It’s been quite a while since we discussed this, but after the publication of this article on Bioshock: Infinite and privelege, one of our readers chose to write a response we felt merited publication. Enjoy.
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Roughly halfway through Bioshock Infinite, the dispossessed underclasses of the floating city of Columbia suddenly turn from victims to villains, with the working-class minority rebels of the Vox Populi replacing the oppressive, bigoted Founders as the leading perpetrators of violence and terror. In a game that otherwise stands out for its meticulous nuance and daring exploration of tough issues, this transition winds up dodging the meatiest issues of race and class that Infinite initially promises to confront.
Why does it fall short? Others have pointed out the problem of “false equivalency” in the villain swap. By changing in the Vox Populi for the Founders as Enemy Number One, Infinite winds up portraying both sides as equally evil — even though the acts of Columbia’s ruling class are senselessly unjust, while the Vox clearly have legitimate reasons to revolt.
The article “Bioshock: Infinite and Priveleged Narratives” also notes that the Founders’ sins — racial segregation, harsh labor conditions, violent suppression of race or union “agitators” — are grounded in the historical facts of Gilded Age America. Armed worker uprisings like the Vox Populi’s, on the other hand, existed mainly in the paranoid fantasies of industrialist elites. Trauben argues that the game sells short the poor and marginalized of the era by having them simply fulfill the worst stereotypes of their overlords’ fever dreams.
I share these qualms — but I also see the kernels of a more thoughtful, even profound twist that might have been. After all, there is an extent to which the devolution of the Vox uprising dovetails strongly with the message of protagonist Booker DeWitt’s own narrative: that humanity’s inherently flawed nature drives us relentlessly toward corruption, violence and tragedy, even — or perhaps especially — when what we’re really seeking is redemption or justice. The game’s final takeaway might have been that neither personal baptisms by water nor social baptisms by fire actually wipe away sins.
There are also plenty of historical examples of justly-motivated uprisings that really did devolve into bloodbaths — particularly if we look beyond the US. Infinite’s Vox most closely mirror not American agitators but the Bolsheviks, who were brewing the Russian Revolution right about the time of Booker’s journey to Columbia. Like the Vox revolt, the Communists’ revolt against the ruling Tsar ended in just another form of tyranny. Even Vox leader Daisy Fitzroy’s shocking attempt to murder a Founder child echoes the Bolsheviks’ execution of the Russian royal family (young Princess Anastasia’s true fate, contrary to what animated movies may suggest).
But is it fair to conflate the horrors of the Russian Revolution with American reformers who actually brought us the weekend and civil rights, just to make the overarching story of Columbia mesh with Booker’s own? It might have worked if the game had taken the time to carefully explore how a revolution devolves into a witch hunt.
Instead, that devolution stands out for how fast and forced it seems. In its opening hours, Infinite is a “show, don’t tell” tour de force: Columbia’s dark underbelly is revealed in the unforgettable scene at the raffle, then patiently fleshed out in a thousand tiny details that build into something more powerful than any explicit explanation.
But when it comes to establishing the villainy of Daisy and the Vox, the game suddenly starts beating us over the head with dialog. Just minutes after Booker and Elizabeth unleash the Vox revolution and while they’re still ostensibly aiding it, we’re trapped in an elevator so that Booker can announce, with all the subtlety of a fog horn, that “the only difference between Fitzroy and Comstock is how you spell the name.”
Yes, we have a few glimpses before this point of the Vox gunning down members of Columbia’s armed forces — but it’s hard to be shocked by those acts after the game has spent the previous four hours vividly showing us just how corrupt and vicious those lawmen are (not to mention tasking players with gunning them down ourselves).
Infinite next offers a brief chance to bask in the glory of leading an all-out uprising through the assault on the Fink Factory (which I’ll admit I found to be one of the most exciting moments in the game). But then, almost as if the game’s writers feel guilty or terrified about endorsing this radical but logical endpoint of the oppressive world they’ve created, they strip the previously sympathetic Fitzroy of any shred of conscience and “insta-demon” the Vox.
The suddenness of the switch leaves it feeling like a too-convenient plot point rather than an inevitable tragedy of the human condition. It also raises one last question: why doesn’t Bioshock Infinite display the same subtlety, patience and insight here that is does with the rest of its beautifully-told story?
There’s a final moment that suggests the reason may be as distinctly American as the game itself. In Emporia, Elizabeth pauses to gaze on the corpse of a wealthy white citizen killed by the Vox and asks, “Do you think he wanted any part of this?” The implication seems to be that the man should have been exempted from retribution because he was just a citizen of Columbia following the rules and going about his business.
But should we account for the fact that the rules he followed and the business he benefited from were fundamentally oppressive and brutally unjust? It’s a question much like those from the aftermath of World War II: should Columbia’s soldiers and ruling citizens get off the hook because they were “just following [Comstock’s] orders”? Or is this a society so sick that everyone who didn’t immediately speak out or flee from it is complicit in the nightmare?
The game’s makers never really grapple with that quandary. While I can’t know for sure, I suspect that failure may be due to the distinctly American tendency to think of discrimination as overt acts of prejudice by individuals, rather than structural injustices tolerated or contributed to by a society as a whole. Thus, the question of how to broadly remedy Columbia’s inequities — rather than just take down its most blatantly racist and classist individuals — is left unexplored. And ultimately, a game that begins as one of the most detailed and provocative portrayals of structural discrimination in perhaps any artistic medium in years ends without clear answers to these challenges.
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Bryan Collinsworth writes (occasionally) about politics, pop culture and their more interesting intersections. He lives in New York and works in nonprofits and new media by day. You can follow him on Twitter as @bbcollinsworth .