NOTE: This blog post discusses key plot points of Bioshock Infinite.  Do not continue reading if you havent finished the game.  It won't make sense if you haven't, anyway.

Ken Levine's decision to not make a decision regarding the fate of his Bioshock franchise was an exceptionally bold one.  What I mean by deciding to not decide is that rather than bring any kind of definite conclusion to things at the end of Bioshock Infinite, he did the opposite: opened the gates of possibility eternally wide.  This presents us with a classic dilemma which I will discuss in the  paragraphs below.  It was also bold because nothing - nothing, mind you - causes more tingles down computer geek spines than string theory and multiverses.  Even the slightest hint of German-owned cats will arouse the philosopher that dwells inside every dedicated nerd.  In my opinion this is a good thing, and with Bioshock Infinite we have been given something to talk about for years to come.  What it also means is that we now have yet another conversational touchpoint about which there will never be consensus.  Not that that is entirely a bad thing. With that let us proceed to talk about why the Bioshock Infinite narrative ultimately breaks down, and how to fix it.

During the climactic events chronicled in the final minutes of Infinite, Booker becomes convinced that to make all his problems go away all he has to do is go back to the source and smother Comstock in his crib before he (Comstock) can grow up to become the monster that makes off into a different universe with his (Booker's) only child.  We get to see the moment when his plan ultimately works.  But if you take a step back and try to look at the whole picture encompassing all the possibilities, all the universes, all the truths and falsehoods did anything really get solved at all?  Stay with me.

If Booker is killed before the baptism, does that erase alternate universes where he does indeed become Comstock, which would in turn cause the other Elizabeths to disappear? In other words, the ending is meaningful only for the small subset of infinite possibilities; specific to however many universes diverge after Booker dies before becoming Comstock. In worlds where he goes back to being Booker, there is always the chance that a Comstock will come after his daughter perhaps in other ways than blackmail for gambling debt. If then it's only meaningful for a small group of an infinitely large whole, it becomes statistically completely insignificant. Even if you had a world in which Booker was never born, there would still be worlds in which Booker was born. Thats the problem with infinity: everything did not happen, did happen, and will happen. Everything is true, and everything is false. Truth becomes meaningless.

Ultimately it was love for his daughter and regret over giving her up that leads Booker to get her back and destroy Comstock's plans in the process. If Comstock dies before he can get his hands on Anna, Columbia doesn't destroy America. In worlds where Comstock manages to steal Anna and Booker never finds out who did it, Comstock's plan succeeds. The same would be true for worlds in which Robert Lutece doesn't experience his twinges of regret over enabling Comstock to take the child. The fact that you actually watched New York being destroyed proves that it does end up happening. Didn't happen, happened, will happen. So basically killing Booker at the baptism solves an infinitesimally small amount of problems.

So I postulate that there must indeed be a finite number of worlds in the Bioshock reality. This would allow us to pursue the possibilities of impacts of choices in a more amenable environment, in which there are things that are truly impossible, or rendered impossible by the undoing of some act from the past.  With a finite amount of universes, perhaps controlled by some sovereign eternal being, life choices and truth actually matter in the cosmic scheme of things. The fact that there must be absolute and universal truths in order for life to have any real meaning, but that this fact does not jive with the game's narrative, is the real dilemma that the Bioshock Infinite story must deal with.

The period between 2007 and now is fairly murky for me in terms of computer gaming. Beginning in the summer of 2007 I left off gaming entirely to pursue a career in Law Enforcement. I wanted to get away from my career in IT, which was experiencing a decent beginning as an IT operations manager. Let's call it a rebellious stage - a time when I wasn't satisfied with what I was doing and tried to make a change. At any rate, I didn't even have a desktop computer for most of 2007, a trend which lasted until 2009. During that period, the only gaming I was involved with was done through DOSBox; reliving the old days with games like Panzer General and of course the ever-eminent Privateer.

