[MP-Ryan]

I'm honestly shocked you didn't hear much about Dishonored, it got a ton of coverage on RPS and huge buzz for being (finally) a spiritual successor to Thief and its ilk.

I thought it was quite good and its flaws were excused by its strengths, but then again I thought BSI was one of the most disappointingly vapid games ever made, so we may diverge on this point 

I'll have to try it out.

I'm surprised to hear you of all people say that about Infinite given your predilection for layered storytelling.  I think the trouble with Infinite is a lot of people had a reaction something like this:

1.  Man, that story was mindblowing.
2.  But the gameplay was totally at odds with the tenderness of the story.
3.  Yeah, I really think the gameplay was wrong for the story...
4.  ...and come to think of it, I therefore really don't think the story was all that good either.

...which all miss...

5.  BSI was constructed this way and the jarring dissimilarity between story moment and action gameplay is intentional, purposeful, and makes complete sense.

I hope that wasn't you.  I played the game through twice, taking probably double the time of the average player, and while I found the gameplay jarringly at odds with the storytelling at first, I came to realize that that jarring juxtaposition was entirely intentional and is actually intricately connected to the stories of Booker, Comstock, and Elizabeth, and none of their character arcs would have been anywhere near as meaningful without the seemingly senseless violence of the gameplay between the islands of moments between Booker and Elizabeth when the rest of the world/universe seems to disappear.

Booker's story is entirely about a man who has been reactionary his entire life, doing precisely what he is told and doing it extremely well, and responding in kind to the type of experiences he's had:  Booker's life has been a response to external force and violence and overcoming it rhough force and violence, which is precisely why his character responds that way when forced.  Consider:  There are multiple points in the game where you can seek to avoid combat as Booker, and yet your are always and inevitably forced into it.  And the man takes no pleasure or pride in it; rather, when he does reflect on it it is always with sadness and regret, but he is determined to carry on and unwilling to let those forces finish him.  Comstock's, by contrast, is Booker's opposite - he does not respond to events, he initiates them; but, like Booker, his life was also shaped by violence and so he always resorts to violence when other measures of force fail; and his actions always involve force of one kind or another to make his way (we find this out both in the videos of his past and actions in the game itself).  Booker reacts; Comstock acts.  Both are the other half of the other - which makes sense, given that they are essentially mirrored reactions to the same experiences.  Both of their relationships with Elizabeth are also oriented around force; Booker uses force to move her, Comstock uses force to hold her.  Elizabeth is largely swept along in one force or the other throughout the plot but it becomes apparent that Elizabeth and Booker's relationship is ultimately changing Booker and Elizabeth both.  After each of those 'island' moments between Booker and Elizabeth, Booker reject more of himself, seeing it reflected in changes to her, and she adopts more of Booker, seeing more of him in her than before.  Elizabeth moves from a terrified girl horrified by violence to a reluctant user of force herself in defense of others, similar to Booker.  Meanwhile, by the end, Elizabeth comes to recognize that to reject Comstock's brand of force is also to reject Booker's - they are two sides of the same coin, and to reject force entirely requires her to reject both of them.  Had Elizabeth merely tried zipping between universes eliminating the Comstocks and preserving the Bookers, she would have ended up exactly the same as in the future we catch a glimpse of.  It is only by rejecting both that she can truly end the cycle - as she says, there was always a city, always a man, constants and variables.

After my first playthrough, I also began to wonder if this was the type of game best fit to tell Booker and Elizabeth's story.  It was only after my second playthrough and really paying attention to the characters themselves that I realized that this is the only kind of game that could tell this particular story.

[Scotty]

The problem I had with BI was that the vigors - one of the primary gameplay elements in the entire game - had no real connection to the story.  While in BS and BS2, Adam was the driving force of both gameplay and storyline, in BI the vigors are shoehorned in and serve no other purpose than to keep gameplay continuity with the first two.  Which BI then promptly throws out the window with Elizabeth and the skyhook.  They just didn't fit very well.

And then there was the whole

Spoiler:

"No, you are the demons!"

ending.  The cult of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson was kinda cool, but the way the ending was set up was really off for me.  Elizabeth was fantastic, and a very good example of how to do the escort mission sidekick very very right, but I felt like the primary motivations for the game were rather contrived.

Which I suppose could be the point, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  Though the Luteces and their whole "There's always a man, a city, and a lighthouse" was cool, but not enough to rescue it from strangling on its own convoluted story threads.

[MP-Ryan]

See my edit above where I explained further.

