BioShock will forever be one of my favorite games. Ken Levine, with a long history of video game production work at Looking Glass Studios in Massachusetts took the egocentric ideologies of Ayn Rand and turned it into a video game. At least, that’s the way I saw it. All the while, the game was asking you, would you put up with an underwater utopia that warns you at the front gate (“No Gods or Kings, only man.”) we don’t abide by the beliefs of the rest of society? A bit like the South Park episode on Scientology flashing the text “This is what Scientologists actually belief.” When someone paints a picture, someone’s imagination gets a little tarnished.
Perhaps BioShock Infinite wants us to ask, can their be corruption in the city in the sky? The so-called eternity that we are guaranteed for “being good.” Well, you’re going to discover a common theme, which is, you must tolerate the people around you in heaven to want to be there. Even then, it tarnished my interpretation of heaven. I wouldn’t want buildings or a sense of gravity. Just the sky itself.
What we truly have is Ken Levine writing his own script, instead of borrowing from literature. Christianity is a great thing to call into question, like any other religion. He incorporates American politicians into the plot, raising them to Biblical status (Father Franklin, Father Washington), reminding us that recalling the past evokes a sense of glory. Who can say time won’t put these names in a book of God like time has a way of doing? Who can say time?
And yet, the mere notion of heaven seems universal across religions. We all deserve a better life, and perhaps a sense of deserving is downright primal. The Earth is 4 billion years old after all. The notion of upward mobility was never lost on is. Yet, we are surrounded by inequity everywhere we go. I helped a customer purchase computer parts today and he wouldn’t shut up about his four sons. Where are my four sons? I would’ve rather not helped brag-a-saurus at all. Send us both to the sky, I’ll clobber you with a mallet, and my kids are mine.
The most pointed observation is that there shouldn’t be gunplay. Without gunplay, you have something of a Sherlock Holmes investigate-athon, trying to save Elizabeth and get the hell out. But odd I need to say hell about heaven. Ken Levine did the job. I have to rethink an eternal resting place. The crazy people say we’re 90% water, and the rest of me is pure organic material, so I think the likes of me will exist again. Maybe the real enemy is just stupid outer space, which little boys like to call “constantly expanding.” Never mind it’s a oxygen-eating murderer. Either way, be careful with “promises” like a “promise land”. Someone has to follow through on those words.
Blimps Go 180 