The original BioShock was heavy on deeper themes, drawing heavily from the philosophies of writer Ayn Rand to create its unique setting. This time around for BioShock Infinite developer Irrational Games is drawing from the jingoistic tone of the 1890s, including that period’s thoughts on the World of Tomorrow. Of course, when Irrational began work on the game, national movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street didn’t exist. Irrational Games’ creative director Ken Levine spoke to the Washington Post about the political themes behind the game.
The central conflict in BioShock Infinite is between the Founders and the group Vox Populi. Vox Populi was actually based on the Baader-Meinhof Group, a left-leaning German student movement that fell into extremism in the mid-1970s to finally become the RAF (Red Army Faction).
“I initially based the Vox Populi on this German student movement, the Baader-Meinhof Group. I’ve been looking at how people evolve into extremism: They start in a peaceful, understandable place and end up somewhere very different,” said Levine.
“What’s really interesting, what’s most interesting to me, is how the movements reflect movements that have come before. That’s either reassuring or concerning when you look at what’s going on now. Some of those movements, dating back to the French Revolution, have had similar complaints to what Occupy Wall Street has. It’s interesting to watch how they evolve. They tend to reflect each other, and for the game you can look at what’s happening in real time, but you really see what could be happening in the future by looking at history.”
Levine even equated some of the problems Occupy Wall Street is currently facing to the problems he’s had in creating Vox Populi.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time watching Occupy Wall Street. The complaint is that they don’t have a consistent message. You can watch that, and this is a challenge I’ve had writing [the Vox Populi]. Leftist movements are always less organized. There’s a messaging machine on the right, where they’ll come up with something and the next day you have 10, 20 people out on the news using those points,” he explained.
“Leftist groups tend not to like authority; nobody in them tends to listen to it. So Occupy Wall Street has been helping me because I’ve been struggling to figure out how the Vox Populi get to the point in the demo. Throughout the game, you’re actually watching them — you see in the beginning of the game that they’re a dead movement and a movement that really fails, and it picks up steam based upon your actions.”
Ultimately, Levine prefers the grey areas between the two ideologies at war in the game.
“So I start [Vox Populi leader] Daisy Fitzroy and [Founder leader] Comstock on opposite ends of the spectrum. Maybe that’s what the study of these movements is: The movement becomes about the ideology and not about reality. The reality starts to change, and it becomes that people would rather give up reality than ideology.”
“From where I sit, people think it has to be one or the other and there’s no middle ground. Personally, that tends to scare me,” he continued. “What’s the point of having something that’s about people shutting down ideologically, intellectually? People are using these movements to pose questions. If you look at Occupy Wall Street, it’s opened up dialogue, and you can say the same about the tea party. Hopefully, they don’t become extensions of parties, they will open up the conversation.”
