How BioShock Infinite will be prescient – interview with Ken Levine

You said in an interview that BioShock is the story of Andrew Ryan, a man who asks, "is a man not entitled to the sweat from his brow". Is there a similar character or central belief system you would say that dominates BioShock Infinite in the same way?

You know, there are several characters that exert a massive influence on BioShock Infinite. There's Comstock, who is the leader of the Founders, and Daisy Fitzroy, who is the leader of the Vox Populi rebel movement in the city. We haven't said too much about those two characters yet, though, I think primarily, because a lot of that space is filled up by Booker and Elizabeth. [In BioShock] we didn't have a character who had a personality or spoke and he certainly didn't have someone walking with him with a driving narrative.

In Infinite, Booker and Elizabeth are trapped between larger forces. But more than that, they're the catalyst for the growth of the conflict that happens in Columbia. In BioShock, when the player arrives, the party's already over and you're looking at the remnants. In Columbia, it's fairly stable when you arrive. It has a lot of underlying problems that are very easily brought to the surface; you saving Elizabeth from captivity acts as the catalyst that sets everything in motion and causes a lot of the conflict in the city. When the player arrives, the Vox Populi are just a rag-tag band of people and it's your and Elizabeth's actions that put them in a position where they can take on the Founders.

Can we go in to any further detail on that?
(Laughs) No, but the really important thing here is that BioShock Infinite is a story that's much more dynamic. As you take action you'll see the changes that Booker and Elizabeth bring to the world.

There was a hint of that in the demo at E3. As Elizabeth and Booker were walking around Columbia, the Vox Populi were attacking people, and a couple of them hurled insults at the player. Are you saying that if you attack one of them you can strange the structure of a level somewhat?
Look, there's content on that level and some of that content would change obviously. There's a part where one of the Vox Populi pushes a guy down the stairs. If you put a bullet in him before that happens, that part would change. The guy won't get pushed down the stairs and you'll end up in a fight with some other members of the Vox Populi.

There's also moment where one guy squares up to you and threatens Elizabeth [in the same level] and you put your gun on him and he gives you the finger and walks off. Brilliant voice actor, by the way, who plays that part. It was me!

Really? It didn't sound like you.
Yeah. They modified my voice.



That would be your Hitchcock moment then?
That's right! I always make one small appearance.
Anyway, you never know exactly how things are going to go in the game. There are a lot of characters in the game that you'll have to walk the line with. They might not be attacking you immediately, but you might be getting set up for something really bad.

You won't always know how to react to characters in your environment and I think that's a pretty interesting dynamic that you don't see a lot in shooters. Usually, in shooters, you see someone and you shoot them before they shoot you.

It's a dynamic we had in BioShock to some degree with the Big Daddys and Little Sisters. We wanted a scenario where the player would go "okay, how do I approach this?" There's a bit of education you need for that. When we were working on BioShock, the first people we gave a controller to acted the same way any gamer would act when they first saw a Big Daddy in a game: they started shooting at it. We had to very carefully make clear that wasn't the best way to deal with a Big Daddy; the gameplay was all about setting up for that big fight rather than just going in guns blazing.

We had to educate people a lot, which is counter-intuitive to the real world because, for example, you don't have to educate people in the real world not to shoot their neighbours … generally. You'd hope. But there are some things that are intuitive in games that are counter-intuitive in real life and vice versa.

So do you think a lot of the heavy lifting in BioShock Infinite with regards to that aspect has been done by BioShock?
No. I don't think you can ever assume that. People forget; they're not seeing a Big Daddy in the new game so they won't immediately make that connection. I think for some of the hardcore fans – if they're really tuned in to what we're doing with the previews – maybe that would be true. But as a developer you can never count on that.

American hegemony is a driving theme in BioShock Infinite. Is there much of an overlap with that and the objectivism that informed the world in BioShock?
I don't think I agree with that. Objectivism wasn't necessarily attached to the United States in any particular way except that Ayn Rand happened to live there and it matched, as close as it could at the time, her principles and her philosophy. She was very unhappy with a lot of things, though – the New Deal for example is something she found utterly repulsive.