About the time that it became clear the police thing was not going to work out, I landed a tax return windfall resulting from my police academy tuition. Naturally, this pile of cash needed to be spent immediately: and spent it was, on a fantastic gaming rig from a company called iBuyPower. I was wary of this no-name manufacturer, having been scarred in the distant past by online hardware purchases. This time around I did my research properly and ended up with a very solid machine with the cutting edge Intel Core i7 processing system and more RAM than you or I or anybody else could hope to ever make use of. I put the new equipment to the test immediately with Fallout 3, and many a happy hour was spent on that game - which will be referenced later. Right now I want to relate a tale of hope, exertion, and initial success followed by ultimate failure.

Throughout all the years since 2003 I had kept up to date with my Black Sheep Retribution gaming buddies from the Ghost Recon days. One guy in particular - Reaper - had become obsessed with America's Army along with me and we became pretty tight friends. Between 2005 and early 2007 we would typically be found dominating SF Hospital servers together, usually as Ambush, pissing off the clans who would all congregate on Escort to crush the disorganized enemy and easily amass a ludicrous amount of honor points. Enter a couple of guys name Reaper and Hazard, who proceeded to dismantle the Escort teams which had gotten sloppy. Obviously, we silly asshats were hacking and booted from the server we would both soon be. Eventually our prowess was noticed by a group named Unitas. Unitas was an awesome group of guys who laddered competitively in AA, in 4v4 and 6v6 formats. We both became involved with matching right away and had many bloody adventures climbing our way to the top of the field as members of that esteemed organization.

It eventually had to come to an end - Reaper got sucked into World of Warcraft and I sold my gaming rig and went to police academy. It wasn't until I had revived my gaming career with the advent of the new hardware in 2009 that Reaper and I again joined forces - this time with the release of America's Army 3. He and I both felt that AA3 would be the Second Coming of Black Sheep Retribution. As fate would have it, the game was impressively unfinished at the time of release. This was apparently due to intense drama at the development studio - in fact, the entire team was fired the day after the game was released, which was subsequently handed to an entirely different studio whose job it was to clean up the mess. We ignored the crippling, egregious faults of the game and played the crap out of the game's beta stage because it was still a very tactical, gritty, realistic, teamplay environment - which was exactly what BSR was always all about. Through our evangelism of the game we convinced a whole cadre of old Ghost Recon adversaries to join the ranks of BSR and soon had built a sizable matching team. Good days were right around the corner - we were simply waiting for the official release of the game and for Team Warfare to open their AA3 ladders.

The release of AA3 brought equal parts triumph and tragedy. Our matching squad was formed and a-matching we did go. BSR was brought out of the shadows and back into the field where it belonged. I found myself dropped squarely into the leadership role of this newly-formed squad, which wouldn't have been nearly as much of a burden but for the complete and precipitous disappearance of Reaper. Without his experience and presence, our matching squad got off to a hobbling start. I was managing the ladders, and having to lead every squad in the matches - which became too much of a burden of time for me. In the exclusive BSR leadership forums I was leaving desperate pleas to the old guard to help establish a basis for the squad to thrive - recruiting processes, team rules and regs, chain of command, all of which were well-established in the past and were very instrumental in the team's success. These requests fell on deaf ears, as the old leaders like Shadow and Ruggbutt were more interested in just playing. That was understandable - they had carried BSR on their shoulders for so many years.

Without an official mandate from the old guard, I felt uncomfortable just grabbing the reins. In retrospect I should have, but sometimes rules get so embedded in one's mind that they become unbreakable. During my early days in BSR it was pounded into my head where I stood in the squad - I was a member, not a leader. At any rate, with the lack of leadership eventually came chaos. Nobody would show up for the practices that I scheduled, and our recruitment fell slack from not having any particular goal or vision. Eventually I faded away towards other pursuits, and Blaze (who had come to BSR specifically to play AA3) took over. Eventually he announced that he and the majority of the AA3 matching squad were leaving BSR to find a group that was more dedicated to the game. I didn't hold any of that against them. I didn't hold anything against Reaper or the other BSR leviathans who simply couldn't work up the enthusiasm to dive into the game. BSR was dead at last. Shortly thereafter, Ruggbutt allowed the subscription for the website to run out and soon after that the domain itself expired. I never have figured out what happened to Reaper... but it would definitely be good to hear the guy's voice again some time.

