You open a new game set in a new and beautiful sci-fi world. The game is a shooter, or a cozy game, or a role-playing game.
Everything around you is either technology or a suspiciously absent technology, or what seems like remnants of technology. After a nice tutorial, you’re ready to help the villagers or shoot aliens or zombies in a relaxing and satisfying way. Maybe start with a little agriculture here in the idyll.
You explore a bit around here.
Then you come across a laboratory. There are some recordings of voice diaries. Always voice diaries, since gamers can’t be trusted to read things. By now you no longer need to listen to them even once.
It’s a cliché so overused that it’s obvious what happened. TV Tropes has given it the name “apocalyptic log”, we often get the variant “Scientist video journal” and the setting is often “late to the tragedy”.
An eminent example is in Doom 3:
“I can see them in the shadows sometime. Why do they taunt me? I’m not sure how much longer I… I… I… I can… I’m shooting at shadows here. And every moment, I feel them creeping closer towards me. Oh God. Oh God, we should never have—”»
It was certainly innovative with Resident Evil in the nineties, but now that narrative grip is starting to wear thin. Here, human hubris has led to our downfall. We did not heed the warning in the story of Icarus. We flew too close to the sun and fell to our deaths.
In Doom, we encounter the self-inflicted apocalypse soon after it has occurred, where it suddenly becomes necessary to shoot demons. In Resident Evil, however, more time has passed since the triggering event.
Then the silence has descended in the post-apocalyptic era and you live in a world that has stabilized in a way.
Some apocalypses are more prolific than others. Here with Horizon Zero Dawn as an example.
Guerrilla Games
Horizon Zero Dawn is a wonderfully idyllic world populated by people who shun technology scattered around in secluded caves. And then there are robots that walk around and are most reminiscent of dinosaurs. Being chased by some of them feels quite similar to the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, an aesthetic choice that was probably not entirely accidental. InGen is the real antagonist in the Jurassic Park universe. Once again those who thought they could control the technology they used, with disastrous consequences.
In Horizon Zero Dawn, you are cast out of society because of your connection to the machines. So you might as well embrace them and learn to use the technology to your advantage. Of course you will find one of the now mandatory audio logs.
The setting is also not unknown in literature: For those of you who have seen Dune and don’t quite understand why there are human computers there. “Thinking machines” are banned in the Dune universe, following an event far back in history: when humanity was nearly wiped out by thinking machines led by the superconsciousness Omnius.
Not even the cozy games, which I’ve written about before, escape it all. In My Time at Portia, searching for ancient buried technology down in mines is a central part of the game. After all, you must have the materials to make irrigation systems and public transport. Even here in one of these cozy games where, as usual, you have inherited a piece of a business from your father, you cannot escape the line of conflict between those who want to research the old days and those who have created a religion around avoiding such things at all costs . What do you want to use the currency “CDs” for? Technology or slightly magical plants?
The apocalypse is a popular setting for a reason. Whether it leads to zombies, nuclear war, demons or lightly modified humans who are no longer human for another reason. Or the robots taking over. Or AI running amok.
It is the job of sci-fi to look at the present and dig into who we are and where we can go. It is possibly a bit exaggerated to conduct a deep literary analysis of Doom. But the apocalypse genre with its man-made doom touches on something we know to be true.
People are the ones who decide, and we decide on more and more technology and biotechnology. And when we can do it then it is very tempting to try to do it.
Now that the Fallout series has come out, we have another addition to the genre. As in The Last of Us, there is a small backstory about the warnings being there but people ignoring or ridiculing the danger. Again a good mirror of some of the warnings regarding today’s technological development. And a continuation of the tired story line “the researcher’s log found in the abandoned lab”.
The transhumanism of Deus Ex also points to a possible dark future, even if the apocalypse has not occurred yet.
Eidos-Montréal
This is often a cyberpunk theme as well. Maybe a little out of the apocalypse for now. In Deus Ex – a series that also deserves a film adaptation – a central element is a critique of large multinational corporations controlling access to transhumanist enhancements of humanity. There’s a real concern about technology trends here: What if your new heart was connected to a “software as a service” service where you didn’t own it per se, but paid a license to use it?
But can we not?
Or as GladO’s song at the end of Portal about the progress of science in her laboratory where there are no longer any people (due to her release of deadly neurotoxins): “We do what we must, because we can…
…And the science gets done, and we make a neat gun, for the people who are still alive”.
