WhitePolypousThing

@rayeth: Wait...you mean everything Nintendo did in its early days shouldn't be taken as canon?

@truthtellah: Not only just the biggest contributors. I have to imagine most people who contribute to/enjoy watching Twitch will see the negative impacts of these policies. Unlike in the case of Youtube, where policies similar to this only effected a percentage of its userbase, the blow back from this ought to be harder to ignore (theoretically).

Also I want to follow up on what I just said because if it's correct it has interesting implications both in the context of the story and outside it as a meta commentary of sorts.

If you always instantly assume the roll of the booker who has done everything you just did to the letter BUT die, than by the time you reach the end of the game your booker is essentially a canonical chronological character of sorts. Whereas in Bioshock, you reach the end of the game in the body of a clone of a clone of a clone of a clone who has had your memories and experiences insta-grafted on to it (which makes perfect sense given the function of vita chambers) in Infinite, the Booker who has reached the end of the story has never died. We the player have seen the tail ends of countless (or at least a couple if you played in medium and only died once or twice) 'failed' Bookers, but for all intents and purposes, the final Booker has performed a flawless run.

It's pretty brilliant if you think about it as 'improving' on how they cleverly contextualized death in Bioshock. In Rapture, they created an explanation to make repeated player death actually serve the story, in Infinite, they have woven it so that, narratively you have never even died. The genius here is that, unlike in days past where the possibility of player death essentially drove the game, in more modern, story focused experiences, death is largely irrelevant. Especially in shooters, the consequences of death are so irrelevant to your ability to progress that de facto it doesn't exist. You often respawn so instantly or so close to where you were with constant checkpoints that death doesn't matter at all. So we as players never really die. As a clever commentary (and out of the necessity to keep things mildly game-like) Levine kept the player-death-that-is-essentially-not-death in Bioshock and married it to a plausible explanation as to why such a thing would exist narratively. In Infinite, he has been able to keep the mechanic but slyly has erased the notion of character death from the game at all. Normally if a character dies at the end of a video game, we think of them as dying "for real" because we have seen them die from our mistakes countless times (albeit with no real consequence). When booker dies at the end of infinite, it isn't "for real" it's an actual death, the fist and only one that booker has ever experienced.

I was surprised to see this theory meet with disapproval during the live stream because I think it almost has to be correct.

For starters we know Ken puts a lot of thought into every aspect of his narratives. A perfect corollary to the idea put forth here is how respawning is contextualized narratively in Bioshock. Respawns are so common in video games that no one really thinks to question them, but the vita chambers having a logical narration works wonderfully and speaks to the thought put into every aspect of the game. Because of this, I find it hard to beleive that they would omit a consistent explanation for how Booker revives without Elizabeth.

There are actually two ways to die without Elizabeth reviving you, the first is a combat death, that has booker stepping out of his office and back into Columbia. However if you jump off of the edge of the city you fall for a bit but then flash back to the spot you were standing before you jumped (something that I think is very important to note). This happens even before you meet Elizabeth, so it simply cannot be her tearing you back up or something like that.

Moving forward logically, the story clearly implies that Booker (or different Bookers in slightly different universes) have been running this Elizabeth rescues mission over and over (or at least slightly differently all concurrent in different universes with the Leteuces acting as transformational observers or something). Regardless of the open ended nature of EXACTLY what's going on, it's basically stated that things have been occuring over and over.

Given all this, when you combine the idea that death without Elizabeth present most likely has a narrative explanation for how Booker respawns, with the notion that until the end of the game things have been happening over and over again, isn't the logical leap that when you die, you are taking the roll of the Booker who has played the events of the game ECACTLY like you have up to that point when the Dies/Lives choice took place, but in the 'Lives' universe? That jumping off the edge of the city snaps you RIGHT back to where you were seems to really back this up.

So if you get into Columbia, make a bee line to the edge of the sky, look around 360 degrees and then jump of the edge you snap back to right where you were standing. In that moment right before you jump two universes are created, the one where you jump and the one where you don't. The Booker who jumped is dead, but there is a Booker who got into Columbia, made a bee line to the edge of the sky, spun around 360 degrees stood still for a moment and didn't jump, and that is the booker you have assumed. The game obviously skips over replaying the whole intro again because 1) it would be very tedious obviously, but 2) narratively it would be redundant because its not just some other Booker you just took over but rather it is the Booker who did EVERYTHING EXACTLY as you just did down to the very path you took, buttons you pressed, where you moved the camera and all.