![]() The underwater city of Rapture is an iconic video game setting, but a impressive a setting as it was it was a city experienced post-mortem – long after the citizens had become drug-fuelled rioters with superpowers. ![]() While the System Shock games are lauded among a cult following to this day it was only when Bioshock was released in 2007 with its impressive art and memorable plot twist on the nature of games that allowed the series to break into the mainstream. The Shock series is a loose series of first person RPGs that began with System Shock and found a Spiritual Successor in Bioshock. In order to understand how Infinite’s gameplay works it is worth considering its genealogy in gaming history. Instead I will be focusing on one of the repeated criticisms among the various reviews of the game (Critical Distance, 2019) – that the violence in Bioshock: Infinite is misused or jarring, somehow inappropriate for a game that is meant to be important and serious. ![]() It is a harsh but I think accurate statement, although the topic of games journalism is too broad for this blog. I will not get too deep into the media coverage surrounding the game but I personally believe the video essayist Matthew Matosis (2013) the praise lauded on it as games journalists trying to “justify their own existence by evangelizing games like Bioshock Infinite as mature storytelling”. Infinite’s story and gameplay did not resonate as much as it’s iconography. I will admit this is a hard statement to quantify but I believe the only real proof needed is to look at the current landscape of gaming and see the lack of games that look, feel or play like Bioshock: Infinite, compared to a game such as Dark Souls. In terms of gameplay it did not introduce anything radically different in its mechanics, and the story did not resonate enough to endure as much as it’s iconography. BioShock Infinite too has an unshakable claim to be challenging what we think games are capable of.” (Cowen, 2013). “BioShock Infinite exists in a pantheon tagged “required reading” in the gaming medium… important touchstones in the maturity of video games as an art form. ![]() Bioshock Infinite was a game that promised to change the industry and provide a watershed moment for gaming culture as a whole, featuring a storyline of fantasy and intense emotion while simultaneously being about class struggle, racial relations and religion. ![]()
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