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  TychoCelchuuu PIGEON Registered User regular

  June 2017

  T-minus one hour, as of this posting, to part one!

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  TychoCelchuuu PIGEON Registered User regular

  June 2017

  
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swg9KTzFf40
  
  Suggested Reading:

  • Game Openings are Important, or the First 180 Seconds of BioShock Infinite
  • BioShock Infinite Lighting

  
  I'm of two minds about the beginning of BioShock Infinite. On the one hand, I think it's the best part of the game and that it has a lot of great stuff. On the other hand, I think there are a lot of things it does wrong, a lot of dumb stuff, most of the problems in the game show up here, and the ridiculous number of plot things it sets up really drag things down.
  
  Starting with the good stuff:
  
  Obviously, this game is gorgeous. This is one of the nicest looking games ever made. For me, it's up there with Mirror's Edge, Team Fortress 2 before they ruined it, the Dishonored series, Firewatch, and Dear Esther in terms of being the prettiest first person games. The lighting is I think my favorite aspect (hence that article on lighting linked above), but the design is also great in places - classical American architecture in the clouds! - and the textures are basically unbeatable. Find me some wood in this game that isn't pretty enough to eat, I dare you. Game turns you into a fucking beaver, I swear.
  
  The opening of the game, which is nonviolent, is a nice way to be introduced to the world. Columbia is at its best for the 15 minutes where you aren't trying to explode the heads of everyone you meet, where nothing is on fire or exploding, and so on. The barbershop quarter singing "God Only Knows" is easily the best part of the entire game, and it's one of the few narrative hooks that isn't in-your-face "WOW WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!" but rather "hey, wait a second, that song is anachronistic..."
  
  The moment when you step out from the garden into Columbia is one of the best vistas/introductions to a world in all of gaming.
  
  That leads to the first issue I have, which is that I think they really mess up the introduction to Columbia. What happens is that you get up there in a weird rocket chair, look out through the window in a reversal of the original BioShock's opening, then you get sucked down into the baptism place, in a recapitulation of the original BioShock's opening, then you get into the garden and step out into Columbia for a second introduction. That's all fucked up. Rather than a double BioShock opening, first reversed (going up!) and then normal (going down!) here's how it should have happened. You get shot up into the sky, but there's no window in your capsule. The capsule lands, you descend (like in the original BioShock), you go out into the baptism place, then into the garden (all the while not sure where you are), and then you open the doors, and surprise, you're IN THE FUCKING SKY!!!! I remember being a little surprised how fast I ended up in Columbia when I first played, which means they totally could have faked you out. There are no signs that your capsule landed on Columbia rather than just in some other location on the ground, except that they put a window in the capsule.
  
  Anyways, that's all small potatoes. Some of my opening gripes are described in the article above. My immersion in this gorgeous baptismal area, for instance, is soured by the intrusive UI and its lame update sound, which is basically an old-timey clockwork "BONK." As I mention in the Let's Play, I also think the menace comes in a little too early. The priest who baptizes you basically tries to drown you, a point funnily underscored by the chunk it takes from your health bar, which is tipping the game's hand a bit. Things would be creepy enough without that overt slice of menace so early on. Let things build a little more naturally.
  
  Speaking of which, the game immediately goes off the deep end as soon as you yank a man's face into a rotating hook, resulting in massive spouts of blood spraying everywhere, followed immediately by approximately twenty four murders equally gruesome. This is the tonal point of no return and the game never really recovers. For a game ostensibly about a guy trying to atone for his sins of violence by rescuing a woman from a city, Booker's immediately the worst serial killer in the history of time and it all goes more or less unremarked, a point that's doubly weird if you kill random civilians, as I do in this playthrough.
  
  The immediate setup to the murder spree also rubs me the wrong way, because it hinges on the racist Columbia's poo-pooing of miscegenation and your choice between going along with that, to blend in, and revolting. Although you get to make a choice, nothing comes of it, because your wrist is grabbed before you can throw. This is pretty endemic of race issues all throughout the game: they're used for window dressing and nothing more. You never make any sort of choice or decision or get any conclusion other than "racism is bad." (Actually, there's one more conclusion, which we'll get to later in the playthrough.) Racism is some pretty heavy stuff, and although I'm not saying this game has to be woke as fuck, I think it is kind of incumbent on you, if you're going to 1. set your game in the past like this and 2. make a point to include the racism and focus on it, to actually say something, or at the very least treat the issue as something more than one more thing that pops up along the side of the Disneyland ride. (Later on the game will literally feature racism as another attraction in a theme park, another spectacle for the player to gawk at in between shooting faces.)
  
