently compelling and addictive. From the very start, the game feels like the best episodes of Lost, Sherlock or the Twilight Zone. Coupled with a gentle introduction to the mechanics of moving and looking around the world, few people would fail to be hooked." This calm doesn't last. And debate rages about whether Infinite needed to be quite as action-orientated as it is - some argue it's simply a work of genre like any blockbuster or thriller, while others have said it strays into


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banality at times - but once the violence starts - and make no mistake, this is a bloody game - some newer gamers might start to peel away. Add in the 'skylines' - essentially giant roller-coasters that you can latch onto during battles to move around the landscape and get the drop on your opponents - and you've got a confusing, 3D, fast-paced shooter to deal with, almost immediately. It's important to avoid condescension, but this side of Infinite will leave some behind." Fortunately, Infinite has another side - and one which completely tips the balance in its favour: the most compelling and genuinely human relationship in video game history.At the start of the game, Booker is tasked with rescuing a woman - Elizabeth - from a mysterious tower. That's about all you're given - and to say any more would ruin the story. But while her looks and background make her seem like a Disney cliche, this isn't Donkey Kong. Elizabeth is a fully-realised, deeply interesting character. Unlike in most games, Elizabeth is not usually 'scripted'. She can interact with the world in real time, on her own. She can talk, look at things, get bored, sit down, get annoyed, be disappointed and wander off. She joins you in battle - not actually fighting, but providing resources and 'tears' in reality to give you cover, or helpful allies. She feels alive, and it gives the game enough weight to survive its more generic moments. And she has a narrative arc that is shocking, taut and moving.Which leads us to the point, really. For beyond - and beneath, and behind - all of its gameplay, graphics and controls, is BioShock Infinite's story. And yes, it's almost objectively wonderful." It sounds like hyperbole - and repetition has dulled the accolade - but at its most basic, this is a hugely interesting, emotional and troubling tale which compares admirably to any Oscar winner or HBO series of recent years.Most importantly, Infinite knows that its a game - and knows that this will be problematic the more its story delivers on its promise. As a result it actually becomes a perfect tale for a


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newer gamer to tackle, commenting as it does not only on itself, but what it means to have played through it, lived it, and watched it unravel." No, BioShock isn't for everyone. It can be tricky to pick up, occasionally confusing and is a serious time investment. But that's all fine, in the end. For no piece of art is for everyone. Not everyone likes the Godfather, either - or Pride and Prejudice, or Tom Gauld's comics, or Radiohead. Neither is it perfect. The frustration felt by those who have experienced a great work of fiction, and want to share it, but can't, is just a burden that comes with the territory of liking stuff. No matter how hard you try, your dad just might not bother with BioShock. You'll have to live with that.But for those whom it does reach - and there will be many, and not all of them (sigh) 'gamers', Infinite will matter.It is a fine piece of work, worthy of anyone's time. And it will reward patience and an open mind with at least as much, if not more, as you are able to give.


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Time Interviews: Ken LevineBy Matt Peckham

Part 1: http://techland.time.com/2013/03/20/ken-levine-bioshock-infinite-is-very-much-a-bioshock-game/Part 2:http://techland.time.com/2013/03/21/ken-levine-weve-created-a-rube-goldberg-device-that-yields-a-person-in-bioshock-infinite/

How are you doing? It’s been what, seven years since I saw you, before the first BioShock came out?

Yeah, it’s been a busy few years. We’re ready to give this game to people and see their reactions because that’s when it gets really interesting, you know, getting out in the world. You live with it, you build it, you fall in love with it, then at some point it’s time to cut the cord and let it go.

When you look back at the original game and you think about how overwhelmingly positive the reaction was to it, what do you see about it with 2013 eyes, where you might say “That was a compromise,” or “We could have done that better”?

