SPOILER WARNING: I will make no effort to conceal any pieces of information from the plot of Bioshock: Infinite.
I would ask the reader to recall the beginning of Bioshock. There’s a plane crash and a lighthouse, and then the player is faced with that gigantic crimson banner, “No gods or kings. Only Man.” You descend a flight of stairs, walk into a bronze sphere, and then the game introduces you to its philosophy.
If you haven’t seen it, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7sjDZeD8fk
By the time Johnny gets his guts cut out by a Splicer, you know a good deal of what you need to know about the city, and the rest is only so much icing on the delicious cake. Audio logs will later reveal the more subtle points of Ryan’s philosophy and the world he built, but it all makes sense. As Ryan says in one of the logs, it was impossible to build Rapture anywhere else, and the world the game creates makes you believe that. It makes you believe that this libertarian paradise existed, it gives a clear reason for both the fact and the manner of its peculiar existence, and the apparent ruin to which the city has come by the time Johnny gets a hook in the belly tells a narrative all it’s own.
I might have belabored the point here, but what I’m trying to point out is that Bioshock manages (more or less) in hardly five minutes a number of important things that Bioshock: Infinite fails to do throughout the course of the whole game. As I view them, I’ll list them so that we’re clear, and then I’ll address how Infinite fails to do so.
1) Why the setting is what it is
2) The essential character of the central antagonist
3) The essential unifying credo, or belief system, which unifies the characters in the setting
4) The current state of affairs in the setting.
5) The overriding thematic principles of the game.
1) It’s quickly established that Columbia is a city in the sky, that’s the central gimmick of its existence. But as for myself, having honestly wanted to love the game and having sought out every audio log I could find, I could never figure out why it was in the sky. Okay, Comstock is a prophet and supposedly the people here are those who follow his faith, or teachings, or something, but I never felt like they managed to sufficiently address why it had to be in the sky, it just was.
2) Again, having carefully played through the game, I could not really give a succinct explanation of Comstock’s character. (*SPOILER WARNING - DO NOT READ THE NEXT SENTENCE IF YOU DON’T WANT THE ENDING SPOILED*) Okay, he’s an alternate universe Booker Dewitt who accepted baptism, and then I guess built a flying city with a physicist, and used her tech to steal his alternate universe daughter and build a flying city with his single-minded, idiotic followers. But this doesn’t really tell us anything about him. So, what, he’s egomaniacal, egotistical, openly deceitful, power-hungry and heavy-laden with a kind of caricatured Christian fundamentalism? That’s not an engaging character, that’s a list of things that most people in most places agree totally suck. That’s not a person, it’s an unrelatable, 2-dimensional washboard, and even then it’s not ever clear why he does what he does.
Andrew Ryan does what he does because he can, because the city he built is founded on the principle of doing what you can, and because he fundamentally believes in the preservation of absolute liberty. Comstock does what he does because... because... because he’s an ass? Because he wants to rule the world? Because he wants to destroy the world? I’m saddened because those really do seem to be the apparent motivations, but there’s never an explanation why except that he fancies himself a prophet or because he’s a kind of generally completely undesirable sort.
3. I was excited early on in the game when Booker wakes to see Jefferson, Washington and Franklin in marble, raised to the status of gods. “Okay,” I thought, “this ought to be interesting to see fleshed out.” After all, the founding fathers and their dreadful pieces of old paper are often elevated to the status of demigods in American politics, so there could be some interesting content there. Also, the gigantic poster and chapel proclaim Comstock as “our prophet”, and though married he styles himself “Father Comstock” (Anglican maybe?)
But never once does the game lay down a central philosophy for the place you’re in. There are characteristics: the people are white, they’re racist, they’re religious, they’re patriotic, but they have no binding ideology. Comstock apparently leads them, and they apparently revere the aforementioned “Founders” along with John Wilkes Boothe, but for a community that is supposedly so religious they have no religion.
There’s no creed, it’s never quite clear what Comstock has prophesied or when he did it. There’s no text that you can read, even in snippets. There’s no religious practice, except apparently wearing white to get baptized, which isn’t exactly original and doesn’t really distinguish you from Christianity when you’re talking about God cleansing your sins.
That raises even another question. Are these people supposed to be Christians? Is Comstock their god? Do they even really have a God? Are they a kind of re-imagined Mormonism IN (almost) SPACE?
