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.