The Binding of Isac part two - who are you anyway?

As previously discussed, the moral choice system is hidden in Binding of Isaac, which is the best place for a moral choice system to be.  If the game presents you with a good and bad option, and literally tells you which one is which, then that's not really a moral choice.  That is, none of you in your daily lives experience flagged good and bad options, deciding to take the one that has been labelled bad. No, you're more likely to take the Isaac route of taking what you want, and thinking that there are zero consequences, even when there are.

But there's another aspect to this game that was brought to my attention, and I'd like to talk about it today.  That aspect is the change in appearance that you undergo as you go deeper into the basement.  But before we can talk about that, we need to talk about the enemies of the game.

The game starts, and in the early levels, you are mainly pursued by things that are variations of your standard body type.  For example, this is you:

Naked, weeping, but not altogether aesthetically unappealing.  Now, compare this character model to the enemies from the first few levels, and you'll start to see something interesting happen.  

Yes, there are a lot of bugs, spiders, flies, demons from Hell, all that as enemies, but a lot (maybe not most, but a significant proportion) of the enemies are just mutations of your character model.  Now, this by itself doesn't really say much, but hold on, because there's more to talk about.

As you go deeper into the basement, you have item rooms crop up, and these item rooms, and the items in them, are the major means through which you can upgrade your stats.  All the items you pick up from the item rooms are there to upgrade your speed, your tears, or to give you new abilities, like

flight, explosive shots, and so on.  But unlike  a great many other games, the items that you pick up are represented physically on your character model.  Some of them are fine, and don't affect things too much.  Pageant boy, spelunker helmet, heck, even number one all make you look fine.  But as you progress and unlock more items, then you'll begin to see more and more changes to your model. In fact, by the end of the game, you're almost always unrecognizable from how you were at the beginning.

So what?  Well, this tells you something about the enemies you're fighting.  The enemies you're fighting are corrupted versions of someone like you.  Perhaps brothers and sisters who have also escaped into the basement, and have picked up powerups themselves.  Their abilities, to generate flies, to spit tears or blood, mirror those of your abilities, and their deformities mirror your own.  There is no upgrade that comes without a physical cost, and these mutated enemies tend to show up at the beginning when they're still more deformed than you. But as you go deeper, the enemies devolve more and more into creatures from nightmares, and you sort of forget about the things that looked sort of like you but a little bit off.  Until you get to the final boss,

When you encounter the boss of the game, something strange happens.  It's you.  Isaac is the final boss.  But not strange, messed up deformed Isaac, regular Isaac.  Contrast the random hodge-podge

that you have become next to the real genuine pristine Isaac you encounter at the end of the game.  Worlds apart.  For a second, you appreciate that in this situation, the deformed, malformed, mutuated monster in this situation is you.  You turned into that through your time progressing through the basement.  You grabbed the powerups that you figured would give you success, or a better chance to survive, and when you get to the end, not only do you realize how far you've come, but also that maybe the basement is full of other people who were making the same decisions.

It's a lot like Bioshock in that regard.  In Bioshock, you're the protagonist by virtue of being the player character, but you're on the same core level as the rest of the enemies you're fighting.  They're all splicers, and from very early on in the game, you are too.  You spend a generous amount of time

splicing, recombining your genetic code, which is the core problem that everyone else in rapture was dealing with too.  They're no different from you, though you think you're all special and different and unique.  And this is where the ambiguity kicks in.  In neither of those two games are you out for a noble task, not really.  You're into it for self-preservation, to survive and to progress.  But the deeper you go, the more you turn into the monsters that you're fighting.  As you splice in Bioshock, or pick up items in Isaac, they change you.  All of a sudden, in Bioshock, you have charred flesh, or hornets all over your skin, or ice breaking through your knuckles, and it all seems normal, because it's what you have to do to survive.  And it's what everyone else is doing to survive, too.  Isaac, same deal.  You can pick up powerups that will let you manipulate the flies, the spiders, vomit blood, fly, weep faster, and all those powerups mimic what you see in the enemies around you.  They're twisted, and so are you.

If you pause and think about how video games work, you play the part of the hero, but why are you the hero?  You certainly cause a bigger bodycount than anyone else.  The number of things you break is huge, the bodies are stacked up like cordwood, there are explosions all over the place, and an awful lot of families have lost their dads.  You're as spliced up and despoiled as the enemies you're facing.  So what makes you the hero?  

The fact  that you're the character that you control.

This is the source of a lot of problems, and one that the Bible really does work hard to bust your chops on.  You are the main character of your own story, and it's easy to see the rest of humanity as essentially being either disposible or at worst adversarial, mainly due to the fact that they're not you. This is how we work out who the heroes and villains are in our own lives, by viewing other people and asking if they're standing in the way of what we want to do or not.  That's pretty much it.  If you've ever wondered how it is that people can be engaged in terrible evil, can be involved with murder, rape, molestation, and so on, and all think they're good people?  It's because like Booker Dewitt, like Isaac, heck, like Comstock, we are all the stars of our own show.  And the people who are around us who stand in our way, they are our enemies.

But the first and greatest lesson of the Christian faith is to look at yourself, genuinely, and ask who you are.  Ask if you're doing what you think people should be doing.  Are you behaving in the way you sincerely believe other people should behave? If not, why not? It's the lesson that John the Baptist taught before the ministry of Jesus even began.  It's the lesson that the prophet Nathan delivered to David, telling him that he was the one who was behaving in a way that he himself found to be abominable and deserving of death.  In other words, when you get to the end of the binding of Isaac, and you find that you're corrupted, that you're not looking overly heroic anymore, you have a moment to pause for thought, and ask yourself what it is that makes you the hero.

