At first, BioShock Infinite appears to be a game about sky racists, violent atheism, and unlockable cleavage, so what’s all this business about dead authors? The deal, friends, is that this game has become a kind of litmus test for how games critics interpret games, and has opened the door for a number of valuable discussions about the use of racism, violence, and unlockable cleavage in game design. Oh, you stopped listening at foreskin? Me too.
How much will the “public consent to be imposed upon” by Ken Levine and his non-conformist, history professor design army? Is it gullible to buy into their vision for BioShock Infinite? Should we, the players, offer them our patience in buckets of Columbian blood, or do we have a responsibility to meet Irrational halfway, grinning through gritted teeth and that chapter about scientific whale categorization? What’s at stake here is a problem that literary analysts have been guffawing about for the better part of a century and still haven’t resolved the tension between authorial intent and what John Crowe Ransom called New Criticism, or the “my opinion matters” stance. There are thousands of ways in which BioShock Infinite is not like Moby Dick. I’m only highlighting this one similarity, although I would love to read a lusty exposition of Ishmael/Ahab as Booker and the whale as Metacritic. Only after Melville’s posthumous success in the Americas did “Ishmael” become more of a Melville reference in pop culture than a Biblical figure, and the Melville name unsmeared.Īs a note, the discussion from here on down may contain spoilers. Heavens, a whale’s foreskin as the pope’s hat!? The jackals in the graveyard of a living whale?! Ahab’s monomania and Melville’s persistence in lyrical extended metaphor did not harmonize with those clever reviewers, a pall that Melville carried to his grave. He is gauging, at once, our gullibility and our patience.” Melville is evidently trying to ascertain how far the public will consent to be imposed upon. And not only that, British reviewers smeared the rag, with such apparent insight as to call it “an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact.” One reviewer cast a deeper line into Melville’s psyche: Moby Dick initially sold around 500 copies in Melville’s native England, less than a tenth of what his previous, high-intrigue island adventures had sold. In 1851, Harper and Brothers published an adventure writer’s exploration into a then-modern poetic adventure.
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