You always have to make decisions and compromises. Your constraints are defined by the team and the time and the platform, and then of course your ability and imagination. So I think that given infinite time you could always do more. I don’t think there’s anything in particular that when we released the game, we were like, “Okay, I really wish we had this.” There were small things, like we had dual-wielding with plasmids and vigors, but we put it in so late that we didn’t really have time to test it, so we had to take it out. That was a bit of a compromise, but then they had it in BioShock 2, which was great.


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http://techland.time.com/2013/03/20/ken-levine-bioshock-infinite-is-very-much-a-bioshock-game/




http://techland.time.com/2013/03/21/ken-levine-weve-created-a-rube-goldberg-device-that-yields-a-person-in-bioshock-infinite/






But I think it was the game we intended it to be. Certainly we didn’t compromise on the message we wanted to get across or the themes we dealt with. Looking back, I don’t see any big things that I would have changed. After it came out, with some reflection — you know I’ve talked about this before so it’s not like it’s new — but I think there’s probably some retooling I would have done with the last third of the game. That’s definitely the benefit of hindsight. At the time I wouldn’t have known that.

The reason I ask is that one of the things I found fascinating back in 2006 was when you showed me all those pictures of real people who’d chosen to wear masks to conceal facial war wounds — the inspiration for the design of BioShock‘s splicers. At the time, you were planning to use the way characters in the game world reacted to the player to reflect their choices, you know, taking this drug that gave them supernatural abilities but that also, over time, caused horrible disfiguration. And yet that never made it into the game.

There’s a concept that…you work out things and you have a million ideas as you go along, and sometimes the ideas make the cut and sometimes they don’t. And we always say that, “Well, people don’t know what’s not in the game,” right? So that feature for instance, like, not only do people not know that we were even thinking about it, I completely forgot about it since then, because looking back at it, I don’t think it would have added anything that would have had a huge impact on the story we were trying to tell, which was really less about addiction or anything like that and more about the will to power and people trying to become the best possible version of themselves. I think we represented that pretty well, both in the splicers and the world, and the sense that Jack essentially found out he had no will, that he was a complete cipher. So looking back, I haven’t thought about that particular topic for


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http://topics.time.com/addiction/

http://topics.time.com/addiction/

years. I don’t think it would have made a huge difference in the game.

Sure, and having played and replayed it, even knowing about that idea, it’s hard to see what it would have added, as you say, without shifting other ideas around. I’m just surprised how much the game retains its power going back through it now. There’s so much going on thematically and philosophically.

I think we were probably unprepared that people would dig into that stuff as much as they did. We thought it was our little nerdy junior professor moment, playing around with those themes. If you were to ask me what was I happiest about with the game, it’s how deeply people engage all the themes. We had to make sure the game worked, even if people didn’t engage that deeply, you know, so there was lots to see and cool monsters to fight, but certainly I’d look back on the game very differently if people were like, “Yeah, that was cool. What’s that about free will? What’re you talking about?” So that’s a bonus when you make a game, because you want to make a fun game, but if it can become something that people attach themselves to in ways that have nothing to do with the mechanics of the game, that’s an additional bonus, and for me as a writer on that game, it’s very gratifying.

What do you think about BioShock becoming the unofficial spokes-game for this whole “games as art” movement that really sprang up, for better or worse, in its wake?

It’s not really a topic that ever engaged me particularly. And I think it’s disappointing to people when I tell them that, because I think they want to…sometimes people look at me as if I have something really profound to say about what games are. But you know, look, I have a liberal arts college


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education. I spent a lot of time in classes and the argument in classes was “What is art?” and this back and forth about what is the meaning of art. Nobody’s ever really established what the meaning of art is. I have my definition, everybody has their own definition. Whatever liberal arts class I was in back in 1985 having that debate, I’m sure every single person in that class had a different definition.