The gameplay mechanics were contrived in part for "coolness," I agree.  They did explain the vigors later on, and to be fair, once the multiverse aspects are expounded upon it begins to make much more sense (e.g. the city, man, lighthouse principle carries to other things like vigors - where a society that proposes to replace divinity or be divinely ordered arises, so do technologies or abilities that reflect the establishment of the supremacy/divinity of man; plasmids and vigors are a representation of the arrogance and hubris of the leaders of the respective civilizations in which they arose).

Ultimately, I think BSI is a brilliant piece of art which has been largely overrated or underrated for all the wrong reasons.

[Scotty]

The biggest issue I had with BI was the multiverse, oddly enough.  The Luteces go through dozens of "Bookers" (I think there are 77 tallies on Robert's board in the beginning?), and somehow the only one that matters is the one you're playing - even though if you're like me you make stupid mistakes and die repeatedly.  BI does its best to pass off you dying and the checkpoint system as another version of Booker reaching that point in another aspect of the multiverse.  Except it's always the one you end up playing that ends up mattering.  This is reinforced clearly to the end of the game, where after "your" Booker drowns,

Spoiler:

all of the other Elizabeth's fade away - as if Comstock were somehow the spur for dozens of Elizabeths even though we only ever see "our" Elizabeth in that situation.

And then there's the whole "magical ghost of Comstock's dead wife bossfight" which highlights the whole problem quite nicely.  It has my favorite music in the entire game, the single instance where I was having the most fun in the game... and while it can be justified as making sense within the story, if you look at it too close it's a little jarring.

At the risk of sounding conceited, I "get" the ending and the story.  I just dislike a few of the directions they took in trying to tie it all together.

[MP-Ryan]

I'm not quite sure why the quibbling about us always playing the Booker that matters... the Luteces engage multiple Bookers, but ultimately the only Booker that changes events is one who actually goes to Columbia, survives the events of the game, destroys Comstock in that universe, and 'surrenders' to Elizabeth.  If we played any other Booker, or didn't take over as a new one, the game would just end where you die or without going to Columbia... so no game at all then.

Also, you know the last Elizabeth standing is not the Elizabeth we went through the game with, right?   Booker actually says as much right before she/they drown him.  All the other Elizabeth's fade away as their universes collapse, but the one left standing (we think, at least) is not the girl we came through the events of the game with (the Elizabeth the person who came through the game with us in the first place also has her universe collapse when Comstock is never born).  As for who she is... well, I have not yet finished Burial at Sea Episode 2, so I'll wait before commenting on that as this story may change my theory somewhat

The energy that reanimated Comstock's wife though... that was poorly explained and seemingly both comes from nowhere and goes nowhere as well.  It was an odd design choice - and if it was meant to show the unpredictability and righteous rage of Elizabeth's power, that wasn't well demonstrated at all.

You might want to split this BSI stuff out to its own thread.

[General Battuta]

That's a reading I thought about quite a bit my first time through, and it's one I think could work in a game less preoccupied with undercutting and second-guessing itself. BSI's narrative design reflects its tortured development in a lot of respects.

You didn't mention the biggest point in support of your thesis, which is that the game's conclusion involves Elizabeth taking over both the narrative and mechanics, leaving Booker/the player unable to exert agency in the way they previously have throughout the game. Bioshock's hilarious penchant for ludonarrative dissonance needs to come up in any conversation about Bioshock, so I think you should bring in the ludic layer by pointing out that Elizabeth's rejection extends to the gameplay mechanics themselves. She seizes both the means of mechanical agency and the ability to progress the story from Booker.

Unfortunately, this is also the game's undoing - most of its narrative space is wasted on fat that works orthogonally to the game's real interests. It's not just the wrong game to tell the story mechanically (earlier preview builds of the game contained mechanics that would've achieved everything we discussed here much better, but they were also more difficult and probably never worked outside scripting), but most of its setting and story are misaligned too, leaving a game whose central narrative is so dissatisfied with its setting that it ends up escaping and discarding it.

A successful game needs to present its story, as you say, in layers - mechanically, environmentally, and narratively. BSI has three disconnected layers which mostly fail to interface, even when the story's subtext pulls at the deployment and consequences of violence as a central theme.

BS1 pulled an interesting commentary on game agency by lampshading its own linearity. BSI pulls an interesting commentary on ludonarrative dissonance by making a subtextual argument that it's a bad game you never should have played - better to drown it underwater, while it remains a beautiful possibility in your mind; better to dissolve the studio. Fittingly, for a game so preoccupied with quantum physics, it never quite coheres.

