Jolt Country

hygraed wrote: Fri Apr 12, 2013 8:39 am

AArdvark wrote:I watched some of the gameplay on Youtube. there seems to be a strong religious theme going on. Is that something to do with the plot or are the programmers weird zealots?



THE
CHURCH OF LATTER DAY CODE
AARDVARK

That's one of the main "things" of the game. It's set in an oppressively racist Christian theocracy, which the player works to bring down.

SPOILERS DON'T READ BELOW THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS










Ok so here's the deal. Bioshock Infinite casts the player as a white dude, Booker DeWitt, who shows up in Rapture and is, I guess, justifiably appalled at the segregation and oppression. One of the first choices (I think the first CHOOSE YOUR FATE-type choice) is whether to throw a baseball at an interracial couple as part of a carnival attraction, or throw it at the carnival barker. Either way, a fight breaks out and you go on to murder a million billion dudes. Throwing the baseball at the barker instead of the couple makes them show up about an hour later and give you some consumable items.

This scene is an example of the bullshit choices that pass for moral dilemmas in many modern games, something I've heard described as "dogkicking": do you feed this dog, or do you kick it? There's no dilemma and there's no choice. If you're playing a good character, you do the obviously good thing, and if you're playing a bad character, you do the opposite. Ken Levine made a big deal in some interview about how it speaks to how far we've come as a society that he never saw anyone throw the ball at the couple during playtesting or prerelease demos. No shit. Who's going to do that when someone's watching you? It doesn't speak to the eradication of racism among gamers; listen to five minutes of any Call of Duty public multiplayer match to give lie to this notion.

Now let us turn our attention to the main story of the game. The main conflict is between the Founders, the Christian white nationalist followers of Comstock, the founder of Columbia, and the Vox Populi, a group of radical anti-racist revolutionaries led by black emancipationist Daisy Fitzroy. The way the game treats this conflict is a double dose of reactionary bullshit. Not only do you get a whole bunch of white savior nonsense where the oppressed black population of Columbia sits idly by while the white protagonist works to free them from subjugation, near the end of the game the protagonist turns on the Vox Populi because he feels that their use of violence makes them just as bad as their oppressors. This is honestly the most absurd thing in the game to me: it completely ignores the vast numbers of black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries who worked materially to free themselves and other black people from slavery and oppression, and it completely ignores the fact that by the time Booker condemns the Vox Populi for their violent tactics, he's killed hundreds and hundreds of people.

Anyway, this is why Bioshock Infinite is a crock of shit. It uses early 20th-century racist attitudes as an aesthetic crutch, a way to point and say "Look! Games are art now! This one's about racism!" despite the fact that it never, ever makes a salient point about racism other than saying "racism is bad" in the broadest way possible, or engaging with the real-world history of the time period it explores. What a waste. What a lazy, arrogant paean to reactionary centrism. I discard it.

Ken Levine made a big deal in some interview about how it speaks to how far we've come as a society that he never saw anyone throw the ball at the couple during playtesting or prerelease demos. No shit. Who's going to do that when someone's watching you? It doesn't speak to the eradication of racism among gamers; listen to five minutes of any Call of Duty public multiplayer match to give lie to this notion.