For Christians, the only thing that we can cling to is Jesus, who offers us a chance to reset.  To be forgiven.  To look at our decisions, to look at how corrupted we are, and to fall on the one who has promised that he can restore us to the way things should be. Restore us back to where we knew people were always supposed to be.  In the most roundabout way of explaining things, the only way out is to reset.  To go back.

The deeper into the dungeon you go, the more corrupted you get, or you don't survive.  Just like real life, the longer you're around, the more corrupted you get, the worse your decisions, until you come face to face with the realization that you are a long way away from how you believe people should live.  So you have a choice.  Pretend that you're doing well, and that everyone else is corrupt, or to fall on the mercies of Christ, who will protect, restore and renew you, washing away all those things you picked up, and returning you back to how you were at the beginning.

The Binding of Isaac - Moral choices.

This one's a strange one.  They're all strange ones, but this one is particularly strange.  It's strange from the top down.  I'll try to describe it.

Imagine the dungeon parts of the Legend of Zelda, top-down with Link fighting monsters, moving through the dungeon until the boss battle at the end.  There's weak walls that can be blown up, there are secrets to find, enemies to fight, and upgrades to get.  All that sounds fine so far, but the breakdown happens with who you are as a character, and who your prime adversary is.

You're a child, a naked, frightened child, who is running away from your mother.  The end boss is your mother (for most of the game, we'll get into that in a bit), and she is trying to kill you.  This is a bizarre setup for a bizarre game.  Your only weapon is your tears, which you cry at the enemies who surround you.  And your enemies?  Equally bizarre, (un)fortunately.  You will find deformed siblings, flies, spiders, giant flies, giant spiders, demons, monsters, and everything else you can possibly imagine.

The game is a roguelike game, through and through.  What does this mean? It means infinite, or at least near-infinite replay value, as the dungeons that you move through are randomized.  The layout changes every time you play.  And when you die, you die.  That's it.  That particular run is over.  There's no continue button, no extra lives (outside of very specific items), and no rerolling.  If you get dealt bunk items, it's a real tough journey to try to get rid of them.  But it's not just the layout that changes, because the upgrades also change every playthrough.  The real pleasure of the game ends up as seeing how the various upgrades and items interact with each other.

And a lot of these items and upgrades have distinctly Christian, or Biblical themes attached to them.  You can end up with the Bible, the book of Revelation, the book of belial, the dead sea scrolls, the nail, a prayer card, and a crown of thorns.  It's absolutely laced through with Biblical items.  How do you get items? Well, this is where the moral choice aspect comes into it.

Most games that have a moral choice system attached to them will present you with a pretty stark, obvious moral choice.  If you harvest the little sister, then she dies, and you KNOW that's a bad thing to do.  Atlas, Dr. Tennembaum, they'll all tell you that you probably ought not to be killing these girls.  It won't stop you from playing the game, or from passing the game, but you know you're getting a bad ending when you finish the game.  But the Binding of Isaac doesn't have multiple endings based on your moral choices.  If you can get to the end of the game and beat the final boss, you win.  That's it. 

But there are choices to make.  And these choices are in the form of beggars, really. 

This is a beggar. He is obviously holding up a sign asking you for your pennies.  If you give him up to four pennies, he will spit out an item.  That's nice of him.  Sometimes the items will be good, sometimes they'll be less helpful.  Sometimes it'll be just what you were hoping for, frequently it'll be something you already have a lot of.  But here's the juice, in addition to giving the beggar money until he spits out items, you may decide that you want some of that money back.  And there is nothing NOTHING stopping you from dropping a bomb next to him, and taking a few steps back.  The bomb will blow up the beggar, dropping coins, hearts, bombs, keys, whatever.  And you can take it all back.  And there are, on the surface, no penalties to doing this.  And you can do this exact same trick in the many arcades scattered around the game as well. 

 

 

As I say, on the surface, you suffer no penalties for doing this.  The beggar will blow up, drop items, and you won't have to deal with new enemies, harder enemies, it doesn't make future beggars less likely to show up, it only changes one thing;  There's a way to get really good items in the game, but that way will cost you. After completing a level, after getting to the end and beating a boss, there's a chance that a devil room will appear.  And that's where the good items are.  And you can choose them, they're out on display.  There's only one problem with them, which is that it will cost you heart containers.  That's right, the best items you can get will make it more likely that you'll die.  Power comes at a cost.  Why am I mentioning this?  Because if you kill a beggar, or detonate an arcade, it makes it 35% more likely that a devil room will show up.  And here's where the very subtle moral choice comes into it, because it's actually a choice.

 

Ordinarily, in video games, the moral choice is obvious.  Here, it isn't.  Most of us probably discovered that you could blow up the beggar by accident, and after having spent all our money on trying for good items, it feels sort of good to blow the beggar up, and recoup some of that money.  And then yes, the devil rooms will appear, and again, what's the problem with that?  The items are good, and if you take them, sure your health will go down a bit, but if you can afford it, why not? 

 

 

 

Well, there's one more aspect to the moral choice system that we haven't discussed yet, one more surprise that will play on your mind whenever you're tempted to take a deal with the devil.  If a devil room appears and you don't make any of the deals, there's a 50% chance that you will get another option the next time a devil room is slated to appear.  There's a 50% chance that an Angel room will appear. 

 

In these angel rooms, you get better items.  That's not really a matter of opinion, the options are by definition better.  Everything from giving soul hearts to giving eternal hearts, all the way to granting flight, increasing all stats, and all that.  They're better.  They're absolutely better.  And unlike the Devil Room, they're free.  There is no heart cost to gain these items.  And the only way to get to the Angel room is to see a situation in which you're prompted to make a sacrifice, and then walk past it, to get the richer blessings to follow. 