So then it’s very hard to say on top of that, “Okay, now that we don’t have a definition, does this fit into that unknown definition?” For me, what I care about, is does it…caring about things that don’t exist is both the definition of art and insanity. Why care about something that doesn’t exist? And yet people engage emotionally. There is no Indiana Jones. There is no Charles Foster Kane. And yet people engage with these things, and they care about them, even though they actually have no impact. It’s not like a loaf of bread where hey, I’m starving, and I eat a loaf of bread and those bread bits turn into calories and carbohydrates and some proteins, and it makes your body function, or say having shelter for your family when you know a storm is coming. It has no meaning…and yet it does.

So I think that’s the question. Does something have meaning that shouldn’t have meaning? That, to me, is what art is.

I spoke with Shigeru Miyamoto recently and asked him a similar question — he said it’s all still, for him, basically “Is this fun or not?”

Yeah, is it fun? Or does it make you care? That’s the thing, because there’s no output from a game. It comes down to what’s in your head. It’s not like you make a Microsoft Word document and words come out and those words get turned into a bill that gets turned into a law that means you can’t cross the street. You know, games have no output…except


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http://topics.time.com/indiana/

http://topics.time.com/indiana/

http://techland.time.com/2013/03/07/miyamoto-the-wii-u-gamepad-gives-us-advantages-over-tablets-smartphones/

http://techland.time.com/2013/03/07/miyamoto-the-wii-u-gamepad-gives-us-advantages-over-tablets-smartphones/

http://techland.time.com/2013/03/08/miyamoto-i-couldnt-have-imagined-where-weve-ended-up/




what you make of them, of course. I think that’s cool, and I like being in that field, because I think if I was just making crackers all day, that wouldn’t be as satisfying for me, though it’s certainly more nutritious, and you could actually give those crackers to your kid and feed him or her. Crackers are probably more valuable, I guess, but I’d rather make the stuff that has no value.

Sure.

I can see the headline now. “Ken Levine likes to make stuff that has no value.”

Or “Ken Levine Doesn’t Like Nutritious Crackers.”

There you go.

I just started playing the game, and I’m struck, on the one hand, by how wildly different the world looks, but also by how very BioShock it still feels.

When we announced BioShock Infinite I think there were three camps. There was the camp that was like, “Okay, Irrational’s doing a new game, we trust them,” which was probably the minority view. And there was another camp, probably larger, that said “This is calling it BioShock because the marketing guys said you have to, they’re just pulling our legs because they want to make a different game and calling it BioShock will sell more copies.” And the third camp was like, “Oh my god, they’re basically just re-skinning Rapture and they’re going to make exactly the same thing!”

So you get these people reacting in completely opposite ways, and for some reason our games do that to people.


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They bring out a lot of anxiety before they come out, and I think it’s because people are very personally attached. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people with those chain tattoos on their wrists. That’s a serious commitment. I think people make a serious connection to the game and then they’re nervous that it’s going to somehow become, you know, corporatized and neutered.

But BioShock Infinite was always to me a BioShock game. We just decided that BioShock didn’t mean Rapture exclusively, that it means the look…the sort of hyper-stylized look of the world, the saturation of color, the feeling, the sense of humor, the combat mechanics and the kinds of themes we take on. We deal with the time period and we take the politics, the art, the music, the culture, the science, the advertising, the technology and then we give it a twist — a little bit of science fiction, whether its plasmids or buildings that float and tears that open in space — and we sort of put that all on a pod. I think that makes BioShock Infinite very much a BioShock game. I think as people play it, they’re going to learn more and more how it’s a BioShock game.

Some of my favorite moments in a game occur in BioShock, but before that, too, really going back to both System Shock and System Shock 2, where you’re self-modifying and exploring, and sort of navigating survival horror informed by science fiction encapsulated in these dark, socio-political themes. There’s a sense of what makes a “Shock” games going all the way back, isn’t there?

