Now that people have gotten the chance to digest Bioshock Infinite's ending, its meaning, and its place in the world, its presence still lingers in our minds. It's got a twisty, gooey, book of the month kind of blubber on it. I wanna chew it. That's a credit to the product as a piece of entertainment and as a bit of pop culture, too. This game requires discussion with good grammar. There are so many angles you can examine the game from -- c'mon, then, you Dickensian urchins, let's point them out!
Its hyper-American aesthetic! Look at the way it postures itself, bulge displayed, inflated, perhaps, but still sorta intelligent. Look at the way its re-purposed rock songs sound as crooning slave hymnals. It's bordering on mega-budget blockbuster. Bending popcorn entertainment into a sneak-attack commentary is high-art.
And then there's the way you can saw a woman's head off with a steam-powered hook.
Yeah, why is Bioshock Infinite so violent, again?
There's been an outpouring of credit to the game's director, Ken Levine, and his team at Irrational (always rooting for the local Boston game devs!), extolling Bioshock Infinite as a work of auteurship more common from filmmakers like Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino. Or, you know, anybody that's ever authored a book. That's what an auteur does, he or she controls every angle, every spoken line, every drop of digital blood spilled. No megabyte of storage is wasted and everything is there for a reason. Do you concur?
To an extent, yeah, there are hair fibres and clues all over the place, trail cairns marking Bioshock Infinite's tonal consistency. The game itself is about constants, thematically. Even with its dimensional-hopping, there's no escaping that you are a guy with a gun, trying to keep evil men from exploiting an important girl. That's an ancient trope, perhaps even an outdated one, and what's great is that the game recognize the infinite times it has been retold. Bioshock is about familiarity and expectations, evidenced by the speech Elizabeth gives at the end that this is what stories look like, that we're always going to fantastic cities, to places that we think we understand, while in our own dum-dum reality, we're expecting to be presented with something different. That's what ought to happen -- change! Time advancing, constants enduring, smaller things altered.
Is that a commentary on videogames? That we expect the largest, shiniest, most marketable games to be hyper-violent, and by sneaking in some elbow-nudging, and reminding us that this is still just a videogame, Bioshock sidesteps its own shortcomings?
I don't know if Ken Levine is that clever. Judging by how much Bioshock Infinite has changed in the last two years, I have to believe that a majority of this commentary on the American obsession with violence and self-importance -- which is what the floating city of Columbia is -- is purely circumstantial. Is Bioshock Infinite violent because it's intended to leave us shocked (heh.)? No. It's violent because Ken Levine grew up a dork reading comic books. That's his template. Those were the adventures that molded him. When it was time for him to tell his version of adventure, he birthed something violent, and aware. It's violent because all his games in the past have been violent, and like Nolan or Tarantino, that's his comfort zone, and it isn't a notable positive or a negative, it's just how he does things.
(Tarantino is far enough up his own ass that he would say the violence in Django Unchained was as gratuitous as it was because he was commenting on our willingness to look the other way on the atrocities in American history, but it isn't. He liked the way the squibs looked in Planet Terror and Inglourious Basterds, and that's how he rolls. Django, though entertaining, and it will find its place as the Ur-Tarantino film (Kill Bill wanted to be a western so badly, but it was just Uma Thurman, ostensibly playing an exploitative black woman revenge-archetype, with a katana), was hyper-real in its violence, but not in its message, apparently. Tarantino went on and on about how the depiction of slavery was accurate, perhaps realer than most realize. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't say there's irony in the story and then crank the violence up to a JACKSON+ level and call it good filmmaking. And that's why it won awards for writing and the smaller acting roles.)
Would Bioshock Infinite work better as something other than a violent first-person shooter?
Some might argue that it wouldn't, since it's a story about revolution. It is not. That's a minor plot thread. Well, it's a story about America, that's got to be violent, right? Closer.
I think it should have been a rail-shooter. It should have been like Sin & Punishment: Star Successor (right) with action designed by the guys at Treasure. There could be grounded-sequences when it demanded we be down on street-level. There could be soaring, diving, flying-sequences, of which there are already plenty on the swashbuckling skylines. There could even be moments where you had to retrace your steps until all of the enemies in an area were dispatched. It would have been able to show the world in all of its microscopic detail. It would give Booker and Elizabeth time to explore each other's reactions to Columbia and its lore, which provide the game's most viable reason for being.
The on-rails feel would fit with the game's obsession with, "That's what happened, is happening, will happen." No step missed there. Looking at the ground and scrounging through the flying city's trash cans for pie and salt would go from 20% of the game to 0%.
But must it be violent? Decapitation-violent? Cliff Bleszinski, inventor of the chainsaw-gun and director on the big, fat, meat 'n meat sandwich, Gears of War, called out Bioshock on its skull-splitting viciousness (scroll down to April 3rd post). The guy knows something about tonal consistency, especially when it comes to chunky-chili violence in games, and when he knew that the Unreal 3 engine was good at making beefy, 600 pound guys shoot 800 pound raisin-faced freak-jerks, he made his game a great big madhouse of stick, bouncy gore. Man, that game was solid, metal toy truck of engineering. It knew what it was, and what it wasn't. Bioshock Infinite could have done just fine without the mechanical neck-snapping that Booker seemed so fond of. Maybe if it had been phased out, or Elizabeth started becoming terrified of you as you did it more and more, or actually showed some acknowledgment of the violence, everything else in the game was called out?
It either needs more, or less, but as it stands, Bioshock Infinite's violence is a blemish. When people look back on Bioshock Infinite, they're going to talk about the story, and the city, and the relationship with Elizabeth, and what a great character she was. If the violence was lost (or just lessened), it would have been an even purer product. We challenge this work because it's good to do so. We challenge it because we've been given something as compelling as Elizabeth dancing, and time and again, people playing the game a second time have just wanted to stay there in Battleship Bay, in a moment where she can be safe.
But we have to carry on. That's where the game's power and its terror kicks in, not in the bloodshed.
-- Alex Crumb (originally published 4/10/13)
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