 

 

 

Other games have tried to do this, and have failed, because at their core they still want to give you a good guy or bad guy narrative.  Isaac doesn't have that.  When you play through it, the narrative that you get is shaped by your hundreds of little tiny decisions over the course of your gameplay.  It's not a straight up good guy vs bad guy narrative, driven by scripted events, but it does have a story there.  It's the story that you make yourself.  Would you step over other people to get yourself ahead, or would you hold off, and partake in the potentially richer rewards to come?

 

A moral choice system that is a lot more like real life.  No script, but plenty of consequences.  

Mafia 2 - It's very boring.

Mafia 2 starts out with a bang.  It's a third person Grand Theft Auto clone at its core, and starting it out, well, it starts differently than it ends.  Here's the deal.  You start the game as Vito Scoletti, and you get into trouble with the law back in Little Italy.  The Little Italy in Empire Bay, the New York

knockoff in all but name (they don't name their version of the Brooklyn Bridge, but there it is, large as life).  As a young tough who gets into scrapes with the law, has no respect for authority, etc, the cops feel as though it's their duty to instead of giving you jail time, to put you in the army and send you to the real Italy to kill Italians in world war 2.  Not sure if that was a real sentencing policy, but there we go. 

Anyhow, the game starts you off with you in Italy shooting Italians, which warms you up for the rest of the game of shooting Italians, and after the first campaign mission in Italy, the game sends you right back to Empire Bay, where you engage in the usual petty criminality that marks this sort of thing.  But hold on, because there's a twist.

In the Grand Theft Auto universes, the criminal world is made to seem awfully fun.  In fact, a great many people who play the Grand Theft Auto games (hereby to be abbreviated as GTA), tend to immediately pick up a car, start running people over, and see how long they can last.  But there are a ton of side things to do in the GTA universe, which really make it seem as though you could enjoy a lucrative crime life.  The police, if they do catch you, are a momentary inconvenience, and easily avoided.  As long as you're not committing homicide right in front of them, they typically don't bother you too much.  And as you amass loot, you're free to spend it on whatever savory or unsavory thing you might want, and there are tons of those things.  New outfits, new cars, new furniture.  And if you get tired of just running around, you can deliver pizza, fight fires, fight crime as a vigilate or as a cop, take people to the hospital, or just explore an alive and vibrant city.  As you drive around, there are lots of things to do, and the only way to do more is to be a bigger criminal.

But Mafia 2, well, this is a horse of a different colour.  Remember my review of Spec Ops: The Line?  That game wasn't fun either, and the lack of fun of it made the story better.  Shooting soldiers and civilians in that game wasn't fun, but you had to do it to progress.  Similarly, the gameplay in Mafia 2 isn't fun either.  Oh sure, it's the standard shoot 'em up style firefights where you hide behid stuff and pop out, returning behind cover to get your health back, but it's what happens between those firefights that is really interesting, in that it's boring.

Between firefights, at the beginning, end, and through most of the middle of missions, you drive through the city.  And the city is huge.  It's huge, and there's nothing to do except drive through it to your next destination.  That's it.  Even if you kill civilians, they don't drop any money, if you kill the police, they just send more police.  That wouldn't be so bad if the distance was smaller, and THAT wouldnt' be so bad if the police in Mafia weren't super-attuned to the slightest fender bender.  Yes, you can get busted for driving over the speed limit in a car from the 1930s, which is barely faster than walking.  No jokes.  

This mechanic of having a dull commute at the start of the mission, and then right back home at the end of the mission, with nothing to do afterwards, really hammers home the notion that maybe being in the Mafia wasn't such a great thing after all.  Oh sure, it seems fun, because the only parts we ever get to see are the fun parts, the parties, the money, the power, all that stuff.  And that's the Mafia that gets presented to you.  In Mafia 2, you mess up a job delivering illegal gas ration stamps, and then go to jail for seven years.  And no, it doesn't just cut away and say '...seven years later' with you getting out, no no no.  You go to jail and have to walk around in jail for what seems like, well, seven years.  You have to do laundry, you walk very slowly around the jail, the guards rough you up, and that's what happens.  In all the GTA clones or equivalents, if you get arrested, it's a momentary blip where the cops might take your guns away if they're feeling overly sassy.  In Mafia 2, they take your time away.  Just like real jail.

Why is this so important?  Because of the point the game is making.  Unlike GTA, not only does crime not pay, it isn't even fun.  As soon as you seem to get rewards going on, as soon as you get a house with a pool and pink flamingoes (seriously) in it, it gets burned down by a rival gang.  Because all your property is stolen, you have no real claim to it.  Ultimately, the real take home lesson is something that you might find jammed right in the middle of the book of proverbs - The righteous have enough to satisfy their appetite, but the belly of the wicked is empty.  There's a great passage in Proverbs 9, which says 

The foolish woman is loud

she is ignorant and knows nothing.

She sits at the door of her house,

on a seat at the high places of the town

calling to those who pass by,

who are going straight on their way,

'you who are simple, turn in here!'

And to those without sense, she says 

'Stolen water is sweet,

and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.'

But they do not know that the dead are there,

that her guests are in the depths of Sheol.'

Proverbs 9:13-18

Do you ever wonder how actual gangs get recruits?  Mainly because that seductive element is there, and real people go for it.  That's what happened in this game, and I went for it.  I thought I'd be Al Capone, or at least Joe Pesci from Goodfellas, and you know who I ended up being?  A low level scrub, just like all the other low level scrubs.  No jokes.  I fell for it, in the same way as anyone else might.  Folly was there, whispering to me, saying 'you know what would be fun?  Joining the Mafia, wearing a fedora, and shooting the place up.'  And you know what happened?  I got to commute very slowly around Empire Bay, driving actually important people around, and those important people eventually tried to kill me.  Hooray.  