4. When you arrive in the game, everything is more or less hunky-dory. Things get chaotic as you trounce about killing police officers, but it’s never really clear what the general state of the city is in reaction to your shenanigans. Really, everything seems fine until Elizabeth starts opening tears. And then, things just get terribly convoluted. Part of this serves a point the game wants to get across, confusion, but it does so in a way that’s nowhere near as meaningful as the game wants it to be.
It ends up that the player just goes from place to place, following the arrow on the ground to the next objective, confused at what exactly the stakes are, how they got to be that way, who is in power, and even who is alive in the present universe. This is bewildering, and it significantly detracts from the gameplay experience.
5) What exactly is the point of this game? Many will surely say that I just didn’t “get it”, but I’m not willing to give them that. The closest thing I can come to is the often repeated, “We make our choices, but in the end our choices make us,” which is philosophically respectable enough, but even though the game belabours that point and repeats that adage, I never got a feeling that it really expressed it.
The central problem here is the multiple universe quantum mechanics gimmick that is never fundamentally explained in any reasonable way and is much too relied on throughout the narrative.
Okay, I get that Comstock is Comstock, evil and racist and megalomaniacal because he accepted baptism and then apparently went to the academy for universal douchebags. I get that, conversely, Booker Dewitt is a grizzled, regret-filled war veteran with an overcoming sense of guilt because he went to war and also sold his daughter *insert face of confusion* unbeknowingly to an alternate universe version of himself, fairly well understanding this concept a solid 30 years before the notion entered the scientific community?
And then at the last Elizabeth kills Dewitt at baptism so he can never become Comstock? Or she kills all of the versions of Dewitt that accept baptism? Or did she kill all of them? It’s not clear, and while the writers are aiming for a kind of Henry James-esque ambiguous ending, what they end up with is a confounding two headed monster.
The first of these heads is a confusing mix up of universes and what exactly cross-dimensional traveling abilities get you. At one point, while Dewitt and Elizabeth are on an airship of sorts, the twins seemingly teleport from platform to platform, muttering their meaningless babble. This teleporting thing is something they have a habit of doing throughout the game, and the implied explanation is that they’re cross-dimensional beings or something like that, able to travel through different universes.
Now, I’m not an expert on quantum theory, but it seems to me that the ability to travel from one universe to another should not scientifically work out to teleportation and time travel. I know that in its fullness quantum theory implies that every possible fulfillment of all possible events on all possible scales occurs simultaneously in one of an infinite number of universes, or something like that, but how exactly does the teleportation thing work? Have the twins traveled, offscreen, to an alternate universe with a convenient walkway to the next spot, at which point they have exited and re-entered Booker’s universe? That reeks of bad storytelling.
Similarly, how has the Booker Dewitt the player has just moved through a whole game with traveled back in time to the time of his baptism (or not)? What universe is that in, or is it all the universes? Why isn’t the Booker who was actually there, there? Also, how did I travel something like 40 years into the future in the segment where Elizabeth sets New York to flame? I don’t remember the player going through a tear, or one being opened, but even if that is the case, have I been transported through to a universe where events as I remember them all happened 40 years ago and I’m only now arriving on scene?
My larger point here is that the whole infinite universes concept tends towards telling a terrible story.
Yes, I will admit with a groan, quantum mechanics do technically make this viable, somehow, because it’s conceivable that Booker exists in a universe where he is transported between universes ad hoc, and because there are “infinite” (knee slap here) universes, all of this is *technically* coherent.
Nonetheless, when you stop saying, “Here’s a coherent narrative of characters acting out fantastic events in a fantastic setting” and you start saying things like, “Let’s throw them from THE SKY and into a recreation of the beginning of Bioshock 1 AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN because everyone will like that and it’s technically viable since we’ve given ourselves infinite possibilities”, you’re using technical possibility as a lazy story mechanic that is at once bewildering, befuddling, confusing and nowhere near as interesting as it thinks it is.
The second head on this apocalyptic chimera is Bioshock: Infinite’s criticism of religion, which gets its own header because it’s so special.
