The Virtual Life – Closing The Loop With BioShock Infinite

Booker DeWitt is falling.

He’s taken a high dive off a platform and is spinning now – his shotgun unable to save him from gravity. He plummets toward the ground, shrouded by miles upon miles of blue sky and cloud. Luckily, a rail appears just in the nick of time and he throws himself toward it, clamping onto the bars of metal with his handy skyhook. He’s righted himself. He is in control again.

So he thinks.

I remember the night I picked up BioShock Infinite from Best Buy. I lived in Kennesaw, Georgia and it was spring. The heat was unbearably oppressive because there’s almost never a day in Georgia where the weather isn’t trying to smother you. There was this poster – you might have seen it back in the day – with Booker and Elizabeth suspended midfall in Columbia, reaching out toward one another. For the past month or so I’d passed by this poster several times, almost always becoming transfixed by it. It was a marketing device and it did its job well, getting me amped up for the product it was intended to sell. I stared at it wide-eyed with wonder, like someone who had just seen the aurora borealis. It made promises. Of high-concept fantasy. Of adventure. Of escape.

All things I desperately wanted.

March 2013 was a strange time in my life. I was a grad student with two classes of freshman English to teach each semester, so that was more or less my job. Over the course of a year, I had also somehow, through one way or another, become a member of the graduating class of Idiots Who Think They Can Write About Games On The Internet And Make A Living Off It (you can see me in the 38th row, fourth from the left, turning to wink at the camera Jim Halpert style). We were bloggers, you see. Hobbyists. We wrote garbage content about video games and then shouted on Twitter about it. Most of us were cordial with one another, perhaps even friendly. But that doesn’t change the fact that we would have screwed over our fellow writer if it meant getting a full-time position at a website somewhere.

Anyway: I bought BioShock Infinite and a bottle of whiskey and brought it home and tweeted about how I was going to mainline the game in a single night even though I had to teach the next morning, because 24-year old me was convinced this was a cool, semi-gonzo thing to say and do.

I did the thing. I shot thousands of bad guys. I drank myself sick. I saved no one. I showed up to class and taught my students about proper source citation while nursing a hangover with convenience store pills.

Mistakes were made.

Booker DeWitt is falling.

This time there’s no railing to save him, but that’s okay. This is a video game after all. As soon as he touches some unspecified bit of sky, he’s transported back onto the airship from which he tumbled. He doesn’t try to make sense of it. He pulls out his pistol. He shoots another a man dead in the head, right beneath his eyeball. The body slumps. Two more men step aboard the ship, weapons raised. Two more for the grinder.

Yes, Booker. Keep going, find your catharsis. Don’t look back.

I was going somewhere with this. It was on the tip of my tong—right. Video games. Magic. Human beings. Me. You. Mostly Me.

Involuntary memory is a hell of a thing, isn’t it? You’ve undoubtedly had it happen at some point: a taste in your mouth or a jingle in your ears whipping you down the corridors of your life to experience some shade of a distant memory. Maybe you’ve even had something video-game related kicking off that journey, perhaps the familiar theme music for Super Mario Brothers conjuring up memories of your childhood.

I have plenty of those, each one leading back to a young man in a small room in the boonies of South Carolina who passed way too much time playing every first-person shooter to grace the market. However, the most potent madeleine for me, perhaps because the memories are recent, is still BioShock Infinite. The uncorking of Vigor bottles, the grinding sound the skyhook makes right before it pops some poor fool’s head like a water balloon filled with Kool-Aid taking me back to that spring.

Infinite came at an important time in my life, perhaps even had a hand in shifting who I was into who I am. I remember playing it for days on end, over and over just so I didn’t have to deal with myself in the after-work hours, when anxiety and self-loathing would descend. I spent an entire summer playing it, The Last of Us, and Dishonored back to back to back, working on my games writing as I did, pitching to outlets with little success, ignoring my personal problems as they loomed.

