I play a lot of sci fi games, and I’m pretty used to them sounding like this:
But lately, the music has sounded more like this:
These futuristic stories take place in worlds
of space exploration and ubiquitous robotics
and yet they remind me more of the public radio station
from my hometown in Kansas.
But look, I’m not in Kansas anymore!
I want to know why I keep hearing banjos in space!
In answering that question I found out these games have way more in common
than just rustic soundtracks.
At first I thought the answer was simple:
country music in space?
These must be some flavor of space western!
But that didn’t quite sit right with me.
If only there was a professor of science fiction who
could explain to me what makes a sci-fi a western?
So the most important thing is going to be a frontier, a new frontier to explore.
And that's some individual goes out to both maybe explore the beauty of that land,
find new resources, but often also to shed themselves of a troubled past and that going forward
under the frontier, becomes a way to really reinvent yourself to invent a new future.
This is Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction at Georgia Tech.
And being a professor of science fiction,
she was able to give me a crash-course in why the western works so well in space.
You can see that translates so easily into science fiction, where you go out into the
space frontier, the Galactic frontier,
and you get to meet people from all different kinds of planets.
Science fiction and westerns go together like Nathan Fillion and a powerful smirk,
which is why for a fusion genre, it’s pretty widely known.
But these games aren’t space westerns.
Unlike westerns, they’re not really about “trying to escape your past,”
they're more about “just trying to get by.”
This is science fiction with blue collar aesthetics and characters, and it actually has origins
that go way back in the history of sci-fi literature.
Science fiction does always sort of celebrate the average individual. There is a character
that goes back to the 1800s to Mark Twain often used a jack of all trades.
So sort of an average Joe or Jane perhaps,
who isn't formally educated, but is sort of natively
smart and has a lot of sort of hands on know how.
This idea of a jack-of-all-trades or everyman is at the core
of a lot of recent science fiction video games.
Rebel Galaxy: Outlaw might seem like a straight-up space western.
In fact, you can be a hotshot
spaceship fighter pilot, if that’s your thing,
but you also have the option of basically being a space trucker,
hauling water and whiskey from Port Ozark to the Louisiana system.
Not only does your cockpit often evoke a sci-fi big rig,
but just look at this bar.
vests and trucker hats and sunglasses and you know,
there's cigarette machines in the bars.
I mean, and you know, you're playing bar games in the bars.
It's not fancy future bar games. It's just bar games,”
And, you know, people have crummy plastic tables and folding chairs.
This is Travis Baldree.
“I’m the CEO, the engineer, the lead designer, the writer, the sound guy”
You could say he's a jack-of-all-trades!
Instead of making a super sleek and high tech future,
Baldree made the world of Rebel Galaxy: Outlaw feel immediately more relatable.
In typical video game progression,
you start with a sputtering tin can of a ship,
This thing didn't just haul trash, it is trash!
but with a little determination and hard work,
you can slowly earn the upgrades that will let you deliver 400 cans of space Coors
while they’re still frosty.
I wanted to make a game that was about people and individual humans,
which I think is easier to tell in a world where you're not saving the universe.
You're just, you're just trying to get by.
And it's easier to imagine that in the context of a world that is falling apart
or barely held together than one that is this
advanced and polished Star Trekky society.
While science fiction can often feel lofty or abstract,
this aesthetic brings it back down to a personal level.
* comforting whistling *
In Outer Wilds, being an astronaut is a blue collar job.
You’re also an archeologist
and an alien,
but all of these things are imbued with a homey, down to Timber Hearth feel.
It’s not a shiny, Star Trek future:
its banjo-playing space explorers
and rocket ships that are liable to give you splinters.
In a game with some existentially terrifying themes,
it lends the player some real comfort.
* reassuring banjo plucking *
In The Surge, you play a newly hired laborer at the CREO rocket factory,
one of the few job opportunities in a world of robotic workers.
No no no, you don’t get to go on the rocket,
you just get to polish the sprockets!
Or you would have, if the factory wasn’t immediately consumed
by a viral robot uprising.
* furious robot kick *
Many of the game’s levels are the factory floors
and warehouses where you would’ve worked,
fighting the robots you would’ve been working alongside.
All you wanted was a paycheck, but
now you’re fighting for your life with the tools of your trade.