Religion in Columbia
*Disclaimer: I am what you might call a person of specific religious commitment, meaning that I do follow a system of religious beliefs and practices which inform my life, my education, my worldview and my criticisms. I cannot speak objectively about religion because I am what I am and I have not come to any position on the subject of religious belief other than, well, the one to which I have come, and since that has informed my mental processes for all of my life I can hardly purport to abandon it now. That being said, it is worth noting that no one can really be completely objective on any subject matter at any time, for the exact same reasons. We all have our positions and if we pretend to abandon them completely we are only lying to ourselves. We can approach objectivity, but never reach it. Furthermore, having actually studied “Religion and Philosophy” as my major course of study in college, I actually am more qualified to speak on these matters than the average bear, and whether or not you disagree or agree with my criticisms, I assure you they are a valid, reasoned response to the game and not a knee-jerk, emotional reaction to the criticisms of specific religious commitment within this game.*
Bioshock: Infinite, among many other things, seeks to go where few games have gone before and make intelligent points about religion as a system of things that people do because they believe that certain other statements are true i.e. I follow Comstock because I believe that the truth value of his claims, both metaphysical and physical, is positive. I say that it seeks to do this because it clearly thinks of itself and its points very well, but as an authority on the matter I can assure you that Bioshock: Infinite fails to make any substantial claims or criticisms of religion, at all. Its two major criticisms can be found in 1) the populous of Columbia and 2) how Comstock becomes Comstock. I honestly wish I could say more about implicit criticisms which would stem from the constructed religion that centers on Comstock and the founding fathers, but since the game does not give us any real meat on the fictional religion itself, I can’t comment on it.
1. We’re all mad (up) here
The implication which the player is supposed to draw from the heavy-handed introduction, gigantic “Father Comstock: Our Prophet” posters, the religious service which is the entrance to the city, the “False Shepard” rhetoric which fills the early game and the tireless, questionless obedience which the populous of Columbia exhibits toward the commands and wishes of Father Comstock is that the people in Columbia are, for genuine lack of a better term, a “cult” who follow Comstock as their charismatic leader.
The implication here is that Comstock offers them an almost assuredly false religious vision of reality which is compelling enough to them that they literally move off of the face of the planet, follow him into a palace in the clouds, and there become his willing, single-minded adherents, (or at least pretend to) doing whatever he wants out of what can be properly called a cult mentality. This is made more or less explicit early on in the game when someone tries to commit acts of violence against the protagonist and he casually remarks, “People will do anything for their beliefs.”
Again, the obvious implication here is the standard cult paradigm noted by Lorne L. Dawson in his book, Comprehending Cults. The implication of this paradigm is that the characters in the game who are adherents to Comstock’s vision and, similarly, anyone with alternative religious commitments, has been deceived into believing an obviously false system of metaphysical truth claims which they (the adherents) buy into because of some psychological weakness. Because of their absolute (read: mindless) commitment to this vision, they are willing to do almost anything (suicide, acts of violence against others, obtuse and strange lifestyle commitments, racism) for the sake of their religious commitments. The implication is that this is a frequent pattern and a definite evil of both fervently held traditional religious commitments and fervently held alternative religious commitments. Usually, there is also some implication of “brainwashing”, or the non-consensual bending of one’s will by subversive, often subconscious, acts of manipulation to which the adherents are susceptible.
What few want to recognize in the modern world is that of all the “cults” or alternative religious commitments in the world, of which there have been millions in the last 60 years, only about 5 of these instances has turned out in a violent way, and only about 3 of these instances seems to have been so because of internal, religious motivators. (See Dawson’s book for a more in-depth look on this understudied subject matter.)
This cult paradigm is by almost all academic accounts (both atheist and theist) a falsehood, a myth which is created by right-wing religious conservatives and multimedia giants so they can sell narratives of alternative religion as narratives of something of which the general public should be very scared and very concerned.
Returning to Infinite’s criticism, it essentially boils down to the most toothless, juvenile criticism possible, which could be universally applicable to commitments both religious and non-religious. Infinite as a whole has hardly anything more to say on the subject matter than its protagonist was quoted as saying earlier. “Sometimes,” the game says with a proud self-conceit, “people believe things. Sometimes they believe crazy things. Sometimes people who believe crazy things do shitty things to people for no real reason.”
Of course, Infinite fails to address whether or not this is just shitty people doing shitty things with religious conviction as a justification, and seems to imply that the correlation with a religious ideology is the causation for the acts of violence and the single-mindedness of characters in the game.
