One the one hand, it tells a well-crafted story about absolution and the impossibilities and false comforts of redemption. That part is great. That part is worth experiencing. What is not nearly as well done is the resolution of the game's aesthetic promise and how it fits in, thematically with the original Bioshock. For those of you not familiar with the game series, both present dystopian cities whose well-meaning credos are taken to horrific extremes, undermining the values that built them. The first game centers on an underwater city called Rapture wherein Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy of sacrosanct self interest plays out, resulting in a society of powerful narcissists seeking to destroy one another as the city crumbles around them.
Bioshock Infinite banks on the twinge of disgust in our gut seeing these images. We are conditioned to disdain blackface, racial slurs, minstrelsy and institutionalized racism and seeing those images placed side by side with the patriotic is jarring enough (though certainly historically justified) to get people to question whether or not the link is necessary. Portions of the game play out (to great effect) like chapters from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The game uses the Wounded Knee Massacre and the Boxer Rebellion as object lessons in American arrogance and cruelty. Colombia is the America that took those lessons as unabashed triumphs. Again there is something laudable in all this. I doubt most people are aware of either event and bringing them center stage is a pretty cool way to make a point about the still extant dangers of believing your homeland to be the messiah of nations.
Unforunately, Bioshock Infinite turns away from this plot in order to tell a personal story about the game's protagonist, a former Pinkerton and survivor of Wounded Kneeand the Boxer Rebellion atoning for his sins by trying to save a maiden-in-the-tower heroine who is more than she appears. About a third of the way through, the game essentially becomes a science fiction yarn about multiple dimensions and causal relationships. By the end your hero, Booker DeWitt is revealed to be the race-baiting prophet, Zachary Comstock from a different reality. The heroine is your daughter and solution to the game is to go back to the moment when DeWitt and Comstock diverged (a baptism) and drown yourself. Very complicated, fairly fulfilling but it necesitates a divergence from the coming race war and its shortcuts left me a little bit uneasy.
Much of the plot of the early game revolves around arming an underground movement called (with sophomoric, winking reference) the Vox Populii. It's led by Daisy Fitzroy, the prophet's former housemaid, wrongly accused of the murder of her mistress. Her rebellion in the works is made up of the city's black, Irish and Chinese populations, working to overthrow the yoke of tyranny and topple Comstock's white-washed hegemony. I was pleased to see a woman of color cast in a major heroic role in a videogame. She also manages to be dressed in an outfit appropriate to a revolutionary and not some cleavage revealing ensemble that belies a well developed character. Say what you will about strong women in video games, no matter how well they are being written they are still, more often than not being dressed in equal parts adolescent fantasy and improbable discomfort.
In order for the game to make its point about multiple dimensions and the trouble with rewriting history, it needs to shortchange Daisy Fitzroy. The game shifts abruptly from having you help arm the rebellion to having you shift into another dimension where the rebellion is already going on and Daisy is on the ascendant. With a few lines of dialogue, the ever-dour DeWitt says "The only difference between Fitzroy and Comstock is how you spell the name." This holds up, Daisy proves to be obsessed with murdering the WASP-y children of privilege and, as she is about to slit a child's throat, Elizabeth, the game's heroine, stabs her in the back with a pair of scissors.
From a narrative point of view, it is understandable that we need to see how both sides of a revolution are subject to blind arrogance and cruelty. For DeWitt and Comstock to be equally guilty and problematic, the political situation has to mirror it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely yadda yadda yadda. The only problem is, the Vox Populii and the Colombian Founders are not equally corrupt body populaces. The game is fairly good about discussing the suffering of innocents in times of war, but it makes the mistake of using real historical racism to make the point that anyone can become oppressed. I'm not saying that it is not possible, in some alternate dimension for a woman of color to be a power-mad eugenics advocate, I'm merely suggesting that we are not there yet as a society to look at that critically.
As I said before, Bioshock Infinite is laudable for its focus on the sins American history: for not blaming racism and injustice on the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws alone--for saying, in fact, that the whole idea of American Exceptionalism is predicated on an exclusionary, white, imperialist vision of the world that trampled numerous cultures and murdered innocents to become an international power. In trying, part way through, to claim that the reactionary revolutionaries are equally to blame as their oppressors, is a simplistic distraction from that story. You and your companion kill Daisy Fitzroy halfway through the game and go on to dismantle Colombia, but her Vox Populii, now leaderless take over from the Colombian Peacekeepers as the game's primary cannon fodder villains. It's as though the game is agreeing with Comstock's assessment of the Vox: anarchists can only ever cause anarchy, if you let oppressed minorities take over, they will run everything into the ground. Racist order is shown to be on equal footing with anarchist chaos.
Again, this is not the crux of the plot and I do not believe the game developers intended this. It's an unfortunate byproduct of shunting the politics of the game off to the side once the character exploration and science fiction emerge front and center. It's disappointing that the kickass woman of color is reduced to an empty symbol while white male characters get lengthy explorations, but I also think it shows a misunderstanding of the game's central theme. The moment that splinters Comstock/DeWitt in two different dimensions: turning one into an arch-villain and the other into a reluctant hero is a baptism some years after the Massacre at Wounded Knee: DeWitt (the good version of the protagonist) refuses to be baptized and Comstock takes the waters willingly. The implication (though it is delightfully subtle compared to most of the rest of the game) is that Comstock mistakes baptism for death and resurrection. He refuses to explore his guilt about Wounded Knee and instead believes that he has been reborn as righteous and holy (taking on the new name, Zachary Hale Comstock as a way of killing off the godless Booker DeWitt). DeWitt, on the other hand, suffers and suffers terribly, is consumed by guilt over the events of Wounded Knee and refuses to give in to the righteous justifications that Comstock makes for his actions. It is a surprisingly complicated moral, especially for a shooter: you don't get to start over. The atrocities you committed don't get wased away when you do the right thing. There is no redemption, only a slow arc--longer than your lifespan--towards real justice.
The game fails to give Fitzroy the same treatment because it mistakes DeWitt's original sin. It assumes that faith in absolution is the lapse. The lapse is genocide. Both DeWitt and Comstock participated in it, and just because one man refuses to end his guilt does not make it less real. Daisy Fitzroy does not have the choice to become anything other than a revolutionary. There is no moment in the waters of baptism where she has the option of turning away and, as a result, she cannot be held to the standards of the game's internal morality when it comes to enacting violence.
And maybe that is the problem with combining multi-dimensionality science fiction with politics. Merely by entering into another world where Daisy Fitzroy won her revolution, the game erases the history of oppression that started the revolution in the first place. This Daisy may not be the same as the one you agreed to arm and that, in and of itself is a letdown. A conceit of Bioshock Infinite's multi-dimensional travel is that you can't actually escape your past or wipe the slate clean. Only DeWitt's death solves the problem of Comstock's tyranny--his death before any of his actions are taken. In that model, we have to assume that Daisy is somewhat stable across multiple dimensions and the game's refusal to acknowledge that is just another way in which she is used poorly. Infinity does not mean infinite narrative possibilities. It only proves that entropy is true in stories as well as physics. When there are millions of subtly different revolutions all happening at the same time, it is hard to really care about the outcome of one.
Bioshock Infinite has a lot of great things going for it (don't even get me started on the beautifully Gothic subplot about the death of Comstock's wife, now interred in a glass coffin and guarded by an order of coffin-bearing, raven-wielding zealots). It is a game that seeks to challenge our beliefs about America's relationship with race and our ability to atone for past misdeeds. Unfortunately, as it tries to do those things simultaneously, it ends up undermining and over-simplifying the politics that make it so intriguing to begin with.
