What Was The Point Of Vigors In BioShock Infinite?
BioShock Infinite takes place in the floating city of Columbia, held aloft by quantum physics and a bunch of barbershop quartet racists. It’s a pretty wild setting, although a far cry from the sprawling, hot air balloon-powered metropolis we saw in the original gameplay demos, but it’s an impressive setting nonetheless.
Now, I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept that the place is in the air because something called a Lutece Field can keep subatomic particles suspended in space. If you told someone 200 years ago that we’d put a man on the moon or be able to read articles like this on smartphones, they’d have you burned at the stake. Science often seems like magic before we understand it - and doubly so once we do - so who am I to question it? It’s a macguffin, it fits the world of the game and makes it palpable. What I can’t make peace with are the vigors - what’s the point of them?
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If you’ve played BioShock Infinite, just take a few seconds to sit and think: what narrative purpose do the vigors possess? We know they’re stolen from Rapture technology by Jerimiah Fink. He peered into the underwater city through the various tears that opened around Columbia and saw Korean scientist Yi Suchong researching Adam and the Big Daddies. I get why he’d steal them and make his own version, but there’s no reason for the citizens to ever use them.
Rapture is a city built on the unshakeable belief that a man should be able to fashion himself into whatever he wants, as long as he puts the work in. “Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?” Andrew Ryan asks as you descend into the depths. If that work involves exploiting others, so be it - if you can, you
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