This is what actually happens when you just indulge your appetites for crime and violence.  Do you know what happens?  It's probably really boring.  It seems fun, but ultimately, it's the same old grind.  Maybe the rules that God left us were there for a reason.  Maybe murder and adultery and especially coveting were forbidden by him for a good reason - because they make us worse.  Famously, it is said that Jesus came that we might have life, and have it abundantly.  This is something that I keep on trying to make clear to the youth group, confirmation classes, and so on, who come up through the church - that the Ten Commandments aren't there to bust you up, they're there to give you a better life.   God knows how you ought to live, how we all ought to live, and he has given us a way to get there.  And if we ignore it, well, we are welcome to do so, but then we get the conseuqences of our actions.  At the best, it's a long, boring commute.  At worst, jail or death, both of which happen in this game.

What's great about Mafia 2?  That it's boring.  That seems like strange praise, but there we go.  Games can make points in all sorts of ways, and this one makes points by being dull.  And it's a good point to make.  

If they just accidentally made the game boring thinking they were making it fun, then I will withdraw any praise I may have given it.

Coming up next time:  Probably the Binding of Isaac.  Probably.

Alien Isolation. On being alone.

One of the first lines of dialogue in the scriptures concerning human beings is from God, who has just made Adam, formed him out of the dust of the ground, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, then placed him in the garden, and says this.

It is not good for man to be alone.

This passage is frequently used in weddings, when we say about ourselves that it isn't a natural, preferred condition to be alone.  We as human beings are not supposed to be alone.  This is why in the corrections system, one of the last few bastions of punishment is solitary confinement.  That is, being segregated from other people is unnatural, punishing, and difficult to endure.  The word of God above is one of those that, whether you believe in God or not, holds true.  You know from your own experience, whether introvert or extrovert, whether you are close to those whom you love or far away, you know that it is not good for you to be alone.  

Most games, you aren't alone though.  The big ones, like Gears of War, Left 4 Dead, and so on, have you surrounded by a group of friends, people who, like you, are well

armed, and prepared to take on the threats, locust, undead, or otherwise, as a group, as a team.  And teams, they make horror much more palatable.  The thing that left 4 dead does, and does well, is to communicate to you that if you get separated from your team, you're dead.  You may not die straight away, but it won't take long.  If you're on your own, sprinting towards the end, you'll be scraped up in a body bag pretty soon.

The wonderful thing about Alien Isolation is that it brings this feeling to the forefront.  You are alone.  In space.  With a monster.  Oh sure, there are other humans, and you have weapons, but ultimately, they're not much help to you.  Most of the humans will

be wildly aggressive towards you, and the weapons aren't much good against the problems that present themselves.  Often, your best bet is to hide, and hide well.  Your best bet is to sneak around under tables, and in vents, trying to hide from what you have all around.  

And the thing you're hiding from, for the most part, is the Alien.  And this alien is a problem for you.  The alien is a hulking monster, a killer whom you know is desperate to wipe you out, to kill you and eat you.  And when this monster shows up, oh boy.  It slithers down from the ceiling, and stretches itself out, snarling and growling, and stomping throughout the space station where you find yourself.  Yes, you have weapons, yes, you have a gun, but shooting that alien yields no success.  It takes bullets like popcorn, and will definitely kill you if you take a potshot at it.

So when the alien shows up, it's a terrifying moment, because you're dealing with something that is in every way immeasurably stronger than you.  It's a monster, a killer, and an unstoppable force.  And as you hide under a table, cower in a locker, or crouch behind a door, those words of God echo in your ears - it is not good for you to be alone.  With friends, with heavy weapons, with a team of marines with guns, this would be easier, but it would also be a different game.  And as Gearbox software found out, a much worse game.

The presence of the alien in the game, as a monster, as a killer, as a brutally efficient slayer, reminded me a lot of something else from the Bible while I was playing.  It reminded me of the passage about the devil from the book of first Peter.  It says 

Be sober minded; be watchful.

Your adversary the devil prowls around 

like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

Resist him, firm in your faith.

Before this game, I wasn't too sure about this whole thing.  I have no experience with roaring lions, but I have seen them in the zoo, and they sure don't seem to frightening.  If anything, they seemed pretty lazy.  They seemed awfully laid back, content to sit around, to do nothing, and to take it easy.  Well, that's because I'm separated from them by fences, glass, and all that.  It would be a different story if I was in there with them.

The alien from Alien Isolation is reasonably analogous to the devil of the Bible.  He prowls around seeking to devour, to destroy.  And if we were paying attention to what the Bible says, we'd be alert, we'd be sober minded, we'd be paying attention to the possibility of the approach of the devil, who seeks whom he may devour.  But we

aren't.  We're complacent.  We get relaxed, we get used to the idea that the devil, well, he might be out there somewhere, but he's nowhere near us.  And you get this idea in Alien Isolation too, because that's how games are supposed to work.  Games are ususally divided up into sections, into action set-pieces, where you fight specific enemies at specific times, with a difficulty curve thrown in there to keep it fair.  Enemies get progressively more diffiuclt as you progress, and there is a fairly straightforward linear curve.  

But in Alien Isolation, all that goes out the window.  The alien is always watching you.  There's no such thing as being out of sight, out of mind.  There's no such thing as him not paying attention to you, there's no such thing as a safe zone, there's no such thing as a space where the alien isn't close at hand.  She's like a lion - she likes to stick close to the zebras.

You see, any interactions we have with the devil are pretty short lived. We feel him at work in times of trial and temptation, we feel his work when we are angry or agitated, we know when he is around, but we forget about him at all other times.  And this is what he wants.  The lion wants the zebras to forget she exists.  The Alien wants you, while you play, to forget about her.  She wants you to be occupied by other threats, by the androids and the other workers.  And the devil wants you to be occupied with the bits and pieces of daily life, forgetting that he's at work at all.  The more you forget about him, the better he works.