[MP-Ryan]

A successful game needs to present its story, as you say, in layers - mechanically, environmentally, and narratively. BSI has three disconnected layers which mostly fail to interface, even when the story's subtext pulls at the deployment and consequences of violence as a central theme.

Eh, see this is where we fundamentally disagree.  The mechanical aspects are fundamentally at odds with the narrative quite intentionally, in my view - they complement and oppose each other, and both contribute equally to the development of the three central characters.  BSI is really Elizabeth's story, told through the opposing forces/agencies of Booker/Comstock, and as you rightly expanded, its conclusion eliminates those forces.  What is unusual is that BSI is a game where the player does not act as the central character, but rather is an observer of her and one of the forces shaping her.  Booker and Comstock are uninteresting and undergo relatively little character development - Elizabeth is the protagonist of this story.  Mechanically, the player's actions are shaping part of Elizabeth while Comstock's shape another, and Elizabeth herself drives the remainder; and she only come into her own by rejecting both of the shaping forces.  The mechanical layer is represented in Booker, the narrative in Elizabeth, and the environment in Comstock - and all three forces interact and oppose each other to shape Elizabeth herself.  It's also why - as you point out - the narrative layer takes supreme dominance in the final twenty minutes of the game.  It's no coincidence that the mechanical and environmental layers essentially disappear at the end.

So I very much disagree that this is the wrong game to tell this story mechanically, and that the layers fail to interface; the game's layers only appear jarringly at odds because they are supposed to be - at its core, BSI's point is that people are creatures of conflict and choice may seem illusionary until you reject the choices themselves.  Elizabeth is presented with the option of Booker's future - reaction, forever acted upon by external forces - or Comstock's - action, forever acting as an external force upon others.  She chooses door #3  - neither, eliminate and step outside of the choice itself.

Going back to the three layers, Booker IS the gameplay - reactionary, responding to others through force without free will.  You cannot choose to escape it (short of stopping play, in which case Comstock wins and Elizabeth converts to his methods).  Comstock is the environment - we barely see the man, yet he is in everything we see and do, forever pushed in one direction by Comstock's forces, by his city, by the very streets (part of the reason why the game is so linear and indeed, the Emporia section that is much more open-ended is where the narrative/gameplay/environment juxtaposition falls apart the most).  Comstock-as-environment acts upon Booker and to a much lesser extent, Elizabeth, and they respond to it.  Booker has no choice; Elizabeth can exercise agency and change that environment subtlely in some places and more significantly in others.  Meanwhile, the narrative is Elizabeth... the entire game is about her, though it cleverly makes you think that you (Booker) are the protagonist right up until the very end.

Don't get me wrong; BioShock Infinite is far from a perfect game, but it is brilliant, groundbreaking, and revolutionary because of its subtle ambition and the layers upon which the experience is built.  It frustrates and saddens me greatly when I hear people talk about its treatment of class conflict, racism, jingoism, and American exceptionalism because those are surface layers and they are merely minor background set pieces for what the game is actually about - choice.  And maybe that's where I agree with you saying much of the narrative space is fat; those superficial surface themes are a distraction that actually detract from the deeper meaning of the game, and much of the criticism of it - listening to Errant Signal's review, for example, and his harping about how the systemic racism and overeagerness of revolutionaries were reduced to much the same thing drove me nuts, because it so spectacularly misses the point - the game treats these things as fundamentally the same because in the story it is telling, they are; Fitzroy and Comstock share exactly the same methods and concepts concerning the application and ideology of force, and they are BOTH the mirror image of Booker.

At any rate, I don't think "disappointingly vapid" is a turn of phrase that even belongs in the same room as Bioshock Infinite.  Ambitious, yes.  Imperfectly accomplishes its goal, absolutely.  But the people who both sing it's praises as the best game ever and the people who claim it is utterly disappointing and meaningless both miss the point it was trying to make and the supreme effort it took to do what it did manage.  I think it marks an important milestone in gaming as a serious art form, and the fact that people can perform deep analysis of it and love it or hate it speaks to how meaningful it is.

EDIT:  I should perhaps mention that some of the themes concerning the impact of choice are fleshed out more in the DLC.

[General Battuta]

I don't think we fundamentally disagree at all, but I don't believe the game's execution qualifies it as more than a footnote to the original Bioshock on any level. You're making an argument based on intentionally isolated formal elements but I think the argument falls apart when you actually get into the content of those elements.

