I thought BioShock Infinite was marvelous. It’s a game which understands perfectly how to compose and curate the experience of playing a first-person shooter better than anything else I’ve played in a very long time. This is another way of saying that it doesn’t attempt to impersonate a cinematic or literary style in its storytelling; it builds upon a format established in the first System Shock and BioShock games, and takes that to a refined conclusion. It’s not a particularly inventive gaming experience, and so most of the problems I did have with it are really more like things that are weird about immersive FPS games: an oddly unresponsive world populated by automaton-like NPCs, the constant scrabbling about in odd little corners for health and ammo, the occasional pleasant moment of tranquility punctuated by sudden extreme violence.
It’s kind of crazy how they’ve got away with giving this game such a remarkable setting. By that I mean that there seems to have been relatively little discussion in the mainstream media about its political content. We’ve heard nothing from right-wing pundits (at least not in the UK) about how it’s a wishy-washy left-wing conspiracy to teach a revisionist version of imperial history to our children – and I kind of wish they would pick up on this stuff just so we could have a debate about it. (It also makes me extremely excited about what a BioShock game in a British context would look like.)
Perhaps they’ve ignored the politics because it’s only been promoted as an action game in a crazy city in the clouds. I caught a glimpse of the TV advert the other night while with my family; I mentioned I’d been playing it, and they were all surprised to hear that the game has anything to do with aspects of American history and racism. On the other hand, that stuff has been trailed for so long in the gaming press that we all knew what to expect when we saw an eight-foot cyborg with the face of George Washington wielding a minigun.
The plot is…odd. I’m surprised that its sheer oddness has not been mentioned more often. I mean, I like it, but it’s highly contrived and based around so many twists and turns that a big part of what kept me playing was a simple drive to find out what was going to happen next. (Which is a good thing.) It feels to me like the kind of thing that only a developer with a proven track record could get away with because it is pretentious. And I mean that in a good way because I don’t believe in using that word as a put-down.
The most important way in which it breaks from its predecessors was that the first two and a half BioShock games (including Minerva’s Den) had stories that were outlandish, but were at least both were founded on a pretty solid ground of sci-fi realism. There was no magic in those worlds, and the weirdest things that happened in them were science experiments gone wrong. BioShock Infinite changes all that. For a large part of the game, you feel like you can’t always trust the objectivity of what the player-character is seeing. You aren’t just steering a silent invisible camera through a world of stuff with your gun as your only means of interaction. And that’s a really interesting thing for a big game like this to be doing.
(A minor spoiler to follow.)
I forgot to repost this - it’s an excellent account of the game, and expresses a lot of what I couldn’t get around to articulating. Don’t read it if you haven’t played Bioshock Infinite and intend to; otherwise, this is wonderful.