I games like Fallout, or Cyberpunk, movies like V for Vendetta, you always have common dystopia tropes. Superficially you may look at these and think of them as social commentary messaging.
In Fallout, nuclear war aside, the pre-war world is full of remnants of messages that depict a highly corporocratic world. I don't think there's a single damn message terminal you can find in the ruins of any given corporation that doesn't have some kind of Monty Burns 'Bwahaha' message of corporations doing cruel and psychotic things to their employees.
In all these types of games or movies, you always have some kind of 'the media lies' message too. Some talking head on a TV starts saying ridiculous things that everyone can identify as being ridiculous. Silly, over-the-top personalities. Frequently, even though it generally makes no sense, they depict some kind of media personality exploiting or taking advantage of some unwilling sap with another ridiculous message In Cyberpunk, they have this TV personality 'Ziggy' who throughout the gameplay, has good-natured "good guy" guests on who play the part of unwitting saps who say reasonable things and then he does some ridiculous stunt to humiliate the guest with their ridiculous biased message. Like why would anyone go on his show when they know that's going to happen?
The part I thought was most ridiculous that I came across in Cyberpunk was a debate between the two mayoral candidates who you later work for in the game. One of them is going on and on about how 'the corporations only pay 0.7%!' and the other guy goes 'Well what about your Cayman Islands accounts!' leaving the first guy stammering and looking like a fool.
In reality, neither candidate would be saying a fucking word about either of those, because both would be paid off by corporations and both would be hiding money in the Caymans, because that's what they do RIGHT NOW.
In every single fucking one of these games or movies, there's always the reasonable voice of good, and it's almost always some kind of reporter figure. There's a reporter in Fallout 4, there's a reporter in V for Vendetta, there's always a goddamn reporter. And this reporter is always the same archetype - scrappy, possibly disillusioned, who wants to speak TRUTH TO POWER! and we need to SHOW THE PEOPLE THE TRUTH!
Yeah no reporters are like that. Reporters are money-grubbing ideological whores. Nearly any reporter who presents themselves as that, you only notice because they're fighting on behalf of their own bias that they refuse to speak the truth about.
And in every game, you team up with this reporter and something happens and you bring the scoop of the century at everyone wakes up and there's riots in the street! Or some shit like that.
And that's what actually makes these games pro-dystopia propaganda.
Instead of looking at these games and seeing cautionary tales about the real world, people see ridiculous caricatures.
The only game that ever presented actual true data about corporations was Deus Ex when the black-haired bald man in the Statue of Liberty in the first twenty minutes of the game spits pure facts about consolidation.
People look at the real world, and they don't see these caricatures. So they think the real world is actually just fine. They don't see the media becoming laughable overt stooges, so they think 'the media can't be that bad, after all, it's not like this!'. They don't see corporations doing stupid evil shit like in Fallout 4, where the water reclamation center intentionally used bottled water to fake all their water quality tests while knowingly pumping sewage into people's homes, so they think things aren't as bad. They don't see the government driving around in silly vans listening to everybody in their homes like in V for Vendetta, so they build their illusion of privacy. In these games there's always tons of drugs, but they only are depicted as helpful gameplay elements.
So when something like climate change comes up, well, besides always being presented as factual in the games ("must be true in the real world if it was even true in this clownish depiction of dystopia! See, even they knew!"), never, not once, does the player end up exploring how something like that can be used to control people.
Maybe the concepts are just too big and difficult to portray?
You know what you've never seen a game or movie bring up? How a company like ABInBev (Bud Light) can suffer catastrophic financial damage, yet, never is affected by it. Why a company like Disney can just churn out box office bombs, yet act like their money is endless. Why nobody goes out of business anymore. Why companies like Twitter could run for ten years losing billions of dollars, never once turning a profit, and yet still remain in business... because they never talk about things like hedge funds, and how companies like BlackRock functionally make all their revenue utterly fake.
How does the media in real life reflect their bias? Almost entirely by simply choosing to never report things. Now this could be difficult to portray in game and movies, because it's not like we spend significant time in either simply watching the news, such that we can see they aren't doing their job.
Furthermore, you never ever actually run into anyone who is brainwashed by the media. It just never comes up. Any time your character has some kind of earth-shattering news, everyone actually just... believes you? Has there ever been depicted a game where 'redpilling' exists, and is depicted frequently how it plays out in reality, where people who you had good relationships with will suddenly never want to talk to you and they just belittle and insult the player, and never reconcile?
So that's it. These games don't actually help fight these problems, they make people love it. Notice how in games like Cyberpunk, you don't have to pay rent on your apartment? You don't have licensing fees on your cyberware, that has to phone home every few hours or else it shuts down? Where the company that makes your eyes isn't recording everything you're doing and exploiting it somehow? Instead, these games (even in Shadowrun) just make cyberware basically faultless and incredible. Deus Ex: Human Revolution at least had the firmware update which is the closest any game ever got.