[General Battuta]

If anything I think BSI is a howl of protest against itself: a densely narrative game trying desperately to escape from the plodding overpolish of a AAA shooter and the massive disconnected air-city of its own design process. When the game finally takes over and gets out, removing all the guns and glitz in favor of a completely linear roller coaster, it can find no way to continue to exist as a game, and extinguishes itself not just by ending but through an ending that prevents the story from happening. Elizabeth destroys Booker to break the cycle. Levine dissolves Irrational so he can stop making AAA games.

There's something beautifully and hilariously sad about this game building its core combat mechanic around attaching yourself to a rail while your advanced AI companion grabs interesting things from other worlds and renders them props in a shooting gallery. As if the game's swallowing pieces of what could have been and putting them in the context of what we have.

[MP-Ryan]

I don't think we fundamentally disagree at all, but I don't believe the game's execution qualifies it as more than a footnote to the original Bioshock on any level. You're making an argument based on intentionally isolated formal elements but I think the argument falls apart when you actually get into the content of those elements.

Which is interesting, because I thought the original BioShock did some interesting things on the mechanical fronts but the narrative was pretty derivative and the environmental design unexceptional (design, not visuals, the visuals and execution of an underwater city were flawless); conversely, BSI was a bit of a reversion in gameplay, but the environmental design was well-executed (and the illusion of three-dimensional freedom within the confines of Comstock's linear playground was marvelous) and the narrative was a far more interesting construction than in Bioshock (if only because I think it's the only game with RPG elements I've ever played in which the player is not the protagonist).

If anything I think BSI is a howl of protest against itself: a densely narrative game trying desperately to escape from the plodding overpolish of a AAA shooter and the massive disconnected air-city of its own design process. When the game finally takes over and gets out, removing all the guns and glitz in favor of a completely linear roller coaster, it can find no way to continue to exist as a game, and extinguishes itself not just by ending but through an ending that prevents the story from happening. Elizabeth destroys Booker to break the cycle. Levine dissolves Irrational so he can stop making AAA games.

That's certainly poetic =)

[zookeeper]

The impression that I've gotten is that the story is disjointed and doesn't really know what it's trying to do half the time. Also check parts 2 and 3.

[Zacam]

On the topic of Thief:

I liked it, but not nearly as much as I was hoping I would.

It is in part a successor but also a reboot. It can't honestly be a successor to the original games in anything but concept only, to be honest. Even following off of Deadly Shadows. It has individual parts from Dark Project, Metal Age and Deadly Shadows, without some of the contrivances those each had to go through while still having to go through contrivances of its own.

In so far as an -engine- is concerned, I really liked what they did with it. The options for how difficult of a game you want to have? ****ing gorgeous and I want to back-port that to all the previous titles, I really do. The art work and sheer feel and scale of the city? Strikes as good a balance between what the engine can do and what they could accomplish while keeping it in tune. Frankly, replay Thief: Gold (as it is now known) and marvel at just how EMPTY a lot of the city areas are. Deadly Shadows improved upon this as much as they could, but the fog intermission areas really broke up a lot of the areas in ways that the previous games didn't do.

I do sort of wish that this game could have been a new revitalization of the Dark Engine for Modern Systems. In the end, it ultimately suffers the most from something that we'll be seeing a LOT more off as more titles release based on pre-baked Engine Developer Kits like UDK and Crytek, in that there is still only so much wriggle room mechanically speaking and while there is still plenty of room for some artistic creativity in the assets, actually making non-default usable assets in the explicitly acceptable format is a bit more of a constraint than a liberty.

Criticisms for the story/writing I tend to mostly shrug off, especially in terms of 'comprehensive scope to previous titles' because really, none of the other games serve that very well other than that the main character is a thief named Garret for the most part. Each and every one of the previous Thief titles has more than enough "Wait, what?" moments in them that I'd run out of room listing them all. So within the title explicitly, it could maybe have been better, but it's not foaming-at-the-mouth awful either.

For myself, in a "lets arbitrarily assign a numerical representation to a game title" rating, I'd put this at a 7.2 out of 11 (Spinal Tap reference) and I don't regret having bought it and can especially recommend purchase during a discount sale.

[TrashMan]

All this talk about subtext and meaning and "what the player/watcher/reader is supposed to think" ... is IMHO, pointless.

Any story has to stand on it's own ,and not rely on symbolism or some - very subjective - interpretations or subtexts.

