This game was never about racism, and people who mistake Levine's setting the game in a racist era for him wanting to make a game about racism are doing themselves a disservice.
So why the scene with the couple at the start? Why is Elizabeth analyzing the bathroom situation?
If racism was left in the background sure... but it's brought forward in retarded scenes like that, trying to stir emotional engagement or w/e. They even stick out like sore thumbs, gives the impression someone had to fill a quota. Slaughter, slaughter, slaughter, racism is bad mkay?, slaughter, slaughter, slaughter...
The big problem is that, there is a huge portion of the game without any interesting happening, the shooting is boring and the plot even more boring. It is only let's show some social issue in a retarded way. People say that the social issues are only a background thing but you can only say something happen on the background when something more important is happening at the same, this is not the case, it is almost impossible to walk 5 m without hearing some civillian/villain saying or watching some form of extreme racism/fundamentalist/nacionalistic/elitism when you aren't shooting dudes. The impression I got is that the people in Columbia put the nazis on shame in term of nationalistic/racism fanatism. It isn't see how the worker life is hard, no, no, no, all the Fink factory have to be a fucking hell to the workers and you have too see a fucking huge golden statue of Fink... yeah, it is a background thing when you are bombarded with it all the time. It is racism/elitism OVERLOAD all the time. I just found that racist/fundamentalist propaganda very boring. I just thought at the time: When something remotely interesting is going to happen again?
When you build a world which has certain differences from our own, and set your game there, do you not want to, you know, spotlight those differences? Given that the average gamer has the attention span of a psychotic goat with ADD, being subtle about it doesn't exactly work. I'm a pretty attentive gamer, and I didn't find the social issues overloaded at all. What was overloaded is the combat. Two steps and there's another one of those.
Bottom line: gaudalost said it before - the game uses these spotlighted thematic moments to create atmosphere and setting. It doesn't try to resolve them in an insightful way - it's touch and go. Infinite isn't about racism/fundamentalism, in the same way that Bioshock 1 wasn't about libertarianism and communism. The ways with which the series deals with these issues are superficial, and while this is a weakness of design from the vintage of socially constructive games, it was never the goal of these games to deliver a message about a philosophical / social issue in the first place. Look at Bioshock 1's central moral conceit - ie DO YOU KILL THE LITTLE SISTERS??? - it's got little to do with the social philosophies the game's flavor texts espouse.
These games have the philosophical / social relevance of philosoraptor.
Columbia exist in the 1910 - 1920 period, if they wanted to make a exagerated version of the time, they shouldn't claim connections with reality. Because it will inevitably bring comparisons with it. If the extremism was justified in some form for example: Instead of Columbia existing on the 1910 - 1920, it should exist on todays's world and the city being trapped on time on 1910 by the whole multidimentions thing (hey, it's science magic, why not?), living 100 years without having the social reforms that came with time could explain the extremism, another possibility is that the player would get in the city when the Vox Populi revolution is happening for some time and the regime is kinda desperate, that is why people are so extreme in their attitudes, the way it is, it appears that the civil war only begins for real when you get to the city and the Vox Populi was a minor resistance group only becoming e real threat because of your actions, it could be propaganda from Comstock and the Vox Populi was a way bigger threat than Comstock admited and in reality he was close to lose if he don't do something, but this should be shown to the player. The problems that Rapture was enough removed from reality so all this exageration on characters design made sense, but people on Columbia appear too much with the average american of the 1910 - 1920 so the whole social issue estremism is exagerated. Racism, exploitatiom, fundamentalism survives because they aren't such obvious thing. Only the most hardcore racist would throw a ball at defenseless, in suffering, black person on a stage (Even on Nazi Germany, Hitler had to hide the mass execution and suffering of the jews from the germans.) and based on the civillians conversations, people in Columbia are
all hardcore racists by their own will, the only people that oppose Comstock are on the Vox Populi, and they are psychotic murders, so there isn't balance showing that there is alot going on than the propaganda from Comstock.
I guess it is my fault for wanting complexity from a 2013 CoD clone.
followed by "Rough guide to the best iphone and ipad apps"
