Back in 2007, in the first installment of BioShock, Levine created a world based on Ayn Rand's individualist philosophy and let it play out. This time, Levine has turned a game into an Aristotelian tragedy and used the model of great tragic heroes.I couldn't give a shit about video games, but apparently at some point the Bad Guys in this one are revealed to be racists, which prompts this arrgh-blaargh from The Virginian:
NPR broadcast an article today about a developer of a violent video game in which the bad guys were Christians who revered the Constitution and were blatant racists. Of course with a theme like that it's obviously comparable to one of the great tragedies of literature...
To NPR this is just like Hamlet or Oedipus. This is an NPR employee's dream of all that's wrong with America; America's founders, the religious heritage, and,of course the racism of everyone who's not part of the NPR family.Like I said, I don't care about gaming and the NPR story doesn't mention it, but are the Founding Fathers really in BioShock Infinite? Because that would great to use in history classes. It speaks to the kids!
But The Virginian's a piker -- the aargh ain't blaarghy till Jeff Goldstein gets at it:
It’s out in the open now. There’s no longer any real pretense of objectivity. Each time the progressive media “report” favorably on something they characterize like this (fairly or not) — and no switch comes down to sting their hands — they grow ever more emboldened...
They are the ones they’ve been waiting for, they were told. And it invigorates them. It gives them a sense of purpose and momentum. Because through the heart of every leftist runs the blood of totalitarianism, of confirmation bias, of rank bigotry and a mob’s lust for violence, for punishment, for blood, for inflicting suffering on those who dare oppose their designs...Gasp! Not confirmation bias!
I don’t care who rolls their fucking eyes at my saying this. Circumstances have taught me that in several years, when the political winds allow them to do so, those very same people on “my” side will be saying the very same things I’m writing on now, pretending there wasn’t a time they rolled their fucking eyes at the True Believers, the embarrassing Hobbits who were preventing them from wooing the moderates.To paraphrase LBJ's analogy, he's outside the tent, pissing himself.
I eagerly await Bill Whittle's take.
UPDATE. This story seems to have been covered previously by Big Breitbart and by Mytheos Holt, whose culture war training has got him thinking correctly about how to cover a game stoners play when they're bored:
Naturally, the creators denied any intent to specifically attack Rand, arguing instead that their general intent was to criticize extremism of all stripes. And considering that the first game treats Andrew Ryan (who isn’t even the main villain of the original Bioshock) with far more sympathy than it treats the all-but-explicitly communist villain of Bioshock 2, Sofia Lamb, who willingly traumatizes her own daughter and leaves a trail of corpses behind her in her pursuit of a utopian society, one could argue that the series had been comparatively right-leaning up until Infinite.After much study of the struggle of competing Tendencies in this video game series ("In other words, the Leftist mass movement could come off mildly more sympathetic, though not much"), Holt finally feels he can answer the question, "Was the game created by Marxists/atheists?" The answer may surprise you!
Coming soon: Which pornographic Tumblrs are consonant with free enterprise? (Trick question! Only pay sites embody the robot Founders' vision.)
UPDATE 2. Commenter Gromet informs us that "Breakout was the last truly God-fearing and patriotic game" because "your job was to destroy a band of rainbow colors." Wait, what about the Hunger Games?
0 comments:
Post a Comment