Bottom line:
“FREUD WOULD BE HAVING AN ABSOLUTELY SPIRIT-CONQUERING FIELD DAY HERE.”
I remember the glossy pages of a game magazine advertising another interview with Videogame Playboy Tomonobu Itagaki. You remember him: the leather jacket and sunglasses. “Tekken is shit.” Supposedly a guy who one time told someone to never buy a jacket for less than $200, a little myth-building hearsay.
That magazine was the first time I saw a director refer to something in a game as their offspring. Probably in response to the kind of goofy sex question that always got asked about Babes in games, Itagaki responded with a phrase likening the women of Dead Or Alive to his daughters. All that’s hearsay: the only reference to something similar is in my memory and an article snippet where he comments on being pissed off about their treatment in DOA5.
Itagaki’s presence as a Rebel in the industry made it possible for him to drop a comment like that. You expected the guy to say something scandalous in every interview. I remember seeing that he didn’t like Resident Evil 4 (you can’t move and shoot) or Dynasty Warriors (lots of guys, they don’t do shit). Now, he’s listed as the “Supreme Advisor” on a game that came out little over a year ago.
A year after Itagaki went on the stand to comment on DOA5’s treatment of Itagaki’s virtual daughters, Ken Levine would end up saying something similar about a creation in his own game: “It’s going to be porn. Lots and lots of porn. Seriously, whoever is doing the porn on DeviantArt, please stop it. You’re killing me. It’s like coming across a picture of your daughter. I die a little inside with every page view.”
My name is Deep-Hell Dot Com, and I woke up and chose violence today.
This isn’t a review of a videogame, but it is a review of why I’ve got more respect for whoever got a hard drive full of Bioshock porn than I do this guy:
There wasn’t a rush of backlash against Ken Levine, who made his perfect ideal woman and paid a team of designers and a voice actor to bring her to life as his terminally-chaste daughter. If it were an anime game from that time period, we could at least be grossed out by the fact that the character is 15 or some shit, but Elizabeth is meant to be a woman all her own. it’s certainly more appropriate by most standards for people of any age to fawn over a 20 year old.
There was a kind of clinical appreciation that a creator’s ownership over a character extends fully into the realm of who gets to fuck them or not (the protagonist usually; certainly not the fans). Ken Levine honest to goodness made a game about a damsel locked in a tower who would be freed from a life of chastity while at the same time being uncomfortable with the entire idea of it happening for real. Ken made her the player’s daughter, to really cement the relationship.
Websites I have never heard of before or since like Inquisitr featured articles by dudes named Todd that infected Levine’s own comment with a type of scathing churlishness: a single sentence about Elizabeth’s tits that radiates with a more evangelical bedroom-scented discomfort with someone else’s body than a hundred hucksters’ sermons. That leering discomfort with sex and capital B Bodies that was the same inspiration behind horny Cosplay articles on Kotaku a decade ago and now comes up with the ‘look, don’t touch’ way we treat writing about sex in videogames: It’s Gross.
Who is Elizabeth, anyway? She’s the doe eyed object of capital. Its slavishly okay to make statues and Funkopops and continue a merchandising treadmill even after the company that made Bioshock: Infinite has gone belly up. It was okay then, and it’s okay now, to literally turn the unobtainable body into a type of commodity.
Ken Levine’s comment about pornography reveals a deeper illusion: the idea that the creator has sole domain over what they make. The idea that if you make the perfect person, you alone are the arbiter of how the rest of the world receives them.
I turn towards Dream Daddy and note that it’s a queer dating game that never explicitly mentions what it’s like to be queer. A game full of gay and gay-coded men who come from heterosexual relationships. The dream of queer representation without having to imagine anyone that doesn’t look like you getting intimate.
I imagine, briefly, that it’s not all that different from Bioshock: Infinite. Someone’s idea of a relationship that has no bearing or influence on reality programmed and put into a piece of software. Elizabeth sure is marvelous: she might be a little more marvelous than the best Dating Sim character can be.
