Azahul said:
Well, the people who want to be there are there because they're religious converts of Comstock's and have been promised an easy life in a new Eden. Seems like a pretty great sell. As for the "sane" aspect, well, they're largely religious and it's not like the world in the US in the early 1900s was all that amazing. Columbia does look positively serene.
As for the minorities, there's a recording early on from Jeremiah Fink that says he knows a man in Georgia who can "lease" blacks for menial labour (as the pilgrims won't want to do anything like that in their religious paradise). So your point about force is... well, actually the answer to some extent. Similar mechanisms are presumably responsible for the Irish segment of the community.
There's also a scene early on when you burst into a house that turns out to be a secret printing press producing pamphlets for the Vox Populi. It's run by two normal, run-of-the-mill Columbian citizens. It's unlikely that they are being oppressed, yet they stand up to Comstock. There's also the hunter hired to kill Daisy Fitzroy, who has a change of heart and ends up fighting for the Vox. These people are not the majority, but the game does present a broader cross-section of and rationale for its community than you seem to have realised.
First of all, I would argue that important plot details, such as this, should not be relegated to audio clips that a player could very well miss, especially since it's all to easy for them to be drowned out by the gameplay and dialogue. If the only sure fire way to get the whole picture of the game is to scour every inch of every room you come across, that's a design flaw.
But onto the primary subject; perhaps I wasn't clear, I know how the game explains Columbia and it's inhabitants, my problem is that they aren't explained in an interesting or believable way. The population being religious converts is not enough to characterize or humanize them; so once again, the only explanation is that Comtock is nucking futts and everyone else is just as crazy as he is. This is not believable human behavior, people weren't just racist and evil in the 1900's because they were told to be, humans don't just blindly follow religion for no reason. Even the craziest people in real life follow some form of internal reasoning, no matter how flawed it is. Every action that is taken in Columbia is just dismissed as "The prophet said so and he speaks for God"
The minorities being brought over makes sense, but it doesn't add to the story in any way; you would figure that, yes, they're here because they have no choice. Like I said, nothing to learn here.
The occasional resistance is nothing more than basic human decency peaking through the cracks, and once again, is nothing special, and it raises the question of why these people ever came to such a shit place to begin with.
The answer to my questions were obvious, and that is exactly the problem; something cannot be both obvious and profound.
Azahul said:
This is an inherently subjective thing, I suppose, but the Bioshock games have always been about ideas taken to extremes. The problem, I guess, is that modern audiences have a hard time believing that Columbia isn't actually that much of an exaggeration. Finkton and Fink Industries operate in a way entirely in keeping with the way American companies sometimes behaved prior to the Great Depression. That religious dogma and systematic oppression of minorities is totally a thing that happened. The awful thing is that Columbia is generally shown to be a great place for the privileged class. To modern eyes, the whole thing might look ridiculous, but you shouldn't believe it is an unrealistic depiction that couldn't actually happen. Short of the city-in-the-sky aspect, Columbia isn't actually inventing all that much.
I also disagree with you on the characters and how deep/shallow they come off as during the game, but that's a pretty subjective thing. Suffice to say that I think they characterised Elizabeth and Booker well enough. Comstock could have used some work, I concur.
If you're up for it, I am curios to hear how you would describe Booker and Elizabeth's characters.
Comstocks ideas are just not very good, extreme or no. I'm aware that Columbia is not that far removed from real life, but depicting something does not mean that you understand it; the people who ran these systems in real life were not Comstock, they were not cartoon characters dogmatically following a madman for no reason; there were years of sociology and layers of industry and ulterior motives driving their actions.
I have no trouble believing that a place like Columbia could exist, I just sincerely doubt that it would look like the Columbia we see in the game; effective demagogues don't just spout religious nonsense and hate speeches, they tell a populous what it wants to hear, they appeal to the emotions of their people to disguise the illogical nature of their clams and back up their reasoning with plausible sounding lies. Nothing Comstock says would attract anyone who wasn't already as far gone as he is.
A real life example is the slave trade; it was a publicly awful practice that almost no sane person thought well of, but it thrived because people got invested in it's benefits and justified their addiction to it by doing mental gymnastics to convince themselves of their own rightness.
The movie 12 Years a Slave does a good job in depicting the ways in which normal people, not so different from you or I, can become complaisant with or sometimes even participate in terrible things.
This is how Columbia SHOULD feel, it should be a well rounded enough world that even if you don't know the history, you can understand why people would act like this; the oppression of Columbia should not be comfortably distant from the player, it should be uncomfortably close.
Azahul said:
I discussed this in a post just previously, but basically, the whole of the many universes thing exists as a metaphor for video game narratives and how the player can't really touch or change them. That's the "constant" part of the constants and variables. This is why so much time is spent on the alternate reality power. It's trying to convey a meta-narrative through the narrative mechanics of the different dimensions. No matter how many times you kill Comstock, another person is out there in the world playing the same game, experiencing the same story, and Comstock is still alive out there ruining their lives.
The "solution", in effect, is to kill the antagonist before he is born, so the story can never take place and the suffering therein never happens. And thus any universe where Comstock exists is erased from existence at the culmination of its narrative, leaving only the universe where the characters (hopefully) avoid such tragedy.
