Skondo wrote:

It would appear that I'm an idiot then. I loved it.

The reason this game gives me such an intense feeling of trembling discomfort, of panic, is that I know the kinds of ripple effects a chunk of gold that heavy can produce. Bioshock Infinite is still bobbing around on Valve's own ripples. "Game" "design" is a nomadic, aimless band of zombies shuffling through a desert, and every few years they see a bright spectacle illuminate the sky, and that becomes their north star, and they mindlessly trudge towards it for another half-dozen years, oblivious to the fact that they're not in a desert at all, but a huge, lush rainforest of a million lifeforms, ripe for harvest. So there, you got some wet metaphors, you got some dry ones, that's a paragraph. 

Massive media products create entire industries. Avatar made 3-D film (and performance capture). Grindhouse reinvented the grittyexploihorror genre for people too young to know what film grain is, other than that filter in iMovie. Independence Day set the template for a decade's worth of disastertrash. 

The difference is that film has been around since before filmmakers' parents could criticize them for liking it, so it doesn't have this obsequious need for cultural significance, it isn't kept awake at night, staring at its popcorn ceiling, committing to one day absolve itself of its repressed daddy issues. 

When Michael Bay burns the entire GDP of Italy making Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (perhaps the most surreal board room fever dream since Space Jam), a film about dieties made of purchaseable products teaming up with the U.S. Military for a battle in the Middle East, and red white and blue robots expounding the merits of freedom -- the most perfect expression of America I've ever seen (die, Levine) -- it becomes a film critic field day. No one in their right mind would be caught dead defending it, even as it rakes in aircraft hangars worth of hundred-dollar bills. Release the same content, with the same production value, as a QTE-laden videogame? The games press will define it as The New Benchmark. Film critics at least have the capacity (though it was touch and go there for a month) to discuss Zero Dark Thirty as the CIA-cross-partnered piece of propaganda that it is (even though it's Serious, and has a Strong Female Lead), while game critics have had their backs against the wall ever since Doom was blamed for Columbine, and could never bring themselves to admit that, just maybe, Modern Warfare is raising an entire generation of authoritarian, state-serving Muslim killers, never mind the implications that Modern Warfare has practically defined The Modern Videogame, not only through content but design. 

Things get a lot weirder, though, in that rare intersection of big budget and cultural compassion, the topic where the Avatar and Infinite comparison is most apt. We are perhaps one of only a handful of generations who will ever experience the psychotic society that allows us to contribute to curing cancer by saving the lids of yogurt containers: the disease of late capitalism percolates the brains of ostensibly intelligent humans, with liberal arts degrees and at least a few humanities courses tucked under their belts, and dooms them see the act of helping the world only through the lens of restoring economic stability (i.e. profit). Tomb Raider's Charity Site GatheringCourage.com could just donate $10,000 to Feeding America(tm), but in order to do that, they need your help to share your stories of courage. Why? I don't know. Is there some cultural Courage economy in play? Has the zeitgeist of Sharing actually made the leap from asking for 1 million Likes to unlock a trailer to feeding human beings? There has been an increasing push, with Kickstarter, et al, to evolve Vote With Your Dollar to Donate to a Corporation as An Act of Expression And/Or Conscience, and eighteen-year-olds with jobs and free rent have to spend that money on something, so we might as well pass that corporate collection plate. Trust us, some skeletal African toddler somewhere is probably gonna get some Plumpy'nut out of this. (My favorite was when all the proceeds for tickets to the Call of Duty Convention went to Supporting The Troops.) 

So Avatar is a $500 million dollar Ferngully. You've probably seen it by now. It explores such politely liberal themes as, "Maybe militarism is bad," and "Maybe the natives are more in-tune to life than us Westerners," and "Trees," though at the same time, the only way for those themes to achieve resonance is for the white man, buried under geologic layers of implicit white guilt, to go through a transformative process in which he not only joins the natives, but, obviously, because he's superior, becomes their leader. And beds the blue cat Pocahontus. This is the discourse to which a $500 million film can contribute to the topics of race, colonialism, ecology, et al. Critics slapped four stars on it, sure, more as a polite applause for How Many Sweatshop Graphics Artists Can You Cram into a Volkswagon kind of gesture; it was narratively punching its weight for a graphics buffet, yeah, hits all those Joseph Campbell bullet points, check, check. No one was sitting there at The Motion Picture Event of the Year thinking, this is going to change the industry/world/human race. 

And I'm not saying anything you don't already know. I drag Avatar's hackneyed blue corpse out only to compare its reaction to that of Ken Levine II: Art Harder. 