This all culminates in the game when we are occupied by the Working Joe androids, hiding from them, runing down the hallway away from their stiff legged strolling, and then the Alien pops down from the ceiling and plucks your head like a man might pluck a grape.  If you're distracted by minor threats, you forget the big ones

even exist.  If you're distracted by the day to day, then you forget about the big monster, the dragon, the ancient enemy, that you're powerless against.  And that's exactly where that particular monster wants it to be.

1 Peter cautions us to be vigilant, to be aware of the fact that we're always in temptation, just as Alien: Isolation reminds you, usually through your death, that the Alien is always there, always watching, and usually waiting until you're distracted for her moment to strike.  Yeah, there's a bunch of other stuff going on, but you've got to stay mindful of that monster.  No matter what else is going on, she's always going to be your biggest problem.


PJ.

Bioshock infinite - oooh heaven ain't a place on earth

This is one of those cases where I don't have to make a tenuous connection here.  When you're looking at the absolute masterpiece that is Bioshock Infinite, you don't have to make a massive logical leap to pull in a reference to baptism.  I don't have to, because the game does it itself.  This is the only video game that I've ever played that both begins and ends with a baptism.  I've never seen a game do that before.

For those of you who don't know, the game mainly takes place in the floating sky city of Columbia, set apart from the city of Rapture from the first game by virtue of being in the sky, vs far far under the sea.  But both games have the element of being trapped in the city until the mission is complete.  But in Bioshock Infinite, some of the best parts of the game happen before you pull the trigger a single time, which for a first person shooter, is quite an amazing feat.  The game starts with a black screen, with a pair of voice overs.  A woman asking 'Booker, are you afraid of God?' and a man replying back 'No, but I'm afraid of you.'

That conversation between Elizabeth and Booker sets up the game, because this game is all about Baptism.  From beginning to end, the game itself is about baptism, and what baptism means.  Booker starts the game already heavily in debt.  His isn't a noble quest to do the right thing, he isn't guided by passion, by a sense of honor, or duty, he is following a voice which proclaims to him loudly 'Bring us the girl, and wipe away the debt!'  This refers to two things, first of all bringing the girl Elizabeth back so that his gambling debts might be erased by a wealthy benefactor.  But the second meaning to this sentence is the one in which Booker's moral debt might be erased by him doing something good.

Booker's moral debt was built up by his time at wounded knee, where he massacred native Americans by burning them to death in their teepees, and scalping the dead, keeping the trophies.  After his time at wounded knee, he fell into a deep depression, drinking and gambling, and having a hard time dealing with his past.  When the events of the game start, and Booker is dropped off at the lighthouse by the Lutece

twins, and he walks into the main door of the lighthouse.  As he walks through the door, he comes across a cross-stitched pattern that says 'OF THY SINS SHALL I WASH THEE' to which Booker replies 'good luck with that, pal.'

Booker's past is so big, so harmful, that he is seriously in doubt that he can ever be rid of the effects of it.  The things that he did out at Wounded Knee haunted him so much that the well of alcohol of gambling that he sunk into continued to ruin his life so much that he had to sell his own daughter to keep out of debt.  And this combination, the war crimes plus the selling of his daughter, lead Booker to the city of Columbia, to the city in the clouds where the new baptism would be found.

The city in the sky of Columbia is promised to the 'pilgrims' as the 'New Eden,' as an Ark for a new age.  The first of the white robed potential candidates for baptism that Booker talks to tells him that it's 'heaven.  Or as close as we'll get this side of judgment day.'  The city in the sky that Booker goes to, Columbia, is a place that is as close to

Heaven as people can imagine.  It's in the clouds, beautifully decorated, the crime is almost non-existant, goods are sold on the honor system, and people up there are astonishingly racist, but very polite to whites.  And this world that Booker goes to is the one in which he has a chance to start again, start totally fresh.  Nobody knows him, nobody has any idea as to his past, he can melt right in as a normal person, with no debts, no extra baggage hanging onto him, nothing that is dogging him from his past.  Nobody knows about Wounded Knee, nobody is counting his gambling debts, nothing at all.  He has the chance to start again.  And when it comes time for his baptism (and the baptism is unavoidable.  You either get baptized, or turn the game off and start again), you are baptized into the prophet, the founders, and our Lord.  A very strange Trinitarian baptism.  And this baptism, is like the baptism at the end of the game too, where Booker looks at it and says 'Might as well get it over with.'

It's so strange to be playing a video game, a video game rated M for Mature, where it says in big letters on the screen 'PRESS X TO ACCEPT BAPTISM.  I've never seen that before, and I'll likely never see it again.  But the baptism that Booker is offered in Columbia isn't a baptism like we would recognize.  Why is that?  Because of what you're being baptized into.

You're not being baptized into anything resembling forgiveness of sins.  You're being baptized into the magnificence of mankind, of the strength and work and majesty of humanity.  Baptized into the prophet, baptized into the founders, and baptized into the Lord.

The majesty of humanity, American exceptionalism, it's something that is built into the city of Columbia, the world of Bioshock Infinite.  The way the story gets going is, as mentioned above, to leave the 'sodom below,' and ascend into the sky where people have made a heaven for themselves.  It's a reveal similar to the reveal at the beginning of the first Bioshock game, where you see massive whales floating by a city beneath the sea, but it's different.  It's in the clouds.  It talks about ascension.  When you look out of your capsule, you see clouds, you see fireworks, you see children playing, and a massive statue of an angel occupying the centre of the floating city. For all intents and purposes, you are being baptized into a heaven, but a heaven of man's own making.  Something with all the trappings of faith, baptism, white robes, ritual, etc, but with all the content focused on the people who made it.

And this Heaven that Father Comstock has made is racist, it's way over the top, but it tells the story of a world that we could imagine being very much like one of us would make for ourselves.  What's all over the city?  Stained glass of Comstock everywhere,

statues of Comstock, statuary of the founders of the United States, a secret society dedicated to John Wilkes Booth, of all people.  If you had a heaven to make, who would be at the centre of it?

