MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper considers the social dynamics of wealth inequality in Bioshock Infinite’s (2013) city in the sky, Columbia, through the lens of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014). Set in 1912, the game unfolds in a period that Piketty singles out as being a comparatively egalitarian era in the United States. According to Piketty, the level of inequality was much more dire in England and France at the time, as the upper echelons of society held significantly more wealth than their American counterparts, prior to the twentieth century’s world wars and interwar period. In this context, the game’s warring labor barons, Zachary Hale Comstock and Jeremiah Fink, are more representative of the massively rich European rentiers from the period than they are of historical American figures. The association is meaningful precisely because the evident source of Hale and Fink’s animosity is the shifting value of land and labor, which is energized by key technological developments that exist beyond the boundaries of a regulatory market. According to Piketty, these are essentially the same sources that determined the European situation up to and during the War years. With this view, the paper reads Bioshock Infinite’s war in the sky as a imaginative dramatization of the European situation, set several years before the outbreak of World War I. In its findings, the reading establishes a novel economic explanation for Columbia’s social discord, which is relevant to published scholarship on the game as it de-emphasizes Hale and Fink’s agency in Columbia’s disintegration, and places new emphasis on the city’s underlying economic trends. Already strained to the breaking point by rapid technological developments in Europe, the economy of Columbia is blasted apart by the city’s runaway scientific advancements, which leave the city-state’s men and women as untethered from capital as they are from land.