You have to wonder if some reviewers know any women. Do they have sisters, mothers? Or, less likely, are they women themselves? Who else is on their list of fully-formed female characters? The rebooted Lara Croft? Our standards for women in games are so low that a down and dirty Lara can now make claims to being a feminist hero. Never mind that her QTE deaths are mini snuff films. That every time she finds a tomb to raid, the camera cozies up for a sideboob shot. That none of this is accidental. (Did the sideboob camera direct itself?)
Elizabeth may clear the very low bar set for women in games, but she’s not a complex character. She’s a companion cube in a corset. For most reviewers, this counts as a real person. Or near enough.
She comes from the haircut school of character development (which can sometimes actually work – see The Walking Dead’s Clementine). She gradually loses her clothes over the game until she is finally re-damselled and etherized upon a table, mo-capped, fully formed. She’s been caged and ogled her whole life. Why stop now?
While leading the player to end-game enlightenment, Elizabeth serves a practical function as well. She’s really a power-up more than a person. A kind of embodied super-vigor mapped onto the controller, sharing the same button as use/reload. She also flicks coins and supplies at you, just to remind you she’s still there. She is otherwise invisible to the rest of Columbia, despite being its most wanted citizen. She exists only for you, a marvelous tool, an extension of your strapping self.
This is all by design. Irrational head Ken Levine wanted the player to forge an emotional connection with Elizabeth but not have her be a burden. Because lord knows, relationships are never burdens. In an interview, he contrasted Elizabeth with a crying, needy Microsoft Word. Who wants that? And reviewers agreed, praising Elizabeth for ‘being useful’ and ‘not getting in the way’.
More people have said that and been killed than there are thorium decay products.
7. Fair and Balanced
If the reception of Elizabeth isn’t evidence enough of reviewers’ inability to evaluate the human elements of a videogame, the response to BioShock Infinite’s story makes it perfectly clear.
Let’s recap: a racist, nationalist, religious cult secedes from the Union, and the planet, and proceeds to oppress all people of color, enslave its workers, and stone interracial couples, all while its privileged white citizens bask in an orgy of Americana. So far, so good. This is a videogame, we have a gun, let’s shoot the shit out of this place.
But Infinite has higher things in mind. Halfway through, the people of color who constitute the rebel Vox Populi actually manage to overthrow their oppressors. And lo and behold: the white man’s fear comes to life. The Vox slaughter, they scalp, they paint their faces and play the part of the bloody savage. See what happens when you let these people out of their cages? No better than beasts, Infinite says.
Why are the Vox capable of just as much cruelty? Because the legacy of violence is passed on from oppressor to oppressed? Perhaps, but that’s not actually in the game. Is it because history is full of examples of bloody rebellions and reigns of terror? But then that ignores the actual historical context in America that Infinite claims to care about, where the struggle for civil rights was remarkably non-violent (at least on the side of the disenfranchised).
No, the Vox are just as cruel as the Founders because Irrational decided they would be. They wanted to show a city fall, not just the aftermath as in the original BioShock. They wanted a new set of enemies, a literal skin palette-swap, halfway through the game. They wanted to make a point about how any extreme position is dangerous. Even if that position is racial equality, fair wages, or medicine for your daughter dying in Shantytown. Infinite is a game that lets you peck a man to death with crows, but hey, let’s not get too worked up, too extreme, about suffering and social injustice.
Infinite creates a clear moral equivalence between Columbia’s oppressors and oppressed. Both Booker and Elizabeth voice versions of this ‘one no better than the other’ logic, in case you miss the point. Such false equivalencies are beloved by the lazy, the aloof, the cowardly. It’s as if the game almost realizes the absurdity of the scenario it has set up, since it doesn’t even happen in the universe you occupy the first half of the game. You have to cross over to a parallel reality to experience it. It’s like admitting: at least both sides are equivalent in some universe!
Infinite may be about multiple universes, but the game itself has only one reality – the one you play through. This false equivalence is not optional, given to some quantum fluctuation. Open the box and this cat will be alive 100% of the time. This turn by the Vox is not even background noise, something you can just ignore. This is a videogame after all – you have to participate. Those people you were just sympathizing with in Shantytown? They’re coming to kill you now. Pull the trigger or walk away and miss the end of this mind-blowing story. And don’t feel guilty when you shoot them in the face. Though Infinite claims to be a game about a genocidal white man’s guilt, all the racial stereotypes turn out to be true. The racially impure are just as bad as the Founders feared. You are justified.
