Discussing BioShock Infinite

I had this game on release day, and finished it yesterday. Was holding off on writing anything about it until I'd finished it.



Back in 2007, the original BioShock was released, which at its core was the usual First Person Shooter. You're stuck in a crumbling underwater city and have to fight the deranged survivors of a civil war in order to escape. What made BioShock different from other shooters, though, was the backstory of this city. The city of Rapture is was created by a character named Andrew Ryan, who imagined the city as an Objectivist utopia (similar to Galt's Gulch from Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged'). Through voice recordings (the collection of which is entirely optional), you piece together how things don't go to plan, as different factions begin to vye for power. Ultimately, Ryan became everything he hated by being forced to implement the restrictions he created Rapture to escape from. There was also a science fiction element, involving the discovery of substances that can grant supernatural powers, and a huge plot twist around two thirds of the way into the game, but it was the picking apart of Objectivist theory in a game that would usually just be about aiming and shooting at things that set it apart. You don't have to learn about the history of Rapture... you can just play it as a shooter, but you get the most out of it if you delve deep.

Last Tuesday brought the long-awaited follow-up to that original game (BioShock 2 was produced by a different company, and whilst fun to play, doesn't really count). And with it came what I hope is the moment that videogames are taken seriously for their potential as a storytelling device. BioShock Infinite draws on not only political ideas (which I will go into soon), but also alternate versions of fairly recent history in order to tell one of the best stories I've seen in any medium.


Instead of the silent protagonist you play as in the original game, you are Booker DeWitt... a fully fleshed-out character complete with dialogue, and a troubled past. You're not going to like DeWitt right away... he's a veteran soldier who took part in the Battle Of Wounded Knee - the final battle of the American Indian Wars, which is also known as the Wounded Knee Massacre because of the number of innocent women and children that were murdered by the American soldiers. After leaving the army, he became a member of the Pinkerton Detective Agency who spearheaded many modern detection techniques, but are nowadays best known for being called in to violently end Union strikes. Booker was fired from the Pinkerton's for being too extreme. All of this led to a downward spiral into drink and gambling which left him with crippling debt. And so he finds himself on what is essentially a kidnapping mission to "give us the girl and wipe away the debt". This is where the game starts, with two mysterious people rowing you to a lighthouse off the coast of Maine. The lighthouse is actually a means to reaching the city of Columbia.


Columbia is a city in the clouds first conceptualised at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (also known as the World's Columbian Exposition). Created by Zachary Hale Comstock, Columbia is touted to the world as a new wonder of the world designed to spread the ideals of American Exceptionalism to the world. However, when a group of Americans were taken hostage in China during the Boxer Rebellion, the full extent of Columbia's ambition was revealed. The city was actually fully armed, and from the clouds brought the uprising to a bloody end. This so outraged President McKinley, that Columbia was disavowed. Comstock spun the story to his people that they had voluntarily seceded from the Union, and used the opportunity to create a cult of personality around himself, and the Founding Fathers of the United States, now referred to by the residents of Columbia as Father's Washington, Franklin and Jefferson. The cult of Columbia is also extremely racist, going so far as to depict Abraham Lincoln as the devil, whilst memorialising John Wilkes Booth as a hero of the people. All of the powerful and affluent people in the city are white, meanwhile Jeremiah Fink (who has a monopoly on all manufacturing on the city) buys Irish and African American "convicts" in order to keep them as slaves.

Racism is depicted very early on in this game in a very blunt manner. Videogames tend to either attempt to avoid the subject entirely, or depict it via allegory (ie: the elves in Dragon Age), and BioShock Infinite should be applauded for daring to go straight for what is usually considered a taboo. For example, the pivotal moment when DeWitt's peaceful stroll around Columbia's streets in which the city has put on a fair celebrating the anniversary of their independence, comes when he forced to enter a raffle which he wins. His prize is the opportunity to take the first throw at an interracial couple who are to be pelted to death with baseballs for their "crime". You can choose to throw it at the announcer (Fink) instead if you wish, but it doesn't make much difference... whoever you choose to throw it at, you are stopped when the police notice the letters "AD" engraved on your hand. This is the mark of the "False Shephard", who Comstock prophecised would appear in Columbia to lead "The Lamb" astray. So it turns out getting that girl isn't going to be so easy.


