[WARNING:
SPOILER ALERT] No, seriously. I plan on discussing the endings and twists of
both BioShock Infinite and the
original BioShock in depth. If you
haven’t beaten either of those games and don’t want the plots ruined, stop
reading now and go play them.
Still
with me?
Okay,
so, I’m still working through my feelings on BioShock Infinite after
having finished it last month. Putting aside the whole cover-art controversy for now (that’s an article in and of itself), I think
the game is incredibly well-written (and I’m not the only one: see the Electronic
Gaming Monthly, Console
Creatures, and Game Informer reviews), I love the ironic use of the song Will the Circle be Unbroken, rag-time Tears for Fears
is one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard, and I absolutely found myself
having fun and being engaged with the game. Something was nagging at the back
of my mind the entire time I was playing it, however. Yes, I was having fun,
but I realized that it was the same fun I was having six years ago with the
original BioShock. The guns are
similar, I can just carry fewer of them; the Plasmids are now called Vigors;
Adam is now Salt (oh, and for everyone who makes fun of that phrase, it’s a
Victorian term for chemicals in general, not NaCL specifically. You see it used
most prominently in The Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that reference is there for a reason). I
played through the game, and I was having fun, but I was also mentally
criticizing Irrational Games for not innovating. Sure, the Skyrails are new,
but I found them really awkward to implement into my play sessions from a
first-person perspective.
Then
I found the documentation and audio diary on the construction of the Songbird,
which gave me pause. Then there was the revelation that the Lutece “siblings”
were actually the same person from two different parallel realities. Then, I
hit the point at the end where the restrictions on Elizabeth’s powers were
removed, and we were transported to Rapture. While there, Elizabeth explained
that there is always a girl, always a guardian, and always a man sent to
interfere. That’s when it hit me: a reason/excuse for BioShock Infinite playing so similarly to BioShock. They play the same because they are the same, just skewed by their respective realities, like the
Luteces. The Songbird documentation I mentioned above implies that the Songbird
was actually developed using techniques and technology observed in Rapture via
one of Elizabeth’s portals, as confirmed by the
BioShock wiki. In fact, the uncanny similarities between the two
games have been noted before, on the Forbes website, no less.
That’s
a really fascinating twist, but after I mulled it over, it left me feeling
vaguely uneasy. The twist is brilliant from a story perspective, much like the
majority of Back to the Future II is
simply a re-telling of the first movie from a different perspective. However,
from a gameplay perspective, it feels less like a twist and more like an
excuse. Yes, the parallels between characters are interesting, and it causes
the parallels in gameplay to make sense, but it also allows for the developers
to not innovate or try anything new under the guise of “maintaining artistic
vision”.
It’s
along the same lines as the justification for why Booker DeWitt is okay being a
murder-bot during gameplay. In his review for the game, Electronic Gaming Monthly’s Chris Holzworth argues:
There’s a vocal camp among the gaming press that
claims Infinite suffers from
ludonarrative dissonance – that the violence in the game is somehow incongruous
to its wildly powerful narrative. But that simply isn’t true. One of the ways
Ken Levine’s opus is so brilliant is that it deftly weaves commentary on
videogames themselves into its core. Infinite
explores how the notion of choice in video games doesn’t really exist, and
forcing players to so brutally dispatch enemies resonates with that very point.
(Electronic Gaming Monthly, Vol. 260,
pg. 74)
Hmm,
okay, that’s a bold and interesting claim to make. I can see the logic, as
well. The game points out that Booker has a history of wholesale slaughter (he
participated in the massacre at Wounded Knee), and throughout the game he
expresses his view of survival: kill them (read: any perceived other) before
they kill him. Thus, the revelation that he and Father Comstock are one and the
same shows that, no matter how hard Booker tries to escape his sins, the circle
of abuse and violence will remain unbroken (hence the ironic use of the hymn).
It
does make for an interesting comment on video games, but, more specifically, it
unintentionally stands as a comment on Ken Levine’s video games. Oh, the
writing is spectacular (Levine was an aspiring
Hollywood screenwriter before he started making games, and is writing
the screenplay for the Logan’s Run
remake) and the sameness of the gameplay could also be seen as commenting
on the replicating nature of video game sequels, so I can see the argument
against those claiming ludonarrative dissonance (however distasteful the
graphic violence may be. It is also incredibly disconcerting that there are
several videos devoted to the melee kills in the game, and the one in the link
is the shortest at 1:48). The problem is that, despite making these comments on
violence in video games, Ken Levine has never actually
made a non-violent video game. Even Freedom
Force, his tribute to Silver-Age comics is overtly violent. You don’t get
to comment on a situation when you actively contribute to said situation in the
first place. Besides, the original BioShock
did the violence criticism thing better, pointing out how willing video game
players are to unquestioningly engage in those acts of violence, as long as
they are ordered to by a “quest-giver”.
Oh,
by the way, Kojima did the whole meta-criticism of video game
violence thing back in 1998, a year before System Shock 2 was released. If you’re not sure why that link is
important, let me just say that when Liquid says “you enjoy all the killing”,
the “you” in question isn’t referring to Solid Snake.
So,
there we have it. There is no denying that BioShock
Infinite is one of the most engaging, thought-provoking,
discussion-provoking games to come along in a long time, it’s just that some of
that brilliance seems to have gone towards justifying re-using the exact same
design as a six-year-old game, rather than offering a new play experience. Will
the circle be unbroken, indeed.
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