Irrational Games' Ken Levine talks 'BioShock Infinite'

• Former computer consultant and screenwriter%2C Ken Levine joined game industry in 1995.
• Studio%27s new game %27BioShock Infinite%27 offers deep story and deep topics.
• Levine%3A game designers must embrace player unpredictability and push medium.

Irrational Games co-founder Ken Levine got his start in the video game industry by answering an advertisement in a video game magazine.

At the time, Levine was a 29-year-old former screenwriter working as a computer consultant. "I saw an ad for a game design job at a company called Looking Glass in a gaming magazine and said, 'What is a game designer?' I looked at the ad and sort of scratched my head and said, 'Maybe I could be one of those' without really knowing what it was. I applied, they flew me up there for an interview and a week later they hired me."

At Looking Glass, Levine helped create Thief and then left to start Irrational with Jonathan Chey and Robert Fermier. Following the releases of games such as System Shock 2, Freedom Force, Tribes: Vengeance and SWAT 4, Irrational released BioShock in 2007, which was a critical and retail success.

How closely tied is BioShock Infinite's story to the original BioShock?
Levine: I don't want to do anything that is going to damage the story experience for anyone, but I will say the most common reaction we get when people play the game is, 'It feels just like a BioShock game and also totally different.' Right from the very beginning, you have a sense, the game play ties and certainly the thematic ties. I think people will know very quickly they are in a BioShock game.

I like the idea of a metaphorical tie to the original BioShock with the water-based opening (the first few minutes of the game have been widely seen on the Net). Why was that important?
It's not just a signal. It's part of the story. We don't do cute nods. It's really essential to the story, those connections.

What were some of your inspirations for creating Columbia and the Infinite universe?
When we started talking about doing another BioShock game, we didn't feel we really had another story to tell in Rapture in that setting. But we started talking about what would we do in another BioShock game… We were all very drawn to that time period of the turn of the century. A bunch of us were reading Eric Larson's The Devil in the White City. It's a great book. I'm a history buff, and that's a period I didn't really know much about. The more I dug into it, the more interesting I found it, from a political standpoint (and) from a cultural, scientific, architectural and fashion standpoint. From every standpoint, if you played the first BioShock game, we dig into all those various areas to make these games.

In Columbia, there's two warring factions, the Founders and the Vox Populi. Tell us a bit about them.
It sort of breaks down to the haves and have-nots. The Founders who created this city are lead by a (Latter Day Saints founder) Joseph Smith-style character, Father Comstock. He sees himself as a prophet and has built a religion that is sort of a North American-centered version Christianity that is very also focused on the founding fathers, the mythological spiritual figures George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. They tend to have a very specific view of the world that involves a certain kind of world, that involves a certain kind of race, a certain kind of religion, a certain kind of creed and a certain kind of class.

(And) there are people in that city that don't fit into that definition. At that time there were a very broad group of people, African-Americans, Jews, Irish and Chinese are all sort of classes that didn't really fit into that and, of course, were not too thrilled about not fitting in and are led by a young African-American woman named Daisy Fitzroy and they form the Vox Populi.

Tell us a bit about the character of Elizabeth.
She starts off almost like a Rapunzel figure, this girl trapped in this tower for her whole life. Basically, she has never been out, never seen anything and she encounters you, (ex-Pinkerton agent) Booker (DeWitt), who is a guy who has sort of seen everything. You are so different from each other and there's not really been a game really like that … (The game) is a huge story, but it's really not about events. It's about these two people and about how these events change them. And you get to play one of these people.

What we are finding is people are forming a relationship with Elizabeth, this artificial intelligence. You are forming a connection with this character and building a bond and they really feel her actions the rare times she is not there. If you think about games and about the future of them, the big thing that is missing is characters. And I think Elizabeth is a step along the way, hopefully an important step, and people will appreciate it, to us she really is the heart of the story.

The game covers some heavy themes, which seems rare in video games. How challenging was it to incorporate these types of topics when telling Infinite's story?
We don't really say, 'Let's cover these topics.' We come up with a story we want to tell and sort of let the story be our guide and it takes us where it takes us. Certainly, in this period these are themes that are central to this period in the same way the architecture is central and the clothing they are wearing. … Some themes, you go really deep on and some themes you find out aren't as relevant to the story you are telling. You think they are going to be important and you sort of end up moving away from them.

This is a time when American nationalism and exceptionalism is coming into its own where the issue of religious revivalism is becoming a very strong force and where you are seeing the rise of the suffragist movement, and civil rights and workers' movements. And all these forces are coming into play against a backdrop of amazing innovations in technology, whether that is electricity or aviation or automobiles, even quantum mechanics. All these things are really coming into play for the first time in history. It really was an incredibly transformative time.

Few games explore deeper topics. Why don't more?
I can't speak for other people, but I presume it's people make games based on the things they are interested in. If I really loved, I like it, but if I loved the Warhammer universe, for instance, I would want to make a game that really goes deep into the Warhammer universe. I like it, but I don't think I'd be inspired enough to make a game out of it. These are the things that interest me and interest people on my team.

You rarely use cut scenes and not very long ones. Why?
What makes games special is they are interactive. I think the mission of Irrational, if it had one, is to make the player a participant in the narrative, not an observer of the narrative. What other media can do that? No other media can do that. So when you structure your story and (say) here's some story, here's some game play, here's some story here's some game play, you are missing out on an opportunity.

That opportunity is to engage the player in the story at all times. I think the reason they don't want to do that, as game developers, is that players are unpredictable, you know. You don't know what they are going to do. There's an instinct as a storyteller, you want to say, 'Sit down and watch my story.' I think you have to get over that instinct and have to allow gamers to continue to express themselves as often as much as to 100% of the time as you can. Because that is what makes a game a game. That's what makes a game special.

Gamers are completely unpredictable and they can do all these things that you don't want them to do. But you know what? You have to embrace that and allow the gamer as much freedom as you can.