Ken Levine takes BioShock from the sea to the sky with Infinite

Ken Levine is not afraid to take risks. “I’d rather go after something that’s ambitious and fail than do the same thing annually,” said the game designer and cofounder of Irrational Games, on the phone from London, England.

Levine’s resume includes work on 1998’s Thief: The Dark Project and 1999’s System Shock 2, two video games that helped establish the modern interactive medium. But it was 2007’s BioShock, with its crumbling underwater empire, Rapture, and its haunting story inspired by the philosophy of Ayn Rand, that exemplifies his ambition.

BioShock Infinite, released today (March 26), is equally aspiring. But despite the title of the game, developed for PlayStation 3, Windows, and Xbox 360, this is no sequel. Infinite’s protagonist is a disgraced Pinkerton agent named Booker DeWitt, who travels to the floating city of Columbia on a mission to rescue a woman named Elizabeth.

Levine explained to the Georgia Straight that he’s challenged by trying to do things in games that haven’t been done before. Figuring out how machine guns are going to work in a game is easy. “You have a pretty good sense of how to do it and what you’re going to get out of it,” Levine said. But there was no precedent for a character like BioShock’s Big Daddies, the giant, hulking robots that accompanied and protected little girls who collected material from dead bodies.

Elizabeth, who was designed “to be somebody that the player can imprint upon and have some kind of emotional connection to,” is the unique element in Infinite. Unlike other video-game characters that are controlled by the game’s artificial intelligence, Elizabeth is a partner to the player. She provides ammunition and medical kits when players need them. She picks locks and breaks codes. “She does all these things that Booker doesn’t do,” Levine explained. “She’s not somebody who’s along for the ride or somebody that you have to protect.

“As you explore a space,” he continued, “Elizabeth is also exploring the space.” She interacts with the environment and the other characters; she becomes distracted by objects that capture her attention and loses interest in things. “She’s unpredictable and she surprises us all the time.” It means that every encounter, every game, will be different.

“I think if you look back on BioShock and you imagine it without the Big Daddy and Little Sister, it’s just not the same game,” Levine said. “And if you look back on Infinite, I think people will feel exactly the same way.”

Creating Elizabeth to be so emergent required a huge amount of programming and writing, Levine noted. And because she and Booker talk to each other and to dozens of other characters in the world, the extra demands of Infinite meant that Levine—who wrote the entirety of BioShock on his own—needed help.

Levine wrote the dialogue for all the major characters in the game, but handed off the hundreds of lines of dialogue spoken by the background characters. And he plotted the levels with help from another game designer and a couple of writers. They were responsible for writing a “dummy script” that contained the essential details that needed to be communicated to the player. “Then I would take that and go off and write the script from it,” Levine said.

The process of recording the dialogue was another opportunity for him to be collaborative. With BioShock he directed the voice-acting sessions over the phone. But for Infinite, he joined principals Troy Baker and Courtnee Draper in studio. Dialogue was recorded at the same time in separate, soundproof booths so each voice would be on a separate track. Being able to see each other through the glass meant that the actors were able to respond the other’s performance.

And those lines had to be recorded in multiple versions to be appropriate to the situation. When Elizabeth says something to Booker she may be next to him, across a room, or in a different section of the city in the sky. That stems from Levine creating Infinite with so much possibility.

After spending the past five years working on BioShock Infinite, Levine’s not sure what’s next. “I think if you’re not aggressively embracing the things that you’re afraid of, you’re standing still.” For him, it’s that unprecedented element, the Big Daddy or Elizabeth, that may or may not work. “The thing you’re most afraid of generally becomes either the thing that destroys you or the thing that makes the game what it is,” he mused.