BioShock is celebrating its 15-year anniversary today, August 21, 2022.

Playing BioShock Infinite at launch, several things stuck in my mind as a young Mormon.

To the game’s credit, these are touchstones rather than full-on parallels.

Part of that caricature is the game’s reluctance to clarify Comstock’s particular theology.

It practices baptism by immersion.

White supremacy and racism are woven into every aspect of its doctrine.

It uplifts the founding fathers to the level of sainthood.

Besides these basic traits, there is no context for Comstock’s religion.

There are no adjacent movements or sects.

This lack of specificity unties Comstock from any particular historical moment.

Still, the parallels to Utah and Mormonism remain.

Before the game begins, Comstock’s floating city seceded from the United States.

Thousands of Mormons would follow over the next decades.

The key difference is, of course, that Columbia is a dream city floating in the sky.

Intentionally or not, the floating city means that the game can largely sidestep the issue of colonial occupation.

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Columbia’s secession from the US enables it to practice “more extreme” forms of institutional racism.

In history, Mormons broughtslavery from the US to Utah.

There was an enslaved population in Utah until slavery was outlawed in the territories.

Columbia is curiously unified outside of the main two factions.

Not every Mormon traveled to Utah.

BioShock Infinite is science fiction through and through; it intends to represent an alternate world.

Additionally, institutions as massive as Mormonism and American Christianity can take the hit.

What criticism it hefts up lacks specificity and bite.

What resonance it might have lacks real faith.

They are called Anarchists, but unlike anarchism, they have no vision for a future world.

All they get are slogans and blood.

The game eventually labels them as too violent and moves on.

It’s telling, for example, that Columbia’s religious art never depictsChrist and the cross.

Even the game’s Ku Klux Khan is clad in dark purple, rather than white.

It might seem like there is a lot to unpack here and in some sense there is.

However, BioShock Infinite does not conjure that history, nor its weight or blood.

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