Irrational Games’s third and final installment in the hugely successful Bioshock series delves into the representational legacies of the 1893 Columbian World’s Fair in Chicago. Deviating from the first two games that take place under water, Bioshock Infinite constructs a first-person shooter game world in the sky, and in the process, offers players a chance to explore the gleaming white city as  time-stamped imperialism and nostalgic racism.

From the start, players take control of Booker DeWitt as he is being rowed to a lighthouse somewhere off the coast of someplace. Handed a box to provide clues for his upcoming mission, it is unclear whether Booker’s world is Hitchcockian, Film Noir, or Wild West. “Bring us the girl, and wipe away the debt,” Booker mumbles while holding a box that marks him as soldier participant in the 7th Calvary’s military action at Wounded Knee in 1890.

In the game world, however, that action is referred to as “The Battle of Wounded Knee,” with no further contextualization beyond a constant referral to sins, debts, and violence.

As digital archive, video games represent something of the new–and they require hours of play to access the full narrative. But they also signal the maintenance of colonial memory. Indians remain analogic signs of the premodern, becoming anachronistic “out-of-time” markers of a colonial nostalgia that metonymically signals the frontier that the first-person genre of shooters reify into new intimacies of playing cowboy.