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Videogames love a dystopia but rarely try to understand it. In particular, games tend to ignore the fact that nobody actually sets out to create the most awful society imaginable. They set out to create something perfect. And then things start to go wrong. That miserable gap between ambition and reality is what made BioShock’s Rapture such a rich environment to explore. The filigreed diving bells, child slavery and lumbering brass-plated horrors provided a few smart surprises, but at the heart of the experience was a man being eaten up by the embodiment – and the consequences – of his own beliefs. “It’s sort of the big tragedy of history,” muses Irrational Games’ creative director, Ken Levine, explaining the threads uniting Rapture and Columbia, the sky-minded city in the clouds that provides the setting for the studio’s new game, BioShock Infinite. “I love to look at an idea and see what happens if the idea becomes more important than the reality.” From Levine’s perspective, loss may lie at the heart of most fears, yet it’s an inability to let go that fuels the worst of all evils.
So it’s ideas – specifically their dangerous power to both fascinate and simplify – that define Infinite. From the toxic exceptionalism that gripped America at the turn of the 20th century to Levine’s own belief in telling complex stories in a way that doesn’t remove player agency, you can feel the restless weight of thought behind the game’s floating metropolis. But we’ll come back to that later. The first ideas Levine had to deal with when creating a follow-up to BioShock weren’t his own: they were other people’s notions regarding exactly what a follow-up to the critically applauded BioShock should be.
“It took us about six months to settle on Infinite, and we even prototyped another game in that time period,” Levine says. “We weren’t feeling it. Then we had this meeting where we thought, ‘If we were to do another BioShock, what should that mean?’ None of us could get excited about going back to Rapture. As a studio, we felt we’d said what we had to say about that story, at least for the time being. “What excited us about Infinite was: what if were to throw away all the things that made us comfortable? Things like the city and the setting and the things that were probably the most successful elements of the first game. Those were exactly the things we thought people had come to be familiar with, in a way that was counter to the notion we wanted to generate. Familiarity in Rapture, you know? Not a good thing.”
Infinite’s not really a sequel, then. It’s a reappraisal of the BioShock template – a testing of the rules. Columbia’s a warship disguised as a floating World’s Fair. Heralding the emergence of America as a major player on the global stage, it has been missing since it fired on Chinese ships during the Boxer Rebellion. Its lofty 19th century inspirations couldn’t be further removed from the paranoid ’50s individualism that warped Andrew Ryan’s dark metropolis, just as its bright courtyards nestling among the clouds are the absolute opposite of the sunken city’s narrow, waterlogged corridors. The narrative echoes the wider reversals, too. You haven’t washed up in hell by apparent accident this time. You’ve come of your own accord, in the role of Booker DeWitt, a disgraced Pinkerton agent paid to track down a mysterious girl named Elizabeth and steal her away from her guardian, a huge, jealous automaton named Songbird.
Columbia required more than a simple inversion of Rapture to take flight, though. “We had the floating city and the time period right away,” Levine says. “What we didn’t have was the conflict, the characters and the look. For a long time, it was just sky instead of oceans. The story was about a fight between a group of technologists and a group of technophobes.” He laughs. “We were struggling to make it interesting.” Interesting or not, Levine and his team had already set their sights on one of the pivotal moments in American history. “I think the reason why there are so many actual artistic visions of a city in the sky at the start of the 20th century is because so much had changed in the last 20 years,” he suggests. “You look back over the last 20 years here, the only big new technology has been the Internet. You go back then and look at that 20-year period, you’ve got electricity, telephones, airplanes, automobiles, movies, phonograph records. People’s heads are spinning. They probably think technological change is going to continue at that pace.”