Lately I have been watching a friend play BioShock Infinite, something to which I paid little attention at the time of its release. At first the setting and the story were attracting me, as they pertain to my field of interest… but later in the story, after acquainting us with an archetypal capitalist, I noticed that the story was getting a little ‘darker’—in a familiar way—and it soon devolved into what I feared: another subplot about how much revolution sucks.
I’ve seen it already in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Metro 2033, so I know how it goes: first the writers lure you in with a display of the prerevolutionary situation, and at first they portray the revolutionaries positively, but as the climax approaches the revolutionaries go around suddenly committing atrocities without any clear rhyme or reason, nothing can be done to prevent it, ordinary people hate it (so the revolutionaries abuse them too), and the lesson is that revolution is no better than the prerevolutionary situation.
Why do revolutionaries go through the trouble of making revolution? Not because the material conditions (whatever those are) made revolution inevitable, no. It’s because revolutionaries are stupid and unreasonable. Simple as that. That’s probably also why they commit atrocities, and also why they can’t figure out how to keep their supporters without resorting to coercion or violence.
The message, it seems, is an advertisement for conservatism: ‘Yes, we’ll admit that things may be awful now, but no matter how awful they may be, anything else would be worse, so just shut up and do nothing.’ They don’t state it outright—possibly because of how embarrassing it would look—but that is the only conclusion that I can draw. (Otherwise, the only alternatives are either that the writers wanted to subject innocent people to their angsty, immature whining, or they simply wanted to waste their time, both of which would be bafflingly unwise of them.)
Is there anything inaccurate about my observation? Because otherwise, I don’t know why these presumed professionals would suddenly subject us to this lazy and shallow writing.
I liked what Disco Elysium did. The situation sucked but it was because of fairly complex and materialist reasons rather than just because of revolution being inherently bad.
I don’t know what goes on the in minds of writers of AAA video games but they do tend to reproduce bourgeois ideology. Bioshock Infinite does this as you noted. The new Harry Potter game does this too. I wouldn’t expect publicly traded corporations being capable of anything better. Usually indie games have more sober writing.
I don’t have a broad understanding of trends because I do not play as much as I would like to but this is what I have noticed.
Disco Elysium devs are leftists, if you haven’t already watched I recommend this https://yewtu.be/watch?v=cdW7Cp0iV0A
Thanks. That’s a good video. I’m bad at critically reading art so I learned a fair bit from it. I wish he had talked about the giant insect too. I feel it has a place in the final message too.