Dear Player: Bioshock Infinite, Repaying a Debt
“A city underwater? Ridiculous.” – Booker DeWitt, Player character,BioShock: Infinite
I have a dream where I open my office door. It’s black and white, and I know I’ve done many things, but I don’t know what I’ve lost in the process. The virtual is tragic and farcical, here and not here, welcoming and reifying, and in playing BioShock: Infinite we see its price.
What interests me in Infinite is how it reflects on the ‘melancholy’ of gameplay - a problem of the virtual itself perhaps, how it seems both immersive and alienating, present and absent. As a meta-game that constantly undermines any notion of choice or agency, BioShock also dwells on notions of ‘guilt’, but what does this mean? “Bring us the girl, wipe away the debt”, “the princess is in another castle” - games often tender a promise of escapism that’s never quite fulfilled, and in Infinite we have a great instance of a game reflecting on its limits.
There are some games that never change – some plots that pull the player back again and again. The market subsists on it, but only rarely, very rarely, will a blockbuster title question its ‘why’. Infinite is perhaps the largest game to wonder at its own popularity. What it looks at intently, with a degree of artistry and introspection exceptional among both indie and mainstream titles, are the suffocating restrictions on ‘play’ with which we live in the interactive art market. More than simply self-ironising, a walk through Infinite is a meditation on limitations and moral weight. Moreover, its affective power not only reflects on its medium, but fundamentally changes a host of player-NPC-narrative relationships and registers, and reflects on the broken promises of the Virtual.
This article is a critical-theoretical reflection on Infinite as digital artwork, and as such, is SPOILERTASTIC.
When allowed a space, some of the best games journalism has analysed Infinite for its commentary on game mechanics, and also invokes the theme of Free Will. Much remains in tying the two together and expanding on a medium specific analysis, but I think we need to look carefully at how discussion arrives at the thematic of freedom/determinism, and this will take us to how the game conceives of ‘guilt’. In a game in which we simultaneously play hero, villain and side-character, what does it mean to play Infinite?
Blockbuster action film has long been dominated by superficial questions of free will. In a consumer capitalist culture industry, conceits that simultaneously reassure us that we have choice in personal minutiae, but that larger social forces are naturally determined, remain central, saleable and reactionary. For first-person gaming, fulfilment of destiny is the governing meta-narrative that fulfils the same ends. We are reassured by choices in tactics and items and levelling that let us forget about restrictions in strategy, mechanics and world-scope. The linearity behind FPS play is all about playing it safe – our most immersive and extravagant virtual environments are fixed by the sights of our gun. The player reads their ‘destiny’, a realisation of martial prowess, as affirming their agency. We can be BADASS – why would we choose otherwise? And just like Cloud Atlas, Sky Fall, Borne Identity, Iron Man, Star Trek, Man of Steel etc. might teach its assumed male viewers an affirmatory and Romantic approach to Fatalism and hypermasculinity in the escapism it offers, the FPS traditionally only offered escape from one restrictive patriarchal environment to another. Our gaming worlds naturalise and reinforce the organisation of society, as virtual environments so often do.
The trick to preserving the lie, however, is in policing the distinction between the virtual and the real. The comfort and empowerment we feel in a game world, that can in isolation seem so limited and derivative rests on our ability to choose it as an escape from the real. The framing of the game as an immersive fiction that hides its rough, real edges gives us the illusion of escape – the mere ability to choose between alternative but equally restrictive worlds gives us a space to imagine we are free. Free to choose our chains, virtual or real, the pretence of distinction between work and play facilitates our cognitive dissonance.
But then along came a game that unravels this, that delights in slippage and self-reflexivity at the same time as it displaces us in a present but absent world. From the moment we enter a flying city, that may as well dwell beyond the clouds above our heads, Infinite has something to tell us about loss.
From the outset BioShock Infinite seems to exhibit all the hallmarks of the enlightened action RPG genre – customiseability, a living world and ‘choice’. But from that same beginning, where we are baptised in a light-bloom soaked steampunk city, our choices are meaningless. From the overt narrative dilemmas – draw gun, or get stabbed and draw gun? Kill a man or let others kill him? - to a cosmetic choice between necklaces with no attributes. ‘Open this tear? There’s no going back’, or remain stuck forever. Even when called upon to flip a coin, the result is always heads. From that point on all ‘coins’ are the same, arbitrary amounts appear from nowhere as Elizabeth continually flips you the same coin again and again.
In its endgame, Elizabeth opens a door to a world of infinite similitude – an infinity of banal stars, lighthouses set inside a vast celestial sphere. It’s a game world of infinite iteration. It’s a Game.
