You may have expected this episode to be about the future of games,
but I actually mean the title completely literally.
What is the future visually gonna look like?
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It may seem like an odd question, but for most of the twentieth century
we all had a popular, general conception of what the future would visually look like.
The buildings, the clothes, the cars
Our assumptions may not have always been accurate, but they were still
a common vision that we could all draw from and play with.
But, as we stumble into the 21st century, we seem to have lost that conception.
Which means that our games and our media set in the future
have begun to look more disjointed, derivative, or just generic.
Let's take a quick trip through what the future looked like in our past.
In the twenties and thirties, you had the skyscraper inspired Art Deco future of Metropolis
In the forties and fifties, we had the future filled with swooping airplane curves
and ray gun architecture, so often seen in the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials.
Then in the sixties, we saw men walk on the moon,
And we thought to ourselves, "The future's not that far off."
And so we began to envision a future that mashed up NASA and the hippie,
free-love aesthetics of the time.
When we weren't envisioning a future blasted back into the stone age by the threat of nuclear war, of course.
By the time the eighties hit, the promise, and even the existential threat of the future seemed to fade
into a much more mundane and jaded future,
where class division and mechanistic corporate greed
were taken to their logical extremes.
Leading us to the faded neon megacities of Blade Runner,
and the Giger-esque claustrophobia of Alien.
Which then, in the late eighties and early nineties,
evolved into our chrome-filled, high-tech, lowlife world of cyberpunk,
filled with mirror shades and leather.
But then, the future stopped.
Or rather, we stopped sharing a singular vision of it.
For the last fifteen years, we haven't really hit on a defining, popular idea of what tomorrow looks like.
And I bring this up in part because it genuinely worries me.
Because when we look at all those imaginings of the future,
we find that they were inspired by the present.
Whether it be skyscrapers, or airplanes,
synthetic materials, atomics, or globalism,
something in each of those todays inspired peoples vision of tomorrow.
So in some ways, it disturbs me that we don't seem to have that driving idea.
But I also bring it up because it's so important for games.
Games seem to be the media that actually might be the best suited to provide the
visual zeitgeist for our modern future.
After all, games have the opportunity to do more than simply provide a canvas
They can provide a living, breathing vision of the future to walk through.
But, instead of providing this, I see us struggle.
Sometimes we play wonderfully with some of the ideas of the past,
like Bioshock's Art Deco futurism
which hearkens back to Metropolis and the twenties.
Or Fallout satirizing the fifties future, by providing us a world where that future has come and gone.
Or even Deus Ex giving us a gold- and black-tinged vision of the eighties cyberpunk vision
But, more often, we end up accidentally mashing together arbitrary pieces from
these various visions,
simply because they're part of our popular consciousness,
without really seeming to give them much thought.
Killzone, Crysis, even Gears of War, and the more recent Halos all fall into this trap.
And, on the one hand, you can say that those games
aren't about the time or the location they take place in,
that's all just set-dressing for the shooting gallery.
But wouldn't they be a little better if there was some
fully-realized vision of the world you were running and gunning through?
Even Mass Effect, which I loved, falls into this trap a little bit,
providing us with a mashup of Babylon 5, Farscape, and Star Trek,
rather than giving us a bold, new vision of the future.
Oddly enough, Final Fantasy, for all of its stumbling in recent years,
has given us several unique visions of the sci-fi future.
Whether it be Midgar in Final Fantasy 7,
Zanarkand in Final Fantasy 10,
Hanging Edge and Academia in Final Fantasy 13,
or even just the cars and the clothes that we've seen in Final Fantasy 15 so far.
These visions of the future may not always be successful,
much like the series as a whole,
but it does benefit for the attempt.
But really, as surprising as it is,
I think the game that's perhaps come the closest to really capturing a new vision of the future
is Mirror's Edge.
If that game had reached a broader audience,
its blazing-white world, which hides beneath it a state based on surveillance and repression,
might have had the same impact on our popular conception of the future that Blade Runner did.
And I won't by any means argue that Mirror's Edge is perfectly executed
cause, it's not,
but it visually presents a bold, different vision that grabs hold of the ideas that we're wrestling with today.
Questions of freedom, and security,
of personal liberty in a world where our actions are constantly monitored,
and it couples that with the modern, minimalist design aesthetics
that are such a product of our post-internet world.
Unfortunately, that vision was tied to a game that was filled with good ideas,
but struggled with its execution,
and thus never entered the popular conciousness in the same way that Neuromancer did
when it cemented our vision of cyberpunk.
Or that Amazing Science Fiction did when it ushered in our ray guns and rockets era.
Leaving us to wonder still,
what does the future look like?
And we do need such a vision,
because when we have that, it provides us a rich canvas for artists of all types to play in.
By having this sort of popular vision of the future,
we can examine its ramifications,
push its borders, and even see what happens if we break it entirely.
We can introduce new elements into it,
or see what happens when we take parts away.
We can bring characters who don't belong to this vision into it, to observe and comment on it.
But without it, we're left with that generic, homogenized sci-fi that we too often see in video games today.
So if you have any thoughts on what the future looks like,
or if you think you've seen any examples of modern pop-culture that are really defining it for our generation,
please share them below, I'd actually love to hear about 'em
Thanks for watching, and we'll see you guys next time.
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