  Shifting gears entirely, what the fuck are vigors? Why do they exist? Why, in this city run by a religious nutter, do vending machines and fairs sell people drinkable cocktails that alter their genetics and allow them to shoot fireballs and control murderous murders of ravens?!?!? Do you know why there were plasmids in BioShock? They're a metaphor for capitalism out of control. As soon as the technology became available, people in Rapture started selling it to each other, and when stuff got violent, nobody regulated anything, because the free market was the #1 value. What the fuck is the excuse here? Why does a religious community want to shoot fireballs at each other? Why does Comstock let any of this happen? Why are they in vending machines? Fuck, why do the vending machines sell live ammunition?!
  
  Why can you rifle through the trash and find apples? Why can you eat a hot dog and a bag of popcorn off a cart in front of a hot dog vendor without anyone remarking on it? Why can you eat a loaf of bread and a wheel of cheese, including the knife stuck in the wheel, straight off the table in a restaurant? Why can you take money lying on the counter? I'll tell you why you can do this in BioShock, and System Shock, and System Shock 2. It's because everyone is fucking dead or insane. Nobody cares if you eat their hot dog. But Columbia is a perfectly fine, functioning city.
  
  All of these weird inconsistencies are important because BioShock Infinite is the last heir to the *Shock franchise. Literally the last - it killed the franchise, at least temporarily. This is the last of the Shocks, and the Shocks are titans of the immersive sim genre. Immersive sims, including the *Shocks, Ultima Underworld, the Deus Exes, Arx Fatalis, and others (like the sub-genre of stealth immersive sims, featuring Thief, Dishonored, and Hitman) are all about immersion. Part of what makes them compelling is that you feel like you're in a fully realized world, with all sorts of tools available to you, various paths to take and strategies to employ, and so on.
  
  This is why there are vigors in the game and vending machines with ammo and hot dogs. It's because long ago, we had psychic powers or plasmids, with various different effects that interacted with the environment in different ways, so that you could express yourself by picking your own path. It's because we had inventory systems and weapon upgrades. It's because we had limited health and lots of objects all around the environment that became interesting because they could restore your health. These all combine to make a living, breathing world that's also fun to interact with because you have so many options.
  
  But for Infinite, everything is gutted - a tragedy, given that the world is ostensibly the most alive. It's still a real city, not a collapsed shell of one. But the game is a collapsed shell of an immersive sim. There's practically no back tracking or exploration, and what exploration there is exists almost entirely off the critical path, down which there is one route. There's no inventory management - all food must be eaten immediately or left where it is. There's no real weapon ammo juggling, the vigors are almost all immediately acquired and practically never grant you access to new parts of the environment or let you interact in interesting ways with anything. Remember when you could shock open a door in BioShock or use telepathy to grab some stuff in BioShock or System Shock 2? Remember when you could use the space roller skates to zoom around in System Shock? Remember when enhanced strength in Deus Ex let you pile up crates so you could climb onto a new path? All that, gone. A shell is all that's left, and it's a shell that's been gruesomely grafted onto the game, because it makes no sense that Booker is hoovering up hot dogs or controlling crows.
  
  The plot, meanwhile, loads you up with so many little clues that it starts to get tiring. Why did that statue just flicker and change? Why is my hand marked with the tattoo of the evil guy who they have predicted? Who are these Lutece twins? Who killed that guy in the lighthouse? (I believe the game never answers this. It makes no sense!!!!) Why do I get teleported back immediately whenever I fall into the void? (This also never gets answered!!!) Why are there quantum-fluxing flasks that upgrade either my health, salt, or shield stashed around Columbia? (Also never answered.) Why is there MAGICAL GEAR like a HAT that makes my MELEE ATTACKS light people on FIRE?!? (Never answered...) Why does Comstock sound like he's doing the SHODAN thing except with my voice echoing his? Why are they singing a Beach Boys song? How do vigors exist? The sad thing is that the game doesn't need to introduce anywhere near this many Chekhov's guns. It's an interesting enough setting and a good enough hook (save the girl) that we're already on board for the mystery! We don't need all this shit in the first ~hour!
  