A concluding note on this section is something I would urge. If, as the internal logic of the game and the theory of quantum mechanics suggest, there are infinite universes with every possible scenario worked out, why is it that we don’t get to see a Columbia that exists with a Father Comstock who is not a complete asshole of a false prophet, but is perhaps a simple, visionary Anglican priest who leads a peaceful, loving, unprejudiced city in the sky of holiness and charity for all? The internal logic and the nature of the Christian religion from which Comstock supposedly gets his assholeishness both make this a possibility. After all, as modern persons like to forget, there were people in the north like B.T. Roberts and his Free Methodist Church who were politically liberal, kick-ass awesome, loving toward all, opposed to all slavery and racism and even down with women’s rights as far back as 1865, perfectly in line with Infinite’s timeline. Somewhere, in some universe, there literally must, by account of the game’s logic, be a Booker Dewitt who studied with loving, charitable people like B.T. Roberts and started a loving, awesome city of Columbia that was a shining beacon of hope for all of humanity. Why don’t we get to see any of that Columbia?
2. Really?
To reiterate, the game’s final, central plot twist is that more or less the only thing that differentiates Booker Dewitt, the grizzled, hardy and troubled but ultimately loving, committed and good-hearted protagonist from Father Comstock, the cowardly, soft, deceitful, hateful, manipulative, overzealous and, in case we didn’t hate him enough already, dreadfully racist and outright eugenic antagonist, is that after participating in the Battle of Bull Run, those who became Booker Dewitt did not accept Christian baptism and those who became Father Comstock did accept Christian baptism.
In case you didn’t hear that correctly, let me reiterate (I’ll admit my commitment to objectivity is lacking in the next two sentences).
If Booker Dewitt does not become a Christian he does sell his daughter to an alternate universe version of himself, but ultimately he’s still generally the kind of person you would call a good guy because he did not accept Christian baptism. If Booker Dewitt does become a Christian, he becomes a menacing, megalomaniacal tyrant and false prophet who kidnaps his own daughter across universes, imprisons her, kills his own wife and then tries to kill the alternate universe version of himself while setting up a blatantly false religion and juxtaposing himself as the only correct voice over and against the billions of voices that make up “The Sodom Below”, all because he became a Christian.
The causation implied by the end of the game is that it’s not Booker Dewitt maybe being a shitty person, it’s not some other event that makes him cynical and detached from the charitable core of the Christian faith, it’s not some horrendous life tragedy that makes him become an exploitative tyrant. No, instead it’s the corrupting nature of the Christian religion in his life. Speaking as objectively as I can, I honestly dare you to watch the end of Bioshock: Infinite and tell me if there’s any other explanation offered by the way the game is written.
...Okay, I won’t wait for and respond to your comments here because, after all, I’m in the middle of writing.
My bigger point is that it’s simply in bad taste. I’m a Christian, and I can assure you that I’m better for it, but what is specifically implied by the ending of Bioshock: Infinite is that the influence of Christianity, not any other religion but Christianity, is so corrupting that it drives Booker Dewitt to become a priest and a dictator in the clouds.
I’ve read several works by Richard Dawkins, and I don’t think that even he, for all his overblown hatred of religion, has such a thoroughly negative opinion. I like to think that if backed into a corner he would admit that there have at least been some circumstances in which faith and religion were good things. He comes close to saying as much in his proposed evolutionary explanation for religion as a sociological fact.
But Bioshock: Infinite sees his point and screams an emphatic, “No!”
There are something like 4 or 4.5 billion monotheists in the world, and most of the rest of the world is Polytheist, Buddhist, or of alternative religious commitment.
If you listen to half the people talking about Bioshock: Infinite on the internet, they’re hailing it as one of the most glorious, perceptive, well-constructed and intellectual games ever. This is, by proclamation of the gaming community, one of our standards for what terms like good, thoughtful, and well-written ultimately mean. And in this world of easily 6 or 6.5 people of specific religious commitment, Bioshock: Infinite’s message in a bottle to the rest of the world from the gaming community is that engaging in a specific religious commitment has the sincere potential to turn you into a maniacal, evil, racist tyrant in the clouds.
As a student of religion, philosophy, and history I am sincerely forced by an honest observation of history, philosophy and religion to say:
No, Irrational Games and gamers around the world, that is not true, and there is no substantial evidence in philosophy, religion or history to point to an even vaguely positive truth value to the thematic claims of your game.
As a practitioner of a specific religion, more specifically the one Bioshock: Infinite is demonizing I am compelled to answer:
I am sorry that you think that, but I promise that if life’s burdens are laying heavy on you and you have nowhere else to turn, you can probably go to most churches or mosques or temples or pagan drum circles and find a place where real people will show you real love and do their sincere best to make you feel loved and welcomed, no racism, no classism, no deception, and no despotic flying cities.
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