One of the toughest questions people ask me is the question, why? Why did my daughter die? Why do I have cancer? Why can't I find a job? Why are people sometimes so nasty to one another? I work in a church game Avatar 225 . And a church is supposed to be a safe place. It's supposed to be a place where those genuinely longing for meaningful answers can go to sincerely struggle. So, naturally, as the caretaker of a local church, much of that struggling happens right in front of me, and I consider it a privilege to sit with people in the trenches of their inner wars. It is a war indeed, for the question that needs an answer, that persistent question, why, often has no answer accessible to finite human beings Avatar 225 . And so in the absence of any kind of peace with God over his sometimes inscrutable, often painful plan, people of faith struggle. That's not always a bad thing, I think.
So what does that have to do with a video game? I finished Irrational's excellent BioShock Infinite recently, and I've had a little time since then for my mind to process the intense intertwining of story, character, setting, and atmosphere. My mind has gone to the places it is prone to wander to, the theological. Religion is a huge theme in Infinite. Religion touches almost every aspect of the game's narrative. The antagonist, Comstock, is a self-styled prophet and leader of a pseudo-Christian, religious cult-city game Avatar 222, Columbia, suspended twenty thousand feet in the sky by a mysterious, quantum, science-fiction-y force. Booker DeWitt, the protagonist, seems at first to be motivated by a desire to wipe away a financial debt by rescuing a young lady from a tower in Columbia, but the game wastes no time at all in indicating that DeWitt has a deeper, moral debt that is not so easily erased. Images and language of water, baptism, washing, and rebirth all build upon one another in the telling of this story. There is even a baby who turns out to be the lamb of Comstock's prophecy. Let me stop here and say that as a Christian and an ordained pastor, I was not in the least bit offended by the use of these decidedly Christian themes. For the most part, things like Christian tai game Avatar 225 baptism were used to move the story as well as I have ever seen them used in secular media. Levine appropriately tied rebirth to baptism. Part of what baptism represents in Christianity is dying as an old self and being raised to a new life. In Infinite, baptism is explicitly used three times as far as I can remember gamealo.net.. The first time is when DeWitt is admitted into the city of Columbia. The second time is at the end of the game when DeWitt is offered baptism, which he rejects. The third and final time is when it is revealed that DeWitt and Comstock are really the same person, Comstock being the seemingly inevitable product of Booker's religious rebirth through baptism. Baptism in that instance is the means by which DeWitt dies for the sake of undoing all the evil that he and Comstock will bring about. In each instance, baptism is used as an appropriate symbolic plot device for the point at which the players find themselves in the story. It's the initiation of a new and profound mission, a rebirth of DeWitt towards an ultimate destiny. It's the rejection of a salvation that DeWitt finds cheap and inadequate, preferring to seek the accomplishment of his mission in order to wipe away his debt, an ultimately futile effort. It takes Elizabeth bringing him back to the baptismal pool for him to fully grasp the profundity of his true debt and what that debt has earned him as a result. Even though there is death but no new life in the final baptism that ends DeWitt's and game avatar Comstock's lives, it functions quite well as a plot device given the kind of setting that these characters and their story inhabit. Levine wasn't aiming to speak theologically about the true meaning and use of Christian baptism. Therefore, I have no problem with him taking baptism and using it to tell a story separate from the Christian story.