In Bioshock Infinite, the sky is devoted to man's service to self.  And as you see, the deeper you get into it, that was a bad trade-off.  It's racist, corrupt, racist, and more than a little behind the times.  It's got a wonderful veneer, but beneath it, it's all horrible and grotesque, with a struggle between the leaders and the subordinates, and the slaves.  But even the slaves are awful too, when their time for freedom comes, and they begin murdering indiscriminately.  In other words, people are fairly rotten most of the time.  If you take away the limitations on us, if you take away the limits of death, of resources, of social structures, of the rules of the nation we're living in, what do we turn into?  Who are we?  Who are we really?  Well, that's the game's big reveal is that you are both the hero and the villain of this story, just like you are in the story of your life.  Bioshock Inifinite is one of my favourite types of games, really, because it's not like Mario or like Donkey Kong, where you are virtuous by definition, and everyone who gets in your way is bad, mainly because they're not you.  But here, in Columbia, eveyone, including, gosh, especially you, is a bit of a basket case.  No matter who you help, whether it be yourself, the Columbians, the Vox Populi, they're all varying degrees of rotten.  They're all no good.  There is none righteous, as the Bible says, no not one.  For all have sinned, and fallen short not just of the glory of God, but even of your own standards.  But all the people of Columbia are racist, violent, backstabbing, frightening horrible people, that, when the surface is scratched, will show you exactly what they're all about.  And they're about looking out for themselves.

So, in many ways, the floating sky-city of Columbia ends up being less of Heaven as the Christians would conceive of it, and more of a mount Olympus from Greek mythology.  What's Mount Olympus all about?  It's a place where the Greek pantheon has set themselves up in a place to be as unrestricted, voilent, capricious, and wanton as they want.  And it works for them, but it serves to show what a paradise would look like if it was made by men in their own image.  It would be full of all the worst parts of the human expeience, not peace and love but wrath and rage.  Not charity and grace, but fiery passion and death.  It's a world where all the rules of the sodom below are gone, and the new ark of Columbia is free to remake the world, but to do it properly this time.  And what do they do? They go and make a world that is even worse than the one they left. Given the clean slate of a new world, populated by the people of a new ark, the first thing they do is to subjugate those different from themselves, and seek to rain down fire on the rest of the world.

So how do we, who are imperfect, who could easily fall into this same trap, go to a place that is actually good?  Not just made in our own image, but actually, truly, legitimately good?

We'll get into that next time.

spec ops the line part two: Dissonance

So, whose fault is it?

That's the big question at the heat of Spec Ops.  Who is the villain?  Games usually have end bosses, right?  You play your way through to the end of the game, you fight all the low level scrubs, move up to heavies, smack them around, and then each level ends with a boss, with a big boss at the end.  A big boss at the end and then a cutscene where you get cake from princess Peach.  That's how it's supposed to go, right?

Well, in Spec Ops, that breaks down, it falls apart.  By the time you get to the end of the story, you find yourself dealing with the final boss of the game being dead for the whole game.  There was no Konrad, not for the entire time.  All the things that happened, all the bloodshed that occupies the game, we blame that on Konrad, saying that it must be his fault that we did any of this.  It begins with you shooting refugees, the people whom you were sent to save.

And this is the biggest unscripted surprise of Spec Ops, that all the other human beings in the game have agency, are following orders, and as bizzare as it may seem, believe sincerely that they're doing the right thing.  And in many cases, they're right, and you're wrong.  Sgt. Lugo, one of your Delta Force team comments on the bloodshed at the beginning of the game by saying 'aren't these the people we're supposed to be saving?'  Yes.  And you end up killing them.

When the game turns, when it tips its hand and reveals to you the length and depth that it is willing to go to, it is as perfect of a presentation of original sin as I can think of, and of the concept of Law, in the Christian sense.  The way things work in the Christian perspective is that people need, desperately need to be reminded of their own sin, entirely because everyone, in their own mind, is Captain Walker, the star of their own sitcom, the player character of their own game.  And just like Captain Walker, you have a feeling, for a long time, that because you're the central character, because you're the most important one in any shot, that you can do no wrong.  Nothing you do is that bad or that wrong, and all that bodies that hit the floor, well, they shouldn't have been trying to kill you.  But Walker's big epiphany comes at the Gate.

Notice that Walker says that it's the 33rd who are going to have to pay for what they've done.  Even though Walker has just blasted civilians with white phosphorus, he's still seeking to lay the blame elsewhere.  How does this work?  It works through cognitive dissonance, holding two conflicting viewpoints at the same time.  

The loading screens in Spec Ops are perhaps the most clever partof the game.  They start off by giving you tips on gameplay, but they ramp up significantly in later stages.  And by the end, they start to say things like 'do you even remember why you're here?' 'Cognitive dissonance is the condition of holding two conflicting viewpoints at the same time,' 'This is all your fault.' and my favourite ' You are still a good person.'  The game is subtly reminding you that you still believe that you are doing the right thing, because you're the protagonist.  That's how the story goes, because that's how all stories go.  The Hero does the right thing, beats the villains, and retuns home with full honors, or dies in a blaze of glory. That's it.  

But in Spec Ops, you make bad decisions, and then continue by making worse decisions.  You make bad decisions the whole way through.  But the hero can't make bad decisions, or he wouldn't be the hero, so who is to blame for all the bad decisions?

Walker blames Konrad.  Walker makes Konrad into the final boss, because that's how the story is supposed to go. He, as the hero, has to move through the levels, killing the bad guys, until he faces down with the final boss, his old mentor, and brings him to justice.  And as his squad continues to voice disagreement with his decisions, Walker says :

"This isn't about finding Konrad.  It's about doing what's right."

