László Kajtár
“Infinite possibilities”—it’s like the empty slogan of a laptop manufacturer or sports brand. It says nothing, because our lives often seem quite linear. Considering all the possibilities, all the things that you could have done or been, there is a certain melancholy to this human condition. This is one of the reasons why we like fiction so much—that is, imaginary stories in which we inhabit different people, viewpoints, and worlds. BioShock Infinite is a piece of fiction that lets you peer into a world where this linearity seems overridden by a multiverse where all the possibilities exist. Indeed, the storytelling in Infinite is a form of art.
Wooden planks appear in front of you as you walk through an infinite ocean of lighthouses. At first, the ending of BioShock Infinite might seem like madness, but there’s definitely a method in it. Ken Levine, formerly the creative director of Irrational Games and the creator of BioShock, thinks about stories. In an interview with gaming site Polygon, Levine shared a thought experiment that’s been occupying him about “narrative legos,” about creating an interactive story out of basic story elements.1 So if a guy who thinks about these things is the creative director for a game, you know that the game’s story is going to make sense on some level.
Storytelling is important, maybe even more than many of us would think. Consider the religious zeal of Comstock, which led him to baptize Columbia the “New Eden.” Comstock knows about the power of stories, and he based his creation of Columbia on a twisting and applying biblical and historical narratives. He dreamed up the myth of “The Lamb of Columbia,” a story of how Elizabeth is savior or messiah of the floating city. This story is the reason behind the whole of Columbia turning against Booker, when he’s discovered after the Ruffle and named as the “False Shepherd”. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato (428/427–348/347 bce) was aware of the power of stories too. Unlike Comstock, however, he didn’t use them to support religious tyranny. Plato wrote dialogues in which characters debate and discuss philosophical matters, like what justice or virtue is, or how to live a good life. But sometimes Plato’s characters discuss myths. These myths are related to the philosophical issue, but they illustrate or establish a point by telling a story of gods and heroes that the Greeks were fond of. Even in Plato’s time, stories seemed uniquely important.
If you think about it, stories are unique in their potential to convey information in an effective way, to kick-start the engine in your brain, to affect you emotionally. Ideologies benefit from this. In Infinite, Comstock employs the power of rewriting the stories of history to support his fascist-xenophobic regime. The people of Columbia enthusiastically support white supremacy because a religious leader offers them a narrative about how America’s fate depends on it. So because of their power, stories have these dangers. But why do they have this power? The literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall argues that humans are actually “wired” for storytelling.2 As Gottschall says, in fiction we rehearse or simulate “troublesome” situations, which might assist in developing our abilities to cope. Speaking of coping, recall the line from Robert Lutece: “The mind of the subject will desperately struggle to create memories where none exist.” One possible explanation for why the mind struggles to create memories is that the mind needs the memories to be part of a coherent story to help us make sense of ourselves and the world. The whole backstory of Booker about the debt and the girl is a coping mechanism for the disruptions caused by traveling through parallel realities.
Stories are important for video games.3 Its story is one of the reasons BioShock Infinite resonates with audiences all around the world. During the combat sequences, you struggle to beat the enemies, to stay alive and to be able to shoot, burn, blow up, and electrocute Motorized Patriots or Handymen. You have an interactive stake in the game. It’s not like a movie that you can just watch; you have to skillfully act to progress. Both Rapture and Columbia are among the most memorable video-game settings of all time. Because these environments are so well designed, the player gets quickly invested in the game. Typically, the player doesn’t merely want to kill a bunch of enemies (there are games with better combat anyway), but wants to explore the world. When you wander off from the main storyline to investigate a building or listen to another Voxophone, you’re not playing the game to beat it.4 You’re playing it because you are immersed in the world and the story. BioShock Infinite is thus a good example of why we can call some video games art.
