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| My "Couldn't-think-of-a-better-image" image. |
We all play games for lots of reasons, but everybody has their own ‘thing’ that they’re really into, one genre, style, or mechanic that always has us coming back. e|2|2o|2 has already told us about what it is he loves so much about PvP (Player versus Player) games, even though it was more a review of Bloodline Champions and less an argument for why he loves PvP enabled games… But I’m not here to criticize e|2|2o|2, as tempting as it might be. For as little as you may care, I’m about to throw in my two cents in response to the prompt of what I would throw into a game, no matter the cost, even if it meant bankrupting the company, losing my job, becoming homeless, having to scavenge half-eaten cheeseburgers out of a McDonald’s dumpster and resorting to needle mugging innocent strangers in front of ATMs to make a quick buck. After all, is what you just withdrew out of the ATM really worth the risk of getting stabbed with a syringe that may or may not have HIV? I should think not, but alas I am losing focus.
Instead of ranting about something morally grotesque like some other people on this site, I want to let you know why I love games set in post-apocalyptic worlds so damned much.
I say “post-apocalyptic” because I can’t really think of a better term for it, even though in some cases there is no real sign of an “apocalypse” that has destroyed the world I am placed in. Put succinctly, I love games set in worlds where there are clear signs that life and society used to exist, but for one reason or another is no longer present, leaving the player a unique sense of isolation. A quick hit-list of such games would include Bioshock, Fallout 3/New Vegas, Metroid Prime, Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, Shadow of the Colossus, Half-Life 2, Stalker, and too many to count depending on one’s definition of “post-apocalyptic”.
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| The strangest boner right now... |
The collapse of society is a common and popular trope in the realm of literature, film and games. For whatever reason, people enjoy the idea and exploration of the extinction of our own species. In what is likely the most bizarre fetish of all narrative devices, post-apocalyptic settings allow us to explore what it means to be human in the context of an empty, lawless world, devoid of all humanity’s customary trappings. When the social contract has been torn apart, we are left to wonder how people will function with one another, and it is in positing how man handles his newfound liberation that such worlds become endlessly fascinating.
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| Fallout 3 |
Take, for example, the Fallout series. In a world where the Chinese overstepped their bounds and attempted to invade the United States, nuclear war broke out and the world as we recognize it was burned to cinders, leaving cold, lonely vestiges of what once was as people attempt to recover and rebuild. There is no law in such a world, only the mandate to survive, no matter the cost. It is this drive to live at the expense of all others that clarifies the human qualities that are intrinsic to our species. Greed is ever present in Fallout, just as one would expect it to be. Prejudice persists, seeing humans persecute those that are different from them, be it because others are horribly deformed and mutated or merely because they are too poor. Violence is omnipresent as gangs savagely ravage the nuclear wastelands, and large, well-organized entities try to reinstitute government and society by force. However, good remains as well, with the player often finding kind, well-intentioned people throughout the world.
Having said all that, games like Fallout, Bioshock or Half-Life 2, where rich, vivid and believable worlds have been torn to shambles and it is the player’s responsibility to fight against all adversaries to uncover the truth/stop the badguys/conquer the world, are not my ideal when it comes to the post-apocalyptic genre. What really gets me where I need to go are huge, empty worlds, essentially devoid of other people. For as long as I will remember the DC wastes from Fallout, and the sunken gem of Rapture from Bioshock, nothing will persist stronger than hollow, abandoned world from Shadow of the Colossus, Fragile Dreams, or Metroid Prime.
