Ken Levine Talks Occupy Wall Street and BioShock Infinite

The Washington Post has a great interview with Irrational Games creative director and co-founder Ken Levine. Similarities between BioShock Infinite and the Occupy Wall Street movement are discussed. I highly recommend giving it a full read; it’s a fantastic interview with one of the sharpest minds in game development…

The Washington Post has a great interview with Irrational Games creative director and co-founder Ken Levine. Similarities between BioShock Infinite and the Occupy Wall Street movement are discussed. I highly recommend giving it a full read; it’s a fantastic interview with one of the sharpest minds in game development.

One curious aside in the interview is Levine talking about BioShock Infinite getting heat from leftists and white supremacists alike. Check it out:

The games tend to be a Rorschach for people, and I’ve heard both sides of reaction [to the demo]. I had the displeasure of going to a white supremacist site that made a point of saying this game by “the Jew” Ken Levine was about killing white people. But then I went to this leftist site that said this is about discrediting leftists movements. Games, as I said, are a Rorschach, and I don’t want to be making games that are expressing a political or philosophical view.

For some reason, in my head I hear a white supremacist calling him “the Jew Ken Levine” similar to how South Park’s Eric Cartman says “that damn Jew Kyle”. Though perhaps that’s just me….

Anyway, head on over to The Washington Post, enjoy the interview, and let me know what you think (please).

Source

Author: RPadTV

https://rpad.tv

13 thoughts on “Ken Levine Talks Occupy Wall Street and BioShock Infinite”

  1. I totally get what he's saying. When I was coming up, nobody had any idea what Mario was really about. Hell, I still don't think we REALLY know, but I always thought it was about drugs. You take the shrooms, and you feel like a giant. You eat the poppy flower, and you're on fire. Several times, you take enough to get to the experience you're aiming at… but it's not the high you are looking, it's in another castle.

    So yeah… I failed that Rorschach test.

    2. @ Ray

      Side note… when I posted this, a few individual words were missing and I thought I typed too fast. I hit the Edit button, scrolled past the Facebook thing's code, and saw they were missing.

      THEN… I erased the Facebook thing's code to better see what i was doing… and all the words that were missing magically appeared. And I posted that fine, but I don't have the FB thing anymore on this comment.

      It's kinda strange and I really can't make sense of it. The only thing I can see making the difference is the div tag inside the comment. Maybe that glitches somewhere with WP. I don't know though, I'm just reporting.

  2. Fantastic quote by Levine in this article, and it feels like something I've been saying about this country for a while now:

    "Maybe that’s what the study of these movements is: The movement becomes about the ideology and not about reality. The reality starts to change, and it becomes that people would rather give up reality than ideology."

      1. i can get it cheaper on amazon, lol

        if i get it, ill get it there, using your links :)

        probably right before i get infinite

    2. Iceman says: "YES, DO IT!" It is similar enough to Bioshock 1 (gameplay) so that if you liked the original, you'll probably like the sequel.

      As an added bonus, I'll play multiplayer with you whenever you want.

      -M

  5. I finally got around to reading the article. It was interesting and incredibly incidental that he just happened to be working on a game that barely seems to current events on the surface. I agree that some people will find meaning in anything, even though it is not the intention of the creator.

    That said, I think the Tea Party and OWS protestors should team up and join forces. They are, after all, two sides of the same coin. I particularly despise how the media is trying to polarize everything by trying to affiliate T Party people as right-wing republican ideologists and OWS as anarchy-inducing liberal hippies. When in reality, they both have the same enemy: corruption. Both groups are simply attacking it from two different sides. I agree when the group Young Americans for Liberty when they suggest for the Tea Party and OWS movement to come together and fight for both fiscal responsibility and against Wall Street lobbying influence on stupid/greedy politicians. If these two groups can come together, they have the potential to truly change the political landscape and have a meaningful impact on our future.

    -M

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