Mutual Distress and Damsels

A conversation with Syl of MMO Gypsy has gotten me thinking again about Bioshock Infinite.  I'd claimed that Elizabeth was not a mere useful damsel.  She was instead a character with her own motivations and goals rather than a useful object that sometimes threw other useful objects to the player.

In part this was based on my view that she and Booker experienced mutual distress.  She'd need rescuing, but he would as well, making it something more like a partnership than a male-dominated rescue fantasy.  It could still be slightly tilted one way or another, but with how games generally go, having a female character who ever saves the male character is something significant (though not necessarily sufficient)  I'm not to aiming for mathematical parity here.

This should actually be pretty easy to evaluate.  I'll start with a basic standard: does Elizabeth save Booker?  The answer is pretty obviously, yes.  The incident that first comes to mind is when Songbird has them cornered and is just about to crush Booker into goo when she yells at him to stop.  She agrees to return with Songbird if she leaves Booker alone.

Okay then, she's saved Booker.  Done.

Or did she?  Well yes, but how?  Merely keeping him from dying hardly makes her a mutual protector or means that he's mutually distressed.

Notice how she saves him.  She doesn't use a tear.  She doesn't run away to draw his attention.  She doesn't poke a weak spot.  She gives up.  She surrenders.  She puts herself right back into a situation of needing saving.  In effect, she hasn't saved Booker, she's just reset the story back to the point where Booker is wandering a hostile city looking for her.

Resetting is her true power.  In the end, which the phrasing of which should indicate that spoilers follow, she resets Booker.  She doesn't actually fix him or fix history.  She's just hitting a reset button and if we're lucky, Booker won't be as evil this time, but since I think he was evil all along...

When I first started discussing this with Syl I didn't mind that she hid a lot.  Look at her.  She's never been in combat.  She doesn't know how to fight.  She doesn't have a shield tonic.  One bullet at the game is over.  Yet as I tried to argue this I realized something: she never changes.  She never gets used to the fighting.  She's always startled, terrified, at everything.  She never develops a sense of confidence in herself or even in Booker.  If they changed her sound, to make her a little less scared all the time, I think that would make a big difference.

But when can't she fight?  She's been learning so much in all her books.  Surely she's read a few about combat.  She could have even read too many that make combat seem glorious and exciting.  The books are such a convenient thing for the writers, like the uploads in the Matrix.  She could learn anything, with every book and all the time in the world.  We're not given the sense that her knowledge was restricted; her lockpicking skills are evidence that she learned things that people locking her up might not have wanted her to know.

I'm not suggesting that she should have been a good fighter.  In fact, I think it would have been great if in the first fight she was utterly worthless.  Make her terrified at the sound of the gun, having never heard it before.  Make the recoil knock her off an airship, saved by a tear, just as she does for Booker.  This could be comical or dramatic, depending on how they portray it.  But then she learns, slowly getting used to the weapons, learning to use them.  And yes, she'd kill a few people.  Would that ruin her purity?  No!  Purity is a silly concept and besides, is it pure to leave someone else to do all the killing while you throw them more guns?  Let her feel bad about killing, but don't pretend that she's not allowed to do it.  Even with no change to the overall story, making Elizabeth more directly active would have made her less of a damsel and more of a person.





After this it's just baseless speculation.  Maybe Fitroy's an Elizabeth from a different universe.  She made a tear and pulled in another self.  She told that self how to start a revolution.  With the revolution and the fall of Comstock's regime, Elizabeth would be free.  She would break herself out using herself and her power.  Suddenly she's not a damsel being rescued.  Booker walked into her story, and while he did a lot, it was Elizabeth who was running the show.  She saw that Booker was useful and when her alternate self threatened to get out of control she disposed of it.  Wouldn't you react somewhat poorly if you had to stab yourself?

Does destruction require a past?

Bioshock takes the player back through some areas after they've been attacked by the Vox Populi.  The once-pristine streets of Columbia, so clean that even stray coins are thrown in the trash, are now covered in ashes and corpses.  Is the effect made any greater by taking the player through a second time?

The first viewing gives a contrast.  You can see what it was a few hours or days before (the gameplay is long enough that I wonder if we ever sleep) and what it is now.  The upright trash can is knocked over.  The sign that you read before in burned.  Yet I don't think it does much.  The first time through an area is brief and prone to distractions such as bullets and explosions.  Players aren't likely to have much familiarity, let alone nostalgia: "And that's where I shot my first cop!"  We're not going to run through thinking about how different it looks now.  The destruction is self-evident.  We've seen other parts of Columbia and therefore have a general idea of what it looks like, so repeating the same area doesn't carry any more weight than an entirely new place.  Even if we hadn't seen Columbia, I think people have a general idea of what a post-war area looks like.  We didn't need to see Rapture before society collapsed to know that something had gone wrong.  Fire, corpses, and bullet holes are rarely the signs of a stable, peaceful society.

