Elizabeth is Levine’s admitted daughter surrogate locked away in a tower like a Disney princess, and rescued from the brutality of Columbia by the hyper-violence of DeWitt. Levine’s paragon of civility appears to be Elizabeth, who only ever dirties her hands to murder the seemingly out-of-control Fitzroy.

This is a natural and unfortunate outcome of ascribing to the horseshoe theory that equates the oppressor with the person acting out uncivilly against that oppression. It shares common ground with the ideology that results in Google’s anti-bullying AI allowing talk of racial genocide to pass its filters as long as it is politely expressed. Levine’s privilege-laced moralizing about the violence and chaos of Fitzroy’s uprising reflects recent mainstream media op-eds that place white supremacists on equal footing with the anti-fascist protesters that have organized to resist them. The true heroes, DeWitt and Elizabeth, are sent on their very important mission, and pass above the ugly fray of the poor, non-white citizens of Columbia, inconveniently fighting for their freedom. As a result their struggle is swept aside, so that the plot of the final act, dealing with themes of guilt, parenthood, and forgiveness, culminating in a zany twist ending involving quantum mechanics, can take over. Criticisms of the segregated and authoritarian kleptocracy of Columbia’s white society are balanced against criticism of the violent methods the Vox Populi employ when resisting that society. Instead, the player is expected to witness the fighting in the streets and assume her guilt.īy casting FItzroy in this light, Infinite throws away the possibility for its fantastical allegory to deliver a lesson. How that transference of power actually comes about is barely touched upon. In one cutscene Booker DeWitt argues: “The only difference between Comstock and Fitzroy is how you spell the name.” She is, according to Levine, “destroyed by oppression”: the tragic, but inevitable outcome of a once powerless person taking power for herself. Wild, violent, unpredictable and untrustworthy: this is how the one character who might overthrow Columbia’s white supremacist nightmare is painted, as a villain just as poisonously evil as Father Comstock, Columbia’s “prophet” and the game’s’ central antagonist. The Vox Populi, Columbia’s resident militant revolutionary faction, is led by Daisy Fitzroy, a caricature of the black revolutionary, cribbed from mainstream recollection of groups like the Black Panthers and Mandela’s African National Congress. Columbia’s fictional ideology exaggerates the white supremacist tenets of the above myths, but in setting them in opposition to violent, unsympathetic strawmen, the game’s creators, Irrational Games and writer and director Ken Levine, build a fantasy of their own. Like America’s founding myth of the City Upon A Hill or the South’s pernicious Lost Cause narrative, fantasies of the kind represented by Columbia are often constructed to justify systems that benefit one group of people over another.

It’s a fantasy not only because it’s a picturesque turn-of-the century cluster of islands floating effortlessly through the clouds, but also because it presents an idyllic and carefree society -one whose white citizens are supported off the labor and oppression of its poor and non-white ones, most of whom are black. Bioshock Infinite’s floating city of Columbia is a fantasy.

Bioshock infinite racism