If you still have doubts about this equivalence, consider the question Irrational tweeted in late June (since deleted):
Why is the moral failure of BioShock Infinite not only accepted but celebrated by reviewers? Because Infinite’s politics are exactly the same as that of many gamers. It doesn’t ‘compromise’. It doesn’t ‘placate’. It suits no ‘agenda’. This is familiar conservative language for those who imagine themselves above politics. Who do not see that claiming no political position is itself a political position, and a self-serving one at that. The straight, white male gamer could in fact find no better home for his high-minded non-politics than BioShock Infinite.
Of course these gamers don’t get what the big deal is. They can’t relate, didn’t feel the same way, aren’t offended. Of course they don’t see that Infinite’s ultimate depiction of the Vox is not that far removed from the racist caricatures in the Hall of Heroes. Of course they applaud Elizabeth’s character growth, her ‘education’, first sympathizing with the powerless in Shantytown and then realizing her naivety once their brutality emerges. Of course Shantytown itself is just a fiction to these gamers, a videogame level, and ultimately, like all the hucksters and snake-oil salesmen of the time, a sham.
But see, they say, that’s not what the story is really about. Did you see that ending, man? Oh right, there’s ‘always a lighthouse, always a man, always a city’. I’m not sure what’s worse: the false moral equivalency, or dropping all concern with the Vox so that we can get to this profound truth at the end. Like so many videogames, BioShock Infinite can only make comments about itself, about its franchise, about theories of the world, not about the world itself, not about the human beings in it.
If only this were true. Infinite doesn’t know how to humanize the white citizens of Columbia and make their vile perspectives comprehensible. Instead, it dehumanizes minorities and laborers so that everyone is a monster. Why does Daisy Fitzroy, a black servant falsely accused of murder, turn into a rebel leader who would actually murder children? Because Irrational needed her to. For moral equivalence to Comstock, for Elizabeth’s character growth, for their plot. Why are the Luteces the most successful characters in the game? Because clever, amusing, so-above-it-all-they-are-actually-outside-space-and-time characters are the only ones that play into Infinite’s ethos. The game doesn’t grant characters much humanity because, while it believes in quantum mechanics, I’m not sure it actually believes in humans. Or has any use for them.
The thing is, reviewers don’t care about any of this. Infinite’s use of racism and oppression as window dressing, its indifference to the suffering and injustice it portrays, its dropping of it entirely once its sci-fi engines get going, none of it seems to trouble the average reviewer. He’d rather not have any ‘politics’ in his games anyway. Certainly nothing that would ‘compromise’ the narrative to ‘suit a specific agenda.’ He who strives for ‘objectivity’, who claims to have no ‘agenda’ of his own. There may be consequences to callously using race and class to fill out a world and then casually dismissing it. But not to videogames reviewers. They just don’t care.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Remember that time Anonus bought an Atari 2600 for Imi for Decemberween
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I've showered now
I think that's the last thing I had to do for tonight, so I might lay down with the Nexus 7 soon
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Stupid asleep schedule
I have a job interview in 5 hours and I can't sleep because I napped earlier
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Things I learned today: Madeline in The New Adventures of Madeline was voiced by Pinkie Pie herself, Andrea Libman
in an old house in Paris all covered in vines, lived 12 small girls in two straight lines. They left the house at half past nine, the smallest one used to wonder what friendship could be, until you all came and shared its magic with Madeline
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I feel bad
I'm not even all that anxious about my interview anymore
But
I can't sleep because I'm not tired
And also because I keep having to pee every few minutes which is an embarrassing problem I've had since I started my new medicine
Comments
to this day, I wonder why people were willing to pay for that shit
As for the Atari 2600, it's so low-res it looks like some kind of...abstract modern art thing
I mean really
I see you have not lost your penchant for punnery.
I have a job interview in 5 hours and I can't sleep because I napped earlier
Also because anxiety
I could use a hug, if anyone's offering
lived 12 small girls in two straight lines.
They left the house at half past nine,
the smallest one used to wonder what friendship could be, until you all came and shared its magic with Madeline
I'm not even all that anxious about my interview anymore
But
I can't sleep because I'm not tired
And also because I keep having to pee every few minutes which is an embarrassing problem I've had since I started my new medicine
I don't know what to do