I love characters I can follow down the rabbit hole, intricately embroidered settings, stories where I feel so invested it’s almost like the protagonist’s hands are my own. (I mean, I generally only play 80-hour RPGs! Some commitment is clearly required.) But reading is like that for me, too: when I start a book, pretty much only alien invasion will keep me from finishing it in the same sitting. I like to joke that when I game, I’m a serial monogamist. The decisions you make have consequences that will forever change the ending, unless you want to start all over. The footsteps you hear are your footsteps. Maybe it’s because you actually are: the hands you see in front of you are your hands. But there’s something about the complete immersion of a good video game-the BioShocksand Bioware games of this world-that makes you want to live in it. Make it into the story in my head, the one I’ve half-invented on top of the one that’s in front of me.Īll writers do this, I think. It drew inspiration from another great love of mine, Sherlock Holmes-when I love something that much, I want to make art about it. That fall, I wrote a novel, and it had nothing to do with BioShock Infinite. I dreamt sometimes that I was in Columbia, the city above the sky. I showed my novelist friend, who didn’t play video games, cutscenes on YouTube. When I finished the game, I played it again, determined this time to smell the roses. But the game was a first-person shooter, and while I love an FPS (and am a pretty crack shot), I found myself racing through each dazzlingly-designed backdrop, killing what felt like an endless parade of soldiers. I wanted to linger in every set piece: the Hall of Heroes, Elizabeth’s beautiful prison. I wanted a world so real that I could tear a hole in my afternoon and climb inside of it.Īnd every day that June, I did. I wanted room for the characters to grow and change. The narrative itself didn’t have to be epic, though that helped. As a kid, I read massive fantasy series-my favorite were the forty-plus books that made up Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar-and as a teenager, I only wanted TV shows that ran to seven or eight seasons. But when I found a story I liked, I wanted to live in it. I wrote stories that were, at best, eight pages long. When I started playing Infinite, I wasn’t a novelist yet. Multiple realities? Sure! A pair of possibly evil, soothsaying twins, one of whom is voiced by Jennifer Hale? You got it. It’s one of those games that defies categorization: describing it here, it feels like the designers threw in the whole kitchen sink. You meet up with a girl named Elizabeth who has the power to tears holes in space and time. As you discover it (and the resistance against it), you find mad prophets, giant animatronic birds, snake oil potions that make you magical. There’s a rot in this America that dates back to its Founders. Suffice it to say that in Infinite, it’s 1912, and you’re a Pinkerton with a gun on a floating city in the sky, and that city is both terrible and beautiful, a kind of Epcot Americana for the Damned. BioShock Infinite might be eight years old, but it’s a game worth approaching on its own merits. I knew this one was a significant departure, that it took place in an America gone terribly wrong. I hadn’t read much about it I’d played the first two Bioshock games and loved them. I’d waited for the end of my semester to open it, thinking I’d have more time to immerse myself in the game. It was, to be sure, a summer I didn’t buy anything new, but I had a shrink-wrapped copy of Bioshock Infinite that I’d preordered back in a less precarious time. I didn’t know then that the only possible escape was escape. I didn’t know that beating yourself up over it just made it worse. When you’re lost in a fog of worry, the words don’t come easy, if at all. It was a summer when making things, writing things, was impossible. In later years, we called it the Bad Summer, the capital letters always implied.Ģ013 was a PBR summer, a lay-flat-on-the-cold-hardwood-floor-at-noon summer while I tried to escape the wretched heat it was the summer that the bed I’d had since childhood splintered and broke, and so we flung the mattress onto the floor. What had begun as a summer of infinite possibilities boiled down to just one: misery. I had a job lined up teaching writing that wouldn’t start for another three weeks. When he wasn’t doing that, he was working as a roofer around Milwaukee while I twiddled my thumbs. The first time I played BioShock Infinitewas the June when we were so broke that my then-husband started selling his plasma for money. This is a guest post from Brittany Cavallaro, author of the Charlotte Holmes series and the just-released Muse, the first book in a YA duology set in an alternate history American monarchy.
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