If it weren’t for the game’s meta leanings, I’d feel way worse about making the completely hack-ish and obvious analogy that, like, Bioshock: Infinite is the real Columbia, man! A la Comstock’s hypnotizing blend of religious fanaticism and American exceptionalism, the game wants to assemble a perfect creation from the cherry-picked strengths of two separate, but incompatible disciplines. Did Irrational set out to make a tight, exciting first-person shooter with RPG elements, or did they want to tell a gripping and affecting story? As is overwhelmingly the case for the rest of the video game industry, it seems that the former had to wind up being the priority.
When a game’s story is the byproduct of gameplay, existing to justify the transition from one level, environment, or setpiece to another, the recurring critical complaint that brainless distractions like the Transformers films are “like a video game,” seems depressingly apt. In most cases, a script is always going to be of secondary importance to game development’s true bible, the design doc, so it’s hard to blame the writers. Imagine if screenwriters were given barely related, audio-free film reels, and then had to cobble together a coherent story out of them by overdubbing all the dialogue? Columbia shares much of Rapture’s awe-inspiring beauty, and astonishing attention to detail, but video game world building is only as memorable as the way in which we experience the world we’re in. Bioshock: Infinite has the plot of a historically-minded, but personal sci-fi epic, but gameplay, the thing that turns that plot into a story, and makes the game a game, is from the school of mindless action movies.
That’s not to say an action movie can’t have a great story, far from it. In fact, Bioshock shows clear inspiration from one of Hollywood’s most successful modern directors, Christopher Nolan, who’s made a name for himself crafting films that balance story and action masterfully. In many ways, Infinite’s plot is one big amalgamation of various twists and themes from the Nolan canon. From Memento, it takes the singular character perspective, and amnesiac protagonist. From The Prestige, a strong emphasis on duality, reinforced by an ending that makes you reexamine the whole work on second viewing. Inception’s reality-challenging philosophy, and ambiguous ending also show a clear overlap. Hell, Bioshock even imitates The Dark Knight Rises, by introducing socio-political themes involving wealth disparity and class inequality, only to dump those themes completely by the halfway marker.
If video game blockbusters are going to ape the blockbusters coming out of Hollywood, they could pick far worse sources of inspiration than Nolan. His films, much like Bioshock, are intensely constructed puzzle boxes, layering ideas and plot points so intricately, that the characters themselves sometimes feel ike cogs in the machinery. But Nolan is more successful at having it both ways, at getting to tell micro personal stories, along with the blood-pumping, labyrinthine macro plot, because film is a solitary medium. It is consistent with itself, and has been for over a century. Triple-A gaming, meanwhile, continues to think that the key to becoming a better storytelling medium means becoming more like cinema, which is entirely false. Gaming doesn’t need more realistic cutscenes and better writing: it needs design that more accurately translates those cutscenes and that writing into gameplay.
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