That’s a great question. I’ve thought a lot about that, and I think there’s a bunch of stuff that defines the “Shock” experience. I’ve really dug deep on this lately, because you finish a game, and you’re like, “What is the mission of the


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company?” you know, “What’s been the mission since we started?” And I don’t think we even knew what it was in the beginning. We started with this game that combined roleplaying and shooting and a cool sense of environment and interaction with characters like SHODAN. As rough as it was, for the time, you were having a relatively sophisticated relationship with a character in a game that wasn’t just based in cutscenes. She chastised you, she punished you, she got mad at you, she threatened you… [System Shock 2 spoilers ahead!] I don’t know if you remember the part where you’re about to go into this room where Delacroix’s body was, and SHODAN didn’t want you to go in because she knew you’d find out that she betrayed her former avatar, and she said “If you go in there I’m going to punish you,” and she did if you went in there, and she rewarded you if you didn’t and followed her directions. That was a very rudimentary form of relationship.

With BioShock, things like the Big Daddy and Little Sister, I think it’s fair to say — and I’m not trying to self-aggrandize here — that they’ve become somewhat iconic characters in gaming. I think the reason that is, is not because of their combat capacity or their weapons, though I think it’s cool to have a drill shoved in your face and everything. But imagine the game without the Big Daddy or Little Sister. Imagine the game with just the Big Daddy walking around attacking you. I think it was their relationship and interaction, that you felt some empathy with them, that you connected to their relationship. That’s why I love…I see all these pictures of fathers and daughter cosplaying the Big Daddy and Little Sister together. I think that’s a great thing to see, because it shows that people are connecting on that level.

With BioShock Infinite, I think the inheritor of that sort of tradition of bringing the player into a connection with


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characters and therefore making them part of the narrative rather than observers is…the final state of where we are now is your relationship with Elizabeth. I don’t know how far you’ve gotten in the game, but all the work we’ve done to build this character, to make her interactive, not just in cutscenes, but to make her live in the space all the time, to make her your partner, to make the story centered around your relationship with her, is to me the next step of “How do you bring the player into a narrative?” Generally, you do that through characters and how you make players not an observer, because that’s what most games do, right? They have some gameplay, then you have some cutscene and they give you some narrative, and then you go back to the gameplay, then back to the narrative and so forth. We’ve always tried to combine the two. It’s just been hard, because making characters is the tough part. With each game we try to move the needle a little bit forward.

Let’s talk about Elizabeth. What led to her inception? When did she become central to the gameplay?

When we started working on the game, I think we started with a lot of the same assumptions, that okay, you’d be a character, you’d be in a dead world. Rapture’s a graveyard, essentially — everybody’s either dead or crazy. That made our job a little bit easier, because dead and crazy people are relatively easy to simulate. Fully normal people are much harder to simulate, so you drop them in a cutscene. With a cutscene it’s easy, right? You give them a script and let them go. But how do you hang out with an A.I. that’s believable, that isn’t just standing there like your standard…most games, like in a military shooter, you have companions, but they’re really just gun turrets that occasionally spout lines. How do you make a character that feels real?


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That’s what we struggled with, and why we didn’t want to do it for a long time. And then we looked at our body of work and said, well, we’ve been playing the same tricks for a long time, and we’ve gotten kind of lazy with it. It’s time to step it up a little bit. And so we decided to give you a character, to give you a companion to be with, and we decided to make it a story not about a world but about how the world affects these two characters, how the story, the larger story, impacts these two characters and what it does to them.

With Elizabeth, we just kept growing her role over time. We had to come up with her arc, her narrative arc through the game, which is really the primary plot of the game. Why is Elizabeth so important to the city? Why is everybody after her? Why were you sent to get her? But then you have these big dramatic narrative moments, and those are the relatively — and I underline relatively here — easy parts in the sense that you write a scene and the scripted actors act it out in the game. There’s some problems with that because you never know what the player’s going to do. They may run off in the opposite direction, and that sucks. But we write that stuff and you have to make Elizabeth charming and likable and capable and smart and interesting and vulnerable and all those things that you want out of an interesting and believable character. That’s the work of the writer.

