BioShock changed the way we think about videogames . If Bioshock Infinite succeeds, it has a chance to do the same.
When Irrational Games' BioShock came out in 2007, it seemed to herald a new age for video games. A first-person shooter about a failed Randian utopia, BioShock married finely-honed and accessible play to the sort of narrative and thematic sophistication that is normally the domain of novels and films. For lack of a better phrase, BioShock was a game that felt like art. It inspired endless conversation and argument amongst the people who think about and make games for a living; it illuminated endless American living rooms. It spawned probably the single most influential intellectual analysis ever written about a game; it sold almost five million copies. It was a fun game for smart people, or the other way around. It was a blockbuster with an indie spirit, and it united gamers in pride: look at what our medium can do.
Half a decade later, gaming is in many ways fracturing: between a crassly commercial mainstream that is too often content to iterate, and an inaccessible and sometimes arrogant avant garde that is too often content to be obscure; between casual and "core" gamers; between mobile and stationary; between those who want to interrogate violence in games and those who want to ignore it; between those who think games should be narratives and those to whom story in gaming is a hindrance, if not altogether anathema. Other recent games have attempted to ask questions of the ubiquitous shooter genre, but they've either been too muddy with their themes or too sloppy with their play to succeed both as games and as culture. If it seems like it's been less than half a decade since BioShock, that's because nothing has come close to matching it. (And that includes BioShock 2, a sequel that was developed by another studio.)
So you could say that the release next month of BioShock Infinite is an important moment in gaming. It is made by the same people as the first game, including the series' auteur, Ken Levine. It's been in development for five years. It's been chronically delayed. It has cost some multiple of the 15 million dollars the original cost to make. If Rockstar's behemoth Grand Theft Auto V wasn't looming at the end of the year, there's no question that this would be the most anticipated title of 2013. And more than any game this year, it represents a chance for some of the divisions in gaming and between gaming and the culture at large to heal themselves.
I've just played the first four hours of the game, and they convey the unmistakable impression that Irrational knows what they accomplished with BioShock and are trying to recapture it. Rapture, the whimsical underwater art-deco city of the first game, is replaced by Columbia, a whimsical, neoclassical city in the clouds. Like in the first game, the fantastical setting is revealed through the windows of a tiny motorized pod. Like in the first game, the story begins in medias res and finds you playing as a quasi-amnesiac (here, Booker DeWitt) with murky motives and a mysterious past. Like in the first game, you follow and are followed by a larger-than-life, ideologically fervent villain (and here, the xenophobic, Christian maniac Zachary Comstock replaces the Objectivist maniac Andrew Ryan. Here, instead of asking us to consider the implications of a society dedicated to rational egoism, we are asked to consider the implications of a society dedicated to Know-Nothing Protestant-American exceptionalism). And like in the first game, the thrill of the combat comes from the combination of old-timey guns with grotesque and fanciful powers, for example, the ability to summon a murder of starving crows.
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