  The introduction of the Handy Jobs or whatever is also kind of lame, in my opinion. Getting to see one up close at the fair ruins the mystery and suspense of meeting one in battle the first time.
  
  I think I have more gripes. It's going to get much worse, gripe-wise, going forward. But the opening does have a lot that wears on me. The lineage of immersive sims really weighs this thing down. The game it wants to be is basically Half-Life: a shooter with an interesting setting and story. But then you get all this other shit that's in there because it's a BioShock game, and that does it no favors. They mess with the setting, making it implausible. And that's a real shame.

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  Fencingsax It is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understanding GNU Terry PratchettRegistered User regular

  June 2017

  The entire point of the game is that Booker cannot atone for the violence he caused (and indeed, the entire game is about violence and the cycle thereof. Which explains a bunch of your questions.) It is a shame that they had so much trouble getting the game together (Act 2's weakness is utterly glaring) because there is a lot of good stuff in there. The Buried at Sea DLCs are excellent, and tie the franchise together so well.

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  TychoCelchuuu PIGEON Registered User regular

  June 2017

  Fencingsax wrote: »

  The entire point of the game is that Booker cannot atone for the violence he caused (and indeed, the entire game is about violence and the cycle thereof. Which explains a bunch of your questions.) It is a shame that they had so much trouble getting the game together (Act 2's weakness is utterly glaring) because there is a lot of good stuff in there. The Buried at Sea DLCs are excellent, and tie the franchise together so well.

  Yeah but it blows its load 10 minutes in when you murder a million people and then it's like "welp, no redeeming this."
  
  Anyways, I'll be starting the next session in a bit less than an hour. I'm going to be drinking heavily to make it tolerable, so tune in if you want to hear me drunk or see what kind of drinking game I go for (I'm thinking "drink every time Booker drinks").

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  TychoCelchuuu PIGEON Registered User regular

  June 2017 edited June 2017

  
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUt0bqvOPR4
  
  I was like "fuck this game, I'm getting drunk," so for a while I played a drinking game where every time Booker had a drink, I had a drink (vodka). Things got boozy. I played four hours in a row and blazed through the meat of the game. So what I figured would end up being lots of posts is going to be one post with many parts.
  
  Table of Contents

  1. Part 1: Violence
  2. Part 2: AAA Games
  3. Part 3: Racism
  4. Part 4: Religion

  
  Part 1: Violence
  Suggested Reading

  • Opinion: Violence limits BioShock Infinite's audience - my wife included
    
  • BioShock Infinite: Now is the Best Time
    
  • 'Now Is The Best Time': A Critique Of BioShock Infinite (same as the above, but with added comments by Kotaku readers, for your edification)
  • Video: Spec Ops: The Line contextualizes violence through story
    
  • Why does BioShock Infinite need to be non-violent?
    
  • BioShock Infinite Is Insanely, Ridiculously Violent. It's A Real Shame.
    
  • INTERVIEW: BioShock Infinite and the problem of history

  Jesus Fuck Christ this game is violent. There's just so much blood. From the moment Booker yanks that guy into the hook and blood goes everywhere, everyone is killing each other. Booker is killing people, everyone's getting tortured (Chen Lin, Elizabeth, Vox Populi people, I think maybe even one of the Luteces at one point?), summarily executed (Chen Lin in an alternate timeline, Fink, Vox Populi people, Columbia civilians, Columbia police, whoever the fuck that person in the lighthouse is, Slate), stabbed (Booker's hand, Daisy Fitzroy), burned, electrocuted so much their head explodes, eaten by crows, turned into crows and then burned, etc. I've seen people (like @Fencingsax above) suggest that the game is about violence, almost in the way that Spec Ops is about violence, which is discussed in one of the above readings (actually a video) and also in the last part of my playthrough (so, not in the above video). (Here's another thing about Spec Ops, if you're interested.)
  
  You can watch that part of the playthrough for some of my thoughts, but in general there are three points. First, this game's message about violence kind of gets lost in the muddle of everything else that's going on. Second, to the extent it comes through, it's all about how this game sucks and nobody should play it and it should never have been made. Third, does it need to be this violent? I mean come the fuck on. The last suggested reading above, the interview with one of the designers, has some good stuff. The designer suggests that the time period was brutal, and that violence is fun in games, and also you can choose whether or not to execute people, and also the game world is rich enough to overlook the violence.
  