But then there’s like, what does Elizabeth do as a full A.I.? And just letting her go, watching her do her thing, and she can completely…she just lives in the space, she interacts with the space, she interacts with other characters, she interacts with you. She’s just constantly looking for things to do, and that was a ton of work, because what does a person do when they’re just standing around? You know, what do they look at? How hard do they look at it? How close do they get when they talk to you? What’s too close? What’s too far? What do


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people do when they’re bored? What do people do when they’re excited? How does their face look when they’re angry? When they’re confused? And all those things we had to figure out, then how to make her play those when we don’t know what the heck the player’s doing at that particular moment. That’s what Elizabeth is. She’s a big, complex machine who we’ve attached all this great content to, and the machine figures out what content to play when, and that yields…that big sort of Rube Goldberg device yields a person, or as close as we can get to it in a video game.

Why haven’t we paid more attention to this sort of personality-based, can-it-pass-a-Turing-test A.I. design in gaming?

Elizabeth for me…there are moments, there are moments, when I forget that she’s not a combination of this voice actress and this motion-capture actress and these animators and my writing and all these objects in the world she can interact with — I just think of her as this person Elizabeth who I know. And those are great moments, you know, because she is not…she doesn’t exist. But that’s what the goal is here. Immersion in a world is great, immersion in combat is great. But immersion in a character? I think that’s the end goal here, and it’s really hard. The reason people don’t do it is because, as we learned through painful lessons, it’s really, really, really hard.

But also worth it. That was the thing. We said this game, if we look back on this game and we find the player feels a connection to this character, we think we’ll have done what we set out to do, or the most important thing that we set out to do.


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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

As a player, do you wish there was more of an industry trend to focus on creating meaningful A.I. experiences?

I think we come to these things in small measures. In the original BioShock, I had this idea for an ecosystem first, but I never really had the idea for the kind of relationship that the Big Daddy and Little Sister wound up having. I had some gut sense that you had to have a connection, but I didn’t really realize how far we could go with that and how we could lean on the paternal-child relationship to heighten their appeal and interest. And then you come to these things and you look at the Big Daddy and you look at them together and you see this big, hulking guy and this little girl, and you’re like, “Oh s***, I know what that’s telling me, it’s telling me go in that direction.”

And with Elizabeth, we get these moments where, we do a couple of experiments and she’s in the world, and at the beginning, these A.I.s are always completely broken. They’re always doing the wrong thing. It’s like the shark inJaws, you know, you can’t get the damn thing to work. But then you have a moment, and she does something amazing, and you’re like “Okay, clear the decks, put everything else aside, push-push-push-push-push on this.” Because there’s something unique here. And it’s unique not because, outside of cutscenes, in a first-person game, you just don’t, you know, since Half-Life really, you just don’t see much of it.

So this isn’t more prevalent because, I’m guessing, the first thing you need to do is figure out what people do and how they act, then you have to figure out how to simulate that. Those two things are both really hard. The first part, we basically said to our artists and our animators, go home, look at your wife, look at your husband, look at your boyfriend, look at your girlfriend, and observe them, but don’t tell them you’re observing them — because the observed always


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change their behavior if they know they’re observed — and just watch how they do things. Watch how they turn the TV on. Watch what they do when they’re bored. Watch what they do when they’re waiting in line. Watch what they do when they’re fidgeting. Watch what they do when they’re tying their shoes. And get all that data. Figure it out. How close do they get to you when they talk? How close do you get to your friend? How close do you get to your enemy? Then it’s like, “How the heck do we simulate all that?” And it’s a combination of good A.I., and instead of designers going into the world and marking things and telling Elizabeth what she’s interested in, what she’s afraid of, what she’s scared of, it’s up to Elizabeth in the action watching the player and seeing, “Okay, is he looking at me? Do I have something to interact with? What mood am I in? Alright, let’s do it.”

