The True Heart of BioShock Infinite

Elizabeth, the girl trapped in the tower.

In video games, it’s pretty to determine who the protagonist is: just look at who you’re controlling. Put in the shoes of the character, it’s easy to drive home story beats since most action and dialogue will center around you (not to mention unattached narration may seem odd whereas they fit just fine in other mediums). Movies can have complex hero/villain/sidekick relationships to where none of the roles are all that clear. Television shows often change from week to week to explore character arcs over the course of a season. But video games almost always stick with the one we control.

There is no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead of gaming. There is no disjointed, pseudo-plot that merely allows observation—or something close to it—in a story-driven vehicle. That would be a terrifyingly amazing thing if someone made a game like that, but it would almost surely be relegated to the indie game circuit and miss mainstream hype, which seems oddly appropriate for something inspired by an absurdist stage play.

The primary signals for determining the protagonist is change and influence. Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, while formulaic and reductive, is a fairly good place to start. You’re looking for someone who encounters a catalytic event that puts the entire story in motion, someone who has direct influence on the outcome of the plot, and someone who overcomes adversity by making a dramatic realization or change in themselves. That is what makes them the hero. Villains start out bad and usually die bad. Ancillary helpers and mentors also have little to no arc and, more than that, have no agency in the matter.

In an interview with Tom Bissel of Grantland, Ken Levine discussed how Elizabeth came to be in BioShock Infinite. She wasn’t originally part of the plan, but Levine thought it was odd to have a speaking character (a necessary contrast given how often Irrational Games had already done silent protagonists) talk to no one in particular as they went about the game. And eventually, as development on, Elizabeth emerged as a vital part of the story. But she is less of a single strut within the walls and more like the only pillar holding the entire thing up.

“As we thought about Booker … it is his story to some degree, but it’s very much her story, too,” says Levine. That, perhaps, is the most important line in the whole interview. BioShock Infinite is not about Booker DeWitt or Father Comstock or anyone else; it is about Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, the curious curiosity.

Consider that Booker, in his own story, gets his MacGuffin from a box containing a note that says, “Bring us the girl, wipe away the debt,” a choice to do as it says or face the consequences. It’s a simple premise that forces Booker from his everyday life of gambling, drinking, and pining to ride a rowboat with an odd couple to a strangely isolated lighthouse in the middle of a rainstorm. Along with all that, though, is a key.

This key is Elizabeth’s MacGuffin. Without this, she would have been in the tower until, well, forever. Her normal, banal world of dreaming about Paris and tearing holes into alternate realities was broken by this aberrant occurrence, the first step in a protagonist’s journey and their story. There needs to be this thing, whatever it is, that breaks the daily cycle and forces something new. That key is it.

SPOILER WARNING: to keep talking about the matters of Elizabeth and what she means to the game, I am going to have to talk about portions of the game beyond the first 15 minutes. I’ll stop just short of the ending, but those of you that plan on playing but haven’t yet should stop reading. Or keep reading. Whatever. I’m not your mom.

Then think about the transformation Elizabeth undergoes over the course of the game. She starts out wide-eyed (literally and figuratively; I mean, my god, those peepers are ginormous) and optimistic. Her archetypal Prince Charming has come to rescue her and whisk her away to France where she can dance and sing as much as she desires. But then, when it comes down to it, Booker has no choice but to kill to protect her, and she sees. And she runs.

This is the first break in her shell and, consequently, the first failure of Booker. His job becomes not to just free her from her physical constraints but also to protect her emotionally, and he fails. Repeatedly. Elizabeth, as the protagonist, faces adversity and overcomes it. The question, of course, is at what cost. In the alternate Vox-controlled reality, she climbs through a vent and gets the drop on a ranting Daisy Fitzroy, the rebellious leader turned all sorts of backwards by Booker’s apparent return from the dead. With a child’s life on the line, she stabs Daisy. She runs her through with a blade. Clean and uncertain on one end, crimson and final on the other; it is a visual metaphor for the internal change and tragedy in Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, the killer.

The thing about stories is that change is the only constant. Even stories about how things don’t change like No Country for Old Men still require change to illustrate how little impact it has in the grand scheme of things, but none of them require a happy ending or a bad ending. Sometimes they can just be complex and create emotional bonds simply for the sake of twisting and bending them until they shatter. All of that manipulation is what we feel because change is what we know.

A protagonist doesn’t have to be the good guy or the bad guy. A protagonist is just the center of the story, the focal point of all the change that gets roped around and tangled up with all the sameness of the before and after. This is the person who you feel for, the one you watch encounter obstacles and hurdle them or face a mountain and barely manage to drag themselves to the top. This is the person you feel for because this is the person who changes.

Bissel asks Levine about the heart of the game, about the driving force of BioShock Infinite. Playing the game, you begin to ask yourself the same question. It’s hard not to like Booker and it’s hard not to sympathize with the outcasts of a floating utopia, but it’s even harder not to love her. It’s even harder to not feel every stumble and fall she makes, harder yet to not lie awake at night questioning why.

Elizabeth, the true heart of BioShock Infinite.

Breaking Down Dishonored’s Untold Stories

I always thought a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead type of video game would be neat. Just as how the story always focuses on the hero that we have been with or become familiar with, these types of games would expand on the side stories of some ancillary character. It’s already been done a few times like in Resident Evil 4‘s Assignment Ada bonus content, but they’re all too directly tied to the story. They are, for this purpose, too crucial to the main story.

A Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in my mind is much more superfluous. They only seem to exist for a singular need at any given moment. This need and moment could be vital or could be totally inconsequential but could just as easily be filled in by any other character, fabricated or otherwise. It also couldn’t hurt to be more absurd, but that’s just me.

The desire for this “telling the untold” sort of game greatly increases when I play a game that has a much more fleshed-out world. It’s not just that the story is good and cohesive enough to support these side tales but that the world in which you interact with it is rich enough to warrant it and inspire it.

Think about the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3. It didn’t just seem like the world was built just for you to navigate and solve a few problems along the way but rather the world already existed and you were dropped in the middle of it. There was a thick and hearty narrative swirling around in that irradiated stew pot and you were just another potato being put into the mix. It just so happened that you were the lil’ spud we kept an eye on after we dumped everything into the soup.

Dishonored, the recently released first-person stealth action game from Arkane Studios, also does a pretty great job of this. Dunwall feels like an immensely well-realized world that existed not just years before Corvo Attano and you set out to right some wrongs but more like it existed for decades before our time together, maybe even centuries. Not only are we just a blip on the map of the Isles but also merely a bump on the timeline of the entire world.

The game pulls a BioShock for some of its fleshing out (flesh outing?) in that you get some awesomely detailed (and disturbingly dark) audio logs in the way of audiographs, 1960s-style computer punched cards that play audio recordings when placed in obstructively large card readers. Seriously, they’re like the size of a sewing machine or large Christmas ham. But the fact that they fit into this old timey Victorian-era world and also deliver macabre notes of not very vital information is what makes them work. They do nothing but enhance the fiction of the world, and better yet, they don’t require any reading. Just press a button and you can continue looting the rest of the room while you hear about how Sokolov treats his house guests.

There are, however, some options for the more literary-minded. Much like in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the world is absolutely littered with books for you to read. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of Fahrenheit 451. Everyone loves reading in Skyrim, just as they do in Dunwall. From the maids to the lords to the guards, everyone’s a reader. I suspect even the tallboys have FlexLights up in their canopies for when patrolling gets boring.

The point is there are a lot of books, and each one brings in a new wrinkle to the fabric of Dishonored. You hear a lot about how everything runs on whale oil, but did you ever wonder how they get it? Or what it’s like to work on one of those whaling ships? Be warned: it’s more gruesome stuff, but it’s so unbelievably interesting that it’s well worth pushing through whatever reservations you have towards animal cruelty.

And each scrap of text is written as you would expect, which is to say in the voice that you inevitably hear in your head when you grok the context of the pages. An uneducated street urchin, for example, has terrible grammar compared to a royal lady. Commoners speak with a lot more idioms and colloquialisms than guards and the like. The castes of the Dunwall society feel like they’ve existed for decades and that these differences have evolved over that time, each one identifying classes and prohibiting them from interacting.

Hearing these characters talk is a bit different in that regard, though. Actually hearing guards go through their chit chat is almost identical to hearing some homeless survivors jabber on underneath a warehouse when it comes to differentiating their linguistic tones and mannerisms. Their topics of discussion are vastly different, though, as guards will talk about how terrible their supervisors are or how there has to be a connection between the Lord Regent and the Empress’ murder while party goers will talk about how much they envy gross wealth and shiny trinkets. You know, like beavers. You eventually get the impression that there are nuances to the social hierarchy, more so than just the rich and the poor and the moderately employed. It’s only the kind of minute delineation that you can get from a comprehensive and deliberate crafting of the background narrative.

It breaks down, however, when you hear the idle chatter, or barks as I believe they’re called. For all the graceful nuance imparted upon you from the conversations you drop so many eaves on and books you tear asunder in your never-ending quest for invading privacy, hearing every pair of guards ask if they are partaking in whiskey and cigars later that night is overwhelming. Even at the moderately quick pace I was moving through the game, every guard that bumped into another guard would either ask if they wanted to get down on some stogies and get ripped or yell at them to shut up.

Asking about getting their own squad after what happened last night is excusable because, let’s be honest, Corvo is up to a lot of shit every night, but the two heavily recycled barks breaks the illusion of the fiction for me. I no longer wonder what kind of life I’m ruining by undermining their singular purpose in the world or if some little baby guard won’t have a daddy guard to welcome home tomorrow morning. I instead wonder how they can just keep putting the same smoky alcoholic guy on duty at every seemingly crucial junction.

And eventually I stop caring. Not about that guard but the world in general. I don’t care about that book; I’ve already read it. I don’t care about that painting; I’ve already seen it. I simply stop caring about the entire woven fiction placed before me and just care about killing dudes. It’s a horrible way to go through a game that clearly has so much put into it and it does a severe disservice to every other revealing or affecting story or conversation you come across.

It’s not just a problem in Dishonored but in all of these types of games. Eventually, you realize that Skyrim and New Vegas and the Capital Wasteland and so much more are not endless seas of history and culture but rather very large sandboxes and that you’ve finally found the edges. You colored and colored and colored and now you’ve filled up the page and there’s nothing left to color. There’s nothing left to ponder and there’s nothing left to explore. Victims of their very success, the assassins pretty much stay at home.

I stop wondering about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and begin to hope Hamlet is dead.