The field of philosophy that deals with art is called aesthetics. It’s notoriously difficult to give a definition of art. Why would you categorize a painting by Paul Cézanne under the same label as a postmodern dance performance or a Bauhaus building or an avant-garde poem? No matter how you try to capture the essential quality or qualities of art, there’ll always be counter-examples. Such is the nature of human creativity. Putting these difficulties to the side, we’ll focus on one philosopher, an American pragmatist named John Dewey (1859–1952). Most people, if asked to give examples of art, would list particular novels, poems, paintings, or symphonies. Dewey thought about art differently. He thought that art is not merely about objects but about experiences.5 It’s not just about the painting but also about seeing the painting. It’s not just about the text of a poem but also about reading it. And this makes sense when it comes to video games like BioShock Infinite.
If you think that it’s even worth asking the question of whether BioShock Infinite is art or not, then you might want to consider this: What is it we’re asking about in this case? We’re not asking about objects like the DVD or the files and folders. We’re not curious about the strings of 1s and 0s that make up the code. When we ask whether Infinite is art, we’re asking about the experience of playing it. To use a technical term, we’re asking whether the experience is an “aesthetic” experience. We’re asking whether the video game designers and programmers have managed to create something that can be enjoyed aesthetically.
For Dewey, the experience of art is not totally different from everyday experiences. Art doesn’t belong in an alien realm. When you fill Booker’s shoes, you can relate to him. He’s motivated to get out of debt, so he goes on a seemingly typical “damsel in distress” mission. As the story develops, the emotional force gets stronger, and it’s not about debt any more but about the sins of a father, about regrets and guilt and about establishing a connection to Elizabeth. In a sense, you virtually become Booker. You live through the beginning, middle, and end of Infinite’s story. From the Luteces dropping you off at the lighthouse to picking Anna up from her crib, you experience the narrative as an organic unity. At the end, you might even use Dewey’s expression “that was an experience.” The adventure through Columbia and parallel realities is not just an experience among others, it’s an experience that is unique. For Dewey, this would be a sign of an aesthetic experience.6 Playing through BioShock Infinite is an experience that is meaningful in a unitary and complete way. This is true even though the storyline is “opaque,” as Ken Levine puts it.
But can BioShock Infinite really be considered a work of art? Is it similar to reading a novel in terms of your experience? If yes, we can call on concepts of aesthetics to help us understand what’s going on when Booker and Elizabeth arrive in Rapture. Columbia is destroyed in 1912, while Rapture was only finished in 1951, and Booker and Elizabeth arrive there in 1960. This is not like the alternate realities of the Lutece “twins” where Booker does not give up his daughter or where Columbia survives and attacks New York City in 1983–84. The latter are variants of what happens in BioShock Infinite. We can think about them as “what could have been” or “what will be if this and that.” But what the hell is Rapture doing there?
My answer relies on a term of literary criticism: “meta-fiction.” “Meta” originates in Greek and means “after” or “beyond.” In many contemporary uses, it has to do with “aboutness”: meta-language is a language about language, meta-theory is a theory about theories, and so on. You can call the world of BioShock Infinite a “meta-universe,” a universe of universes. The term meta-fiction, fiction about fiction, is mostly applied to modern and contemporary works of art—works of art that are “self-conscious” or “self-referential,” works of art that call attention to being works of art. Novels often do this by telling stories about an author composing the story or about the reader reading it. Movies can be about people making a movie. (The hip reaction to this is: “Wow, that movie was so meta!”)7
But what does this have to do with BioShock Infinite? As outrageous as it sounds, I think this is the only way to explain the appearance of Rapture in the game. In forums and comments, people have tried to set up explicit connections between the two cities, somehow forcing them into the same universe. Is Rapture the same as Columbia sunk under the sea? Is Comstock the same person as Andrew Ryan in a different alternate universe? Such understandings seem unwarranted. Playing through BioShock Infinite, there are no allusions at all to Rapture. In the scene when you travel to the future, to New Year’s Eve of 1983, going into 1984 (a gentle nod to George Orwell), seeing Columbia attack New York City, you don’t get any references to Rapture. The developers know better than anyone that their previous two games were set in a really cool underwater city called Rapture. If they wanted to make an explicit connection between the two storylines this way, they would have made it.