The story of Second Life is nearly impossible to tell anymore. The memories are hazy and shaded, yet still real. Before I semi-retired from the game I actually wrote an SL autobiography - which still exists here and there in various people's inventory. This will be a brief summary.

I'm sure you've heard of SL, if you haven't played it before. In its first four or five years it caused quite a stir amongst the media types. People used to talk about virtual worlds; you know, the Myst franchise and stuff like that where you wander around and solve problems. In fact, that was Cyan's motto: "We create worlds." Linden Labs, however, actually did create a world. A legitimate one, with people who literally spent all day in it. Many established and lived off the income they made in the game. Many more found themselves hopelessly lost in romantic engagements. Even many more than that found gratification in the cheap sexual thrills which permeated the game.

You can do anything you want in SL. If you can imagine it and learn the right skills, it's all possible. My SL career began as a plaything for my friend YumYum, on October 1, 2005. I dropped into the game ugly as sin and not a penny to my name - just like everybody else. Thankfully, there was a healthy supply of nurturing single women who would take me in as their gentleman lover and provide me with clothing and shelter. For the first month I just bounced around from girl to girl - something which I'm not really ashamed of. Nobody likes being a mooch, but a man has to survive somehow, right? A relationship in SL, just like everything else and exactly as I explained in my reminscining of my time in the game There, goes very fast. But until you find a job to do, there's nothing else going on except hanging out with strangers and combing through mountains of crappy free stuff. Relationships are unexpected yet unavoidable, and usually have endings less like Apollo 11 and more like Apollo 1 - they normally will go completely Hindenburg on you at the end.

I eventually found a cool place to hang out, made great friends, and SL became for me a place of refuge. The place itself was called Celestia, and I became a regular the first day I was there. It was at Celestia that I first learned how to make realistic in-game models out of primitives and rediscovered my computer programming skills from college classes long forgotten (sad to say at the time I was actually still in college). I spent hours making small arms from scratch - modelling, texturing, scripting, animating. I developed powerful proprietary technology in the area of armor-penetrating bullets. Soon I opened my own little gun store and sold enough weapons over the ensuing months and years to keep me out of the gutter. I had plenty of money with which to dabble in all the little subcultures SL had to offer - goth, furry, Gor, etc. I made a female avatar and turned her into one of the hottest women in the game.

Many, many good times were had. Perhaps the only balanced person I ever met in SL was a gentleman by the name of Matt Enfield. Matt and I were destined to be great friends from the start - he was smart, talented, creative, and also quite deviant. So was I, and hilarity inevitably would ensue.But there was a dark side, and it of course came in the form of a woman. She and I started off as the best of friends, wreaking havoc and carousing 'til all hours of the night for months. It was inevitable that we would eventually develop deep and complex feelings for each other. When it all spiralled out of control and I discovered she had been carrying on a secret relationship with a guy on an alt for many months, I burned myself out of SL and deleted my character.

The problem was that I constantly thought about her. As most upper-tier players do, I came out of my retirement and started seeking out my old friends. I didn't expect to find her again, but I did - on the first day back. So it all started again - this time spilling over into real life. Things then went predictably sour - she was married and I wasn't comfortable with that one bit, but I still struggled with my feelings and attraction to her. Eventually a breaking point was reached: accounts were blocked and phone numbers deleted - one more casualty of the digital dating age. So take that as a warning, ye who would Second Lifers be. Of course this type of thing happens in most MMOs, but in SL it becomes much sharper just based on the level of interaction that's possible.

Between my discourse on There and Second Life, one important item I haven't yet elaborated upon is the Jackson Dictum. Throughout all the drama, relationships, back-stabbing, and sorrow, I had to find a way to make sense of it all; to make the right choice in a game in which there didn't seem to be any. Even the word "game" seemed to take on a whole new meaning in the context of these virtual worlds. How could one ensure an enjoyable playing experience while navigating the trecherous emotional pathways one was forced to tred upon? My answer was this: "Do what entertains you the most." Ultimately this whole thing was about entertainment, was it not? There were of course no moral absolutes, no overarching codes of personal conduct which had any bearing. It was truly every man for himself, and the Jackson Dictum was basically just another way of saying "Look out for #1". This, by the way, has nothing to do with my personal principles of conduct in my real life, and that is an alternate and very lengthy ethical discussion. In the end, I suppose there was more harm done than good in Second Life. I always equate it to the words of an old Irish ballad: "Of all the harm that e're I've done, alas it was to none but me."

