BioShock Infinite: Ken Levine talks

"The world of Columbia is like the world of the riot," explains Levine as we talk to him during the aftermath of urban chaos seen on the streets of England. "Think of periods of time like the LA riots or what the UK is going through right now. I don't want to make light of it, but when you normally walk down the street you don't think anybody's going to attack you, right? You don't feel that you're going to get into a conflict. In a riot, though, you don't know what's going to happen in a particular situation: you don't have confidence that you're going to be safe. At the other extreme you're not walking down the street shooting people with a machine-gun either; it's not appropriate - you're not in Stalingrad! It's a strange twilight world where you don't know what's going to set people off."

FLIGHT CONTROL
The situation Levine is discussing is an early part of the game that sees leftie rabble-rousers Vox Populi ripping their way through a posh district of Columbia - a place so proud of how American it is that the Stars and Stripes dangle at each corner and its stores sell Abraham Lincoln dolls and George Washington tupperware. As you, an agent called Booker, and rescued damsel-in-distress Elizabeth work your way through the streets, the chaos begins to mount.

 “A prophecy says that if Elizabeth falls then the city falls with her. So they want her dead.”

"Your homes are ours! Your live's are ours! Your wives our ours! It all belongs to the Vox!" screams a lunatic, as posh gents are shoved down steps in exchange for their monocles, billboards are ignited and dead postmen - considered the tools of the oppressors - are stacked in piles. Throughout it all, however, you don't have to fire your gun. An edgy tension reigns throughout, with you only having to warily aim your pistol at snarky looters to ward them off.

Full-scale conflict only arises should you intervene, which in Levine's demonstration case comes when he interrupts the execution of the final mailman. Had he been content to watch him die it's impossible to say how much longer the tension might have brewed...

"In BioShock you arrived after the party was over: after the struggle between Ryan and Atlas had been decided," explains Levine. "When you arrive in Columbia, Elizabeth has been trapped in this tower since she was a little girl - and you bust her out. That's essentially the catalyst that heightens the conflict. You really turn the heat up in a way that it wasn't before. The Vox Populi believe that the city is corrupt, so they want to demonstrate to the workers and the downtrodden of the world that this symbol of American imperialism has to fall. A prophecy says that if Elizabeth falls then the city falls with her. So they want her dead."

CLOUD COVER
Levine, for now, refuses to be drawn on Elizabeth's origins - just as he is on the presumably shared backstory of the Plasmid-esque Vigors that (to take a gulp of Bucking Bronco as an example) can hurl enemies, pots and pans alike up into the air for a nice slo-mo hover takedown. What's clear, however, is exactly why the Founders and Vox Populi are willing to go to war over this particular pretty lady: hers is the face that tore open a thousand space-time rifts.

Infinite toys with the scientific thought of the early nineteenth century just as much as it pushes its politics to the edge of insanity. Levine waxes lyrical about the minds of people like Heisenberg, who peeled back the origins of physics during this period (for our part, we nodded and smiled fairly uncomprehendingly at this point), but ultimately it's all wrapped up in Elizabeth's trick of accessing other dimensions, times and worlds.

In the current game demonstration she'll notice a tear behind a dying horse and try to save it, for example, only to unwittingly open up a doorway to a street outside a neon-clad cinema in alterno-1983. The dame's got talent, there's no denying it.

"We started to think about this notion of her interacting with other versions of reality" explains Levine. "It's a notion of things that don't necessarily exist in our reality, but that she can bring into the gameplay. What if she could bring in a skyline? What if she could bring in a turret? What if she could bring in ammo, or access to a new area that you can't get to? What if you're fighting the Vox Populi and you can summon in some Founders from another reality to fight for you? All these ideas came up in one meeting!"

“I've had the experience of knowing a girl once, dating her once actually, who had been with somebody who had abused her before.”

Vox Populi want Elizabeth dead, then, but the Founders - the Americana-fuelled imperialists that built this steam-powered Cloud City - want her back. The creature that misses her the most, however, is the Songbird. He's a giganto-budgie with attitude - his searchlight eyes reminiscent of the Big Daddy whenever a red lens clanks down inside his head to show he's in a temper. And boy, does the Songbird have a temper on him.

He's been built to nurture and protect Elizabeth, yet also to keep her captive. Now Booker has taken her away from him he'll rip off rooftops and throw you around like a doll to get both his revenge and his loved one back. For her part, in a moment of animated brilliance, Elizabeth shows that she would rather die than return to her tower - by delicately wrapping Booker's hands around her throat.

DEADLY SERIOUS

With the Songbird, quite brilliantly, Levine and his team at Irrational are using a videogame to reflect on the horrors of domestic abuse. "I've had the experience of knowing a girl once, dating her once actually, who had been with somebody who had abused her before," says Levine, contemplatively. "All the clichés you hear about are true. She would say that this guy had pushed her down the stairs when she was pregnant, that he had made her kneel in glass... all these unspeakably horrible things. Then she would make excuses for him, all the time. I knew the entire time that we were dating that she would go back to him. I could just see it. It was this tragic thing happening in real-time. And she did go back to him."

"That's not Elizabeth - Elizabeth is trying to get free - but she definitely has a connection," Levine continues. "This is the thing that raised her: this was the only contact she had. He brought her food, and her clothes and her books. He played with her when she was a kid. So she's conflicted. And I think conflicted characters are way more interesting than characters who act with a certainty."

via cvg

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