Consider what Grant Tavinor says about the original BioShock:
The metaphor of being immersed in a fictional world is surely not accidental—BioShock is self-aware in a way that draws attention to its nature as a video game and as a fictional world into which players step as actors.8
This is crucial in why Booker and Elizabeth arrive in Rapture. The Rapture scene is the prelude to the sequence with infinite lighthouses. This is about telling stories. You see how the “meta” is creeping in: the makers of BioShock Infinite reflect on the potential of video games to tell stories. In a sense, BioShock Infinite is a video game about video games, particularly about video game stories and worlds. When Elizabeth says, “there’s always a lighthouse, there’s always a man, there’s always a city,” she doesn’t just mean Booker’s 123 attempts to defeat Comstock and rescue her. BioShock has been about creating awesome worlds that players can inhabit and explore, and in which they can follow intriguing storylines. These are constant features, just as the lighthouses, the main characters, and the cities are. They are always there. What is variable is whether you go up to the sky or under the sea.
A lighthouse, a man, a city. This is almost saying: we’ve created a fictional world (city) into which you, the player (man) can enter through a “doorway” (lighthouse). I’d conjecture that BioShock Infinite is called “Infinite” precisely because of the infinite lighthouses that appear to Booker and Elizabeth in the weird space they cross close to the ending. Infinite lighthouses mean infinite stories—stories that take place in Rapture, stories in Columbia, stories in other video games, in other worlds that are experienced a bit differently by each one of us playing them. BioShock Infinite is meta-fictional even in its title: it is about the possibility of infinite stories.
“Constants and variables”—Booker echoes Elizabeth’s words, trying to comprehend them. These words are about Booker’s previous 122 journeys to Columbia, which are forgotten, but they are also about the constants and variables of the alternate universes. Sometimes it seems like a constant that Booker was part of the Wounded Knee Massacre and it’s a variable that he went through with the baptism afterwards and turned into Comstock. The ending of the game offers another possibility: a variable of Booker’s being alive to become Comstock. Many possible Elizabeths appear and kill him at the baptism by drowning him, effectively destroying the possibility of Booker becoming Comstock. These are constants and variables of the alternate universes in BioShock Infinite. And then, sometimes Booker is a private investigator in Rapture, sometimes he is called Jack and Comstock is Andrew Ryan. These are constants and variables of the meta-universe that is BioShock.
Lighthouses, men, and cities. These are archetypes. The word comes from Greek: “arkhe” is something like a primitive or a foundation, put together with “tupos,” which means model. An archetype is an original model on which later instantiations are created. BioShock makes lighthouses into archetypes with symbolic meaning. There are two lighthouses: one offers entry into Rapture, the other into Columbia. What is common to both of them is the symbolic property of offering entry into these fictional worlds. This is what “being a lighthouse” means in BioShock. It’s like when you open a book or when the room in the cinema goes dark. “They are doors,” says Elizabeth.
The notion of archetypes was used influentially by the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Jung thought that the human psyche has ancient archetypes in what he termed the “collective unconscious.”9 What he meant by this is that these archetypes exist in your mind as well as my mind from birth in the same way, without you or me necessarily being aware of them. These archetypes can explain the common structural features of ancient myths and religions. For example, the recurring symbolic image of “the mother” is present in many cultures. Like most stories, the narratives of the BioShock series use archetypes. And again, this helps to make the case that BioShock Infinite is a work of art, similar to novels and movies. It’s a work of art because it uses similar techniques, resources, and methods to tell its stories. Not only does BioShock Infinite use various archetypal images, it reflects on using them. It reflects on storytelling just as modern meta-fictional works of art do. The alternate universes and worlds of BioShock Infinite are not only about the machinations of the Lutece “twins.” They are about the ways in which the BioShock series goes about telling its stories.