All in all SL was a fantastic experience for me, but eventually it was time once again to move on. I still jump into SL from time to time just to muck about or possibly dig up an old acquaintance, but the golden age has forever passed.

Lineage 2 was my very first true MMORPG. This was in many ways a blessing and a curse. On the good side, I wasn't bitter and jaded from drama in other MMORPGs. I could appreciate the fun parts of the game without worrying about the desperate grind of people that actually knew what was going on. Blissful ignorance. The problem was generally that L2 came from Korea, where it had already been played for some time. Most of the people in North American L2 by the end of beta were people who had learned the game by beta-testing the asian versions. They knew all the glitches and duping opportunities and milked them mercilessly in the opening weeks after the Open Beta character wipe. For these and a number of other reasons, L2 was doomed from the start but I got sucked in early.

Ketae and I had signed up for the L2 beta together. It looked like my kind of game - manly combat in a roughly medieval setting. After I got into it, I immediately thought of her and looked her up. We had some resolving to do, but patched things up and played together for the last week of closed beta and two weeks into open beta. Then she had to take a couple weeks off, I kept levelling, and I do not believe she started back up again.

The story of my adventures in L2 are many and someday may be told in their entirety. I was primarily a casual player, hardcore for a week or so at a time. I never made a huge amount of progress despite being in the game from the very start. I got a character to level 40, left the game, came back and started a new one which I got to 52, left, came back and got him to 60ish, only to be knocked out of the game by nothing other than a classic scam which deprived me of my primary weapon. I've kicked myself over and over for it since then, but what can you do?

By way of reflecting on my time in Lineage 2, during which I was involved in many high-level political conflicts and rubbed shoulders with the best and brightest of Sieghardt server, I think it was chilling how many hours you could sink into the game and how immersed in it you could become. In the era of voice communication and broadband internet, for several years now MMORPGs have truly been alternate existences for people rather than just outlets of entertainment.

On the subject of alternate existences, during my L2 travels I ran into Charisse, Eddie, and YumYum, my old There cronies. YumYum and I spent a lot of time together in L2 during my second stint in the game, and it was she that introduced me to something called Second Life. SL was like There, she said, only way better. It was free, so there was no reason for me not to try it out.

There was a thoroughly unique experience for me. To begin with, I need to set up the situation for you. The game had just transitioned from closed beta to "limited access", in which people were being let in group by group. Consequently, I was one of the only people playing the game at the time that was not a beta tester with years of previous MMO experience. Into this tank of piranhas dropped _Jackson, a combat veteran whose only defense in games past was the rifle in his hands. There were no rifles in There.

My first week possibly the most chaotic of anybody's. The experience was, appropriately, like actually being born. You had to learn how to walk around, change your clothing and communicate. Later on you might progress to gaining skills and making money, but for the moment you were just overwhelmed by your surroundings. The interesting thing about this social-interaction type of MMO, which I noted after my experience was more or less over, was that accelerated rate at which things happen. In the real world, the romantic life-cycle of Learn, Love, Live, Lose can happen in as quickly as several weeks' time. In games like There the cycle can happen in its entirely within days.

Sparing all the details, within my first week I had met someone, hung out with them non-stop, developed a crush on them, and was then tossed aside in favor of someone else. The emotions were scary - what was the most scary was how easy it was to let yourself get so involved. It was my first introduction to the concept of drama, and it was a valuable lesson. No longer did I face enemies with weapons in the arena of the cold, hard battlefield and its valor and justice. Now the enemy was myself, somebody I've been fighting with my whole life. No longer were there objectives to accomplish. Here, falling in love, dating, arguing, being mad, and gossiping were actually part of the game. It took me a while to realize this and thereby develop the "Jackson Dictum", which will be discussed later.