What we forget about in the real world is that in everyone's view, they are the protagonist in their own games, in their own stories.  And if you're a protagonist in a story, you will do what Walker does, which is to fight through the odds, and come out victorious.  The Hero makes good decisions, and his decisions must be right because he is the Hero.  And we live in this world in which we are the main characters in our own stories.  We are conditioned to look outside ourselves for the reasons behind anything that ever goes wrong.  Why do our relationships fall apart?  Because our ex-husbands are inconsiderate jerks. Why do we get disciplined at work? Because our bosses have it out for us for some reason.  Why do we end up fighting with each other?  Because the other person refuses to listen.  Why did we get stopped while driving?  Because the cops have a quota to meet.  If the truth is undeniable, you make your own.

The thing is, this is what sin is all about.  It's all about us looking at ourselves, and being honest with what is happening.  It's all about us looking at our sin, and repenting of it, and seeking to amend, whether we do or not.  And the more of our blame that gets foisted off on other people, the less likely we are to amend things.  We need someone to blame, but we usually can't abide it being us, so we make up someone of we have to.  Think of Captain Walker.  If he would have just admited what he had done at the gate,if he would have said that he had done some things he should not have done, then he could have walked away, and moved on.  He did not.  Someone else must have been to blame, and therefore, the body count continues.  None of this would have happened if Walker had just stopped, but he marched on.

The last surprise that the game has is that the person that you thought was going to be the final boss had been dead for the whole game.  You, as Walker, had made him up.  He wasn't real.  And as a construct, you realize at the end that the decisions you'd made all game, you weren't forced into them by Konrad.  The walkie-talkie was broken.  The final boss was a corpse all along. So who is the final boss?  the final boss is Walker himself, and what he chooses to do with his legacy.  He can kill himself, or he can kill 'Konrad,' and choose to put and end to the difference between the two.  And so far, this is the only game I've ever played where the final boss is the Old Adam.  The only game in which the last boss is you yourself, the part of you that did the stuff you knew was wrong.  And that's us.  The final boss of your life is your sinful nature.  The final boss of your existence, the only real enemy you've ever had to face is yourself, and the things you do.  It's really hard to admit that, as hard as it was for Captain walker, but it takes a strong man to deny what's right in front of him.  In most cases, you are the one who has been causing problems in your life, you are the one who has been  causing the majority of the problems, and it's this that Christianity, with its focus on sin and repentance, aims to deal with.  Working through this is and always will be complicated. It's a tough look in the mirror, it's a hard, difficult thing to do, to look into that mirror, and to see the Konrad that you were fighting against.  And that's what Walker worked out, was that the only way to beat Konrad was to beat himself.

When Konrad talks in the closing cutscene, he says that someone has to pay for all of this, and that's true.  The wages of sin is death, and Walker has a lot to atone for.  So much, that he'll never pay it off.  And this is where our Christian understanding of Grace comes into it.  We are people who, if we take seriously our beliefs, we end up knowing that our sin will require punishment, some kind of redress.  The great gift of our faith is that this doesn't rest on us, but rests on Christ.  When faced with a similar conversation, when faced with the possibility that we might have to atone for our many and various crimes, we don't have to take the dichotomy proposed to us by Konrad, that either we pay for it, or that we have to enter into dissonance and invent someone to take the fall for us.  Christ's whole work was to take that dissonance away, to understand that sin needs to be payed for, but that we can't possibly manage it on our own.  In all the things we have invented and created in our lives to ensure that we won't take any blame for our sins, in all our dissonance, the thing we need to know is that Christ offers to take that away, to not live in denial, nor to hide from our sins, but to confess them and have done with them.  And knowing those sins is the first step in that process.

The best line in the whole game comes right at the end, when Walker says "I didn't mean to hurt anyone," and Konrad answers "No-one ever does."  All the body count that you racked up in Spec Ops is comprised of people just like you, people who want to do the right thing, who want to help, and yet it keeps on going wrong.  Yes, you never meant to hurt anyone, but you did.  Both as Walker, and as you yourself.  The only question is who pays for it?  Walker, Konrad, or Christ?

Next week, new game.  Not sure which one yet, but probably not paper mario.  Maybe Paper Mario.

Spec Ops: The Line part 1 - original sin.

Massive spoiler alert here.  If you haven't played Spec Ops: The Line yet, please do before continuing this review.  The midgame won't mean anything if you know exactly what's going to happen, though you might figure it out during.

Spec Ops: The Line was one of the big surprises in video games, in that it's a war game in which the enemies are not people you feel good killing.  The thing about action games is that they're supposed to satisfy through adrenaline, you're supposed to get a bit of a high from pulling the trigger and watching someone's head explode, or what have you.  But Spec Ops, a modern military shooter, does away with that in the first few minutes.  The first few enemies you find, and kill, well, as your squadmate Lugo says 'aren't these the people we're supposed to be rescuing?'

Here's the deal.  You arrive in a ruined Dubai, where massive sandstorms have essentially buried the city, and have left the survivors holed up in squalid conditions in ruined buildings.  And those survivors
are working with the CIA to try to oust the 33rd army battallion led by John Konrad who have gone rogue in their role as army ambassadors.  They stayed behind after an order to leave, in order to evacuate the city.  But the evacuation got caught in a storm, and thousands of people died.  The 33rd turned against itself, and the remaining civilians got caught up in the violence.  Everyone starts fighting for their own interests, often against each other, over dwindling water, fuel, ammo, and shelter. The storms keep on rolling in.  It gets awfully muddy.

But the muddiness is vital to understanding how the game works.  The thing about the enemies that you kill, is that they're all people.  They're all people who are doing their best in a terrible situation.  As the sand rolls in, those who are left behind are thirsty, have no food or water, have no place to live, and they're getting increasingly desperate.  And it's into this desepration that you, as a player, enter.

