Bioshock Infinite Creative Director Ken Levine Sits Down Just With Us For Extended Conversation

Your New Found Friendship With An AI Named Elizabeth In the game you will play as Booker Dewitt, a disgraced Pinkerton agent challenged with infiltrating the city of Columbia and 'rescue' a young girl called Elizabeth. However, as such things are, it isn't quite that simple. Elizabeth poses the power to tear holes between dimensions and time and is at the center of a raging civil war. In the game, Elizabeth will accompany you through the majority of your time on Columbia. Levine is obviously very excited about people interacting with his character.

To me, Elizabeth is the real experiment. She is an AI. Most AIs are gun turrets right? She is an AI that is really designed to...put it this way, I was talking to Guillermo Del Toro once. He said, an interesting character is one that you can imagine in repose. Not in combat, not attacking. It is relatively easy to make AIs who are in combat. How do you make a character you are just hanging out in a room with believable? We spent so much time and energy making sure the Elizabeth feels engaged and feels believable, even when you are just in the room with her. Let alone the cool stuff and the combat. If you are out of ammo, she will toss you a gun and do all these really helpful things for you but just hanging in a room, just being interested in what is around her. Being engaged in the space, just starting conversations with you, but also going through a narrative progression and changing and being changed by the world around her. In any other media, you can't build a relationship with another character the way you can in games. I think the closest thing would be an improv with somebody. That is the closest connection.

I have noticed, especially recently, several fascinating case studies of companionship in games. From games with great single player companions like Clementine in The Walking Dead to more interpretive multiplayer companionships like Journey, experimentation in how we interact with a companions in our games is ripe. Levine seems fairly confident that his game will bring something new and better to the table.

Journey is sort of an abstract version of companionship. There are a lot of questions they don't ask. Clementine is an excellent companion but she only exsists in designer crafted moments according to a script. She doesn't really have a life outside of that. Where as Elizabeth both exsists in crafted moments in the script but she also exists in a dynamic sense inside and outside of combat, just in walking in the world. You will be in an arcade and she will start playing with them and acting with them, you walk into a ladies bathroom and she'll like comment,"what are you doing here?" So we have all this stuff that is built into and happens between the lines of the scripted moments. You have all these if/and statements and all these sort of reactive statements. So I think Elizabeth really is, there is a continum of like, Alex from Half Life, Chip from Enslaved, that I thought was really strong, and I think Elizabeth is . Then you have, like you said characters in Journey. I think Clementine is a little different. Very well, very well written. Extremely well written but thats all... she is essentially a written character. Really not that much different than how you would write a character in a movie or animated series. So Elizabeth has to exist in both of those spaces and that was the real challenge for her.

When the word companionship comes up, it's bigger, more corporate brother 'connectivity' is never far behind. In fact, the word is coming up all over the game industry. The Playstation 4 have even gone as far as to base their whole console on it. I ask Ken if he thinks Bioshock fits into the connectivity equation and if as an industry we are jumping to the idea too wholly. "I am a primarily a single player gamer myself" he assures me.

I mean, if this is a co op game, and it is not...there is no Elizabeth as a co-op partner. Then she is just a collection of powers that is running around with you. It is that character connection that matters here. So we never thought of her being a co-op partner here. The amount of roleplaying that would be necessary here would be pretty extraordinary. And yet, we want you too feel like partners. We want you to feel like,"Wow, It is a co-op game where the partner I have is this really great actress who is really invested in this part." Now, of course it isn't always going to feel like that, but I think that's cool. Because generally you either had co-op or a really solo experience. This is somewhere...I wouldn't say in between, but a third way.

With all these interesting narrative innovations, Levine could have been forgiven for feeling less inclined to focus on the core shooting of the game. But he is an entertainer first. While trying to tell a serious story imbued with political overtones, he wants to deliever the gleefulness of gun-totting and vigor wielding.

