Bioshock Infinite, Ken
Levine's newest stab at bringing some life to the AAA gaming
landscape, has spent the last month enjoying impressive critical
and public acclaim.
As a game, it is a machine as
well-oiled as you could hope to ask for, a first-person shooter
etched from thoughtful gun combat and a Vigor system that complements
it stylistically and ludically in equal portions. There has been some
streamlining, but we're in a gaming climate that streamlines as a
matter of course, especially by a franchise's third iteration.
Narratively, Infinite hosts
a plague of discontents, ameliorated partially by the game's
insistence on exploring them through the story's subtext. To simplify
drastically, Levine claims through Infinite that
narrative video gaming will always be subject to a series of
technological restrictions. It's a wonderful idea for a game to
grapple with, but it doesn't always work out. Leigh Alexander has
done an excellent job at delineating some of the friction that
Infinite encounters as
a narrative-based game,
but some of her arguments are predicated on the notion that the
original Bioshock unified
narrative and gameplay seamlessly. It is unrealistic to expect every
act of brutality in a game of this genre to maintain a sense of
commodified mortality; for all that atmosphere and all those piquant
Objectivist flourishes and all the hullabaloo about “Would you
kindly?”, the first iteration is still a game where you mow down
underwater zombies in the hundreds.