  My own thoughts are that it's one thing to say "the time period was brutal" and another for there to be blood spraying everywhere like a fucking Kill Bill movie, "it's a video game" is barely an excuse given all the nonviolent games and anyways plenty of violent games are not this violent, the execution choice point is not helpful because I got gear that healed me when I executed people so there was a reason to do it and no reason other than violence not to, and finally the game world could have been much richer if I could focus on it rather than getting distracted by all the heads I had to explode.
  
  Part 2: AAA Games
  Suggest Reading

  • Bioshock Infinite: A Completely Sincere, Not At All Manipulative or Self-Aggrandizing Journey Inward
  • Plot Summary, Bioshock Infinite
  • Infinite Lockdown: Playing Bioshock in Boston

  I don't know how many of you remember, but BioShock Infinite was an event when it came out. It was a super hyped up release in a super hyped up, critically lauded, gazillion dollar game franchise. It had all the weight of AAA gaming behind it and in a lot of ways it came to represent AAA gaming itself. Remember that this is the year of Gone Home, another landmark title that, similar to BioShock Infinite, sort of represented its corner of gaming, namely indie gaming. For me the narrative basically felt like the pendulum was swinging: AAA games reached their peak and now it's all downhill, whereas the upswing for indie games is just beginning.
  
  Infinite is almost everything anyone could have an issue with in AAA gaming. On a basic level it just took up lots of discursive space. Everyone was playing it and talking about it. You couldn't escape it. It was hegemonic. It was violent, unnecessarily so. It had incredible pretensions to profundity, and to complexity, and to historicity, and it let everyone down along all those dimensions. Its profound message was more or less "BioShock games are terrible. Nobody should make or play them." Its complex plot was basically just layers and layers of ridiculous shit, with every cliche in the book (time travel, quantum whatever, drunk loser trying to redeem himself, lost daughter, alternate realities, alternate reality clones, ten billion hints at what's coming next, twists upon twists) and holes you could drive a truck through as soon as you sat down and thought about it. Its use of history was basically for set dressing, a point exacerbated by its treatment of race and religion (coming up next!).
  
  Gone Home, meanwhile, was a cute little game about lesbians where you walk around a house rearranging coffee mugs and listening to riot grrl music. This is when it was first starting to dawn on some people that games could maybe be about more than just murdering lots and lots of people. The fight over who is and isn't a gamer, and what is or isn't a game, began to kick off, which is the middle of the three main Gamer Identity Moments lately that brought us up to our current shitstorm (the other two being #1reasonwhy and #GamerGate). For more on this history, see this thread and this thread for #1reasonwhy, (and this piece by the guy who wrote the Spec Ops thing I linked above), this thread for "what is a game," which is the debate that was contemporary with BioShock Infinite, and of course I'm sure you've all heard of #GamerGate.
  
  If you read through those threads and the other related stuff (like the post in the GOTY thread I linked above or this discussion in the Gone Home thread about the time the developers didn't go to PAX because of shitty stuff Mike said about transgender people) or some of the criticism Gone Home got you'll see that the narrative I'm pushing and that I think is pretty clear is that all these things are linked together. Misogyny and sexism built into the game industry, parochialism about what counts as a game and who counts as a gamer, #GamerGate and Depression Quest (which, if you read the GOTY thread closely, was already incipient)... it's all part and parcel of the culture war that, to put it rather bluntly, got us a Trump in the White House (among other things). I think my most gratifying interaction on the Penny Arcade forums, over the 12 years I've been here, is when someone PMed me years after #1reasonwhy and "what is game" and so on and said something like "I used to think you were crazy to link all this stuff together, but looking at the misogyny in #GamerGate (or something) I've decided you were right." And Infinite for me always feels like the game on the other side of that equation. Elizabeth's massive knockers and revealing outfits, the racism, the violence, the spectacle, and the story that was ultimately a metaphor about AAA gaming combined into a cocktail that make it hard for me to divorce this game from AAA games generally, and of course it's hard to divorce AAA games generally from the culture around them, both in their creation and in the identity people craft around these games.
  
