![]() ![]() If you create a world that hews too close to real-life discrimination, the comparison becomes too direct and looks cheap next to the real historical record. Provided it’s done well, this conceit can allow people to see past their biases, or reveal something about prejudice they’d never considered.īut there are also pitfalls - like creating a too-close parallel. Imaginary racism is what you see when you play a game where magic-users are feared and distrusted, or a fictional race - elves for example - face discrimination. I’m going to refer to these structures as “imaginary racism” - an attempt to use sci-fi and fantasy fiction to imagine prejudice. These allegories work because they let the audience project themselves onto it, rather than spelling out a simple parallel. These worlds created an imaginary structure that let us conceptualize prejudice. X-Men works the same way: sure, black and LGBT youth saw themselves as the mutants, but so did Jews, the economically disadvantaged, and class misfits. That’s why so many people relate to Frozen, interpreting it as everything from an LGBT metaphor, to a feminist one, to a parable about mental illness - we all know what it’s like to struggle with, and eventually own, our identity. When this approach succeeds, it succeeds big, but there’s a catch: in general the more abstract the comparison, the better it functions. Classic sci-fi like Star Trek used imagined worlds as a way to view prejudice in a safe space, letting them be more open to the message. During the Civil Rights era, mutants in X-Men paralleled the struggle for racial equality, and later LGBT rights. When fantasy or sci-fi worlds want to approach a controversial topic, it’s common for them to use allegorical structures. And though this imaginary world ultimately doesn’t hold up, it also allows the game to make its most shocking statement. ![]() Boil it down, and Infinite both succeeds and fails due to one aspect: it re-conceptualizes racism via an imaginary world. Given that, I think it’s a good time to revisit that title and assess it for what it is - a daring game that doesn’t quite live up to its ambitions. BioShock: The Collection hits shelves today, putting one of the decade’s most polarizing games - BioShock Infinite - back in the public consciousness. ![]()
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