In her words, “everything is constants and variables…there’s always a lighthouse, there’s always a man, there’s always a city”. What she outlines is a psychoanalytic world of narrative archetypes. She forces us to confront our past. She opens doors to parts of our character distended across time and space, primal scenes. And a reading of an infinite world that promotes nihilism and self-destruction. Indeed, under her guidance Infinite allows us only one meaningful ‘choice’, to undo an earlier choice. We end our character before they can become either ourself or our nemesis. I’m already having problems with effective pronouns, and this is hardly incidental for a game that tosses you between unfixed character relationships that also question your own relationship to the game.
The experiments of the Lutreces, begin from the opposite end of the spectrum from Elizabeth’s. They’re interested in the coins. The coins Elizabeth merely tosses our way. While Elizabeth shepherds us like a very human god, the Lutreces stand as a prime mover – beyond gender and beyond material interference. Moreover, as Jennifer Goodchild convincingly argues, their illustration of the mutability of gender, of its contingency and the potential for transition - all with consistent wit and agency – constitutes perhaps the best instance of trans* representation in a mainstream title. Their mutability and split singularity personifies the player’s negotiation of identity.
While Elizabeth suffers alongside us, their domain is also that of punishment and forgiveness. Indeed, to me the most pivotal quote in the game is the constant refrain of Lutrece: “Bring us the girl, wipe away the debt’. In this world of interchangeable fields, of constants and variables, narrative conceit also ensures that our ‘debt’ remains abstract and unknown until the endgame. While attention has been given to the self-reflexivity and determinism within the game, much of its statement on metaethics and the virtual consists of the unknown and the ambivalent.
Freedom in this work is consistently and fundamentally questioned. The song bird and its cage are inverted, the bird is Elizabeth’s cage and the confines of the floating city are the very means of destroying the world below. Elizabeth herself, much like the player character, is alternately victim and heroine, destroyer of worlds and saviour. The bird and the cage, the prisoner and the prison, are two sides of the same coin. When the game shows us the world through this figure of the coin, it isn’t merely showing us a world of contingency, but more importantly showing us a world of mutability, of slippage with a fundamental emphasis on the problems of salvation.
While choice isn’t really an option, and the meta-commentary on the nature of game mechanics brilliantly executed, what’s most fascinating is the way this game figures ‘debt’, responsibility, the weight of (non-)being in a game. The player is forced to try and find different ways to live with guilt, and repeatedly face their own bad decisions. BioShock revels in immersing us in a world while distancing us from the avatar we play. Not only does our narrative past haunt us – from flashbacks of drunken ennui to the complete saturation in a theme park dedicated to our pre-game massacre of a first nation people. But our present decisions are as hollow and dark as much as they are textbook illustrations of ‘fatalism’. Do you want to shoot your old friend in the head, or leave that to your other self, Cumstock?
Our level of immersion is intense, but so too is our lack of empathy for our own character. Self-hatred is the result of having lost Elizabeth, indeed it is figured as losing her to our other self. Self-destruction, twice over, is our only salvation. In Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia , he poetically describes this type of loss as a loss we fail to deal with, indeed a loss that becomes part of ourselves – subsumed into our Ego - we come to hate ourselves just as we hate the lost love object for no longer being there. InBioShock, even before we bash our alternate head on a font we find ourselves committed to self-alienating action. Throughout, the violence is pitched at an intensity completely at odds with its idyllic setting, and asymmetric to its narrative. Again and again the women we try to ‘save’ is sickened by our actions. We decide not to throw a ball at an inter-racial couple, but seconds later we are committed, even coerced by the game into ripping a man’s face off with a metal hook. In a single stroke BioShock parodies both the game behaviours of ‘choice’ and ‘justice’. In erasing our debt we nearly drown in blood before water, with a level of gore consistent with F.E.A.R or Gears of War, but alien to the tactical combat and metaphysical narrative of the floating city.
The presence of a sense of loss is not only felt within the narration of the player-character, but in the means by which we push narrative forward, the structures of interface and game logic. Our alienation from our character is everywhere – as a man who is either antagonist Cumstock or supporting character to Elizabeth we find ourselves left in a liminal existential void as dizzying as our dislocation into the sky, while violence and false choice continually make us aware of our separation from the game, our inability to truly inhabit our avatar. This is a distance that haunts us at the level of the HUD, where text mismatches contingency: “Shall I open the tear? There’s no going back.”[Press M1 to open tear, Press E to cancel]. As with the hyper-violent, the banality of text-overlays disrupt the game world while at the same time constituting it. Moreover, the blurring of game fiction and game mechanics haunts us through the interface too – powers that can show us the root to next objective, transition sequences in Fink’s factory that show the fictional production of meta-game elements, a horde of mechanical vendors on the factory assembly line.
