This will be another one of those entries where I essentially ponder out loud, so you’ve been warned…
So, “Dark Future”…
I was going through my movies this afternoon, looking for something to watch that I haven’t seen recently, and didn’t find much. So I checked out my friends posts here on ye olde journal and read Lyon’s glowing reviews of “Repo – the genetic opera”, so I went to the web site and it got me thinking…
I went back and looked through my movies, books, and poked about a bit online and I’ve determined that the media is precluded by law from portraying a “happy” future. It’s always dark, bad, repressive, and full of horrible things.
Why is this?
I think this might be the root-reason for the lack of success for “sci-fi” games:
In a fantasy setting the strife mechanic is a result of situational issues, not the environment. In fact, the ‘past’ is usually portrayed as idyllic – it’s a great place to live, you just need to evict the Orcs first…
In SciFi the strife mechanic is more often than not a product of the environment; life sucks for you because you live here and even the air kills people…
The one real exception to this seems to be “Star Trek” – where the future is good and the strife is situational. The human race has managed to survive long enough to grow up a bit and things on good old Earth are pretty awesome. The strife is caused by external forces rather than simply being a product of “the future”.
As we all know, people tend to make their own reality by spending a lot of time thinking about it. So are we dooming ourselves to a miserable future by pumping the population’s collective conscious full of killer robots, evil megacorps, and plagues?
I really can’t say for sure, but I hope not. I want my personal robot and flying car damnit, and I can live without the plagues and evil aliens thanks. 🙂