stillgray:

Warning: BioShock Infinite spoilers lay ahead. If you’ve yet to play the game, I recommend doing so before reading on. If you don’t care or have otherwise completed the game, press on.

BioShock Infinite, one of this year’s contenders for Game of the Year, has been accused of racism.

At the source of all of these accusations is a blogger named Jeff Kunzler, who argues in his blog that the game is racist on the basis that its creators intend to promote a racist agenda. He argues that this isn’t “ironic”, and that he considers the game to be every bit as racist as the National Liberty Foundation (an organization which recently used BioShock Infinite’s concept art to promote a xenophobic perspective) with the difference that the game’s developers “just, well, know how to hide it better.”

It’s true that the game is a bit tone deaf when it comes to its depiction of the minorities, who make up the vast majority of the organization called the Vox Populi, who rebel against the Founders—Columbia’s overlords and ruling class.

In short, they’re depicted as being every bit as violent as their oppressors and very little characterization is given to fleshing them out as human beings with motivations beyond “kill whitey.”

That’s deplorable, true, but it doesn’t imply that the game’s creators are racist or that their “message” is that the solution to racism lies somewhere in the middle between oppression and liberty—only that violence, more often than not, begets violence.

The message I got out of the game was that revolutions are often violent and that the motivations of some characters, such as the Vox Populi leader Daisy Fitzroy, may not necessarily be pure. She is motivated by revenge against those who oppressed her rather than a desire to set her people free. Casting off their chains is secondary to the revenge she seeks against Comstock, who framed her for his wife’s murder. The Voxophones, paltry though they might be as a storytelling device, serve to enforce this understanding of the context. Miss them and you might miss the story.

If anything, the presence of Daisy Fitzroy is a critique that had nothing to do with race and shows how the oppressive segregation took its toll in more than just lives, but in her sanity. After all, the game doesn’t even chastise Fitzroy for initially rising up. The only chastising that the game does is against the latter version of Fitzroy’s ruthlessness and power-hungry attitude. Seen as a single character, Fitzroy is not an extension of the entire Vox Populi. That particular read is something you’d have to personally make while playing the game.

Fitzroy’s attitude can be summed up in the Voxophone where she declares her intent: “The one thing people need to learn is that fear is the antidote to fear. I don’t want to be a part of their world. I don’t want to be a part of their culture, their politics, their people. The sun is setting on their world, and soon enough, all they gon’ see…is the dark.”

Before the game goes full-on with the revolution, you step into the homes of people who were committed to changing public opinion about minorities and encouraging society to do away with racism and slavery. The game makes a big point of it by showing you their printing press operations.

Unfortunately, the story moves on and the revolution gets ahead of whatever efforts these peaceniks were conducting. The game seems to throw all of this out the window when it depicts the Vox Populi as being just as bad as the Founders. Booker even says “when it comes down to it, the only difference between Comstock and Fitzroy is how you spell the name.” Is that offensive? I don’t know. It’s just how things worked out for Columbia. I don’t think the game has the responsibility to tell anything more than the story its creators set out to tell and forcing them to make some sort of political statement about how the revolutionaries are the “good guys” only serves to weaken whatever nuance the game seems to have.

At this point in the game, the revolution serves as little more than a backdrop to the science fiction and the character drama between Elizabeth and Booker, which is unfortunate because up until this point, the game’s politics had a lot going for it beyond “red versus blue.”

If the game is guilty of anything, it’s that it just doesn’t go far enough with its politics and keeps it at arm’s length.