Once you do reach her though, Elizabeth (or "The Lamb") quickly makes her mark as one of the greatest characters in videogame history. She's been locked away in a tower shaped like the Angel Columbia (who Comstock claims came to him and showed him the future) her entire life with only books and an enormous "protector" named Songbird for company. Turns out, Songbird isn't so much a protector as he is a jailer, and he's going to be a pivotal (if somewhat underused) character in the story to come. Elizabeth will then be with you for the rest of the game as you attempt to escape from the city, begin to unravel the mysteries surrounding the city (and there are many... involving Elizabeth's "miracle" birth, the fate of Lady Comstock, exactly how a city is able to fly, who are the mysterious English twins who keep showing up and who is Daisy Fitzroy and her "terrorist" group, the Vox Populi - a lot of these are discovered via optional voice recordings just like the original game, so if you want any hope of understanding what's going on, get as many of those as possible, but unlike the original in which most of the bad stuff has already happened, turning paradise into hell before you get there, you also get to see a lot of this happen before your eyes). One thing people hate about videogames is when you are given a non player character who either just gets in the way (I'm thinking carefully laying out mines to trap a boss in Resident Evil 5, only for your "helpful" companion, Sheva to go "Hey, I've found a mine!" and throw them all back into your inventory), or are there to be protected at all costs despite having a terrible habit of running directly into danger. Thankfully, Elizabeth is not in danger during combat in this game... she keeps out of the crossfire, and nobody will deliberately aim at her, because they all want her alive. She'll constantly be there providing you with ammo, health or Salts (the equivalent of RPG's "mana" which is used to power the supernatural powers you get from Vigors - in the original game these things were referred to as EVE and Plasmids respectively). She'll also open "tears" in reality in order to bring objects from parallel versions of Columbia into your world for you to make use of. When out of combat, she'll collect money for you, and point out when she sees lockpicks (Elizabeth is a font of knowledge about many subjects thanks to her time spent reading in the tower, and one of these is lockpicking). Because she's such a major part of the game, if any part of Elizabeth failed, then the game would be infinitely worse for it. Thankfully, the development of both hers and DeWitt's characters throughout makes for a believable companionship... and the few times when she is not by your side are some of the most terrifying in the game. Especially at one late point in the game which feels a lot more like the claustrophobic survival horror of the original, which is even more disturbing as you've gotten used to the epic battles in outdoor locations.

Now, if you think the story will all be about the political machinations of Comstock, and the civil war between his founders and Daisy Fitzroy's Vox Populi, you'll really be thrown by what happens at around the halfway point of the game. Suddenly, Elizabeth's powers that until that point had just seemed like a gameplay mechanic suddenly become integral to the entire plot. What proceeds from that point on is either genius, or distracting from part of the plot that you care about depending on your viewpoint. In my view, it's genius, but rest assured that either way, it's a headfuck. When you finish the game, you probably won't know what's just happened. You'll probably have to replay the last moments of the game again and read countless articles around the internet and the BioShock Wikia in order to begin to get your head around it. If you're anything like me, you won't be able to get to sleep because all of the possibilities will be swimming around in your head. It's an ambiguous ending, and contrary to the belief's of the people who like to hate the likes of The Matrix Trilogy and Lost, this is a good thing. The fact that there are already multiple theories flying around is probably exactly what the writers intended. And you'll probably only understand that last sentence once you've seen the ending for yourself.

I haven't gone through any of the gameplay mechanics, mini-bosses, etc. as my reason for playing games is mainly to experience a story (albeit one that I can consume at my own pace, and interact with). Rest assured, if the actual gameplay was broken, I'd hate it even if I love the story. As it is, this is my favourite game that I've ever played. Not as long as Skyrim, nor as complicated as other games, for sure... but that's a plus point as far as I'm concerned. Everything in the game (even the parts that don't seem like it at first) is in service to the story. The way it should be. Don't get me wrong, there have been great game stories in the past... but I do believe that this game will go down in history in videogame storytelling as its renaissance. It's to videogames what Watchmen and The Sandman were to comics... the moment when people should hopefully pay attention and realise that games have grown up and are able to stand alongside literature, movies, music (and comics, obviously) as legitimite ways to tell an infinite number of stories, without the boundaries often associated with them. Sure, there'll always be dumb games, but that doesn't mean there can't be smart, ambitious ones in the mainstream, too... for another analogy, it's Inception to Call Of Duty's Transformers.