I got into hoverbiking. Within two months I had established myself as the second-fastest active hoverbiker in the game, after being tutored by the fastest - a beautiful and highly-intelligent woman by the name Ketae. I never did manage to beat her times (I tied her once and saved the screenshot - she later said that she had only gone through the course one time), but I met with success in a more important way. Ketae and I dated for approximately the second half of my time in the game, and leaving her - when I left There - was my only regret when it was all said and done.

Several people in There would be a factor in later games, including Ketae, Charisse, the woman with whom I spent that first chaotic week, and FTR_Eddie. One would factor prominantly, and that was YumYum. I left There after three months, which felt honestly like three years. The circumstances surrounding my departure were unfortunate. It was the end of January, college was becoming burdensome, and something had to give. Heartbreaking as it was to leave Ketae, it had to be done. I took out my frustrations on the battlefield, getting involved with UNITY as described previously. After a couple months of hard fighting, an email arrived from NCSoft, telling me I had been accepted into the closed beta of a game called Lineage 2. The next obsession was about to begin.

My AA career had two main periods of activity. The first era consisted of the Bridge SE glory days. The second was the SF days, which will be discussed in further detail at a later date. I initially made a name for myself as an M203 gunner, back when Bridge SE 203s had seven rounds rather than just three. There were many different styles of 203ers. Mine was very surgical - I very rarely did "spam" shots (shooting to a location you can't see but where you expect enemy to be). I would mostly take targetted shots, and developed a reputation thereby. Naturally I had to expand my repertoire, though, and so in the latter portion of my Bridge SE days I spent time sniping and bridge-storming.

It was during this that I courted the attentions of an elite squad called UNITY. UNITY was comprised primarily of Old Bridge players who had made the switch to Bridge SE, and I was interested in joining. By that time I had taken a sabbatical from BSR and was looking for another group to potentially ladder with. UNITY wasn't really a laddering squad, but many of them were legendary in the community. I got involved in their recruitment process, a period of about a month where I gamed on their comm server and they just watched me and decided if they liked me or not. I thought I was doing great, until the day one of their members accused me of hacking.

Hacking is of course the unforgivable sin in the AA community, and I took the accusation rather personally. It was also very out of character for a UNITY member to cry hacker - they had spent hours of PR time defending their own members from similar attacks. I complained to the brass, at which point they revealed that they had always suspected me of hacking and that was why I wasn't accepted into the group. Needless to say, I was a very unhappy camper.

After several months of AA but before the UNITY fiasco, I got involved with a game that would have an impact on my game-playing days for years to come. The game was called There, and it was a new idea that was being tried. There was designed as nothing more than a virtual playground - a place where you could buy a house, ride around in buggies, but most of all just chat to other people. I don't know why this appealed to me, but I was bored and feeling adventurous, so I gave it a try.

America's Army was an instant obsession. Finally, a game where true skill would separate the good from the bad, and the ugly from, well, gamers are all mostly ugly. Since BSR had more or less nothing to do with AA at the time, I entered the game as _OzBoRnE_, which eventually morphed to simply OZB0RNE. I began playing right after the release of version 1.9, just to kill time between Ghost Recon matches, which were getting more and more scarce with each passing day.

One fundamental difference between AA and GR was that in GR you played every map virtually the same way, whereas in AA individual maps had a unique feel and skillset that had to be mastered. Solid tactics would only get you so far; you had to learn the nuances of each map to be successful on them. Thus, you had individuals who were map specialists - people with an entire playing career spent on one map alone. I personally fell in love with Bridge SE. Bridge SE had some major fanatics, people who had spent literally thousands of hours on it. I totalled up perhaps 600-700 before it was all said and done.

Other map favorites included SF Hospital, after the Special Forces additions were made to the game. From a chronological standpoint, I was in and out of AA all the time. I would play consistently for a month or so, get into another game, come back 2 months later, play AA non-stop for a whole summer, leave, come back, etc. AA was always there for me when things in other games went sour. It became a bit of a refuge from the storms of drama that engulfed me immediately upon entering the world of the MMORPG.

