How BioShock Infinite is Influenced by Occupy Wall Street

While BioShock Infinite is due for release next year, the game’s story still is undergoing change, says the series’ creator Ken Levine. And if nothing else, the Occupy Wall Street protests going on in New York (and elsewhere) serve as an affirmation to him in how he’s scripted the motivations and temperament of the Vox Populi movement in Infinite‘s airborne dystopia of Columbia.

“Occupy Wall Street has been helping me because I’ve been struggling to figure out how the Vox Populi get to the point in the demo,” Levine told The Washington Post referring to the demo shown at E3. “”I’ve been spending a lot of time watching Occupy Wall Street. The complaint is that they don’t have a consistent message. It’s been interesting to reflect upon the movement’s message, watching it crystallize.”

Levine understands the charged atmosphere; he made BioShock after all, which became either a pamphlet for Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism or a stark condemnation of it, depending on whom you talked to. “The games tend to be a Rorschach for people, and I’ve heard both sides of reaction. I had the displeasure of going to a white supremacist site that made a point of saying [BioShock Infinite] this game by “the Jew” Ken Levine was about killing white people,” Levine said. “Then I went to this leftist site that said this is about discrediting leftists movements. Games, as I said, are a Rorschach, and I don’t want to be making games that are expressing a political or philosophical view.”

Paraphrasing the old adage, if you’re pissing off both sides, you must be doing something right.

The tea party, Occupy Wall Street and ‘BioShock Infinite’: How a video game is reflecting life [The Washington Post via Gamasutra.]