The type of destruction matters.  Contrast Columbia or Rapture with Azeroth after the Cataclysm.  Something big happened.  Yet if you didn't play before, what was it?  The slash across the Barrens is clearly a problem, and of course the fact that the resulting two zones still share the name of Barrens indicates to new players that something has changed, dramatically.  On the other hand, Thousand Needles, which old players will know was completely reshaped, looks a little odd, but the lack of fire and the underwater nature of the destruction means that it doesn't look as if it was radically altered.

Overall I think the lesson to take away is that destruction does not require a before and after picture set.  If the previous land was one to which the player had an emotional connection, such as a half-decade of Azerothian adventuring memories, then the knowledge of what came before is powerful.  Without the emotional connection, then it is less likely that knowing the past is of any use.  When there is fire and destruction of buildings (since we know generally what they look like, with vertical walls and horizontal floors), then it's redundant to give a picture of what it once was.

Evil on the other side of the coin (Bioshock spoilers)

This post has Bioshock Infinite spoilers.  You might want to finish the game.  Then wait a while to sort it out in your head a bit.

Booker DeWitt is an evil man.  Or at least he was.  Let's begin at the beginning.

We first know him as a man who appears to be kidnapping a girl to get rid of gambling debts.  Or maybe it's a rescue.  Or a rescue into a worse confinement.  He never asks.  I'm curious what would have happened if he'd managed to fly her to New York.  Or Paris.  But those realities are all destroyed...

He committed atrocities at Wounded Knee.  You could say that he felt bad about it.  But what did he do about it?  Nothing, except one time make it worse.  This is where he splits.

In one split he's Booker DeWitt.  He follows up his Wounded Knee experiences with some violence against workers, so much that even those who employ people like him couldn't tolerate it.  He drinks too much, gambles too much, and eventually sells his daughter to get rid of his debts.  Now you might be thinking about how he regretted it and then rescued her.  He only regretted it.  As for rescuing her, he did not!  When he goes to the other reality, what does he remember?  His daughter vanishes and instead he's a kidnapper.  He rescued his daughter by accident, or at best by the nudging of a trans-reality physicist.  Left to himself he'd probably have just ended up dead by some means or another.  This is the nice version of him.

His other self accepts God.  He is reborn as Zachary Comstock.  This person is evil, but the evil on the other side of the coin.  Rather than destroying himself with self-loathing, he turns it outward.  Rather than hate himself for his atrocities, he revels in them, proclaims them, and furthers them.  He fully embraces, not God, but himself.  It's a wonderful irony that the False Prophet is him.

His daughter is lost, again by his own hand.  He's rendered himself sterile by his abuse of technology.  So what does he do?  He steals her, from himself.  He steals her from the self who had wallowed in his guilt rather than turning it to pride and feeding on it.  That's the split.  While both are evil, one lets it destroy him, while the other takes it as a source of power and turns it against the world.

Despite kidnapping her, he still does not have his daughter.  He cannot, for he is not a man of love.  He cannot nurture her.  Instead he locks her away and makes her only friend her warden as well.  When she gets out he tortures her and turns her into a monster.

In the end it is not sufficient to only kill Zachary Comstock.  He's not the only evil one.  Instead they must both die.  Yet, can we call it a happy ending?  I don't think so.  He is still the man who killed so many at Wounded Knee.  That past was not erased.  He is therefore still the man with the ability to sell his daughter to pay off a debt.  The next time he does it, will he have the benefit of transdimensional physicists and a daughter who can pick and choose reality?

Elizabeth is not a "useful damsel"

Recently Syl asked on Twitter, "So, is Elizabeth just another 'helpful damsel'?"  (she's the woman in blue in Bioshock Infinite).  If you don't want to watch the entire video, here are the bits I'm focusing on: subject vs. object (around minute 10) and "helpful damsel" (around minute 15).

Elizabeth as object

If you've just started the game then she's going to look like an object.  The recurring phrase of the game is some variation of, "bring us the girl and wipe away the debt."  It's something between rescue and kidnapping, as it's not at all clear what they want with her.  You fight your way in, killing a lot of people, and break her out.  And then you chase her down repeatedly because you keep getting separated.

Elizabeth as subject

You don't get separated because someone swoops in and kidnaps her from you.  She's not your instant friend.  She's instead someone who's been in a cage a long time and justifiably isn't so sure about the next cage you're trying to bring her to, and isn't a fan of the constant killing either.  If that second part sounds like the weak, scared woman trope, put yourself in her shoes: imagine you've been locked up but safe, and all of a sudden you're ducking behind cover while a complete stranger kills dozens of people every few minutes.  Maybe the first cage doesn't sound so bad anymore...

To be clear, the player character still treats her as an object.  He's on a job and people on jobs tend to treat people as objects, whether it's the object to retrieve, the object to kill, or the many objects that get on the way.  Objectification is rampant in videogames and it is not always a gender issue.

However, the game treats her as a subject.  She makes decisions.  She forces the player's actions.  I previously described her as a support class during combat, which certainly looks like the "helpful damsel."  But during combat I'm just a mindless killing machine, so that's hardly the way to determine the personality of a character.  Since there is more to Bioshock than just the combat, evaluating the characters based only on their roles in combat would lead to an incomplete picture.

