The Many Worlds of Bioshock Infinite

I’ve spent some time this week playing Bioshock Infinite since it was released on Tuesday. Now by that I mean I’ve spent pretty much every waking hour thinking about the game since I first got my hands on it. I started to play it at around 1:00 am Tuesday morning and straight through until I was literally too tired to keep my eyes open anymore, then awoke the next day to finish it, after a few things that needed to be taken care of throughout the day of course. I won’t talk too much about the game itself, it’s an amazing game but that is coming up a little bit later once I’ve had enough time to fully wrap my head around the game. No, this article is about a bit more than a wonderfully crafted game.

The ads for Bioshock Infinite are amazing. Now, they didn’t do anything too out of the ordinary on the surface. They got a good musical score to accompany what most assumed was cut-scenes or just snippets of the gameplay. The real kicker about all of these trailers is there are a lot of scenes that don’t actually take place in the game, and there is an amazingly well thought out reason for this that isn’t even apparent until you’ve played the game for awhile, or hell even beaten it entirely.

Now, at this point if you care at all about playing the game and not having any of it spoiled for you, I’d highly suggest you stop reading now, turn back and we can pretend that none of this has ever happened. Moving forward I will try to remain vague, however some parts of the story cannot be avoided when covering this bit. So just a bit of warning, continue at your own risk. I will not be blamed for anything you see from here on out.

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Alright now that, that’s all out of the way lets take a look at some of these trailers if you haven’t seen them already. Many people have been following this game for quite some time and there were lots of inconsistencies between trailers and even some of the screenshots released by the developers. A lot of this was noticed online and people within the gaming community as well as the press assumed it was a change in style or direction, ultimately causing delays in the game’s release. I, like a few of the people out there was just excited to see the game progressing but for me the game’s trailers and released content was just not adding up. Different character models, clothing, styles even the NPC and minor characters populating the world seemed to change every time there was more information made available. Some gamers, including myself were surprised to find some sequences we’d seen in the trailers or  some of the some of the footage we’ve seen of the game in action weren’t even in the game at all! I found this a bit odd at first as I played through the game, but hey sometimes things are cut or things get changed. That’s the downfall of following a game that is still in development. I was looking forward to playing through some of the iconic moments we saw in the trailers only to realize little-by-little that I most likely won’t get to as I neared the end of the game.

On top of all this, the story really wasn’t adding up. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was all going to add up but when was the question, for me. I knew there was some big twist coming since nothing made all that much sense yet, almost like bits of information I should know were missing. I really started to think that I’d somehow skipped over a huge sections of the game that weren’t necessarily required to play but certainly helped flesh the story out much better. In the end I turned out to not be missing anything and that it in fact was not supposed to make much of any sense until the end of the game and the same thing goes for these disconnected, inconsistent trailers that had started getting released two years before the game was even ready to ship. Now comes the big reveal! (seriously, if you read this far but don’t want it spoiled stop, this is literally my last warning.)

If you’ve made it through the end of the game then you know that Elizabeth (Anna,) has the ability to control space and time with those wonderful little tears she is able to open and as her power increases towards the end of the game we find out that she’s a being who has ascended passed the confines of time and space all together. We essentially find that she is no longer bound by the same laws of the universe that Booker, Comstock and even us poor saps playing the game are. No, Elizabeth can see everything that has, is and will ever happen throughout the universe. As she puts it, there are infinite possibilities and the story we’re playing through is simply one of them. That’s the sinch right there. Once the player finds themselves staring at all the towers, leading to different worlds you realize that all the things that you’ve done are simply one of many things that could have happened, the choices you made could have been mirror images of yourself except one subtle difference, or it could have been as drastic as looking like a completely different Booker; or worse off Booker not even showing up to rescue Elizabeth.

All of these trailers, screenshots and gameplay demonstrations that have different content in each one are of the same exact game, just where different choices were made. It is both the same and different world! The events that unravel in front of the player in this world are unraveling differently in the neighbouring universes so it stands to reason that all these trailers happened somewhere in the same time frame too! These stories were all unfolding at the same time with different choices that produced different consequences, except the way it began and the way it ended, your choices matter but there are fixed points that no Elizabeth or Booker can avoid in any universe. All these trailers are advertising the same game in a different universe with different choices, but they are all still Bioshock Infinite. This realization hit me like a ton of bricks. Whether Irrational thought of this from the beginning or it was something that just “came to be,” as they started sifting through what had been developed so far I can’t say, but it certainly helps build up and explain the world at the end. It carried much more weight for me once I realized how every little thing both in and outside of the game came together to make an entirely new and unique experience for me as a gamer and gave me ever more to think about as a writer.