The people I admire the most are the people who have their cake and eat it too. The people who make a great entertaining film that stays with you for years, you know? I don't think you have to choose. I believe in entertainment, but I also believe in... well, look at Animal Farm, a great little short book about a bunch of pigs that take over a farm. An say that you knew nothing about the Russian Revolution, that is what you would think it was. That isn't even the Russian Revolution, but human nature and political thought, it is still a great little story. I think you can do both.

So, there is clearly something for everybody here. Maybe standing around in an arcade to see what an AI is going to do and say just isn't the way you get your kicks. Perhaps you care less for the story and more for running though everything and shooting at the other AIs. Well, if you are a run and gun player, fear not, Elizabeth shant get in the way of your power fantasy.

I think it is that we really let the player take the lead. You never have to feel obligated to Elizabeth. In the sense that, right at the begining we did a lot of testing and you have some people say, "I feel like I really have to wait for her." We knew that was a problem. So we wanted her to really drive the player's experience. Her AI is generally watching you all the time. I don't mean her, she isn't concious of it. The game is constantly wathcing you to make sure that if you tend to hang out in an area, she will sort of branch out and start doing interesting things. Or if you tend to zip through things, she'll zip through things. It is our responsibillity to sort of show you what cool stuff she can do. We find that, y'know, people tend to like to say, "Well cool, what is she going to do here?" That has been a real interesting challenge because there hasn't been a real precident for that, where people may or may not do a bunch of cool stuff in that space.

But if you are indeed about all that exploration, Don't worry, the franchise hasn't lost anything.

It is very Bioshock. We have always had all these little nooks and crannies that you can choose to explore or not and you get rewarded, I mean if you are into that, if you are into the detail, there is 'so' much in this game that you will, 'soo' much detail you will be able to discover.

Bioshock Infinite ties to the original in the series are not immediately obvious. They take place int he same universe but at largely different time spans and on completely different cities. So how do they tie these two together? The answer is through gameplay. Bioshock was known for its first person shooting but also the use of plasmids. What I always liked about the plasmids was that they weren't just fun to play with but also how they enhanced the themes of the story. Bioshock Infinite deploys a similar concept in vigors.

The thematic connection is really talking about where the Vigours come from in this world, that is a story in a way. I think probably the theme of plasmids was more important to the first game, because it was about people becoming super people, you know, supermen and what happens if that gets pushed too far. That was a very sort of visceral representation of that. Where are with this game, we are really getting with Elizabeth and her ability to open portals to other dimensions and other version of our realities and the differences between that. Those are the themes of this game and are closely tied to that are the vigours of this game. There are reasons why they are there but it is more about providing the Bioshock gameplay experience. Some things are thematically tied, most things are thematically tied. Some things are a little more systemic.

While on the idea of game mechanics, I really wanted to get Ken's opinion on the First Person Shooter. It is a concept that I have always found a little confusing. Coming from a film literate background, my understand of genre is often based on content such as Horror or Romance, where as game genre defines itself by gameplay. But Ken puts me straight and tells me the strengths of the FPS.

Right, right, right. For me, the FP is more important than the S. To me, that is a genre because you are in the shoes of..well I guess it is not technically genre. But, the fact that you and Booker are sharing a skin, it is very interesting to me. Because there is no way we can hope for you to build a relationship with another character unless you are first person, I don't think. Because there is observing a relationship and being in a relationship. I think there are lots of times where you observe a relationship. If you look at the Big Daddy and Little Sister relationship, it was a very powerful and emotional relationship, but it is an observed relationship. People look at me strange when I say this, but Elizabeth is the inheritor. People say, €œoh is the Songbird the new Big Daddy? Is the Handy Man the big daddy?€ I think Elizabeth really is. What made the Big Daddy powerful was that you empathised with him, you felt for him because of that relationship he had . Creating emotion with the AI was really the goal of that. That was the goal with Elizabeth as well. a connection and emotion and empathy. And so, I think that is way more important than any combat experience with the Big Daddy. So I think that is why the first person matters to me. You having this relationship with Elizabeth and for a few moments, even for a few moments, make you forget that she is just a collection of motion captures and character models and dialogue, because I knew sometimes, and I wrote the material and directed the actor.