A Commentary On Violence, Race, And Choice In ‘BioShock Infinite’

On Race

In his article, Golding writes:

In taking the game seriously, I want to be as clear as possible: BioShock Infinite uses racism for no other reason than to make itself seem clever. Worse, it uses racism and real events in an incredibly superficial way—BioShock Infinite seeks not to make any meaningful statement about history or racism or America, but instead seeks to use an aesthetics of ‘racism’ and ‘history’ as a barrier to point to and claim importance.

I think that this perspective is flawed and shortsighted, and of course I’ll tell you why. I think that Infinite uses race not to draw attention to America’s history of racism, but to draw a line connecting the past, the present, and the future of racism in America. It’s 2013, not 1912 or 1893 or 1863, for that matter. America’s less-than-stellar track record with racial issues such as, oh, slavery and denying civil rights is well-known, well-documented, and understood by every child with even a middle school education. I don’t think putting a sign on that history saying “THIS WAS BAD” is what the developers had in mind.

I do think, however, that the matter of player agency and choice in Infinite should lead us to understand that the developers want us to think about how and why we play video games. Not just Infinite, but gaming as a whole, and shooters in particular.

For instance: did you ever notice how many white guys you kill? Seriously, you kill a lot of mustachioed, Anglo-Saxon-type people in Infinite. You kill giant effigies of American presidents. As you hop through tears in space-time, you find yourself suddenly the leader of a popular uprising against the Comstock government–a largely racial populist uprising. You then find out you’ve been killed–or, depending on who you ask, martyred. The minority, supplied with weapons and resources that you yourself acquired and gave to them, overthrows the white, American, Christian government and, of course, turn out to be not much better than the people they overthrew in the first place.

Simply put, you’re a terrorist.

In any other shooter in recent memory, the player would be firmly and fondly on Comstock’s side–the side of American pride, of defeating our religious and secular enemies. You’d be the white guy shooting the brown people, not leading a popular revolution and lifting the brown people up. Imagine booting up the new Call of Duty  and instead of playing a grizzled Special Forces operative trying to stop a war or terrorist threat, you’re a Russian or Arab trying to start that war or plant that bomb. That is what Infinite gives us, and without giving us a special prompt or letting us skip over the particularly disturbing part where we can choose whether to gun down civilians or not. 

Sticking a sign on America’s racist history is trite but in Infinite, that sign is misdirection. It’s akin to saying that we live in a post-racial society because we’ve got a black president–it glosses over the underlying root issues of racism that have been entrenched in our society since its inception hundreds of years ago. That racism persists, even in our popular media, even in video games. The game tries to draw attention to the broader racial themes at play by showing us awful caricatures and misrepresentations of Native Americans and Chinese during the Hall of Heroes segments, but most people have seemed to miss what Infinite seems intent on showing us: that racism takes many forms, and so do our efforts to white-wash that racism through propaganda, rewriting history, and influencing the public consciousness.

Infinite doesn’t treat race in a superficial way except for those who are intent on only seeing the superficial. The real story is not that we dehumanized certain cultures a hundred years ago, but that we continue to dehumanize cultures to this very day–through the nameless, faceless brown drones we gun down by the thousands in Call of Duty and other popular, militaristic, mainstream shooters of our era. Infinite hangs a lantern on American exceptionalism, hero worship, and racism and points them out for everyone to see, hoping that that light might shine on the Call of Duty-type games and make us see that they’re full of the same.

I’m reminded of the outcry that rose up when the box art for Infinite was revealed, and the reasoning behind it–that the box needed to appeal to casual fans of the genre, that it had to have a familiar look and feel that Call of Duty and Battlefield players would be attracted to. While I’m sure that that choice was certainly influenced by market considerations, I think it also serves to demonstrate that Infinite is directly addressing those shooters, directly commenting in a heavy-handed way just how jingoistic, saber-rattling, ruggedly individualistic, and rooted in American exceptionalism those games are. BioShock has taken the history of racism in America and connected it with the present of racism in America and reminded us that, in large part, it exists in the same ways and for the same reasons as it ever did.