Anyone can find simbolisms or make arguments that X actually means Y. People can find depth in things that don't necessarily have any.
I've some people write similar stuff about Super Mario - some deeper message or subtext is something you can pretty much always find if you look hard enough, and if you apply enough mental gymanstics.

[Luis Dias]

People who don't like or want to engage with subtexts do not need to engage with such kinds of material.

Alas, there are those of us who do like that sort of stuff. Censoring this layer because you don't like it is not sensible, IMHO. There's a lot of other layers that I don't give too much of a damn, but I don't piss condescendingly in their playground as if they are idiots who take their joys too seriously.

[The E]

Especially in the case of Bioshock Infinite, which is a pretty explicit commentary on games, those who play them and those who make them, discarding the subtextual layer or claiming it is irrelevant is not a particularly useful way of thinking.

[MP-Ryan]

Especially in the case of Bioshock Infinite, which is a pretty explicit commentary on games, those who play them and those who make them, discarding the subtextual layer or claiming it is irrelevant is not a particularly useful way of thinking.

Indeed.

As I put it in my Steam review:  Saying Bioshock Infinite is about guns, violence, jingoism, American Exceptionalism, systemic racism, a story about a man trying to save a girl, a game where the violence doesn't fit with the narrative, etc - which are all ideas that people apply to this game - is like saying "Gulliver's Travels" was about a man cast from country to country of strange, non/quasi-human entities.  It misses the point spectacularly.

Some games are about the plot they portray on the surface.  In fact, I'd say most.  Others are about something else - and that, IMHO, is where games, like film and writing, become art unto themselves.

[Grizzly]

Whoa, I really wasn't expecting those interesting views on Bioshock Infinite in this thread. Well done everyone.

[zookeeper]

As I put it in my Steam review:  Saying Bioshock Infinite is about guns, violence, jingoism, American Exceptionalism, systemic racism, a story about a man trying to save a girl, a game where the violence doesn't fit with the narrative, etc - which are all ideas that people apply to this game - is like saying "Gulliver's Travels" was about a man cast from country to country of strange, non/quasi-human entities.  It misses the point spectacularly.

Some games are about the plot they portray on the surface.  In fact, I'd say most.  Others are about something else - and that, IMHO, is where games, like film and writing, become art unto themselves.

This is approaching off-topic, but since I rarely get the chance, I'll just say that I don't understand what's the point of subtext like that or what about it is that people seem to enjoy. If I watch a movie or play a game then it's about what it depicts, nothing else. It can evoke emotion, I can relate to the characters, I might find it exciting or the ideas interesting, sure, but to say that this or that is "about" some abstract thing almost always comes off as nonsense, to me. I just don't see it, and if someone explains what it's "about" I might see how it's indeed a central element in the story, but that simply doesn't do anything for me.

I can't think of a single example of any fiction which I could with a straight face say I think is about something outside the plot synopsis.

Unsurprisingly, it's way way more common in movies than games; I've seen a whole lot of movies in recent times which I found boring and nonsensical and unable to get anything out of, which were nevertheless praised by critics and said to be exquisite portrayals or poetic dissections of this or that. In games there's the gameplay, and if I don't get the subtext of the story then it doesn't really impact my enjoyment of the game. I'm sure I wouldn't find BI boring and nonsensical because firstly it has gameplay and secondly because it apparently has a surface-level plot in addition to the subtext, but what you said is such a clear example of the kind of alien approach to stories that I couldn't let it pass unremarked.

[General Battuta]

Being 'about' something is not nearly the same as being successful, though. The Bay Transformers films are extraordinarily dense with subtext, fascinating to read. But like BioShock Infinite I think they're ultimately not very coherent.

I think Infinite mostly doesn't even attempt to be art in any way specific to games. Unlike BioShock 1, it tells a story about choice that could fit well in a movie, a book, a television show. It doesn't much leverage the unique capabilities of its medium. Far from a particular triumph or watermark for the art of game narrative, I think it's actually a bit of a dead end. I think Bastion or Alpha Protocol are both much sharper examples of how games can be written to succeed in a way possible only in games.

