As the world careens towards apocalyptic dystopia, it is only natural that the dedicated escapists of gaming might crave the inverse – a world that at least functions, that isn’t on fire or ridden with disease or rapidly shuffling malicious and incompetent liars right to the top of the power hierarchy. However, even as “cozy” and “wholesome” games are ascendant, these largely eschew the actual pursuit of utopian thought, instead pursuing cartoonish or agrarian fantasies that are often as or more reactionary than the lurid violent fantasies they’re an escape from.
It is rare for games to posit a better world, but common for them to be set in better slices of worse worlds – the one happy town in a troubled world that must be protected at all costs, the one cell of resistance against tyranny or supernatural evil. One reason for this is likely that games center around solving problems, and a utopian world might suggest to many that no such problems are available to solve – surely only true of the most stringent definition of utopia, a truly perfect world. Within any world short of that excess, there might be any number of small but significant problems that emerge – no place is without the occasional trouble – but our narrative conventions state that bigger is better. There must not only be Problems, conflict, but these problems must be huge, consequential, world-changing – and, invariably, these problems shift every potential utopian world quietly back into the realm of dystopia. Nothing is allowed to be what it seems – if what it seems to be is an alternative to our current society that isn’t crumbling around the edges. That’s boring, supposedly. Of course, this isn’t an issue with any story set in our society or one very much like it – at that point, it’s no longer even considered a part of the story, any more than the sky or trees, only summoned to mind when mentioned explicitly.
This is not an issue unique to games, all narrative media (especially American media) are caught in this whirlpool. All story must have conflict (they say), all conflict must be heightened (they say) – together these edicts make imagining better worlds untenable and subtly embed cynicism into the very metrics we use to evaluate what is and isn’t art, what’s a story and what’s a mere catalog of events, what’s music and what’s just muzak.
I get as bored of simple harmony as anyone, I’m as addicted to messiness and complexity as anyone, but there’s a certain flavor of craving for complexity out there that’s really a craving for simplicity in disguise. This push to complexify, to problematize, only happens in certain domains – individual characters can enter into complex but clearly more or less beneficial relationships without becoming parables, but if the story is of a system of organization then, where it departs from the neoliberal status quo, it must be shown to be flawed. Totalitarian monarchies are, as well, similarly seldom questioned, simply treated as another default and therefore invisible form of government – a slightly more whimsical form of the total dominance of the wealthy few, usually aligned in some way with the heroes, against the (usually happily dominated) many.
If all worlds are dystopian, and better things aren’t possible, we can all breathe a sigh of relief – everything is as it should be, everything is for the meh-est in this the meh-est of all possible worlds. Is it any surprise that we seek to burn down utopias? The mere suggestion that something better might one day be in reach is a stark indictment of the dystopia we’ve made for ourselves, and our collective everyday decision to continue living in, unchanged year-by-year except but superficially.
Better worlds are possible – and when people get mad about that suggestion, consider who lives best in dystopia.