Bioshock Infinite | The Free Will Paradox

BioShock Infinite is to buy a shock but Bioshock is to system shop to as I said in my essay on Bioshock 1 it has a major meta element and that it commentates on the tropes of its spiritual ancestors and most specifically what may as well be its thematic prequel System Shock 2 and Bioshock as in most other o 4-5-1 games you start out with an unclear goal in a fantastic world typically contained them someway cut off from the outside world whether it be von Braun and the Rickenbacker as in System Shock 2 Black Mesa Shadow Moses or indeed rapture something has gone wrong in that world typically due to man's hubris you have liquid snakes desire to prove that he's better than his brother solid the resonance cascade scenario caused by man's experimentation you have the development of the showed nai and system shock and at sequel and you have atom in the plasmid and Bioshock another trope in all of these games is for the protagonist to slowly become engulfed in the problem of the game's world the snarks and the hype and the augmentations and Deus Ex the mechanical eye the exotic weapons and the transformation into a big Daddy sorry to recap my last essay so early into this one but I'd also like to quickly cover the literal events of infinite sending here before moving on in case you need a refresher or an explanation as it is pretty complicated so with Comstock killed our last question is how Booker is related to Elizabeth's missing finger songbird destroys Elizabeth siphon and now has to be killed she uses a tear to transport Booker songbird and herself into rapture in comfort songbird as it drowns one thing worth noting is that we see a little sister crying to her dead Big Daddy in the distance lined up with songbird and Elizabeth alluding to the multiverse were about to peer across anyways we get into the bathysphere and see the lighthouse from Bioshock 1 and it's revealed that we're currently in the world in between realities there infinite lighthouses each one leading to a different but parallel city it's then revealed that Booker refused a baptism after Wounded Knee and that the loot s is bought Booker's daughter Anna so the Comstock could have a child of his own jeans Elizabeth in order to fix what they had started the lutessa swiped Booker's memories and told him to go to Columbia and rescue Elizabeth Elizabeth tells us the Comstock is still alive and realities so we go back to where he was born the place where Booker refused his baptism and with that it's reeled the Booker and Comstock are the same person one got baptized and one tenant so Booker agrees to be drowned before he ever made the decision to be baptized and as the elizabeth's from different realities kill him Comstock Booker and by extension and a / Elizabeth cease to have ever existed moving on Bioshock commentates on the tropes of its ancestors to make a point about free will and so BioShock Infinite furthers those ideas showing us the opposite side of the same coin another road that leads to the same conclusion it never matters what you choose Bioshock says that every player character is essentially a slave not having the ability to truly choose and in finis says that every real-life human is a slave not being able to know how their choices will impact their timeline no matter how much it feels like we're choosing consciously there's so many choices no one tells me where they go you've already been which leads me to the title of this video the freewill paradox the question is is it possible to change the future or are we all just trapped in one timeline unable to see the many roads ahead and if we were able to truly choose our actions would that be any more or less liberating than being trapped without free will according to how I see BioShock Infinite its answer is No one of the most interesting aspects of BioShock Infinite is the fact that we're constantly presented with branching paths that all lead to the same destination the level design is absolutely full of these four paths that immediately lead to the same place then you have moments like the two pendants the baseball the coin the guitar or even something as seemingly a given as the decision between certain weapon upgrades and fusions or Viggers BioShock Infinite loves to give you choices narrative Lee speaking there's more choices to make them there are in BioShock however Bioshock offers three separate endings while infinite only has one it doesn't matter if you throw the baseball at the interracial couple or choose the Cage pendant for Elizabeth or play guitar for the young boy hardly if anything changes with those choices however they feel like they matter just as it doesn't matter if you push up the left or right flank in any of the dozens of parallel battle arenas in the game it still feels like an impactful decision so the game constantly presents us with choices that don't ultimately matter why well this is where things get meta while Bioshock 1 also fits this description I see infinite as a sort of swan song for the immersive samyamaa acknowledging the redundancy of making more immersive Sims in that format by exposing the format for all to see like Bioshock 1 infinite is very interested in analyzing the tropes of its ancestors and the lead characters of both games are trapped within those tropes there's always a city in this final scene we see countless parallel universes each one containing a lighthouse the leads to a rapture or Columbia with subtle differences due to being in different timelines along with these lighthouses they may as well have shown the shuttles that supposedly take the player to the Rickenbacher Citadel station or Tallis one or even the tram from half-life they're all just doors to those games worlds you're in the normal world then you go through the door and you're in this fantastical immersive sim world in my recent Metal Gear Solid 3 essay i theorize that snake realizing he's a weapon of the times and not of any ideology was Kojima's way of acknowledging that snake only ever exists to complete a mission whether he agrees with it personally or not essentially exposing the redundancy of continuing the series past solid three we know however broadly what's going to happen in that'll Gear Solid games just as we know what's going to happen in the mersive sim games from this lineage finding a city that was torn apart by man's hubris getting more and more absorbed by the thing that destroyed the city being betrayed by something we trusted be a Ryan Fontaine show Dan or ourself as in pray and BioShock Infinite and eventually confronting whatever it was that betrayed us it's a formula one that was becoming apparent by the time infinite came out this predictability of the broad-strokes of immersive SEM plotlines is one of the couple reasons for infinite sending Elizabeth is able to see what happens in every single lighthouse just as we were becoming able to see what's behind every metaphorical lighthouse hubris betrayals and a slow reveal of how closely related you are to the city it's a pattern to put it in literal terms Citadel station Columbia