The Big Ideas of BioShock Infinite

Irrational Games has always layered its adventures with big ideas, thought-provoking complex themes that challenge our intellects. BioShock Infinite is no exception.

It’s set in a ruptured world where icons of American history have been elevated to quasi-religious status, where working people struggle to find acceptance among established elites and where time itself is an amorphous property, incongruously warping previous predictabilities.

Newly released concept art.

If you care to look, there are plenty of parallels with our own world. This is what made the original BioShock such an interesting experience back in 2007, and what makes BioShock Infinite so hotly anticipated in 2013.

Of course, it’s also a very pretty exploration game with striking characters, interesting weapons and all that. But I wanted to find out about the social, scientific and political ideas that the Irrational team had decided to play with, the underlying thematic complexities of this story.

I spoke with Irrational president Ken Levine and animation director Shawn Robertson to talk about BioShock Infinite’s story, its setting, the game’s underlying messages and its inspirations.

So here are just a few of BioShock Infinite’s Big Ideas....

The Love and Dread of Machines

Irrational's previous work has often explored the complex relationships we have with those useful contraptions around us, but BioShock Infinite seeks to unravel both our own perspectives on the machines of the early 20th Century, romantic progenitors of things we use every day, and the implausibly optimistic visions that people of the time had of those same machines. To some extent, the dream of machinery has become a disappointment to us. Air travel promised to free us, and yet is there any experience that makes a person feel more like a machine, than commercial flight?

Colin Campbell: "Tell me about the period that you’ve chosen. 1912, the late-Victorian era. Is the attraction the opulence of that time and place?"

Shawn Robertson

Shawn Robertson: “It’s funny. The way we started down this path, we didn’t land smack dab in the middle of American Exceptionalism, in the look that we have now. We started off exploring with Art Nouveau, dark-and-stormy, really organic, swirly types of shapes. After a few art tests, we realized that we were basically creating Rapture again, except in the sky. It was a dark and moody space. It wasn’t as interesting as we could possibly make it.

“It may have been the wrong aesthetic to start out with, but it certainly got us reading up on that time period, the late 1800s and early 1900s. We started to realize how important and exciting this part of history was worldwide. How much new technology was coming on board. The hopes and dreams of the population in general. Even the political atmosphere. There are so many stories to tell there. It’s such a rich background to draw on. That kept us in the era.”

Ken Levine

Ken Levine: “It’s the dawn of the modern era, right? It’s where all the technologies, essentially, except for the internet and computers, came on board. You have airplanes and cars and electricity and movies and radio and phonograph records. All this stuff. It was a really exciting time. Everything was in these very early stages. Airplanes were made out of wood and canvas.  All the technology of the time had this very home-brewed, vulnerable look to it and yet they were all portrayed at the time very differently.”

Colin Campbell: "The striking thing about this point in history for us is that things we are familiar with that are sleek and efficient were were all messy angles and oil. Today we live in this world of iPads and smooth cars. So we yearn romantically for clanky old machines."

Shawn Robertson: “But if you look at the marketing machine back then, if you look at the posters of the time, it was all about this idealized romantic notion of machines. It wasn’t about strapping yourself to this highly dangerous machine that could burst into flames or break your neck. It was about the romance of flight. The artistic interpretations of these technologies offers a nice contrast between that and the actual reality.”

Colin Campbell: "That’s interesting, the split between the reality of what people are living with and the illusion of what they want to live with."

Ken Levine: “I think that’s what it’s about. There’s that moment in the game where you really see the city for the first time. On the street, it’s this incredibly idealized scene. You see this vision of America that I think a lot of politicians think existed. This perfectly idealized summer day. There’s this feeling of amity and this feeling of peace and this feeling of a simpler time, when everything was better.

“Then you look up in the sky and you see all this technology flying around. Buildings coming in to land. These skylines and so on. I love the contrast of what we think the past was like and what they thought the future would be like at the time. We’re dealing with our collective memories, a mix of our fictional, fantastical memories of the past and people back then, their fantastical view of the future.”

Source : ign[dot]com