You’ve been reluctant over the years to attach political positions to your games, which makes me think of Tolkien when he said people shouldn’t read The Lord of the Rings as allegory. And yet BioShock was deeply engaged with political and philosophical questions – BioShock Infinite perhaps even more so. Take someone like the historian Howard Zinn, where he argues “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” What’s your view on games as political or philosophical platforms?

I could be wrong here, but I think what Tolkien was saying was that The Lord of the Rings shouldn’t have been read as an allegory for World War II. Isn’t that what he said?

That’s right, though I think he also said something about disliking allegory in general.


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http://topics.time.com/world-war-ii/

http://topics.time.com/world-war-ii/

So is it an allegory? Forget about World War II for a second. First of all, who knows what Tolkien was really thinking. And does it really matter? Because what matters is the viewer. What do I intend when I make a game? What does my team intend? Who cares. It’s what you react to, it’s your emotional reaction that matters. So if I never heard what Tolkien said and I thought it was an allegory for World War II, then that’s my prerogative, that’s how I interact with the experience. My feeling on The Lord of the Rings is that it’s absolutely an allegory. It’s an allegory for how power can destroy anybody, including the most innocent, loving creature in the world, Frodo. Even he can’t resist the call of power. Maybe Tolkien thinks its about different kinds of tea, you know. He’s entitled to that.

But it doesn’t matter. What I think about BioShock Infinite doesn’t matter. What matters is what you think as the gamer, the person experiencing it.

And in terms of being neutral on a moving train, look, the problem is that I don’t think there are two sides in the world. I think there are people out there who are very anxious to turn us into teams, and the conversation is much more complex than these people want to let us make it. I love the fact that…a couple days ago on Twitter or some forum, somebody said “F***ing Ken Levine, if not for him, nobody ever would have heard of Ayn Rand, and there would be no Tea Party movement, that a**hole Ken Levine.” Which shows an almost breathless lack of understanding of the political history of the 20th century, but it also shows that people can take…I’ve had people say I’m responsible for the rise of Randian thought, you know, that I probably knew that Paul Ryan was going to come and that’s why I named someone Andrew Ryan five years before that happened.


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http://topics.time.com/paul-ryan/

I love the fact that people don’t really know, and the reason they don’t really know isn’t because they don’t have political opinions, it’s because what we’re trying to challenge is certainty, and that notion that you don’t need to think anymore because we have all the answers. I think that’s when things get scary. Both Ryan and Comstock share that sort of smug satisfaction of knowing all the answers. And that is, at the end of the day, what turns them into the men they are, even though their world views are completely different.

In other words, a one-dimensional read of BioShock might reduce it to an anti-Rand, anti-capitalist polemic, when it fact it also shows all the things a system like unfettered capitalism and markets and ideas can produce on the way up.

That’s why mission number one was making Rapture a stunning, beautiful place, like a place that you go “Oh my God, how did they create this incredible thing?” Because the ideas Andrew Ryan had were very powerful and they had a lot of amazing potential, and then the journey is watching him taking these ideas and seeing them failing, because he’s human, because these ideals out in the world of flawed humanity don’t hold up. It doesn’t mean his ideas are all bad, it means his rigidity…that’s the problem. It’s his lack of self-awareness. But the tragedy is also that the ideas still have potential, you know?

And that’s where the nature of the medium itself, the plasticity of the experience, works against rigidity.

Absolutely. There are people who’ll zip through that thing and just notice the burning stuff or the fires, and then there’ll be the people who’ll stop and just see the incredible beauty, and


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then there’ll be people who’ll see both and be like “Wow, what is this game trying to say?” And hopefully the answer is, “I don’t know, let me go think what I think it is,” and go off and develop their own experience. If they want to come back and say “Ken Levine created the Tea Party,” well that’s their prerogative, that’s fine, because that’s their experience of the game.


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