As for Comstock and Booker being the same person, I believe it's intended as a bit of a jab at video game violence in general. Both these people carried out terrible, terrible acts. Booker slaughters hundreds on his way to face Comstock, after all. Them being the same person is meant to carry across the idea that they aren't so different, as you said, but in the context of the game's rather meta narrative it comes off more as a condemnation of the way video games portray violence in general. Most games, after all, have a fairly limited number of enemy types. From a certain angle, that isn't all that different from Comstock inciting violence against specific racial groups.
I have a few issues with this concept; one of which is that it simply isn't true. People are constantly complaining about how their in game choices don't matter, but they approach this idea with insane expectations.
Take Mass Effect; it apparently isn't enough for some people that their choices can condemn 3 entire species to extinction, or determine who lives and who dies; people were still upset that they're choices didn't have more impact.
I have a fairly complex theory regarding this, but I'll try to summarize quickly; developers are touting the virtues of choice and consequence more and more in RPGs, sometimes even acting as though this feature alone will make or break the gaming experience. Now, many people have trouble putting words to thoughts, of taking an abstract emotional reaction and breaking it down into a rational sequence of events, so they borrow from other sources to find the words. And these people often place the blame for being unsatisfied with a gaming experience overall on what much of the industry considers to be the holy grail of game design; choice and consequence.
People seem to have forgotten that simply because a game is different every time you play it, it doesn't mean that it's any good any of those times. The purpose of choice and consequence is to make the game world feel like a real place that operates not based on the whims of designers but on a system of logic not so different from our own, to allow you to interact with it and form a sense of self within it. Creating replay value pales in comparison to making you play the game as if you were actually there. If an action results in a consequence in a game, it should be because taking such an action would likely result in that consequence were the game world real, and sometimes the shit we do just doesn't matter, not every consequence has to be earth shattering to be meaningful.
To summarize how this relates to Infinite, it's idea that nothing you do in a game matters only holds water if you approach the video games with the same arbitrary desire for endless choice and consequence that the industry does, if you want every choice you make in a game to affect every aspect of it, even though such a game would probably be severely unfocused and not very good.
Further more, implying that what you do in a game is meaningless because someone else played it differently is a contradiction; the world of the game will only acknowledge the set of decisions you've made in this particular pocket dimension, and the characters will not be affected by the others.
The same concept would apply to real life; there may be a version of me somewhere that posted a picture of a ferret juggling chainsaws instead of this reply, but you and I will probably never run across him, nor will anyone else in this dimension.
If you say that what you do here doesn't matter because another version of you is doing something else, then you must also acknowledge that what you are doing has some sort of meaning, otherwise what that other you is doing wouldn't matter either. There are infinite realities in which Comstock is being a prick, but there are also infinite realities in which he spearheads the civil rights movement instead.
If one cancels the other out, then the other must do the same; if the fact that Comstock will always exist is supposed to bother us, then we should be equally glad that there are places in which he doesn't, to focus only on the negative is to be pessimistic for the sake of being pessimistic.
As for the metaphorical violence stuff; everyone you kill on the way to Comstock is either totally deserving of death or trying to kill you. The fact that they all have similar character models only resembles racism in a superficial way. The reason that Booker kills people and the reason that, say, the KKK killed people have nothing in common.
Further more, to have Booker or anyone else acknowledge this fact makes no sense; in the world of the game, these are all different people, so this has nothing to do with the story of the game itself being any good, in the game the violence is very cut in dry.
The fact that both Booker and Comstock have killed people who sort of look alike means nothing besides that Booker and Comstock have both killed people who sort of look alike; the two still have nothing in common. This is sort of the problem with allegory; simply referencing something doesn't mean you're commenting on it.
Simply depicting a behavior does not make your story profound; being Meta does not make your game enjoyable.
Once again I will play the example game; Demon's Souls conditions the player to behave in certain ways in order to survive; get souls, kill bosses, repeat. Not doing these things results in either you never getting anywhere in the game or dying over and over again, you have to adopt them in order to survive.
Then, you come across Garl Vinland and Maiden Astraea; neither of these people have done anything deserving of death, and they do not want to fight you, but you can't progress until you kill them. They die because they refused to follow the rules of survival in the world of the game.
You may notice that this behavior has a lot in common with the way lots of real world situations play out, and it's not because Demon's Souls is trying to comment on them specifically, it's because Demon's Souls is thoughtfully designed enough that its story and setting resemble human nature as it is in real life.
We are not simply told by an arbitrary comparison that we and the soul starved monsters we kill are alike, we go through the process of becoming one and come to intimately understand their motivations and psychology.
THIS is how you use a mechanic as a metaphor; your behavior does not simply vaguely resemble that of your enemy, you BECOME your enemy in every way that matters; everything you found despicable and perverse about the demons now applies to you as well, and now you understand why people behave in horrific ways; because they are only as good as the world allows them to be. The game does not simply change the character, it changes the player.
Azahul said:
I find quite a lot of people seem to have felt the same way. That's fine, the game really isn't for everyone. With the rather crazy levels of meta-narrative at play, the game is actually pretty pretentious and not that interested in helping potential players to "get" it. Personally, I find that kind of thing enjoyable, but to anyone whose brain isn't as obsessed with highly pretentious claptrap as mine I can see that it wouldn't be all that great.
No argument here, though I would say that Infinite is not pretentious because it's aloof, I would say that it's pretentious because it's not as smart as it thinks it is.