In a game space predicated on loss and an ambivalence of attachment, our situation in the virtual is continually questioned. Amid traumatic repetition, we are forbidden any unmediated access to heroic escapism – from a denial of choice to the haunting vignettes of our character’s resurfacing past and the violent failures of a revolution stuck in an iterative Terror. Narrative collapses and consequence becomes confused. Again and again the game’s ‘tears’ in time show us glimpses of confused future-pasts – from the swinging sixties to elided game time in a future we jump beyond. Steampunk itself is a willfull discord in time. This temporal confusion acts to reaffirm the impossibility of progress in this virtual world, or indeed escape from its infinite ‘present’ of myriad lighthouses. Melancholy time serves to haunt us eternally – even in game-death we find ourselves in the black and white office where it all began.
“No one tells me where to go.”/”Booker, you’ve already been”
Eternal return. All our actions belie the game’s title. With the infinite recursion of time and horror, the futility of choice in Infinite draws attention to questions of how we read the ‘eternal return’ of our actions, our losses and murders. As Nietzsche framed moral action in The Gay Science, if we suppose our world, our constellation of lighthouses, is truly infinite, then everything that ever happens will recur infinitely . The moral burden of action becomes unbearable, every decision magnified to horrific proportions. If, however, the universe is finite, it may be that every action is almost inconceivably ephemeral and trivial – ‘unbearably light’ in the words of Kundera.
Bring back the girl, wipe away the debt.
The melancholy, in gameplay and narrative, redolent in a failed religious rhetoric of absolution and staked in this impossible imperative, confronts us with this unbearable lightness of being. An impossibility of action, of meaning, and the constant erasure of all our attempts. Like the myth of pre-cultural non-separation, where human contact was unmediated by the evils of language, the Virtual often seems to offer the perfect immersive experience. An undying life in completely immediate and responsive engagement with art, an unalienated experience. But Infinite’s play – fixated on present-absence -is too transient, too light-weight and too honest.
When we respawn, the game shows us the dichotomy between our virtual gods: Lutrece knocks ominously, haunting us with the spectre of our loss, Elizabeth, however, pulls us up, trying to save us from ourselves again and again. Respawning is rendered transparent and essential to a game in an industry of games that often pretends it never happens – a fluid transition back to an unending fight where our death is irrelevent. Until, that is, we decide to remove the weight of our constantly repeated past, and erase our infinite perpetuation of evil across an infinite number of worlds. Our rebirth is staged repeatedly until we finally decide that the best moral choice is not to choose – is to end ourselves before the game begins its melancholic process, to remove ourselves from a world that haunts us and that we ourselves haunt. The Songbird’s death prefigure’s our own ‘escape’ into meaninglessness.
Most fourth-wall-scaling of all, at this moment we even find ourselves in the game’s prequel, and here BioShock makes its ultimate melancholic statement on the Virtual. While many games reference their prequels, they do so to reinforce their fiction, their legitimacy as inheritors of a virtual world, and to build on past work. In Infinite, however, the prequel returns as alternative, as a narrative concurrent with its own but one inaccessibly alien, and as a result, ridiculous. In BioShock’s first iteration it was tragedy, now it’s farce. The recurrence of the game franchise itself is thus figured as a pitiable state, the ultimate verdict on the distance and separation involved in the virtual, in contradiction of immersive spectacle. Progress and salvation rendered as light and ephemeral. Instead of reinforcing either the image of Columbia or Rapture, both are undone in a single sentence: “A city underwater? Ridiculous”.
If escapism is predicated on difference, then this is the moment that breaks the Virtual’s back. Space between games is collapsed into the game, its self-reflexivity an incorporation of an ‘infinite’ world that admits not only of other possibilities, but discrete ‘ridiculous’ fictions only linked by brand name. In such breadth we could find our own daily lives in one of those lighthouses. What Infinite’s melancholic metanarrative achieves is a statement on the collapsing of distinction between the real and the virtual. If the weight of repeated action stalks our waking lives, how much more haunted we are when our virtual lives provoke a melancholy awareness of guilt and loss. Our time with DeWitt epitomises a failed ‘becoming’. Our present day condition of detachment, of separation and alienation haunts our dreamworlds.
Our ‘debt’ is indelible – the meaninglessness of ‘being’ in a salvation that ends in self-erasure shows us that guilt and loss are all we have in a game world. If ‘success’ is here the undoing of hours of game-time, then we are told ‘loss’ as the precondition of the Virtual. Our desire for freedom, for choice, for immediacy, for non-separation - all these are only present inBioShock as melancholy reflections. Through inversion, recursion and subversion Infinite illustrates how the Virtual has failed to deliver on its promises. Infinite undoes its own fiction and blurs its borders with the real. For all the promises of immersion and catharsis, our experience is unbearably light.
“A Guarantee!? Who has time for all that paperwork?!” –Vending machine, Columbia
Merlin Seller