Hardspace: Shipbreakers is probably the best example of this blue collar mentality that I’ve found.
In this game, players take on the role of a ‘cutter’,
breaking down and scrapping old spaceships in zero G.
It’s dangerous work and requires a steady hand,
lest you accidentally nic a coolant line and start a core meltdown.
From the very, very earliest stages of the game
we wanted to focus on this blue collar feeling
and that satisfaction that comes from a hard day's work.
Rory McGuire, the Chief Creative Officer at Blackbird Interactive, says this idea of
blue collar sci fi was always at the heart of the game – not just the aesthetics and music,
but in its gameplay.
Shipbreakers’ core game loop takes place in a 15 minute ‘work shift’.
This time constraint forces the player to move quickly,
increasing the risk of... workplace accidents.
* alarm sounds *
* rushing air sounds *
* sounds of explosive, fiery carnage *
Your tools also degrade over time, and have to be repaired and maintained:
after all, a cutter’s only as good as their tools...
or their aim.
The inspiration for this came from a lot of places:
coal miners in Appalachia,
the construction workers who built New York City’s early skyscrapers,
and salvagers who deconstruct retired ships.
“and like a 100 people swarm on with blow torches and like
no protective gear at all,
and they take those things apart, like it's very fascinating, but then there's
also like, themes of exploitation and stuff going on there and, and danger and so that's
something that we just wanted to try and explore and fit to the mechanics that we had.”
This is Elliot Hudson, Associate creative director at Blackbird,
and he argues that blue collar work goes hand in hand with corporate exploitation.
REDUCE WEAR ON YOUR SUITS HEATING ELEMENT BY MAINTAINING A HEALTHY BODY TEMPERATURE.
At the start of the game, players are immediately in debt.
Like, an astronomical amount of debt,
which you’ll slowly pay off by salvaging ships.
And those tools you have to pay to repair?
You don’t even own them!
A rental fee is tacked onto every work shift.
If you wanna purchase, say, upgrades for your laser cutter, you gotta earn enough V-Bucks
— I mean, corporate currency!
This isn’t some wild eyed, sci-fi pondering:
company scrip was how a lot of early 19th century lumber and mining companies paid their employees.
It created a perverse monopoly
where the worker could only use their ‘paycheck’ at the exorbitantly priced company store.
Buying your own tools in Shipbreakers with corporate currency is also absurdly expensive,
but what choice do you have?
we started to think about the world kind of as the Gilded Age where, that time period was where
you know, the railroads were built, labor laws got established, unions rose, because America
was going through this phase of incredible industrialization, but it was also just chewing
up people
And you are likely to be chewed up in Shipbreakers.
In a sci-fi twist on this idea of
‘selling your soul to the company store’,
even dying isn’t an escape.
Having given up rights to your genetic code, you’re instead reborn as a clone...
and you’re footin’ the bill.
YOUR ACTIVITY HAS DROPPED BELOW NOMINAL LEVELS, PLEASE RETURN TO WORK
Pay for your own clones to artificially extend your indentured servitude?
In THIS economy?
Issues of labor and capital aren’t really hard to find in science fiction games these days.
The Outer Worlds is full of company towns and corporate psychopathy.
The player character of Void Basterds is a rehydrated convict
forced to do incredibly dangerous labor
to earn their freedom.
And when you really think about it, there’s no better genre to address these issues.
science fiction has always been interested in issues of labor, let's be clear about that.
It is the genre that's about work right?
It came of age during the Industrial Revolution
and with the scientific revolution, and the radical transformation of culture as people
moved out of agrarian societies out of farms and into cities, right?
And so work changed and identity changed and so,
obviously science fiction is gonna be one of the ideal forms to narrate that,
cause it's literally telling these stories for us.
So it makes a lot of sense that these games tackle issues of labor,
but why do so many of them also have a down home country aesthetic?
It’s why they first reminded me of westerns,
but these issues aren’t really relevant to the frontier.
Their geographic and cultural touchstones have more in common with the American south
and Appalachia and that theme of just trying to get by.
These complex and storied areas
are often reduced to regressive stereotypes with backwards views of technology and science.
But that’s not really accurate.
all though we think of the the South as oriented to the past,
the reality is, over the course of the 20th century,
the South experienced much more intense industrialization and urbanization
than other parts of America.