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| Shadow of the Colossus |
In Shadow of the Colossus, you control a nameless man on a quest to resurrect a woman of unknown importance to the character. The world is utterly sparse. There are no other characters to talk to, save for a disembodied, ethereal voice in the temple that guides the hero on his quest. Other than that, it is just the hero and his horse in a vast, empty landscape. There are no common enemies to fight, only 16 boss-enemies scattered around the map. This was indeed a common criticism of the game when it came out, as some reviewers found such a large empty world to be boring. While that may be a fair criticism, I wholly disagree that it is anything but a great thing. The entire point of the world of Shadow of the Colossus is that you are alone in what is revealed to be a cursed and forsaken land. There once was society here, evidenced by the dozens of temples, shrines, tombs, stadiums and bridges, and people do exist beyond the walls of this forsaken land, as the game reveals that the hero is being chased by people for having stolen a sacred sword from his people.
It is difficult to explain in words just how incredible it is to explore an entire world. The impeccable sense of awe and wonder as you find a hidden stretch of beach behind a mountain, an endless and sprawling desert that seems to stretch out into infinity, a half-sunken tower slowly submerging down to the depths of a foggy marsh, a crumbling and dilapidated shrine nestled beneath the shade of a large, dying tree, a towering temple that strives to penetrate the very heavens themselves, a secret labyrinth of tunnels hidden in the crest of a grassy knoll, is a feeling that can never be recreated in a movie or a film. Shadow of the Colossus presents the player with a rich, believable world of what once was, and gives him/her free reign to explore it, and nothing makes a world more believable than being able to explore it all for yourself.
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| If the gas giant in the background represents things I like, and the planet in the foreground represents movies I like, then the tiny object to the left represents Avatar. |
James Cameron’s “opus” Avatar was hailed for creating an incredibly real and believable world in its space-smurf planet of Pandora, yet for any unique, incredible sight Cameron thought to include in the movie, the viewer was only given a few minutes to really appreciate it. Maybe I stand out as an exception, but Avatar did nothing to convince me that Pandora was a real place, and it wasn’t necessarily because Cameron did a poor job (I totally think he did thought), it was because a film, by its very nature, cannot permit such a degree of freedom to an experiencer as a video game does. Nothing is more believable than that which we are allowed to experience for ourselves, and in media like film and literature, where the creator is forced to guide the audience, the world feels helplessly fabricated. But in a video game like Shadow of the Colossus, the creators are able to craft a beautiful world and tell the player, “Go.”
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| Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon |
Another fantastic example of this comes in Fragile Dreams. In it, you control a young boy in post-apocalyptic Japan. The young boy is left all alone after his caretaker passes away, and he is forced to live life without the only other person in the world, or so he thought. He happens upon a pretty young woman singing in the moonlight one night, and though she runs away for reasons unknown, the boy is desperate to have someone, anyone, that he can talk to. As he desperately searches for her, he makes his way through crumbling shopping malls, hotels, theme parks, and more, all of which still bear the signs that, at some point in time, people used to live here, and that they used to be happy. As the player explores, s/he will find mundane items, perhaps a single shoe, stuffed animal, cell phone, candy wrapper, and so on that each carry a memory of the long lost world. Sitting by a fire place, the boy gets to experience all of these memories in what are some of the most beautiful, forlorn and melancholic short stories to appear in videogames. The story of a beleaguered father returning late to his child’s birthday, of a little girl enjoying a day at a theme park with her parents, of lovers forced to say premature goodbyes, they are believable stories about believable people that are all dead now because of mysterious reasons.
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| Metroid Prime 3: Corruption |
Metroid Prime (the first of the trilogy) is my final example of post-apocalyptic done right. The set-up is standard Metroid fare: Samus responds to mysterious distress call at a space station, things go wrong, she loses all her abilities and must rediscover them in order to get out alive. What was special about Prime was that it was the first 3D Metroid game, and for the first time players were right there in the suit with Samus, seeing everything she saw and nothing more. Due in part to this new perspective, Prime endowed a powerful sense of isolation to a world that felt naturally alien, with a somewhat believable ecosystem and large ruins scattered throughout the planet.
What the above three games have in common is that they isolate the player in an impeccably designed and beautiful world, and this is exactly what I would have put into any videogame some poor bastard lets me design.
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