I'm a bit limited with what I can say due to spoilers, and I hate sticking up tags and forcing people to skip posts, so here goes.  She has a mission of her own.  It ends up being Elizabeth who grabs the player, shoves him through time and space, and puts him on the path to fixing something.  That's her initiative, her plan.  Right before that she sacrifices herself to save the player character from what I'm pretty sure was certain death.  You might point out that she probably intended to be rescued, but in my mind that's part of her plan rather than an indication that she is helpless.  One step back and two steps forward, if you will.

DeWitt as object

Elizabeth started the game as an object, something to which things happen.  The same was the case for the protagonist.  You're stuck on an island, told to do something, trapped by your past, and pushed forward along a narrow path.  You're manipulated along the way, attacked and branded as a false prophet.  The character did not choose to be the false prophet, it was forced upon him.  He's as much dragged along by the world as Elizabeth, maybe more so since he can't pick his world.

Why'd she change clothes?

Something I'm still puzzling over is her change of clothes.  She switches to a more revealing set of clothes early in the game.  However, these are not the transition to helpless female.  Instead she knocks you out with a wrench, probably because at that moment the player character is treating her as a prize to capture.  Resisting being an object seems like a strong argument in favor of being a subject.

In conclusion: Who's using the conformation bias here?

Maybe I'm just trying to defend and justify a game and story that I enjoy.  I suppose I could break out a calculator and add up the incidents of helplessness for each character, with some modifier for degree of seriousness and the extent to which they are saved by luck vs. the actions of the other character (I exclude saving themselves since that would not be a helpless situation).

Elizabeth spends a great deal of time helpless or supporting the more violent male.  She also spends a great deal of time saving him or going off on her own.  The characters are linked and dependent on each other; it's not a one-way street.  To say that she's merely a "helpful damsel" is selective, picking out the times when she's helpless and ignoring the fact that the other lead character, DeWitt, is helpless at times as well.  Nor is his helplessness merely in the form of being unable to stop her from being kidnapped.  Instead, he is unable to help himself, unable to save his own life.  Mutual rescue is not sexist unless you're only looking at one side.

Bioshock combat: beads on a chain

Bioshock really wants me to think of it as an open world.  It lets me move between zones.  The fights take place in large spaces with room to move.  I'm not sure how I'd deal with handymen without the space, since my current strategy involves a great deal of running away.

Yet it is inevitably a world that moves forward.  Elevators break.  I got thrown to a different platform.  Skylines go in loops.  I will not be fleeing from a fight, not entirely.  Tactical retreats are all that is allowed.

This makes sense from a couple perspectives.  Within the game things are happening quickly.  If I were running around to other areas in the middle of fights, then I'd expect to run into reinforcements.  Or given the extremism of all other sides (and myself, but that's for another post), they'd just shoot down the entire platform.  From the standpoint of the developers, an open world makes it harder to tell a story.  This is the point where someone talks about how they want to tell their own story, not get railroaded through the developer's.  I don't care.  I was under no delusions that this was going to be a game about telling my own story.

Despite the clear railroading, I am not quite complaining.  The combat allows me to move.  I can fall back, try from another angle, jump to a higher platform with the help of freight hooks birthed from tears.  The overall effect is that I'm only really constrained between fights, and that's when I want to follow the story anyway.

Others have said it before, but it should be emphasized: Elizabeth is awesome.  At least where I am in the game, she's not a fighter, but she's not a liability or a coward.  She keeps away from the bullets, but keeps me stocked and alive.  She's a support class and she does it well.  Someone needs to point out all those lockpicks I keep missing.  Someone needs to sing along when I find a guitar.

Bioshock Infinite

I don't understand my... self.  The lack of protest at being left there confuses me.  The refusal to pick up the knife confuses me.  I suspect many things in this game will confuse me.

Yet I am not confused by who I am, for I am an RPG player and that means that I pick stuff up.  Maybe that stuff is an offering at a church.  I will pick it up.  In my defense, I am poor and for all I know, this is another Randian dystopia that thinks wealth is the measure of one's soul.  In that way I am saving myself, as one should in a church.  And clearly saving is needed, for the floor is stone and covered with water.  The stairs are stone and the water flows down them.  My lost gun is no loss, for it could not save me here.

What did "that idiot priest" do wrong?  Everyone knows that you don't struggle and breath in the water during a baptism.  Clearly this DeWitt fellow that I inhabit has come from some extremist atheist camp in the backwoods and does not know how to function in a different society.  Then again, he is what he is, which will make sense if you've played it for a few minutes, or none at all if you haven't.

The developers seemed to have perfect timing.  Right as I was saying to my friends that the game seemed to be a bit slow, setting up the scenery and then some more, with nary a bullet in sight, then I smashed someone's face in in a most dreadful manner.  Since then I've been in more or less constant combat, pausing for a moment to listen to the local chapter of the KKK before throwing a fireball into their meeting.  Thus ended my first night.

P.S. Syl's the bestest person ever and she knows why.