WARNING: This post contains massive spoilers for the games
Bioshock Infinite and Doki Doki Literature Club.
Bioshock Infinite and Doki Doki Literature Club.
At first glance, these seems two totally different games. They are. Bioshock Infinite is a steampunk first person shooter set around the idea of a cult mixing a prophet with American patriots. It is somewhat gruesome but with wonderful characters, an interesting story, and a heart-wrenching look at racial justice. Doki Doki Literature Club is nearly the opposite. It is an anime style dating, visual novel where the player chooses poems to appeal to a certain girl within the club. However, there are some dark twists after you continue to play past the halfway point.
So why am I featuring them together? Both games have disturbing content (yes, even Doki Doki), but that is not the only similarity. From the outside, they seem incompatible, but the endings are eerily more similar than you would think. Obviously, the rest of this post will contain spoilers, so if you have not yet played either of these games, I recommend doing it now.
Let's start with Bioshock Infinite. The final cut scene reveals the player's character, Booker Dewitt, is the same person as the antagonist cult leader, Zachary Comstock. In an alternative reality, Booker is baptized and becomes obsessed with the idea of a utopia. He hires scientists to create rifts through which he could see and influence alternate worlds. (Confused yet? Just wait.) The other main character, Elizabeth, whom Booker has been trying to protect, is connected to these alternate worlds. She is the one who shows him the truth.
Throughout the game, Elizabeth is a moral character, criticizing Booker's eager trigger finger and panicking when she is forced to kill someone in self-defense. I was pleasantly surprised at her revulsion of violence in a first person shooter. As the game goes on, she becomes enamored with the idea of getting revenge on Comstock. She and Booker vow to end things before they start by killing Comstock before he can destroy her world. Then, Elizabeth becomes connected to all realities: alternate, true, past, present, future. The pair meet other Elizabeths from various realities who are all aware of the same painful truth. To prevent their worlds' destruction, Booker has to die. The final scene of Bioshock Infinite is a first person view of many Elizabeths drowning Booker in the river to prevent Comstock from being born. Her infinite knowledge influenced her morality.
So why am I featuring them together? Both games have disturbing content (yes, even Doki Doki), but that is not the only similarity. From the outside, they seem incompatible, but the endings are eerily more similar than you would think. Obviously, the rest of this post will contain spoilers, so if you have not yet played either of these games, I recommend doing it now.
Let's start with Bioshock Infinite. The final cut scene reveals the player's character, Booker Dewitt, is the same person as the antagonist cult leader, Zachary Comstock. In an alternative reality, Booker is baptized and becomes obsessed with the idea of a utopia. He hires scientists to create rifts through which he could see and influence alternate worlds. (Confused yet? Just wait.) The other main character, Elizabeth, whom Booker has been trying to protect, is connected to these alternate worlds. She is the one who shows him the truth.
Throughout the game, Elizabeth is a moral character, criticizing Booker's eager trigger finger and panicking when she is forced to kill someone in self-defense. I was pleasantly surprised at her revulsion of violence in a first person shooter. As the game goes on, she becomes enamored with the idea of getting revenge on Comstock. She and Booker vow to end things before they start by killing Comstock before he can destroy her world. Then, Elizabeth becomes connected to all realities: alternate, true, past, present, future. The pair meet other Elizabeths from various realities who are all aware of the same painful truth. To prevent their worlds' destruction, Booker has to die. The final scene of Bioshock Infinite is a first person view of many Elizabeths drowning Booker in the river to prevent Comstock from being born. Her infinite knowledge influenced her morality.
Now, for Doki Doki Literature Club. In this award-winning game, one of the girls, Monika, is aware she is in a video game. In fact, the second half of the game is basically the player struggling against Monika's pursuit of him/her. She kills or deletes all the other girls until there is no game, and she is the only one left in her virtual world. Monika believes this will make the player love her, but she was not always so heartless. In the end credits song "Your Reality," Monika sings about how conflicted she feels. She does not want to hurt her friends, but she has no idea how to deal with the knowledge she has of the world outside her game. As a high school girl, all she wants is reciprocated love, but she does not know how to get it. This leads to the downfall of the entire Doki Doki universe.
I started to notice a pattern with these two games, and it reminded me of an old quote. "Power corrupts, and absolute powers corrupts absolutely." Comstock, Elizabeth, and Monika started with innocent intentions: paradise, freedom, love. They were only human, but they had the abilities of a god. Comstock could reach into any reality and take what he wanted, like Booker's baby. He could see the future, so there was no reason to hold back in the present. He killed his own people for the "greater good" he knew would come. Elizabeth acted the same way. She was against killing until she saw how Booker's death would affect the rest of the worlds. After that, there was no hesitation to drown the man who was her friend, her father, and her protector. Monika realized her friends were only video game characters and felt little remorse having them kill themselves to get out of her way.
You may think this is irrelevant since humans cannot be relegated to a godlike state. On the contrary, this is something almost everyone struggles with. Isaiah 55:8-9 reads, "'My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,' says the Lord. 'And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts." God knows all: past, present, future, what is, what can be, and more. He is the only one able to manage all the ideas and implications inherent in that amount of knowledge. Comstock, Elizabeth, and Monika were human, not created to handle such knowledge.
Personally, I want to know every detail of God's plan for my life, and I want to know it all at once. What would I do with that knowledge, though? I would cower, afraid of the giant things he has in store and believing I could never do them. I would run, using all my knowledge to avoid each path that would be difficult. I would be bitter, thinking I could do more than His plan indicates. Because I am only human. I have emotions and pain. I have ideas of my own, and they are not nearly on par with the ones God has set in place.
If I knew everything I would be, my mind could not handle it, just like Monika. God knows this. That is why He reveals His plans to us little by little, step by step. He wants us to grow, not to avoid the rough spots but to learn from them. He wants us to reach the potential He knows we have and not the potential we think belongs to us. Absolute power corrupts absolutely because we are not made to handle it. Only God is. We are to trust Him. This trust is where our true power lies.
You may think this is irrelevant since humans cannot be relegated to a godlike state. On the contrary, this is something almost everyone struggles with. Isaiah 55:8-9 reads, "'My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,' says the Lord. 'And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts." God knows all: past, present, future, what is, what can be, and more. He is the only one able to manage all the ideas and implications inherent in that amount of knowledge. Comstock, Elizabeth, and Monika were human, not created to handle such knowledge.
Personally, I want to know every detail of God's plan for my life, and I want to know it all at once. What would I do with that knowledge, though? I would cower, afraid of the giant things he has in store and believing I could never do them. I would run, using all my knowledge to avoid each path that would be difficult. I would be bitter, thinking I could do more than His plan indicates. Because I am only human. I have emotions and pain. I have ideas of my own, and they are not nearly on par with the ones God has set in place.
If I knew everything I would be, my mind could not handle it, just like Monika. God knows this. That is why He reveals His plans to us little by little, step by step. He wants us to grow, not to avoid the rough spots but to learn from them. He wants us to reach the potential He knows we have and not the potential we think belongs to us. Absolute power corrupts absolutely because we are not made to handle it. Only God is. We are to trust Him. This trust is where our true power lies.