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Infinite’s revolutionary moment has already been detailed and evidenced with care by Adam Sessler and Forbes’ Paul Tassi. Rather than echoing something well said and best said once—and erroneous thereafter—I mean to take another focus, and consider how, exactly, BI innovates with regards to VG story-telling; and how it stands apart, positively and negatively, from its two official predecessors (discounting System Shock as a faithful member of the line, notwithstanding Infinite’s incestuous, lighthouse-mutliverse proposition).

One of the chief concerns vexing futurists leading the video game industry is what’s next? What will maximize player-involvement? While one frequently proposed solution concerns what’s beneath the hood or what colour the vehicle’s painted, a great deal of the time, developers concern themselves with the controls. What, ultimately, is the best interface to use in order to seamlessly connect users with great stories and engaging environments, or vice versa? Over the past decade, we’ve seen several natural user interfaces (NUIs) crop up, such as the Kinect and the Wii. These platforms have focused on achieving a sense of immediacy and immersion by attempting to erase all traditional evidence of intervening members, mediums or agents; asserting the player as controller. While I’m sure we’ll see a great deal more of these NUIs, I fear it’s presently a shoddy way to grab attention, and a worse way to implicate the user in any given story (e.g it’s pretty hard to become properly immersed in, say a raid on a Al Qaeda compound, when you’re trouncing around in your living room, dressed in sweats, every once in a while glimpsing the silliness reflected by your television). The surreality and awkward synthesis in these kinetic NUIs prompts a sense of disconnect. The material inconsistency makes us hyper-aware of our physicality, and thus, the game’s artificiality. What intrigues me about Infinite is its unapologetic employ of a conventional GUI and how this seemingly archaic gateway accomplishes immersion to such a high degree. In their antiquated yet nevertheless important work on remediation, Bolter and Grusin argue that: “If immediacy is promoted by removing the programmer/creator from the image, it can also be promoted by involving the viewer more intimately in the image.” BI has done just that.

Infinite doesn’t revolutionize the heads-up-display, and, follows, for the most part, FPS interface conventions to a tee. As for the avatar, you’re certainly not “you”—at least not in the Wii Sports sense. Rather, you assume control of Booker DeWitt, an indebted Pinkerton in the year 1912. DeWitt has a dynamic-enough personality, history, and purpose for you to adopt. As you navigate your way through the horrific “utopia” of Columbia, he yammers away. It’s all the free indirect discourse you could ask for, further characterizing with off-hand remarks and observational commentary. In mirror pools, it is his face you look back on. When taking a beating, his are the hands that you see cling out for help—scars, gore, and all. Save for her agency exercised in furious button-mashing, the player’s substance is not intermediated into the world. Even this causal sway is illusory; you have less than indicated, notwithstanding the explosive promise of your assumed arsenal and “vigors.” At the outset, it’s the same-old.

Bolter and Grusin have suggested that in a video game, the “player is often both actor and director.” In the case of Infinite, the player is actor, director, and audience. You frame your shots; you role play to the point of emotional connection and interest; and you relish the world and events over which you have no control as impotent observer. (Frequently these moments of passive engagement are the most rewarding.) Infinite’s immersivity is intricately linked to all three of these roles, but the third in particular, and this is where it really shines. Unlike the cinephile or the bookworm, the place for the audience inBioshock is in the fictional air-borne city of Columbia—in its embattled streets, Chicagoan-esque fair, and its sky palaces. From time to time, you’re free to walk off the script—off the page. Such non-linear moments harkens back to Bioshock 1 and System Shock. Where meandering in the remediated forms entails an introspective or mental projection, deviation and exploration in Columbia is intruded. Appealing to Marshall McLuhan’s distinction, in this sense, Bioshock’s a very hot media unlike its literary equivalent. And in order to achieve the most for yourself as audience member, you must first and then coincidentally exercise your directorial and acting chops—becoming Booker; scrutinizing the script; seeking out Columbia’s kinetoscopes and voxophones; and haphazardly tumbling through 2K’s faux-maze, down the rabbit hole.

Just as in Bioshock I and II, there are cinematic sequences where, save for the shake or nod of the head, you are strictly an observer, and these scripted events carry inevitable story consequences forward (e.g. the death of a villain; the collapse of a particular monument). To avoid Infinite unfolding as a typical action flick, the player must go beyond the primary events and flesh out Columbia’s cultural and pictorial implications—its sidelined embedded narratives. This is where you suspend the act, and become director and audience. Had I not ambled about reading, listening, and gawking, the game would have—owing to my own impatience—dropped a subjective letter grade.