Who is Elizabeth anyway? I’m actually being edited on this one (not that you can stop me from running up the word count) but that means it’s technically legal for me to leave a drop quote from the editor here. One of those times I’m bugging them in the afternoon hours where I should still be asleep and safe from inflicting further trauma of a working relationship.
Who is Elizabeth? “She’s someone’s DeviantArt softcore porn art of a Disney princess. – No Escape VG dot com.” And ain’t that the truth of it? We’ve got everything in the wiki article. Elizabeth plays with the conventions of a Disney Princess down to a matter of fact, so well that, Christ, I’m not sure that the scene isn’t copied beat-for-beat from Tangled, released right around when this game would have gone into development.
All of the moments that can be reduced down (on high heat, no less) and thickened so much that the plot practically reads categorically like a TV tropes pages are there – the Meet Cute, the Deconstructor Fleet. The fact that the author has now had to repeat these phrases into the ether and wants to put a gun in their mouth.
Elizabeth is Rapunzel but is also the Disney’s Tangled girl, and too many more uses of italics than I actually feel comfortable using in this article. To look at Elizabeth is to see a man’s description of a woman, Ken’s very own Vanity painting (you don’t have to italicize paintings do you? [I’ll figure that out later -Kaile]) of the woman he could never have. Elizabeth is constantly looking out of the window at the player, who in turn can only ever see her through them.
There is a moment in Bioshock Infinite where Elizabeth has just been freed from her cage, stepping about the giant tower that she’s been forced by the men in her life to call home.
Whether Ken was smart enough to highlight it or not, she steps through a “tear” into another reality. The player is Booker is looking at Elizabeth, who steps through a window into another world. Booker is also the player, who can only ever see Elizabeth through the four harsh lines that delineate an LCD computer monitor in real space.
Videogames might not be empathy machines, but they might allow us to access it the same way a Voyeur can access the root emotions of empathy. Elizabeth becomes the player’s partner – she’s the real point of view for the whole game. Look down and see nothing, except your gun, Booker. Point it at whoever you want: even Elizabeth.
Freud would be having an absolutely spirit-conquering field day here.
Elizabeth circles around and becomes the player, eventually, in Infinite’s second DLC, Burial At Sea, and we finally see her story play out to its conclusion. She is still rattled by the loss of her Booker, enough to go down to the bottom of the sea and find the one last Comstock in existence, and as this was playing out I found myself asking: exactly what kind of happily-ever-after was Booker imagining in the first place? At the end of Bioshock Infinite Booker floats the idea of both of them running off together numerous times. What the fuck was at the end of that blood-soaked rainbow for him? Or her, for that matter?
Yet, as with all reveals, we the players are destined to find out our voyeurism of Elizabeth is based on a weird parent-child relationship in Ken Levine’s Break Up Game.
One of the first scenes where Elizabeth’s away from Booker and Comstock has the player chase her down while she’s being captured. Rattling moans echo through empty hallways as Booker frustratedly exclaims he’s coming for her. The first time a man besides her father puts hands on her, and it’s played like it’s a one-sided sexual encounter that only Dad can save her from.
I wasn’t the first one to point out that one of the closest scenes to that one is Booker, gun still in hand, chasing Elizabeth down a hallway. He begs, then commands her to take him back, that things will be better this time. We were streaming the game during this scene, and almost everyone initially started laughing and went silent soon afterwards. We were playing out a real break-up with words and emotions that seemed too real to not have been drawn from somewhere and doing it as a coded dad-daughter relationship.
In RS Benedict’s absolutely sublime essay, EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL AND NO ONE IS HORNY, the way we’ve gotten more comfortable with seeing nudity but frown at romantic, physical or intimate excesses is brought up.
Here is our Xerox culture of beautiful Hollywood actors and actresses: still kissing each other while the score swells and looking so uncomfortable with the idea anyone else could feel something.
Bodies pile on bodies, all impeccably well designed and near perfect enough it can be imagined real. When an actor takes their shirt off, part of the fantasy has become knowing and feeling like that type of physique, that type of body, is real. You could have it and so could I: but we don’t need to as long as it’s there to look at.
