History, along with political unrest, often repeats itself, even in video games

Matt Hawkins Contributing Writer, Video Games

BioShock isn’t copying the tea party and Occupy Wall Street movement, it’s copying the stuff that came way before it.

If the upcoming BioShock Infinite feels like something that’s ripped from today’s headlines once it arrives, it should… even though those headlines are quite old. Because the tale it weaves, that of a class struggle between the Founders, the privileged few who basically run the entire show, and the Vox Populi, the disenfranchised and disgruntled everyman that feel used and abused, is a vicious cycle that’s been happening for a very long time now.

With the only difference it the game being how everything takes place in a floating city. As Destructoid points out, in an interview between creative director Ken Levine states and The Washington Post…

“When we started the game, we had this idea for these movements, and we were looking back at history. Our games are heightened versions of history — “BioShock” was kind of a hyper-realized Ayn Rand if she had made Galt’s Gulch. But instead of having her idealized characters, we put in more realistic characters.

In this world, we came up with the idea of looking at what was happening at the time of the game [the 1890s], with the jingoism movement and the nationalist movement versus internationalist movement. This was before the tea party, before Occupy Wall Street. Actually, when people saw that demo, they thought we were aping the tea party; they thought it was a hit piece on the Tea Party. But these movements tend to happen. There have been nationalist and nativist movements many times through history.

As we developed these opposing groups, the Founders versus the Vox Populi, it was interesting to see this play out in real time, so that the fictional movements we’re creating that are set in this heightened past are almost being duplicated in reality.”

Levin goes on to state that, because it so closely mirrors what’s happening today, he fully expects a backlash of some kind, from both sides of the fence. Case in point, he makes mention of how some white supremacist site who called him out for being Jewish, for encouraging the murder of white people. Oh silly racists!

And since we’re talking about video games and politics in general, a number of folks have recently come to the same realization that the noting of debt that one which has no hope of paying off was something they learned at an early as, as a kid, while playing Animal Crossing…

animalcrossing History, along with political unrest, often repeats itself, even in video games

Meanwhile, here’s something that I’m shocked hasn’t gotten more attention: For America goofy use of Super Mario motifs…

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