I think all philosophies, when they're taken to an extreme and are embraced by people who have shut out reality because it contradicts their beliefs, pose a very significant threat. It becomes a case where you're not sure who's running the show here. Is it the philosophy or the world? You see it in a lot of systems. Take the Stalinist system, for example: when reality didn't contort to fit with a worldview, that meant reality had to change. People had to be taken out of pictures and history rewritten to block them out completely.

In some ways BioShock Infinite seems weirdly prescient. The Founders almost sound like the Tea Party politicians in the States with the Vox Populi taking the part of the Occupy movement.
I think as a very amateur student of history, though, you understand that these sorts of movements are very common. There have been dozens and dozens of these kinds of movements over the course of history. I mean, look at the turn of the century. In 1894, anarchists assassinated a French president. The US president McKinley was assassinated in 1901. In 1900 the Italian king was assassinated. Then, of course, you have Archduke Ferdinand assassinated in 1914 and we all know what happened after that.

You have these movements throughout history like the hard left Baader-Meinhof group or extreme nationalist like the John Birch Society or the Know Nothings in the 1800s. You have nationalist verses internationalist as a theme come up over and over again and I'm not surprise, given the current economic climate, that it's happening again now. Hopefully it won't get as extreme as what happens in Infinite. But the roots are there in any sort of crisis where people try to express their anger at a situation.

Given that the driving force behind Columbia in BioShock Infinite is American nationalism, how would a faction like the Vox Populi rise up? Wouldn't they have been ultra-nationalists to begin with?

Well, generally, when you have a push towards one extreme, that's going to have an affect on people that aren't part of that extreme. You'll create a situation where there are affluent native-borns who will start saying that they're what you have to be to have a real place in society. Naturally, those people who aren't like that will start getting frustrated.

In Columbia, when you arrive, a lot of those seeds are there. Booker and Elizabeth accelerate the conflict with their actions. I'm not going to go into too much detail about that, though. But take a look at one example in the form of the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany. That started off as a student protest against the Shah of Iran visiting West Berlin where one of the students was killed by the authorities. Then the students reacted, then the government reacted and one reaction provokes another and suddenly everyone's initial positions have become obscured. It almost becomes like a pendulum affect.



Did you plan BioShock Infinite and BioShock to be a way to examine the flaws in belief systems and political movements?
I think we're really fascinated by unintended consequences and good intentions that go haywire. You see that on a small scale in the demo where she tries to use her powers to revive a horse the results are catastrophic. Even the best intentions can have horrible results. I think that's a key theme in the franchise really.

Andrew Ryan had this great idea right? A man's entitled to the sweat from his brow – who would argue with that? But then you take that idea and extend it and you wind up in Rapture. What I tried to do, having read Ayn Rand, was to create Galt's Gulch and stick real people in it. Rand populated Galt's Gulch with perfect people.

Of course they all got on and their philosophy worked perfectly because only one person was setting the rules – her! I wanted to look at a scenario where nature set the rules and people's personalities set the rules and I think in that instance, you'd end up with something that looks more like Rapture. The more utopian you get and the more you follow a particular ideology, which can't bend to reality, the more fragile a social system becomes.

So are your games an indictment of dogmatically held beliefs?
I wouldn't say they're an indictment. I think BioShock and BioShock Infinite are more a reflection of my own ambivalence about people's certainties. I don't feel very certain about a lot of things – particularly in the political spectrum. The older I get the less I know and the less certainty I have. I think these characters such as Booker and Elizabeth and even Jack in the first BioShock are avatars of my own certainty in that they're people who are stuck in the middle of these very rigid elements and they become crushed. They can't really turn to either side and they don't really have a place in those systems.

And yet they have the biggest impact on the worlds they are thrust into.
Well, I think the people who have the biggest impact in societies are people who have the most flexibility.
The very nature of science, for example, is flexibility – it's the data that drives you. I think that's why science has had such an impact socially over the last 200 years – by that I mean the scientific method, which welcomes uncertainty and welcomes the unknown.

The scientific method is a way of structuring uncertainty in a way that makes it more palatable and understandable. You're telling people something quite counter-intuitive. It's okay to not know. It's better not to know than to think you do know and you're wrong. That's why the scientific method is, way more than any particular discovery in science, the most important scientific discovery because it gave the framework on how to pursue questions.

Take that away and everything collapses.