This is one of those incredibly rare situations in which you, as a player and as a player characeter, don't actually have any moral high ground in your decisions.  None.  Usually, the people you're used to fighing in these sorts of games are bad people.  Even in relatively sympathetic games, they're people whose motivations you can understand, but they go about it through the wrong methods. But here, in Spec Ops, you're going through things the wrong way too!  Almost all the way through the game, you end up making decisions that you have to make, because you'll die if you don't.  And these decisions, whether they be burying survivors under suffocating sand, or killing civilians who turn their guns on you first, all these decisions are made with survival in mind.  The other people have to die because they aren't you.  And you can't all survive.

This turns the modern military shooter on its head, really, because usually the other people have to die because they aren't on your side, but in Spec Ops, all the enemies you kill are supposed to be people who are on your side.  Refugee combattants, allied soldiers, and even the very unarmed civilians you were dispatched to save.  Why do you end up killing these people?  Because it's either them or you.


The entire game revolves around this problem , that you're trying to do your best to do the right thing, and yet doing the wrong thing time and time again.  You're trying to rescue civilians, you're trying to only shoot 'bad people,' but all sorts of people are turning against you even though you're trying to talk them out of it.  The best way to have moved forward would have been to have stopped, and left as soon as things got going.  But if you keep playing, the body count will keep on going up, and it'll keep on being you who is making the bodies hit the floor.


This pushes you into a real situation that is a lot like a bizarre indie game called save the date, which is well worth playing if you haven't before.  In both these games, it is incumbent on you to realize that the majority of other people will lose as long as you keep winning.  If you can call it winning.  Ultimately, any forward progress you make comes at a great and terrible price to those whom you should be saving.  There isn't a good outcome for you, or the people you're working with, and if you genuinely want the people who you're supposed to save to do well, the best bet is to butt out, and call it even. Look for survivors, radio the cavalry, and go home, to quote Captain Walker in the first mission.  But the more you keep going, the more you find that it's a big mess of people making bad decisions, and you're stuck in the middle of it.


Spec Ops: The Line is the game that comes the closest to really wrapping a game's head around the notion of original sin, or for the layman, the knowledge that everyone is just varying degrees of messed up.  It's harder to see in other games.  You're the hero, other people are disposable.  Their deaths don't even flicker as a blip on your karma meter, really.  And games like Fallout tell you that as long as you do more good stuff than bad stuff, then you're doing a good job.  But Spec Ops, well, you as the playerhenchmen, goombas, koopas, the locust, the Helghast, aliens, whatever, are free to execute because they're not you.
character aren't making decisions better than anyone else out there.  Your decisions are frequently just as bad, if not worse.  Konrad  was responsible for the deaths of 1300 people, while you as a player character are guilty of at least a generous chunk of that yourself.  It's a clear breakdown in games, in which you have been conditioned for a long time to believe that because you're the player, because you're the protagonist, all your actions are morally justified.  Other people in the game, enemies,

Why do you kill enemies in games?  That's a google question that has no answers.  Sure, it'll tell you how to kill enemies, or what weapons to use on particular enemies but the existential question of why you kill enemies isn't covered.  Usually, it's because they're standing in your way.  Because they're not you.  Sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're cartoonishly bad, and they have to be made that way so that you as a player can still feel okay about blasting them to bits.  If they were people, just like you, it would be a lot harder to massacre them en masse.

Which is why Spec Ops, though a magnificent game, isn't fun.  It's not fun becasuse step by step, you're making bad decisions, and as you make those bad decisions, they cling to you and make the rest of the game happen.  Nothing would happen if you'd just leave, but since you don't, or can't, the game and so are everyone else's. Delta Squad, Colonel Konrad, the 33rd, the refugees, the CIA, they're all making bad choices, and you don't get to stand above it all.  As bad as everyone else is, your decisions are equally bad, and equally reprehensible.  And this is what sin is.  You can see it in everyone else, but can you see it in you?  The best part of the game is when the game opens up, and you see yourself for the first time as someone who is, in every way, making the same decisions as your enemies.  The only difference is that you're you.  That is literally the only thing setting you apart. And most of my time spent preaching on the law half of law and gospel, it's spent trying to get people to see that this law, this law of God, applies to them, as much as it does to other people.  And this is so hard for individuals to figure out, almost impossible, until they wrap their heads around the idea that they are every bit as sinful as everyone else.  Most of us don't see that until we have it pointed out to us in very particular ways.
gets more and more difficult, and more and more dark as you go.  And the darker it gets, the worse your decisions are,


Spec Ops, it's one big story along the same lines of what Nathan the prophet said to David, when telling him a parable about David himself, Bathsheba, and Uriah the Hittite.  Nathan tells David the story about a poor man who had a sheep, whom he loved and cared for deeply, until a rich man came and took the sheep away, and ate it in a meal for his friends.  And when David heard this, his anger burned hot, and said that the rich man deserved death, at which point, Nathan says one of the great lines of the whole Bible:  'YOU ARE THE MAN.'

David had stolen Uriah's wife.  David had gotten Uriah killed.  And after all that, David was living fat and happy, with his new wife in his big palace, assuming that everything was, and was always going to be, fine.  He couldn't see his own problems until they were pointed out to him by a story, by a parable, by seeing that the standards of behavior he was expecting of everyone else, those weren't the standards that he was obeying.  He had in mind how people should act, he could see how other people weren't meeting up to that, and then he had to see only through a story, through a narrative, that he wasn't doing what he thought everyone should be doing, or living the way he believed everyone should live.

Now, next week. we'll be getting into what you do with that information.  When Walker, at the Gate, finally comes face to face with his own sin, what does he do with that information, and how is that an awful lot like what we do with that self same information?

See you next time,

PJ.