Archetypes found their way into the immensely popular theories of Joseph Campbell (1904–87). Campbell believed that stories around the world exhibit the same archetypal structure: the “monomyth” or the “hero’s journey.”10 Basically, what you have in various tales from various cultures is the main character who departs (Departure) from the everyday world to go through the initiation (Initiation), to have adventures and to beat the challenges that lie ahead, and then to return (Return) home triumphantly. Narratives from ancient Greek myths to novels like The Lord of the Rings to movies like Star Wars and games like Mass Effect exhibit this common structure of the hero’s journey. If you think about it, BioShock Infinite has this structure as well. At the beginning, all we know is that the (anti-)hero, Booker, comes from an ordinary gambling-debt background. He believes (falsely) that he has to rescue a girl from a city to “wipe away” his debt. On the boat, approaching the lighthouse, the Departure stage begins. Booker enters the lighthouse and the fantastic adventure starts through superpowers, tyrannical preachers, and motorized soldiers, signaling the Initiation stage. At the end, Booker returns to a very different reality than he left. So the structure is there, but it is twisted by multiple realities.
Noël Carroll, a prominent American philosopher of art, argues that art shouldn’t be defined by essential qualities or conditions. Instead, if we can tell a coherent story about how a particular work descends from the tradition of other works, then we have a good chance of saying “yes, this is a work of art”.11 The genre of video games is still very young, compared to the thousands of years of drama, to the centuries of novels, and to moviemaking that began at the end of the nineteenth century. So it has to walk before it can fly. But to me, it has a damn good chance of flying. The scene with Rapture and then the overwhelming ocean of infinite lighthouses are there to show you that video games can tell great stories, and that by telling great stories they participate in the same tradition as other artistic media. Now, I don’t want to say that I’d rate BioShock Infinite as highly as the great novels of the past centuries. What I want to say is that the comparison is not as unimaginable as some people thinking of the arts would have it.
Some players have criticized BioShock Infinite for its lack of interactivity. There’s no choice between “being good” and “being evil” that would lead to different endings. The original BioShock had three endings depending on your actions concerning the Little Sisters. In BioShock Infinite, there’s no such interactivity between player actions and story conclusions. Some would say that this makes BioShock Infinite into more of a movie than an actual video game. If BioShock Infinite can be claimed to be an independent work of art, it needs to be a work of art distinct from movies, even if it shares qualities with them. It needs to make use of the possibilities that are inherent in the medium of interactive video games.
The main problem here is that it’s really hard to tell a good story when the audience can influence the story. This is the reason video games sometimes take the control out of the hands of their players in the form of, for example, cutscenes. If you had freedom to interact when Booker is killed by the many alternate versions of Elizabeth in the end, you might run away or kill an Elizabeth or two. It would’ve been funny, but it would also have significantly reduced the intellectual and emotional impact that BioShock Infinite has, and would totally have gone against a coherent ending to the story. There are events that simply must happen for the game to be able to tell its story. This is the same even with sandbox games like the Grand Theft Auto series or Skyrim. Even though you have much more freedom to do as you please in those games, to follow the main quest or main storyline, things simply must happen. BioShock Infinite reflects on this on a very deep level. It has integrated into its story the whole quantum physics–Schrödinger’s cat–multiverse business. The infinite possibilities are drowned in one linear playthrough.
And yet, you can choose the bird or the cage. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you choose. You are like Booker being totally oblivious about his previous journeys to Columbia. You have the illusion of choice; the outcomes will be the same. The way in which BioShock Infinite explains this is that every choice is made in a parallel universe. If you choose the bird in one universe, you choose the cage in another. It doesn’t influence the ending or the gameplay, and yes, it can seem that BioShock Infinite pulls the player along a fixed rail where the only “meaningful” choice is whether to blast out a Murder of Crows or a Shock Jockey Vigor. BioShock Infinite seems to be a work of art when it tells its story, but it doesn’t seem to be one when it comes to its gameplay. This has a lot to do with the lack of interactivity. However, BioShock Infinite is still one of the greatest video game stories and worlds of all time. In this, it represents a big step towards artful video game design, and in the future, if Ken Levine is able to pull off his “narrative legos” idea or something similar, it might just be the game with an artistically captivating story, combined with innovative and interactive gameplay, that offers a uniquely aesthetic experience distinct from movies. In the meantime, BioShock succeeds in showing that the possibilities for artful storytelling are infinite.