Bioshock: America!
If you read my reviews regularly, you know that I don’t like 90% of everything ever invented. Since a young age I’ve realized that my role in the world is to be the angry black Ewok that want’s none of C-3PO’s bullshit. So keep that in mind when I tell you about Bioshock: Infinite, because I am about to tell you that it is FUCKING AWESOME.
Infinite is one of the best games I’ve played in the last 5 years – even better, in my opinion, than the first one. Our guest writer Andrew Nichols posted his initial thoughts of the game on Monday, and I agree with them, up to a point. And that point is where the game GETS EVEN BETTER. (You should probably prepare yourself for a lot of caps lock in this article.) I don’t want to cover the same ground he covered, as you should just go read his article, so I’ll try to keep this short.
When I first fired up the game what struck me most was the imagery and sound when you first arrive in Columbia. I grew up in an extremely small town in rural Maine, so the Christian revivalism music and setting blew me away. Then I looked around and was disappointed. “Oh, another game with only white people. Great.” It appeared that Irrational Games had meticulously constructed the white washed picturesque turn of the century America idealized by every institutionalized racist since 1900. This feeling persisted for about 10 minutes as I walked the streets of the flying city, until I was thrust into a scripted raffle event that showed me “Yes. You’ve seen only white people. Get a lot of this, asshole!” My character won the Columbia raffle, and my prize was to be the first person to throw a baseball at the head of an Irish guy and his black wife, for the crime of mixing the races. Holy. Shit.
With the first game in the series, Irrational took a swing at Ayn Rand and Objectivism. In Bioshock: Infinite, they take on a much larger target: American Exceptionalism and its relationship with racism, classism, and oppression. This is a pretty ballsy move considering the state of political discourse in the United States these days. And what’s more amazing to me – it’s paying off. Somehow the political pundits don’t seem to have noticed that this video game is trying to actually SAY something about America and haven’t yet gone off on a tirade.
Even though I’m tickled to death that a video game company is willing to take a stab at making an actual artistic statement about life in America, that alone wouldn’t be enough to make the game as amazing as it is. They nailed every element – the gameplay is fun, the graphics are incredible, the set designs are stellar, the voice acting is incredible, the story is moving and well-told . . . and it’s just plain good science fiction. It is a GREAT science fiction story that belongs in the classic pulps that gave us Ellison, Dick, and Asimov.
I grew up with video games, and I’ve been disappointed for a long time that they didn’t grow up with me. Now with companies like Irrational making games that directly take on philosophies and political worldviews, I feel like the wait is over. The clock is ticking on when we get our Citizen Kane video game. I hope it comes soon.