Ghost Recon and Black Sheep Retribution combined to give me the greatest experience of my gaming career. The game itself was right up my alley: a bitterly realistic team-based modern infantry combat simulation with a huge online playerbase. I joined Black Sheep Retribuion in early 2003 and to this day maintain friendships that I struck up with the men and women of BSR. We played on The Combat Zone Ghost Recond Ladder, and were not only the most active squad but also the most successful. My initial months with BSR were a bit shaky, as I suffered from the effects of dial-ip internet and having to use Ventrilo for voice comms. But near the end of the summer of 2003 I managed to get broadband and finally made it onto BSR's matching squad, the first-call players which could jump in anytime a match popped up (usually about 2 or 3 per night at the height of the Island Thunder days).

BSR not only was a great gaming experience, but I learned alot about life in general from interacting with my squadmates. There were fun times, tough times, times when I screwed up and had to set things right and times when I had to forgive. Even 3 years into the new millenium, people outside of the internet phenomenon considered this type of interaction to be fake, somehow not real. I can attest to the fact that it was and is very real, and I am quite thankful for the memories which gaming with BSR gave me.

Broadband not only enhanced my virtual combat skills but also opened up a huge door of opportunity. Eventually, near the end of 2004, Ghost Recon's popularity had diminished substantially and we realized that it had in fact been dying for quite some time and that we had been existing in a small isolated pocket of activity (which eventually we ourselves smothered by beating people too much). It was around this time that "Dimension", one of my squadmates, informed me that he was playing a really cool game called America's Army, and he went on to say that it was completely free. Realizing that we had to find an alternative to Ghost Recon soon, I tried it out and was immediately hooked.

Near the end of my days in Asteroid, old players started getting together in Voice Chatrooms, the latest technology and something nobody had ever done before. All I remember from that was having a good laugh at all the voices which for years we had just imagined (Nicodemus' voice was particularly amusing). Little did we know that voice communication would be a vital element of future video gaming.

The next game I played consistently online was Ghost Recon. I had bought Ghost Recon right when it came out but for some reason never even thought of it as a multiplayer possibility. When the Island Thunder expansion was released, I decided it would be a great time to give it a try. I became instantly hooked on the game, which had a massive internet following (100,000+ estimated regular players). My internet "nickname" had always been OZBORNE and it was supposed to be that in GR, however at some point I had made use of the offline-practice feature of the GR multiplayer (one of the genius aspects of it) and I had entered J. Hazard in place of defPlayer. It is believed that Jackson Hazard was born as my first character in Fallout. I started playing on UBI Soft's game thingie under the name J. Hazard and became involved with a regular server run by a guy named dudzcom. The name stuck.

I really sunk my teeth into Ghost Recon and sought mastery of it. One day while perusing one of the Ghost Recon websites I looked through a list of dedicated servers hoping to find some good ones, as I was getting sick of UBI's software. The first one I entered was the Black Sheep Retribution dedicated server, and it was in BSR that I was to find my first and only clan home in Ghost Recon.

MOTS and Asteroid was my first experience with a gamer community. I had entered it somewhat late in its lifecycle; Jedi Knight and MOTS itself had been out for some years already, but still I became strangely addicted to playing MOTS online. Although I never really distinguished myself in the community, I had the chance to play with and be trained by some of the elites (Nicodemus, Sun, YoungGun, Ryu, MasterBee, Carnage, and many others). I was once referred to as "some noob that's been around forever", and I took that as a compliment coming from Nicodemus; at least he knew who I was. I made a valiant attempt to get in with the cool crowd, but was just too late to really get involved.

Asteroid was a special place. Half of the fun was trash-talking in the main chat channel. Since by the time I got into the game most players had already lived their glory days, and were content to simply chat for hours on end about random topics mostly relating to how much other people sucked. One clan in particular, NBK, was known spitefully as "chat specialists". Even though I had missed out on the heyday of MOTS, the community still had a profound impact on me as a gamer. It was also amazing how much drama could be generated, even just in chatrooms and the occasional Cargo Soldiers free-for-all or Full Force Port romp. MOTS was also before the advent of voice chatting. The next online game I would play would be my introduction to voice comms.

MOTS has been completely dead for years now, and it was truly a sad thing to me when the average player count in Asteroid went below 100 for the final time.  I'd like to have some kind of reunion, but I highly doubt that will ever happen.