As RS Benedict says: “who wants to be touched?” Bioshock Infinite is a game redolent in the imagery of fear: Booker is afraid of Elizabeth’s power as a Woman as is Comstock and Ken himself. We’re there to break up with Elizabeth, to see her suffer: one goofy quote from Ken Levine about the way he feels seeing his virtuous invincible plastic creation actually have a good time: Look, don’t touch.
But Elizabeth is always in some stage of breaking up with the player. It’s no wonder Ken is so sure of who ought naught lay hands on his Precious Girl. From the moment “we” save Elizabeth from the gilded tower, she knows something better and more is possible. Booker, Ken, Comstock, the player: we know what we want for her. Who knows who broke Ken’s heart; I don’t.
Heartbreak makes you confused, deeply and truly. I keep coming back to the hallways segment with Booker and Elizabeth while writing the first half of it: all of the things said are classic and true breakup texts but are we supposed to be Elizabeth or Booker? We end the game, we bring everything to conclusion by being willing to kill The Man We Are. Booker DeWitt has to die so Elizabeth can go on living.
That’s if we agree to the conceit of the original Bioshock. One little sentence drives all of the subtext of that game home: “Would you Kindly?” It asks over and over again if we are willing to be complicit in every bludgeoning and shooting. If we’ve got control, are we willing to take responsibility for the final plundering of that deep sea city, and what’s gained from its excesses?
Bioshock Infinite closes like asking us if we’re willing to let Elizabeth put her hands on us. After all, Ken, aren’t you willing to have us put our hands on her as many times as you want? A would you kindly, delivered so sternly and matter of fact that the player never even gets to hear it.
And then there’s the darkness. That great primordial abyss. Booker and us, we all die drowning. Bioshock Infinite lives on in the lives of its DLC, named after a particular method of disposal and drowning: Burial at Sea.
Burial At Sea starts with a Sexy Elizabeth and goes from there. From a hinge point in the original game where she finally kills someone and commits to not being a girl but a sexy woman we learn the cost of death: bangs and cleavage, right Ken?
Blood seems to be a common method of transitioning between the boundaries from one period of life to the next. From the moment in Infinite where callous doctors recount Elizabeth’s first menstrual cycle to the time where she makes the blood come from someone else: blood changes who someone is.
Booker never faces redemption after a gunshot, for the audience. Booker DeWitt – that’s us if you haven’t gathered – never so much as gets to look in the camera after a murder, a bludgeoning, a shotgunning. Booker never performs their reflection after pecking a man to death with Bio Ravens or setting them on fire and listening to the screams.
Here we are back in Rapture. Elizabeth? Well, she’s Sexy Now. Not just Hot, Elizabeth bears the immortal markings of the Femme Fatale. In terms that the clueless guy out there might not get: a femme fatale is just a woman with an agenda. Someone old Hollywood would say uses her feminine wiles to get what she want.
Who broke your heart, Ken? We’re a Game and some DLC into this by now. I have to know. If you want to reach out discretely: my email is on https://deep-hell.com. I wont tell anyone if you don’t, Ken!
Elizabeth makes her story with Booker come full circle. She’s not really there to ask you what you want and gesture at the camera. All of her innuendo is ineffectual, brought to heel by a piece of metal through the sternum at the end. Elizabeth was out to get us, the game says, a woman with an agenda. All of that vivacious sexuality really to steer one goal home: killing her dad. Maybe that last line is more fucked up than anything I could write about it.
But it’s not, is it? All of that suggestive leering at the camera is there for someone. All of the calls for lines and videos shot with a camcorder leering over the voice actresses face while she belts out a tune sang later in the game: is this subtext?
Bioshock Infinite: Burial At Sea Part 2 wraps up with a dismal segue back into the original Bioshock. For all of her troubles, something something cycles of Violence, Elizabeth ends up worse than Booker or the same and pays for it. A cosmic wunderkind done dirty: a bludgeoning at the bottom of the ocean.
A distant vision. A man is going to come and save all of the little sisters and finally set things right.
This is the man that can be a healing force.
In some sort of strangled (or maybe drowned) cry, Bioshock Infinite comes to a close with one implied line: this is the man that can touch my daughter.
