Video game taps into Occupy Wall Street

Reuters India ^ | November 24, 2011 | Liana B. Baker

[2ndDivisionVet]

New York-When gamers take the wraps off the new "BioShock" video game next year, they should not be surprised if parts of the game remind them of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Ken Levine, the creative director of the Boston-based development studio Irrational Games visited the protests in Boston this month to do research for the next game in the best-selling "BioShock" series, which will be out in 2012.

The game "BioShock Infinite," is set in 1912, in a floating U.S. city in the sky called Columbia, where two fictional political factions, the left-wing group called the Vox Populi and the right-wing Founders, are fighting.

"It's been fascinating to watch the conflict in the game, which is based on historical conflicts, sort of become reincarnated in our times," said Levine, who previewed parts of the game to media months before the Wall Street protests started.

Some of his inspiration comes from political groups such as the Baader-Meinhof gang, left-wing militants in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Know Nothings, an anti-immigration U.S. political faction in the mid-1800s....

[2ndDivisionVet]

Real life might be different than a video game.