And of course, a thousand times of course, BioShock Infinite is about guns, violence, jingoism, American Exceptionalism, so on. Any reading of the game must engage with these themes - as yours has. Your argument is that the game's decision to fumble these themes is intentional, a formal gambit to highlight its real concerns. which is a valid stance, but my reaction on my first playthrough was that this attempt at storytelling through pure formalism ultimately fails. The game cannot flee from so much of its own text in some frenzied search for a way out, a way towards its real concerns, without impoverishing itself. By intentionally deciding to abrogate the principle of self-similarity, by passing up the chance to instantiate its story in its moment-to-moment gameplay mechanics (there are a few exceptions: the looting mechanic is a taunting, almost contemptibly brilliant reminder that you really have no choices and nothing matters), Infinite is basically committing protest suicide. It says: 'there is no way to tell an interesting story using these mechanics! We cannot resolve the trap posited by BioShock 1! Therefore, we will tell a story about the futility of choice and violence, leveraging the very repetitive, reactionary emptiness of our mechanics!'

But it's an aimless, raging suicide, a hateful divorce between writing and design. Infinite says: 'we can't make this fun. So the story will be about how you are a dull sort of monster, who cannot have fun.' And between writing and environment, too: 'None of this matters. We will make a story about fleeing this world for its variants, searching for something better, so that we can make it formally clear how much our failed worldbuilding is holding us back. We will show that all our factions are in fact equivalent. We will make Fitzroy into Comstock and Elizabeth into Fitzroy, the actor of revolutionary violence. In the end Elizabeth will be empowered to destroy the game and the narrative, to undo it all, saying: 'I should have been in a better game. Drown this FPS-man who dragged me down, and drag the level-building apparatus he could otherwise have become.'

I call Infinite vapid because it hates itself, and that hate makes it empty. When it has discarded the meaning of its mechanics (reject this! it cries) and the meaning of its world (this is all the same! Just a theater for empty violence! Go back to BioShock 1, and a game I liked better! Drown the monster that has chased us in the ocean of our past success!) all it has left is a formal web: a string of connections between empty symbols, writer and designer and environment artist, a Lost-like shell game which asks us to be interested because it is complicated, but which says nothing when pulled apart. Well: a formal web, and the player's emotional attachment to Elizabeth.

One of them works. One of them doesn't. Elizabeth is right in the end: she should've been in a better game.

All this I suppose is to say: formal ambition sometimes only enables formal disaster. BioShock is not an attempt to move the genre forward. It's a screaming, vomiting, self-loathing purge of everything that's holding the genre back, a purge so total that it consumes itself and says: I wish I had never been made! I wish I'd been drowned, because everything I could become is terrible and holds you back!

Everyone reads subtext, even you - in much the same way that the eye registers all kinds of detail we don't consciously process. The trick is in learning to recognize it. It's like an artist being trained to pick up on composition or body kinematics: they've always seen it, the information has always been there, but they've never known how to extract it and discuss it.

Trash posted earlier about the pointlessness of subtext in games, and yet he loves subtext! It's one of the things he uses to evaluate his art. I've seen him reject one game and embrace another over literally similar plot points because their subtext was handled differently.

To people interested in subtext, it's often as obvious as the dialog in the script. It's just another kind of information being conveyed.

[MP-Ryan]

This is approaching off-topic, but since I rarely get the chance, I'll just say that I don't understand what's the point of subtext like that or what about it is that people seem to enjoy. If I watch a movie or play a game then it's about what it depicts, nothing else. It can evoke emotion, I can relate to the characters, I might find it exciting or the ideas interesting, sure, but to say that this or that is "about" some abstract thing almost always comes off as nonsense, to me. I just don't see it, and if someone explains what it's "about" I might see how it's indeed a central element in the story, but that simply doesn't do anything for me.

To each their own.  But to pick a few examples...

I can't think of a single example of any fiction which I could with a straight face say I think is about something outside the plot synopsis.

Depends on what you've read.  To pick a few well-known examples though... is Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift) really about visits to lilliputians, Houyhnhnms, etc?  Is Lord of the Flies (William Golding) about a bunch of boys that go feral? How about the I, Robot collection (Isaac Asimov) - is it really just about robots in every day life? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) - about Earth being blown up and interstellar travel? I think you'll find that most works of fiction have a lot more to them than their plot synopsis.

Unsurprisingly, it's way way more common in movies than games; I've seen a whole lot of movies in recent times which I found boring and nonsensical and unable to get anything out of, which were nevertheless praised by critics and said to be exquisite portrayals or poetic dissections of this or that. In games there's the gameplay, and if I don't get the subtext of the story then it doesn't really impact my enjoyment of the game. I'm sure I wouldn't find BI boring and nonsensical because firstly it has gameplay and secondly because it apparently has a surface-level plot in addition to the subtext, but what you said is such a clear example of the kind of alien approach to stories that I couldn't let it pass unremarked.

You should ask the BP team what BP and WiH are about sometime.  Or better, really think about it =)