Columbia’s history and cultural dimension are frequently hidden in plain sight, found whilst traipsing around pre- or post-battle. The search for loot unwittingly turns into a search for meaning. Fascistic propaganda, tattered pennants, kinetoscopes, graffiti, and audio diaries litter the scenery. They add far more than simply to the ambience. The audio diaries, or “voxophones,” provide character motives and biographical details, and link historical events, by way of clues, to their triggers. The kinetoscopes (i.e. primitive motion picture exhibition devices) play sensationalist silent films that speak to the villain Comstock’s treachery as well as to Columbia’s bigoted, jingoist brand of American exceptionalism. The player learns what she cares to learn, and learns more by becoming greater engrossed in the scenery and in the world.

The minutia and image-script of Columbia immerses, but when scrutinized, transforms the ostensibly beautiful sky-flung reality. Just as there are multiple depths to the narrative, there are similarly different Columbia’s we can grow to know. The player’s sense of dissonance and disenchantment will likely increase relative to their cognizance of the class disparities, the racial injustices, the hatred, and the abuse that pervade the sky-city’s glistening streets, shadowed by the furls of red, white, and blue. Much of this knowledge comes by way of interaction with Columbia’s non-essential citizens. Their conversations—sometimes amusing, sometimes perturbing—frequently shed light on the major-characters’ motivations, especially important because without these vignettes, the major characters come off as rather cartoonish and myopic. The enemy characters you battle similarly convey something about the story and the history of Columbia. The Handyman—one of the larger, more terrifying brutes you come across—is an excellent example of 2k and Irrational utilizing the game’s arcade elements to illuminate narrative details. Originally deemed weak or incapable by Comstock’s eugenics-informed standards, this once disabled or injured citizen was mutilated and transformed into a Frankenstein to qualify as a purposeful member of society. His heart beats in a hermetically sealed sphere, surrounded by armored machinery and scrap—all pitiful and terrifying. Amidst an oppressed worker’s revolution and themes of inequality, this enemy-oddity stands testament to the rigidity of Comstock’s ideology and the monstrous implications for those who don’t fit the mould. Sure, you’re shooting him half the time, but that doesn’t lessen his import or relevance. Even at the level of character design, the developers are telling stories—drawing us in with muddled fear and pathos.

If anything in BI drew my attention to the game’s apparatus and interrupted my possession of DeWitt, it was the film-noir loading-screens that broke up Columbia’s sectors/chapters. Valve and Gearbox figured out more than a decade ago with Half Lifethat consistency is crucial for maintaining suspended belief and projected agency. In Half Life, the cut scenes, though scripted, were in-game. Regardless of the event or spectacle, you were always Gordon Freeman, and your perspective never changed. When you transferred from map to map, there was no second media, no loading screen; the frame simply froze with a subtitle to inform you it was, indeed, loading. Had 2K and Irrational employed something similar, I’m sure I would have played Infinite in one sitting, forgetting that I was director, actor, and audience, fully assuming DeWitt (save for the occasional coffee break or ketchup-chip binge). Perhaps the developers were wise to stall me, however; Infinite, though re-playable, only has one ending.

The first Bioshock has three alternate endings. Bioshock 2 has six. So far as I can tell, there is only one for Infinite. I’ve already mentioned how Infinite remediates film and literature, but here it returns to their fatality—their finality (however modern or ambiguous). This is particularly unfortunate granted a) the -Shock series’ attention to moral choice and determinism; and b) the anchorage of Infinite’s plot in multi-verse theory. Apart from a few instances where you’re enabled a Han-Greedo option (shoot first or wait to be foiled), the game runs a strict overall sequence of events, alluding, instead, to a multitude of alternate realities and possibilities. The captivating interactivity of the fairly recent Walking Dead The Game: Season One and the plethora of impactful decisions you button-mash therein has left me wanting more from games that pose ethical quandaries. Even in the first Bioshock, you could either take the quick and easy route, whereby you harvest innocent girls, or conversely, free them for a promised, but not guaranteed, pay-off. Similarly, in Bioshock 2, your choices—often binary (e.g., X or Y)—determined how the citizens of the underwater city of Rapture perceived you, and how your character behaved when you’re bereft of control. It is unfortunate that we’re constantly lectured about choice, morality, and alternate worlds in the game, when Infinite only provides one. Nevertheless, the few opportunities to make decisions and the game’s constant reminders of personal agency were provocative, forcing us to ask, “damn—what would I do?”

While I’ve expressed dismay with the linearity of the game and the singularity of its ending, I realize, this criticism must be checked (especially with DLC packs in the works). After all, to properly create two endings, the developers would—in effect—have had to double their efforts. Not only would this have slowed down production and delayed a game already thrice delayed, but it would have suggested that the primary story was not enough, which is certainly not true. Infinite is revolutionary, but not because of the technology it boasts or its [marginally] emergent game-play. It achieves a high degree of immersion by drawing the player in with a strong concept and a beautiful world, and keeping her there with smart narrative, buoyed at different depths.