"Booker! Booker! Gold!," Elizabeth cries out, holding up what appears to be a valuable figurine of George Washington, found amidst the various red, white and blue offerings at Notion's Sundries and Novelties. "That's gold like I'm the kind of England," former Pinkerton agent, and player character, Booker Dewitt responds. It's a charming back-and-forth, and the beginning of a lengthy pre-E3 demo for Bioshock Infinite, Irrational's city-in-the-sky followup to BioShock. The first thing you may notice is obvious: Booker speaks. "You're a character in this game unlike the previous BioShock games," Irrational Creative Director Ken Levine tells an audience of game writers. The "level" we're seeing is about a third of the way through the game and "it's still pretty early in that relationship, how you two interact with each other," Levine says.

Of course, by this point Booker has rescued Elizabeth from her imprisonment, and they're being chased by "Songbird" (previously referred to simply as Him). "He's her jailer," Levine says. "Her only friend. He's got one job in the world once you bust Elizabeth out: To find her and bring her back to her tower." So, for Elizabeth, everything in Columbia is as marvelous as it is to us, and then some. "She's a bit de novo. She was basically Rapunzel sitting in her tower with her books and the Songbird. All she wants when she gets out of her tower, it's a very Roman Holiday moment," Levine says, citing the 1953 Audrey Hepburn classic. "She wants to explore and see this incredible world and she learns very quickly it's not that simple. All she wants is to control her destiny." But before she can do that, she'll need to learn to control her powers.