And so I think we can also use those tropes to think
about our relationship to science and technology.
Even if these games aren’t always intentionally evoking the American south, they are pulling
on those threads through their stories and their aesthetics,
whether that’s salvaging old technology
or automation of labor
or trucker bars
Or, music.
When you start Shipbreakers, the opening cinematic uses Americana music to underscore
a young girl reciting a poem about the dangerous work of “cutters”.
If there comes a time when he and death meet,
bless the next cutter that takes his seat
This morose and stoic ode to a literal dead end job is actually a modified version of
the “coal miner’s prayer”, a poem lamenting the working conditions of Appalachian coal miners.
It directly connects the music you hear throughout the game with the labor themes
present in the story and mechanics.
But the musical connections aren't limited to Shipbreakers.
Since The Surge is a souls-like, and players will die often,
a med bay stands in for the bonfire.
No matter which med bay you’re in, this bluesy Americana song crackles through
the cheap sound system everytime you return:
I was born
in a prison
no hope
for escape
It’s not really subtle!
Anyone working in CREO’s factory had to have a robotic exoskeleton
surgically grafted to their bodies.
And as you learn throughout the game, CREO acts as
though they own not just the mechanical rig,
but the person it’s attached to.
You can even find these musical touchstones in long running franchises.
When the Fallout series went to
WEST VIRGINIA
in Fallout 76, it suddenly needed to have actual instruments your player could equip.
They couldn’t go to Appalachia and not let you play a banjo.
* fun little banjo tune *
And I can’t even talk much about how important the banjo is in Outer Wilds without literally
spoiling the end of the game.
So hurry up and play it!
Why does an instrument more commonly associated with Deliverance
keep popping up in science fiction?
And why for that matter is it so intrinsically associated with Southern and Appalachian music?
well the banjo has a very interesting history. It's an African derived instrument.
It's an instrument that made its way over through forced enslavement.
You have an instrument that is like the banjo or as close to the banjo
developing in the Caribbean in different parts.
And eventually it makes its way down to the American South
where it then becomes a part of the culture there.
This is Dom Flemons.
I'm known as the American songster. I'm a cultural historian and a practitioner of old time music.
* Dom Flemons playing the banjo *
Dom explained that the banjo’s popularity outside the South really exploded when it
became a standby in blackface minstrel shows.
it was known in the black communities as a strong piece of the culture that remained
from Africa, in one form or another.
this particular show, being a, a satire and
at times of mockery of African American culture, incorporated the banjo into it.
And while that in of itself is horrific to think about, it created an international demand for the banjo.
The associations we bring to this music being ‘working class’ weren’t quite there yet
because these connections were in part a product of capitalism.
At the turn of the 20th century, the recording industry was working to define
what we think of today as country and folk music.
As producers looked for more markets, they tried to cater to different ethnic groups.
As you went along by 1920,
you had the first situation where there was an effort to create an African American category,
which was actually dedicated to Southern working class Blacks.
In an era of segregation and Jim Crow, this working class music had to be separate
from working class white music.
which was called hillbilly, these designations were made to show it was working class
it wasn't the upper class music, you know, so it had a Down Home quality.
People around the world — and especially across America — listened to and even pick up the banjo.
And eventually, musicians like Pete Seeger
began to grapple with its historical context.
and sort of repurposes all of this misappropriation
and turns it into something that is highly American, highly iconic, as well as being
a strong statement for political activism and civil rights.
So the banjo has all of these things within its story.
The history that built our associations between working class peoples, and Americana music,
and the banjo is what makes it such a powerful touchstone,
even in space.
It’s why I can’t stop thinking about this quote from Andrew Prahlow,
the composer for Outer Wilds
talking about why the game had so much folk and banjo music.
It creates a really cool concept of how we as humans can be emotionally connected
no matter the distance. I love thinking about our purpose on this planet - that we live
on in this massive expanding universe, and through music, it gives us all an opportunity
to connect and make it feel a little more like home.”
Using this kind of music or the the banjo in particular,
says something about the now by referencing the past.
Using science fiction says something about the now, by referencing the future.
And using them together it's like building a bridge through time,
between the real and the fictional
or at least, what’s fictional for now.