I've historically been an enjoyer of post-apocalyptic media, but as our actual times threaten to become as dystopian as our fiction, I'm finding it a bit harder than usual to stomach doom and gloom during my rare moments of free time.
Too many games--even some of the most commercially successful ones--are set in futures that are unpleasant at best and outright despairing at worst. Fallout, The Last Of Us, Horizon, Cyberpunk–they're all a huge bummer. I could go on forever listing games like this, but something that's got me especially downbeat about this preoccupation with pessimism is that it's found even in my favourite place, strategy gaming
The genre could and should do better. It's one thing for a game with a pre-baked narrative to be set in the post-apocalypse, that's a creative team's call. But strategy games are about control, and shaping things, and creating your own stories through decisions and actions.
Let's take Civ as an example: the 4X genre is so flexible in its actions and outcomes that it's a form of story-telling through systems. Yet even Civ can't escape the lure of Bad Times. Multiple games will not only have the player actively causing a climate emergency, but then be unable to stop it, their only containment measures being to try to clean up pollution as it's caused or adapt to rising sea levels. And every Civ, with the series built as it is on a bedrock of Western ideas of progression and technical advancement, is always pointing towards the same endgame: one where nuclear-armed states fight globally-destructive conflicts, and where ideas about politics and society, which we've been able to shape for thousands of years, end abruptly with the systems we're trapped in today.
But what if we don't like today? What if we, as players of a genre that can do literally anything it wants with the world, want to imagine and create something else, something better? Why do so many video games see the flaws in our world and follow them to their most depressing conclusions, instead of actively working to rewrite them?
Let's all watch a short video that explains what I'm talking about. Yeah, it's a yoghurt commercial, but still, I think about it a lot:
Dear Alice--which featured a soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi, and is often described as "Solarpunk"--is a beautiful piece of animation, and deserved all the credit it received upon release in 2021, but what's made it stick with me so many years later is its outlook. It's a rare vision of the future that doesn't shrug its shoulders and say "we're all fucked", it says "we can fix this". As someone who gets overly-obsessed with climate doomerism far too often for my own good, I want to engage with more media like this.
I don't want to read too much into a one-minute yoghurt ad (though you can do that here and check out some art from it if you'd like), but Dear Alice envisages a world where things have got better. There's a sense of community; there's renewable energy; there's a focus on nature and the natural and our place alongside them. Even the skyscrapers of this world are covered in greenery. Future technology still exists, from robot drones to holographic water wheels, but it's on the periphery, serving nature rather than destroying it. Did these people avert a climate disaster by living like this? Or is this how they recovered from one? I don't know! I like thinking about that, though, and it was a recent rewatch of that video that got me thinking about strategy games and the future.
A game I've badly wanted to exist ever since I first saw Civ dabble with climate change is a 4X that doesn't go from 2000BC to today, but one that starts today and goes 2000 years into the future. That doesn't see democracy and capitalism as endpoints, improvements on what's come before, but as the things that need to be improved, or thrown out altogether.
I want to play a game that has ideas about how money and economies can look in the future, not just about recreating those from the past; games that can picture something, anything else to replace our current obsession with share dividends and quarterly results.
Surely somebody out there at Firaxis or Paradox or somewhere or anywhere has ideas of their own, or that they can pull from--and I gain physical pain from typing this corny-ass word, but I have to--"Hopepunk", about what we can replace our current world order with. And, to make it a game, maybe they can pull some different, competing ideas, and pit them against traditionalists and each other, just to make it interesting.
Like, what could we replace capitalism with? Could we replace it peacefully, or with a second, more heated Cold War? What do we call those ideas, and more importantly, what would their stats and characteristics look like for a 4X game? What effect would implementing something like Universal Basic Income have on a people's productivity and happiness, and what would we be measuring that against? What would "factions" look like: Would Ecofascists clash with AI proponents, who are also at war with a Commonwealth Of Socialist Guilds?
I have so many questions! How can we mobilise to fix this planet, would a game like this work toward uniting the world behind a single joint effort, or would every faction be left to fend for themselves, doing their part while wheeling and dealing with pacts and treaties? I want to manage the unrest of a robot revolution, I want to see if progressive social ideas married to militarism can overthrow a despotic Christofascist regime.
I know some games have tried at least some of this already; Civ deserves credit for at least modelling an ecological collapse and giving us some tools to mitigate it, Anno 2070 has some cool ideas, Synergy is cool with the planet but it’s not our planet, and Alpha Centauri got weird with its sci-fi politics, but again, it’s not Earth. As for Terra Nil, it's an uplifting game about restoring life to a dead planet, but I'd rather terraform the Earth before we're all wiped out and have to send robots from space to clean everything up.
And I know there's positive media out there, some of it better than others, but I'm not here asking for someone to tell me a story. I'm specifically asking strategy game developers to give me the tools to tell my own story, to explore a future that doesn't select "apocalypse" as the default, but gives us the promise and the hope to do something about our planet before things get that bad.
