Bioshock – Warranted Violence

When a significant game comes out we’ll often see two waves of media about it.  The first is almost always overwhelmingly positive or negative, depending on people’s initial reaction to the game.  The reviews are often one-sided, mostly because in the digital age reviewers have about 12 hours to play a game and file an article in the rush to beat the press.  After these come out, we’ll see a second wave about a week or two later that are more nuanced, and sometimes directly opposite of the first reviews we saw.  This has been the case for Bioshock: Infinite, and while I agree with some of the second wave criticism, I think a lot of reviewers missed part of the point of the game.

Author’s Note:  I was writing this piece last Monday when the explosions went off in Boston.  It was too difficult to continue after that, which is why it waited a week.  Obviously since I finished it afterwards, the situation affected the piece, but the majority was written prior to the Marathon bombings.  I hope you enjoy reading it, and that it makes you think about the game and what I think it was trying to achieve in a different light, but if you find yourself getting upset while reading, please get up and walk away.  I know I had to a number of times while writing it. -Nick

The initial reviews of Bioshock were nearly universally positive.  I should know – I wrote one, and my feelings on the game really haven’t changed.  The second wave was much more critical, centering mostly on two topics: the mechanics and the gameplay vs. tone.  Prepare yourself for the third wave of Bioshock reviews – the Commentary On the Commentary!

1.  The Mechanics:  I actually agree with most of the second wave on this one.  The mechanics of the game were not only unimproved over Bioshock 1 and 2, they were actually worse.  The plasmids, I mean vigors, are all nearly identical.  I was very disappointed when I got my third vigor and the alternate fire mode was exactly the same as the first two.  The gun fights felt a bit like rollerskating through melted cheese while firing a chain gun.  The upgrade system was obviously a last minute unbalanced add-on (if you upgraded anything but salt first, you made a mistake), and the shield was not a great solution to maintaining a fast-paced game with dozens of bad guys.  The skyhook system was cool for moving from area to area, but it was awkward and not fun to use in combat.  And giving upgrades based on randomization was a bad choice for such a tightly controlled narrative game.  This isn’t Diablo, don’t roll me up equipment drops.  Despite all of this, I still think this was the best game I’ve played in 5 years.

2.  Gameplay vs. Tone:  A lot of people are criticizing the gameplay of Bioshock vs. it’s tone.  Namely, they are criticizing that in the game you bounce back and forth from having touching interpersonal moments with Elizabeth and other characters to embedding your steel skyhook into the craniums of the Columbia populace.  This game is VIOLENT.  There are no non-violent solutions to making your way through waves of enemies, and the fighting is absolutely brutal.  In a game that is entirely based around some fairly sophisticated narratives you are forced to literally get your hands bloody again and again.  Many reviewers felt this was discordant and distracted from the game.  I disagree – it IS discordant, but that’s the point, and here’s why.

• Booker is the bad guy.  He is not A bad guy.  He is THE bad guy.  He is Comstock, the villain of the entire game.  Booker possesses all of the qualities that make Comstock as wretchedly evil as he is – racism, classism, brutality, and an absolutely selfish view of the world.  He doesn’t develop those things in other universes where he becomes Comstock.  He already has them.

  Every choice he makes is for a selfish reason – even when he decides not to take Elizabeth to New York.  He’s not making that choice because it’s the right thing to do, he’s making it because she has become his surrogate daughter to him, and he feels so guilty about SELLING his real daughter.  (The fact that she’s the same person is basically irrelevant here.)  Let me say again – he SOLD his daughter to pay off gambling debts.  He killed women and children at Wounded Knee.  Even his remorse is only as solid as his ability to stay out of trouble.  Look at the two paths his life takes after Wounded Knee:  religious zealot dictator or drunken gambler that sells his only child.

  It’s hard to muckle on to just how bad of a person Booker is because the game is played in first person.  As a rule, the protagonist of first person style games are just cyphers onto which the player projects their own personality.  They rarely speak, and if they do it’s in short generic sentences.  That’s not the case for Bioshock: Infinite.  The “protagonist” isn’t a projection of the player.  Booker de Witt is a very well realized character with his own motivations, and he is a fucking terrible person.

• The game is about the whitewashing of American history.  In fact, it does it so effectively, and as US citizens programmed with this sort of imagery, we completely miss the point of the violence in the game, which is that violence IS American history.  We see the barbershop quartet, the kids playing the fire hydrant, the beautiful buildings and hymns, and even though we KNOW that this game is showing us these images in order to make a point, we still pretty much miss it, because we want to believe in America, and this is how America is always pitched to us.

  American history is the story of a nation that leaps back and forth from beauty to savagery in a heartbeat.  When Booker goes from comforting Elizabeth to beating a man to death, it’s because that’s what America does.  When a terror attack happens, in one breath we declare that terrorists will not break our spirit and we will give anything to help the victims, and that the perpetrators should be tortured to death.  And we mean both equally.

  Take the two real incidents that the game uses as history and tonal setting: Wounded Knee and the Boxer Rebellion.  At Wounded Knee US soldiers assaulted and killed over 150 Lakota Sioux in a panic.  The firing was so intense that it’s believed that the soldiers killed over 30 of their own men.  History remembers it as the Massacre at Wounded Knee, where most of the Native Americans had already been disarmed before the shooting began, and women and children were murdered.  History DOESN’T remember that we gave 20 soldiers the Congressional Medal of Honor for their part in what we specifically call a massacre.

  While the Boxer Rebellion wasn’t quite as black and white as the Wounded Knee incident (the US in the real world played on a small role in the struggle, and the Boxers weren’t exactly white knights themselves), the enduring image of the conflict is of US troops scaling the walls of Peking.  The goals of the Boxers?  To prevent the spread of foreign influence, specifically Christianity, in China.  In response, the allied Western nations wiped them out and burned their temples to the ground.  The Boxers were guilty of their own atrocities, such as an attempted genocide of Chinese Christians, but the entire situation was exploited by the Western coalition, including the United States, to basically loot and plunder China and impose their own values on the Chinese citizens by force.

  These two incidents really should tip us off that the violence of the game doesn’t distract from the point, it IS the point.  But damn it, that 1920s cover of Tainted Love is just so damn catchy, why can’t the rest of the game be like that?  Just long conversations with Elizabeth and playing Johnny Cash covers on your guitar in the basement.  Well, it can’t be like that because the VIOLENCE IS THE POINT OF THE GAME.  It’s who we are, even if we don’t like to think about it.

My one real disappointment in the narrative flow of the game, including the violence, was Daisy Fitzroy’s descent into child killing terrorism.  Booker’s comment about Daisy being just as bad as Comstock seemed out of place to me.  Some issues really aren’t two sided, and the systematic degradation of a group of people because of their skin color or ethnicity is one of them.  I wish they’d gone in a different direction with that plot point, as the whole “The liberator is just as bad as the tyrant” is a bit played out.

I loved Bioshock, and I loved it for its spot on criticism of my country.  I was born in New England, where we celebrate Patriot’s Day as a holiday, we have gravestones from the Revolution in our graveyards, and every local landmark has some significance to the birth of our nation.  I’m proud to be a United States citizen, and I believe in our country, what we have accomplished, and what we might someday accomplish with ever fiber of my being.  But to deny that violence is in the soul of our country is to willfully blind yourself to the reality we have lived.  And that is really what the game is trying to say (whether or not the developers meant to say that is another discussion entirely).  No matter how picturesque we make our history, and our current society, we live with and do violence everyday, both as individuals and as a nation.  It’s a part of our nation that we need to face, or we’re just trying to live in a city in the clouds.