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Tag Archive for dystopia

Fallout was the Future

November 14, 2015 future, Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Fallout was the Future

The thing about Fallout 4, for my generation this was the future that was dangled in front of us. We had movies like Mad Max that codified this post-apocalyptic world in such a way as to make it easier to deal with. It became less of a boogie man as our TV, movies, our books dug into the idea and familiarized us with the potential outcomes.

This game is riddled with touches, with background moments and still life’s that are like getting an ice pick in the ribs, emotionally. There are lots of things to shoot, there are lots of unreasonable enemies who never seem to fall their morale checks, but they’re all set against a visual backdrop of unspeakable tragedy.  By and large Fallout 4  is a slow game, it’s an exploration RPG at its heart and it gives you plenty of time to mull over the state of that game world in comparison to the state of the real world.

The artist in me goes so far as to note this is reflected even in the brightening of the color palette. We are given an option to play in the pre-apocalypse world, just for a time. This 1960s that might have been, were all the colors are bright and the sky is clear. That hopeful imagery, that feeling of immortality, those bright colors underlie all of the texture development, all of the environment development in the game. There are very few places so blasted and destroyed that you can’t help but be reminded of that Utopia that the game began in. Bright blue shelter in place pods are scattered throughout urban environments, few of them contain corpses, but all of them contain reminders of the people who sheltered there, protected and preserved until you open them to take a look.

And as a parent, because by now many of us Cold War Kids are, you can’t help but place your family in the scene. You can’t help but look at the well preserved, scattered toys inside of a shelter and think, that could have been my kid in there.

If you couple the emotional devastation of the world with the agency of being a player, it can double down.  The attraction of being a player in a world like this is that you can do something.  You can save the town, you can eliminate the Raiders, you can actively engage to make the world a little bit better. But at the same time you are constantly reminded of the tragedies you could not affect. It’s an implicit failure, one that underlies every action you take in the game. And when the adrenaline rush from mowing down super mutants is over, you are still left with the world that may never recover.

Throttle Forward

January 25, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on Throttle Forward

 

So WHY haven’t all these bits and bobs gelled yet?  Will they ever?  The thing about fictional futures is, they are often driven by a single mind, and single individual.  That means they are fueled by the experiences and information gleaned by one mind.  Someone (usually the author) has done their research, talked (or not talked) to experts in the field that they have access to (who may or may not be the same experts that everyone else is talking to).

Like a bathtub full of gin, all of those experiences and information points get mellowed together, they sit and steep and come together over time until you have a final, consumable product (much like bathtub gin, the quality may vary).

So a vision of the future is a *curated* experience.  You are looking at it through a single lens, through the eyes of the writer/artist who put it all together.

Which is why the “real” future won’t match.  Ever.  The people who *create* the future do their own curation.  Sometimes they are informed by futurists, by authors and artists, and the pieces they create reflect that.  As often as not, they are chasing a rabbit and have to see where it goes, so where they end up may not at all be where they planned to go.

So, while we may have all the *pieces* of a dystopic future at our fingertips, they are not going to gel.  It takes an individual to do that, to create a suite or a collection or an experience by bringing all of those bits and bobs together.