About an hour into Bioshock Infinite, you are expected to make a disturbing choice. After winning a lottery during a festive day on the floating air city of Columbia, your character's "prize" is to chuck a baseball into the faces of an interracial couple being punished for their crime of being found together.

BioShock Infinite takes place in 1912, and the game fully plays on the values and paranoias of the time, including this one. As you wind up for the pitch, you're presented with the option of hitting the couple, or tossing it at the man who led them onto the stage. This all takes place in front of a crowd frothing for a good show.

"I haven't seen anyone throw the ball at the couple yet," says BioShock Infinite creator and Irrational Games co-founder Ken Levine.

The decision doesn't impact much in the game. You'll see the couple later if you chose not to throw the ball at them, but they don't change the flow of the narrative or help you significantly in the future, grateful that you spared them. Levine is not so much interested in how choices change gameplay, but how the player feels in that moment of choice.

"It's interesting that people put value in things that actually have no real world meaning," Levine says. "But that's the wonderful thing about fiction; people sort of hook value to things in their head that don't actually exist. Attaching emotional value to things that don't exist is the joy of art — and the definition of insanity."

The ability to make difficult choices is a hallmark of the BioShock franchise. In the first BioShock, players were introduced to young girls, called the Little Sisters, who gathered Adam — a material that helped you gain supernatural abilities — from dead bodies. They were zombie-like in their service, but you had the option to save them. You could turn a Little Sister back into a more human version of herself, or kill her to harvest even more of that magical material. The player had to reconcile reward with their own moral compass. There was also the incentive that maybe helping the Little Sisters now would get you a reward down the line.

"I'm more interested in watching that moment and the emotional reaction they have at that moment of choice than I am in going to the screen and tracking some morality numbers as time goes on," Levine says.

In the end, it's a wash as to whether this really affects the game. You end up with similar resources, and the ending only differs by a cinematic. Levine argues that it's more important for you to have made that decision, and to have felt the weight of existing in this world where killing or sparing young girls is a casual button press.

But because that same interaction is repeated more than 20 times in the game, Levine says it loses its power. He wants all the choices you make in BioShock Infinite to carry weight.

It's hard to even link BioShock Infinite to the previous BioShock when you first watch the trailers. But fans will be able to feel the strong connections within the first 10 minutes of gameplay.

One link is the strong villains. BioShock had the enigmatic Andrew Ryan, who didn't like morals or government telling him how to run his life, so he went beneath the waves to make his own city. BioShock Infinite mirrors that with the ultra-nationalist religious leader Father Comstock, who has taken his floating city Columbia out of the hands of America. Both men represent more complex villains than you'll find in many games.

"I wanted to make Andrew Ryan a character that people could relate to just a little. He became a monster, but he started out as a guy who wanted something, with a passion for life that he felt he couldn't have anywhere else," Levine explains. "None of the things that happened in Rapture were possible to create anywhere else. Nobody else would allow him the lifestyle he wanted."

Comparably rich villains are usually reserved for other fictitious media; comics, books or television. It's another device used to bring players into the world, Levine says.

"If you scratch any person, what kind of monster lies beneath?" Levine says, referring to people's complexities. "Every good villain actually thinks they are the hero of the story."

The reason you might not see as much great narrative in games, Levine simply says, is because it's hard to pull off. Often having a game with great gameplay systems — fun action, clever strategy — runs counter to points where you want to add a great narrative. Telltale Games' episodic point-and-click The Walking Dead was held up by critics as a great example of story interwoven with gameplay. But Levine argues that's because the game had to sacrifice a lot of the systems that define other genres.

"In The Walking Dead, the things you can do are preordained by the designers. They know all the paths you can take, and they are distinct. They are more distinct in some ways than our paths, but they are also more particular," Levine says. "The things Clementine [the game's young character] can react to are much smaller, so they can write all the options of things you can react to."

This means that only so many scenarios can happen in the game. Levine wasn't being disparaging; he says Telltale just made different design decisions than a more action-heavy game like BioShock Infinite can afford to make while still accounting for player choice.

Levine has lots of reasons for wanting to make BioShock Infinite a wonderful action game with a great story. As a gamer, it's the kind of game he loves to play. The bigger reason is that action games sell. It's no secret that Irrational Games did a lot of research on "average gamers" during the early development of BioShock Infinite. Reps went to frat houses to talk to guys who primarily played Call of Duty and Halo games to see what they thought of the first BioShock, and altered BioShock Infinite's cover art and marketing materials to fall in line.

This may be a tough pill for die-hard fans of the series to swallow, but Levine says it's for the greater good of getting to tell the story he wants. He points to movies like Inception and The Matrix — action movies hiding deeper plots and complex themes beneath a candy-coated shell of guns and cool.

"They managed to sell an egghead movie like Inception without compromising their vision," Levine says." When we look at that, and think of how we sell this game, there isn't a lot of compromise inside the game on the themes and the story we're telling. Our story isn't trying to please everyone; in fact it tends to piss off a lot of people. But that can be shown to a broad audience if you give it to them in the right way."

BioShock Infinite does play with a lot of themes that could offend, including the situation mentioned earlier. The game experiments with the ideals of the early 1900s, and many would be incongruous with the beliefs held today in America. It also explores when religion and nationalism become fanaticism. These may be challenging ideas to market to a broad audience, but Levine says he relishes the problem.

"If I didn't like challenges, we would have just made a Rapture sequel, and we would have put in three kinds of new splicers, five new weapons, and hey, Andrew Ryan's brother just showed up. [This game] is challenging, and it's not for everyone, but I like making things like that," he says. "Honestly, a lot time you spend is questioning things. You have to sort of have faith in yourself sometimes, especially on the narrative side."

BioShock Infinite arrives for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC March 26.

Images courtesy Irrational Games/2K Games.