Bioshock Infinite video interview: "life would be so much easier if we could use cutscenes"

The latest OXM Report to reach these hallowed pages covers Bioshock Infinite, and it's unintentionally hilarious. The music says one thing - "let's all be upbeat about shooting people in videogames", basically - while Irrational Games boss Ken Levine says quite another. Skip to the four minute mark, if you dare, for a lengthy discussion of what Bioshock Infinite owes to Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg.

Actually, don't skip ahead, because you'll miss out on what he has to say about AI partners and the like, along with the juicy fragments of gameplay footage we've snuck in amongst the talky segments. Here's an excerpt where Levine discusses the age-old difficulty of telling a story without locking players onto narrative rails: "Telling this story would have been so much easier if we'd just said: 'Alright, time for a movie! This is the story of Elizabeth, this is the story of Booker.' We really try to let the player catch things on their own, or not catch things.

"We certainly stack the deck in terms of how we light scenes - we know where the player's probably going to be looking at any moment. Sometimes we'll cheat and nudge the camera a little bit, there are a lot of tricks we use to get the player's attention. But at the end of the day, we don't generally like to lock people in place and take away their interaction, unless we absolutely have to, and it's very rare that we do."

Enough excerpting! Get watching. For more on Bioshock Infinite, pick up a copy of issue 95, out this Friday - it's our cover game, don't you know. Also, here are seven reasons why Infinite is 2013's most exciting release - a feature we'll probably disown when they announce those next generation consoles. The sky's the limit in terms of Bioshock sequels, apparently.