Daily Archives: April 14, 2023

When I wrote about Bioshock Infinite back in May of 2013, I had just started university and had some fantasy in my mind about this blog being a bridge to working in the games industry. James journalism, I imagined, was waiting for me to present an example of what I could do, and so, I wrote about games with the energy of someone trying to reach that sweet spot of irreverent professionalism, discussing games in terms of pros and cons and the inevitable consideration of a consumer.

At the time I did call the game a modern classic, on par with Spec Ops: The Line. I cringe at that a little, because while it’s true, it’s true in the way that you could remove that description from context and leave with the impression that I think that makes it good. It’s absolutely a classic – you can look at it in the context of the games of its time and it serves as an iconic reduction of so many of the elements that make up what it was to be games in that time and that place.

I then spent several years familiarising myself further and further with Bioshock Infinite and realising how much worse a game it was than I appreciated at the time. I eventually came to refer to Bioshock Infinite as a ‘shallow game as high watermark.’ That’s reasonable, I think — It does deserve to be regarded as a classic because of it. It was very much a good example of what gaming, at the time, considered The Way Things Should Be, that it was an example of art as a game.

It’s 2023 now.

I resolved the idea that I should be kind with energy, and cruel with purpose. The purpose here, is to look at my own writing, ten years ago, about this game, and see what I think of it, what I think of who I am now.