Note: this is a take from an art, not politics, perspective. Respect the rules of the community!
Most of the dystopian genres in art, and especially visual art, try their best to represent the dystopian world as something very black, grey, uniform, with iron fences, barbed wires, and street shootings.
And that’s while we know that dystopian world comes at us while trying to remain unnoticed, unimportant, to fly under the radar.
And it would be amazing to expose through art, storytelling, etc. To help players immerse in a world that’s not so different from our own, while slowly showing to them what’s actually happening, deconstructing the world to make players see what it’s actually made of and what hides behind the facade of a normal everyday life.
I think this kind of representation of everyday dystopia could be helpful to prevent it from expanding in our very real world. People should learn to see signs of it without the common aesthetics.
I mean…books have been doing this for a while. No need to make it a game. Look at 1984 and see some parallels. Book was written 75 years ago but covers things like:
- information sources being constantly edited (far before things like Twitter were able to remove posts)
- constant wars where people are resigned to always being at war
- language being modified so people can’t even express what the problems they’re experiencing are (like how certain terms like CRT are being erased from schooling)
- the every day shmoe being complicit in it while just receiving orders from someone he’s never met editing news articles he knows nothing about (like everyone stuck in the “machine” as it were).
1984 is a bit of a cliche, but it has a lot of relevant discussion of modern issues in it.
Also Brave New World where everyone is too absorbed in entertainment and drugs to realize how fucked everything is, and Fahrenheit 451 because, y’know censorship.
Not exactly modern, and maybe a bit cartoonish, but given how old these books are it’s remarkable how relevant they still are.
Point is, doesn’t have to be a video game. Books are cheaper to produce and tend to need less financial incentive to be written. So you get better content.
Having read them all at some time in the past, I feel like, while they capture a lot of modern problems and are scaringly accurate in many of the predictions they make, they still don’t create this “everyday” feeling.
Brave New World is probably closest to capturing what I’m looking for, even though it too opens immediately with a dystopian picture.
The thing is, it would be interesting to explore, in any form of art really, this progression from feeling completely normal about what happens to figuring out what everything actually means, which could lead to people questioning and investigating things in real life.
Fahrenheit 451 was fascinating for the sub-story about the TV walls and, “Oh look! The White Clown is on!”
Best friend held an acid party back in 1991 or so. From where we stood we could see all 3 TVs, 3 different sizes. He said, “Check it out. The attention people pay to the screen is directly proportional to it’s size.” Didn’t matter was was on screen, the larger it was, the more people stared, the less they talked. That’s really stuck with me.
And the parasocial relationships with the people are the screen foretold much.
Can’t imagine many would care about book burning today. I only know one other person that reads books, and few even “read” the internet.
I remember thinking the interactive TV thing was dumb when I read it in middle school (early 2000s).
But now we have streamers who just sit there and say “mmm ice cream!” whenever someone gives them a dollar.
I’m going out on a limb here. But the game your looking for is Cyberpunk 2077.
It will depress you as you playthrough it and compare it’s world to our own.
I felt dread while playing knowing this is pretty much our future.
Cyberpunk is more about finding something normal among a clear dystopia rather than finding dystopia among normality :D
But it is immersive and emotional indeed.
honestly what is really depressing are the things likely to be better. Like most folks seem to own stuff.
Literally all dystopias are very obvious commentaries
The TV show Years and Years is a bit like this
Interesting, never heard of it! Thanks
The overstory by richard powers is a book that does this well.
Thanks, will look into it!