  The suggested reading for this section originally included an article called "The Case for Never Talking about AAA Games" which is no longer online, unfortunately, plus a dumb reply article I included just to illustrate the sort of responses it got. This stuff went onto the spreadsheet a couple years ago, at least. In the time since then, the person who wrote that dumb reply has become one of the main faces of Heat Street, one of the big alt-right Internet sites. I realized this just a few days ago when I first started preparing for this playthrough - I went and clicked on all the articles just to make sure the links worked and I almost fell out of my seat when I realized the random bullshit reply article I had picked was written by a guy who later became a hardcore alt-right spokesman. That's not an accident! I'm not saying everyone who likes BioShock Infinite is a #GamerGator who loves Donald Trump, but I am saying that AAA gamer culture was formed in part by, and is thus inextricably linked to the output of, places like 4chan. Do with that what you will.
  
  Part 3: Racism
  Suggest Reading
  Unfortunately this is one section where a lot of the interesting stuff has disappeared from the net - sleuths should check out this post, which has some good dead links

  • The Girl Without a Land
  • untitled
  • BioShock Infinite Review: Objective Game Reviews
  • BIOSHOCK INFINITE AND CRITICISMS OF RACISM
  • BioShock Infinite: an intelligent, violent videogame?
  • BioShock Infinite and the Terrible Case for Banning All White People from Games Journalism and the follow up article (I'm not the biggest fan of these two articles, but I include them for completion)

  Okay wow gee this game is really racist guys! I mean, at first it's a little objectionable that it uses pretty virulent racism (everything up to but not including the n-word, basically) as set dressing for half the game, because it doesn't really have anything interesting to say except "racism is bad" and "wow look at these racist people, haha gee don't they suck?" and "let's shoot racist people, isn't that good that we're shooting the racists?" That's lame for like eighteen reasons which we'd go into except suddenly it gets much worse. The leader of the Vox Populi becomes a bloodthirsty maniac, looking to murder literally everyone who isn't Vox Populi (including you) and all of her followers agree with her and they start murdering everyone.
  
  Partway through the game (it's somewhere in that fucking four hour video above!) when you're trying to rescue Chen Lin, you find an audio log by Comstock talking about how it's actually good for black people to be servants, because society runs better when white people are in charge. It may seem bad for black people to be subjugated, but they're incapable of ruling Columbia, and it's for everyone's benefit that white people run things. That's one of those classic chestnuts of racism: colored folk can't rule themselves, so it's the white man's burden to keep things in line. Yadda yadda yadda. Except IN THE CONTEXT OF THE GAME HE IS RIGHT. I mean holy shit, Columbia wasn't a paradise before the revolution but afterwards it's just slaughter! The developers clearly had the French Revolution in mind, but it's super gross to take the results of an economic/social revolution and paste those into a racial revolution because when you do that, the message is the racists are right. Goddamn!
  
  At fault for this is the famous White Man Game Developer's dictum "I'm actually super neutral, being in the middle is always right." David Cage is the guy doing this lately (see also here, here, etc.) but it used to be Ken Levine. And I mean come on, fuck that shit. That's literally the same sentiment as "Hillary and Trump are just as bad."
  
  There's honestly so much to say on this topic, but a lot of the above articles cover it pretty well and I'm so tired out from this shit from back when the game came out that I'm basically over it. Suffice it so say this thing alone would be enough to sink the game in my eyes, if it weren't shitty for like eight hundred other reasons.
  
  Part 4: Religion
  Suggest Reading

  • In Defense Of Religion In BioShock Infinite
  • The Anti-Gospel of BioShock Infinite
  • Et Tu, Ken Levine?: BioShock Infinite's Tortured Relationship With Religion
  • Shoot First, Ask Questions Later
  • Is the Video Game Being Called the ‘Best Game of the Year’ Anti-American and Anti-Conservative?

  I think the articles cover a good spread of viewpoints (that last one's a real doozy!) so I'll let people make up their own minds on this one.
  
  
  Alright so this post is pretty long but here are a few good other articles that didn't fit into any particular category but that I think are really worth reading if you care about this game and all and want to think about and talk about it (which, judging by the thread so far, describes basically nobody. That doesn't speak too well about the game, IMHO... not much staying power...):
  
  http://gameological.com/2013/03/review-bioshock-infinite/
  
  https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/04/10/emulator-part-one
  
  http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2013/04/03/hulk-vs-devin-vs-bioshock-infinite

  TychoCelchuuu on June 2017

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