I had a novel I was determined to finish, thinking it would be great and people would love it (it lies incomplete and dead somewhere on an old hard drive, a cobbled together mess of post-modern literary trends). The divisions between the person I lived with and myself were growing. I probably could have stopped that from happening; I did not. I drifted away from the friends I had made over the years because I was busy. I was playing games. I was writing about them. I was learning.

The truth is that I was never better than the horde of other up-and-coming game writers during that time, the ones who quit or found better things to do with their time. I was just more stubborn and desperate. I wanted out of teaching, out of the South. I didn’t know that yet, not in a way that I could put into words or even think about. I had, after all, spent a long time convincing myself that the life I was born into was the one I deserved.

But the thing is sometimes we know deep down what we want and we do what those voiceless desires demand.

I wanted out so I broke through the cell wall and started digging. Video games served as my improvised shovel.

Go to page 2 to continue our descent.

Booker DeWitt is falling.

Into gun barrels, into whiskey bottles, into piles of corpses, into himself. There are no rails around for him to cling to. There is no game designer's hand reaching down to set him on the ground gently.

There is only the plunge without end.

I sit in my apartment now in Minnesota. The BioShock Collection has just been released. I load up Infinite.

I have a visitor. My former self takes a seat beside me on the floor. He is young and filled with THOUGHTS about video games and wants to share those thoughts with the world. He wants strangers on the internet to love him because of his profoundness. He thinks he's better than everyone because he read all of Ulysses a handful of times and that makes him an expert on what it means to be a person.

"What are you going to write about?" he asks as I ram a skyhook into a man's face and tear away his cheekbone.

"Not a thing."

"Nothing?"

"Nope."

"Not racism?"

I shoot someone in the kneecap. "Pass." I stick the skyhook into their belly. I twirl their guts.

"Not the Industrial Revolution? Not the corruption of organized religion? Not the game's position that even if the oppressed rise up they become oppressors?"

"No," I say. "I just want to play a game. I don't want to think about things."

In the dining room my roommate and his girlfriend are over. They're having some fancy homemade pork-covered-in-winesauce dinner. They say adorable things. They make plans to go to the park tomorrow.

I see the person I love once every two weeks if I'm lucky. I am not bitter. I am above such things.

"Liar," my company says, peering over my shoulder at the scribbled handscript in my notebook. "That's not how you feel at all."

"Can't you just leave people to the peace of their own self-deceptions? This is why no one likes you."

He falls silent, knowing it's true. I unpause the game. I shoot four more men dead with a machine-gun. 

I don't feel any better. 

Booker DeWitt is falling.

Through time and space. He sees the events of the same world playing out in wildly different ways but somehow it all feels the same. Sometimes there’s blood. Sometimes there’s fire. There’s never love.

There’s always falling.

I live differently than I did in 2013. I go to an office and I write about video games for the biggest entertainment magazine in the country, one of the few stable jobs in an industry that’s finding new ways crumble every day. Sometimes I go talk to developers about video games you’re looking forward to or even maybe games you’ve never heard of. On other days, I write honest things to you about myself and video games because I contain more confessions than a Scorsese film.

I wake up in different cities. Vancouver. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Reykjavik. Portland. Jet lag is becoming second nature. I transcribe interviews. I sit around and try and figure out what the hell I’m going to write about next. I put my head on my pillow at night and miss people who live far away. This is my existence now. I’ve never been more successful in my life. I’ve also never felt more peculiar and satisfied and more miserable, and yet I keep getting drawn back to things as they were, to the person I was. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Revisiting the past is important, but I’ve got enough to deal with in the present, so I think this will be the last time I subject myself to BioShock Infinite, some 15 playthroughs after my first more than three years ago. I don’t need to think about that place and time anymore. I don't need to mull over who I was.

Because I’m happy now, yes. I can close the loop. I can be the person I choose to be.

I’m happy, right?

Booker DeWitt is falling.