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.