I just want to start by saying there is a 40-minute Giant Bomb interview with Ken Levine that you should only watch if you own plastic silverware. The most amazing moment of this interview is when journoblimp Jeff Gerstmann says, "It doesn't seem like it was very focus tested," and Levine responds (let me paraphrase), "Well, with themes like racism, how could it be?!" 

My body spasmed, my hand clenched my 1800DPI mouse as it drew what would be Exhibit A of the evidence of my would-be seizure in the MS Paint program I had been using in an adjacent window. I actually shouted out loud, in my commuhostel filled with post-docs (one neurobiologist, two legal psychologists specializing in juror decision making), "WHAT FUCKING WORLD ARE YOU LIVING IN, LEVINE?!" And then I remembered that he lives in Boston, at which point I blacked out. When I came to, they were talking about the HBO show "Girls." 

Bioshock Infinite's contribution to the the topic of American Exceptionalism are billboards with the Founding Fathers standing upon dirty browns, with captions in ornate fonts, saying, "WE MUST DEFEND AGAINST THE FOREIGN HORDES." It is a world in which a pasttime is throwing baseballs at niggers. It is not a funhouse mirror of jingodimensia. That already existed, and it was called the Tea Party. Bioshock Infinite is a parody of a parody. It's Ron Paul in Toontown, whacking people over the head with mallets that make bald eagles fly around their skulls. 

"But it is also a videogame" -- the most surreal line ever uttered by a videogame reviewer. 

That's right, in between the Pirates of the Caribbean "Move Forward And See Money Being Spent In Realtime" sequences (unless you put the controller down, and time becomes less real as the fires and alarms and panic will drone on for eternity), there are enemies to shoot! One of the types of fodder enemies are Klansmen, which seems so obvious that I suspect an enemy designer did a Google search for "Racist People" and started modeling from there (though, hey, Earthbound had one). 

There's also a George Washington mech with a machine gun. How, exactly, am I supposed to react to this. Am I supposed to see it and grin and feel fuzzy like when I those combined animals with names that tickle my pun gland in MOTHER 3? Am I supposed say, oh, Levine, you so cray-cray? Am I supposed to cheer his irreverence for Our Most Cherished Political Icon? Am I supposed to be taking any of this seriously? Because other people are. This game has a 96 Metacritic rating, with proclaimations that it is "daring" and "challenging," and "demonstrates the true power of this medium to engage and inspire us." 

And that is what scares me. Grown adults dumping heaps of adulation upon it, young adults dumping heaps of cash, championing this as some progressive masterpiece, who probably have never even heard of A People's History of the United States. "An FPS with Themes" will reign at E3 2014, "An FPS with A Female Servant" will be back in vogue. And all the while nobody notices the new goalpost is the same as the old goalpost: Featurecreeped Doom. Now with Meaning(tm)! 

I mean, it's pretty. The sheer production value honestly makes me jealous, though, hey, you get what you pay for. There's gorgeous rim-lighting and pastels and festive balloons. I would've enjoyed this asset tour in 2006, after playing Gears of War. At the same time, though, I here I am, walking around in the Norman Rockwellverse, reminding myself that my grandmother would probably enjoy this place without irony, thinking about how many movies have won Best Costume Design Oscars by default because of old-timeyness, and there that forebrain goes again, nagging that bright and clean visuals are an obvious metaphor for the purity of the white race (Levine, you GENIUS). 

EarthBound's world was an idealized America that never existed, and that game was made by the Japanese. Baseball bats and suburbs and hamburgers and daycares and flea markets and hospitals and taxis and bicycles and circuses. 

Bioshock Infinite's Columbia is a place made by an American game designer who once upon a time read a Miyamoto quote about a drawer full of playgrounds, and thus would go on to make Racist Disneyland. 

Then there's Elizabeth, which demands its own article. Its own fucking encyclopedia. 

Final Score: 

Lincoln + Beauty and the Beast + Inception

Tempy wrote:

I didn't say it was your criticism, but in other channels the criticism is actively targeting fans of the game. Fact is, Infinite hashed some of its themes, like racism, but how frequently does it ever get tackled in gaming, let alone $200 million blockbuster budget gaming? A mallet hitting you on the head is the start, that people are so critical is simply because it has something to say in the first place. Also the whole 'ugh, it's a shooter' thing is tired. When you get to the end if you can't see why the over the top violence was a boon to the character development of Booker, and consequently the entire setting of the game, then you might have massively missed the point of the plot.