Black Mesa rapture and so on exist in parallel universes there's always a city and a similar plot line and everything else is I believe infinite is saying is just cosmetic changes plasmids instead of Biggers an AI going rogue instead of a resonance cascade missing memories instead of manufactured ones Columbia sword key and scroll instead of raptures art Science and Industry a bird pendant instead of a caged pendant hooker throwing the baseball of the captives instead of at the announcer it seems to me that infinite is saying change all you want about the world and its problems there's always a city and a man in a similar plotline we could have just as easily been the Booker DeWitt that led the vox populi revolution in this timeline and it still would have been a similar plotline so wrapping around to where I started this section from with the pattern exposed to Elizabeth and the player what's the point in making more immersive Sims that follow that same pattern the System Shock formula go left or go right you'll still end up on the other side of the room following this logic that BioShock Infinite is encouraging game creators to get out of following the System Shock formula the post-credits sequence is recontextualized Booker opens up a door to Anna's crib and says Anna revealing that she's back in her crib and we're back to where we started the cycle begins again and the game acknowledges that the System Shock formula will continue to be used this post credit sequence may as well have been a teaser trailer for prey 2016 a short five second clip that reveals that the system formula is coming back soon don't get me wrong as I've said before pray is my favorite game of the past decade and I'd probably choose it over any bioshock game but I still get the impression that BioShock Infinite would be disappointed if it knew that it failed to finally put the System Shock formula to rest however as my interpretation of the post-credits scene suggests I want to be surprised I will say though that the ending is a little ambiguous Booker became Comstock before he had an ax so when the Elizabeth drowned Booker before he decides whether or not he'll be baptized there retro actively changing the past meaning there would be no Booker Comstock or Elizabeth however the fact that Booker exists at all on this post credit sequence tells me that they must not have gone back far enough there were still infinite Booker's and the Elizabeth's only killed one of them interesting but not very satisfying from a plot perspective the matically however it makes sense in tandem with my idea that the post-credits sequence is acknowledging that infant correctly assumed that it would fail into the mission to put an end to the system shock formula if anyone has some logic that I've overlooked giving a different literal meaning to the post-credits sequence I'm all ears but above is the most satisfying way of looking at it that I can see the ending was all about going back in time and killing the system shock cycle before it ever started and the post-credits sequence reveals that they didn't go back far enough and that the system shock cycle will continue past infinite because of that mistake to put in slightly less abstract terms the Elizabeth's tram system shock just before it got baptized and became Bioshock however they didn't go back far enough to truly put an end to the system shock cycle they needed to smother System Shock in its crib and maybe even that wouldn't have been enough don't get me wrong I think it would be a gaming tragedy if we never got any of the shock games and infinite story feels as fresh or even more so than bioshock's but this is an especially interesting way of saying that they were starting to get a bit bore maleic anyways BioShock Infinite is a game of mini layers and can be read in a million different ways so let's reexamine this ending and see how the meadow narrative described above relates to bioshock's ideas about free will or the lack thereof while the two Ken Levine games won an infinite R to me ultimately about free will in the linear game many of infinite ideas apply to free will on a branching narrative game and many of both games ideas can all we'll be applied to free will in the real world the major theme of both games is our paths have already been written for us and there's nothing we can do besides act out our part and the world of BioShock humans have the ability to change the future by making decisions whether or not we have this ability in real life is a topic for another day but in Bioshock we do however there are so so many possibilities that rather than be made free by his ability to decide Booker is enslaved by his decisions first his decision to sell an ax resulting in him branding his hand and being recognized in Colombia and second his decision to not go through with the baptism with Comstock serving as an example of what he could have been if he accepted it in the world of Bioshock it's impossible to predict what humans will do and so with every decision that Booker makes the circle of possibilities for his future gets smaller and smaller his face slowly being set in stone free will is a finite thing for all the free will humans have in Bioshock each decision they make just uses up a bit of it as a microcosm of this consider the raffle in the beginning before the decision to throw the baseball is made we could have been the Booker who threw it at the couple or the one who threw it out the announcer or the one who didn't throw it at anybody each one with a different future or so we're led to believe however as soon as you throw it your fate is set in stone the interracial couple is either going to thank you later or not based on how you choose but they won't do both so to put the game what if one day you decide that you didn't like your choice surely somebody who had no free will such as Jack in the beginning of Bioshock 1 wouldn't have to worry about that because he never made a choice to have no free will is liberating if you know that you were always going to think and do exactly what you did then suddenly the burdens of pressure and regret are irrelevant so which would you prefer to be able to choose or to be destined to do what you were always going to essentially it's a choice between pride and regret or nothing at all a creature with freewill would feel proud of certain things but regret of other things while one whose fate was written in stone would have no true cause to feel either of course in real life this isn't the case we feel enough like we have freewill to feel things like regret and pride but if the outcomes of all of our decisions could be exposed to us would we still want that free will would it even still be free will [Music]

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 146,927

Keywords: bioshock, infinite, ending, explained, analysis, discussion, postmodern, metanarrative, meta, booker, dewitt, comstock, lutece, multiverse, free will, paradox, ken levine, lighthouse, system, shock, immersive sim, 0451, immersive

Id: RZOZ6ho8L9k

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2019