[Warning: This article discusses the video game Bioshock Infinite and contains spoilers.]

Video games, like science fiction are bounded only by the creator’s imagination. They both provide alternate realities that can provide a culture or world, as a canvas, to make social commentary. In the 1960’s, Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek series had scripts that dealt with volatile issues for the 60’s, which included gender and race. Some of today’s games are not only providing a fun alternate reality for game play, but are also making us think about today’s society.

Recently, I just finished the latest installment in the Bioshock series, Bioshock Infinite, which provides an alternate reality of America, which gave me pause to think about how the conditions of the game could apply to our own current political and social conditions. Most games deal with good versus evil in very superficial ways, as a means for an adversary to advance the game story. Few games try to tackle “good” and “evil” in a more complex manner, as Bioshock Infinite has done.

The setting for Bioshock Infinite is Columbia, a city floating in the sky that was launched as part of an 1893 Exposition. As the playable character, Booker DeWitt steps out into the bright and cheerful world of Columbia, which seems to have all the makings of a Utopian society.

The founder of the city, Zachary Comstock, is a fiery religious leader, and his visions and use of technology, to found Columbia as a new Eden, earned him the distinction of being a prophet. One plays as Booker DeWitt, a private investigator on a quest to wipe away his debt, by retrieving Elizabeth from being held by Comstock.

"Stoning" of interracial couple

“Stoning” of interracial couple

 

As DeWitt steps onto Columbia, he soon realizes that there are cracks of racial inequality in this Utopian society. It is a white supremacist society, with minorities, and in particular blacks, being relegated to servitude. Early in the game, you win a raffle, where the prize is to throw the first baseball at an interracial couple, in a public “stoning” with baseballs.

Daisy Fitzroy, the leader of the Vox Populi, is leading a revolt against Comstock to win freedom for the subjugated blacks. It may seem the sides of “good” and “evil” clearly defined, but having good motives don’t always make a cause “good,” as Daisy’s methods to achieve the good cause are just as cruel as Comstock’s.

It is a central theme in the game, that having high ideals does not guarantee that the choices made to achieve those ideals are as lofty. No one is born good or evil, each person is a culmination of the choices they have made. We all have the potential to be saint or sinner, as Comstock pondered. This is revealed in the game through Elizabeth, who has the ability to open tears to parallel universes. In these alternate universes, we learn that people’s lives could be quite different, based on the different choices made in those universes.

There are defining moments in life, were major decisions are made that have a huge impact in making the person. A crossroads moment in DeWitt’s life was at a vulnerable point in his life, after participating in the horrors of Wounded Knee, where he was confronted with a decision to be baptized. In some worlds, he was baptized and he becomes a religious fanatic and in others he declines and he ends up giving his daughter away to pay for his gambling debts. These diverging paths collide together in Bioshock Infinite with the traveling through tears.

Religion, capitalism, science, freedom and equality, each have noble ideals, but individuals compromise their morals for a distorted view of their ideals and values. The game has obvious parallels to our own history, with religion being used as a justification to uphold racial inequality, criminality of interracial marriage and even slavery. Although, we may want to believe that racism is in our country’s distant past, it is a reminder that it is an issue that is still alive today. Chillingly, many Voxophone audio recordings, found around Columbia, are reminiscent to current statements made by politicians and others, stating that blacks were better off before Civil Rights and even before their emancipation. These statements imply, as the Voxophone recordings state, that the subjugation of the blacks was necessary for their own good, and was the noble and right thing to do.

Parallels can also be drawn to other forms of inequality and subjugation in today’s social and political environment. Religion is once again being used to justify restricting equal rights, and cutting programs for the poor and needy. Homosexuals are being denied equal access to marriage and minorities are stereotyped as lazy and abusing government programs.

Of course, it would be very easy to demonize religion, or any other group, as the root of the problem that motivates inequality and cruelty. There are variations in methods used by any group or ideology. Before the Civil War, religion was used to support both the emancipation of the slaves and the continuation of slavery. Not all Christians are in support of austerity measures to cut government aid to the poor. Instead, many Christians, such as Nuns on a Bus and Pope Francis, are reminding other Christians that it is their moral duty to help the downtrodden, the poor and the needy.

No system is completely free from imperfections and, no matter how lofty their ideals, are at the mercy of how people choose to act within those systems. As in Bioshock Infinite, life is not black and white. In life, there is a lot of gray.

Further Reading

Charles M. Blow, Escaping Slavery, New York Times, January 4, 2014