And then there was the reporter in Babylon 5 who "risked everything to get onto B5 and get the real story from their own mouths" and "subtly get the truth to the people in ways that won't get them shut down."
... and proceeded to go full pro-authoritarian propaganda.
I think about that episode when I think about propaganda today.
Mass effect had a good reporter
Only because you got to treat her like a reporter
The idea that journalists and news companies will still exist in 2183 is the most unrealistic part of the entire Mass Effect trilogy.
You can say that now. But nobody (to a significant degree) probably thought like that until 2016.
I think the aesthetic choices in dystopian media are interesting. You mentioned V for Vendetta: I've only seen the movie, but it borrows heavily from Nazi Germany in terms of the aesthetics presented. It always tends to be right-wing coded.
Yet in dystopias that they actually exist, police will roll up in a rainbow colored squad car and dance in a tik tok video right before they crack your skull open for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.
So whatever defenses you have are totally defused because everything looks "happy" and not at all what you've been trained to associate with dystopias.
It's a subtle example, but I thought the universe in Mirror's Edge (original) portrayed a believable dystopia. There's nothing overtly dystopic or dark about the setting. It's a clean, gleaming, modern, highly commercialized metropolis. But the actual story is about the corrupt politicians that run things and hints at Tianmen Square-level tyrannical actions of the police state just a few years prior. But the only people who really know or care how bad the situation is are the couriers the game is set around. Apparently most citizens live their lives completely oblivious to the truth, just like in real life.
Basically this, I meant to expand more on why I brought up V for Vendetta but the post was long enough.
In those kinds of movies, the bad government is always just comically ridiculous.
It comes down to the actual problem we have in the real world. By making 'Commies' a normalized punchline to works of fiction, it means nobody can now believe that there's actual Marxists and Communists taking shit over. You sound like a stupid asshole when you talk about it.
Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol
I just saw some of that the other day. Really bizarre seeing some of those 90's quirks combined with Doctor Who.
This is a fantastic post. This part illuminates how leftists can say things like "eat the rich" and call themselves anti-corporate yet functionally support every corporation and institution that exists. Assassin47 is right that the videogame corporations are caricatures left over from the 1980s, when they actually could be trenchant critiques of the status quo. Since then, the government and the internet have complicated and, as you point out, have at times severed the relationship between profit and success. To state the documented obvious, Twitter's value (prior to Elon) was not in profit at all, but in control of public opinion.
Mr. Burns was created as a parody of 1980s corporate attitudes. Since then, technocrats with far superior brand management skills have displaced him as the movers and shakers of America.
I love this part too - everything in the post actually but this part gets at the norm of fiction to portray indifferent dystopias concerned only with elite profit, whereas in reality we have dystopias that are concerned with deliberately breaking down the common man in order to increase the predictability of the system and maybe just because they ideologically desire to change the form of humanity. The former is a dog-eat-dog world where risk-reward is dramatically increased and individual agency is king. The latter is a homogeneous, flattened world that values control over achievement. It's the familiar C.S. Lewis quote:
In most sci fi and dystopia themed media. Games, movies, TV, books, whatever... The default state of the world at the beginning of all these stories is already in the dystopia state. We rarely see how the transition plays out from start to finish. It just "is".
That's part of the problem too. Subtly programming us to think that the default state is to be living in that kind of a world, and that it's ok. Granted throughout these stories there are efforts to change that default state but that is irrelevant. The characters and the audience begin the journey in a fucked up world and they must navigate through it
The funny thing is the worlds are never actually that fucked up, it's always 'told' not 'shown'.
I would dare say that Skid Row in Los Angeles is legitimately a worse place than the worst of the worst places depicted in Cyberpunk 2077. Night City is literally a better place to live than Los Angeles. You can walk down the street and not have human shit thrown on you. You can park your car and nobody stole it or robbed you blind while you were out. If someone attacks you in-game you can freely mow them down, but in present-day Los Angeles, you'll go to prison for self-defense, especially if you shot the 'wrong' type of person.
The pathetic thing is that there's all these pieces they could actually do something with. Okay, so maybe games think child rape is too intense and would never pass ratings. Well, you have the 'XBDs' in Cyberpunk, where people live out fantasies of murder and rape.
Well in real-life we know for sure we have at least some kind of cabal of child-raping elites. They went and would hang out on an island with their friend Jeff.
You ever seen a single fucking one of these game even depict the idea that, hey, maybe all the politicians are XBD connoisseurs? If they ever did do that, it would only ever be just one guy, and the player would go kill him or something, hooray, mission accomplished!
Or, if they did do that, it would probably be absurdly over-the-top, and the player just kills all of them. And the world will probably seem unaffected and that's it. You defeated Satan Inc. There's no crushing realization that the lone player is actually utterly powerless, and the game ends like most dystopian games should, on a downbeat note where the real lesson is that you are no hero, and you've got to live with the terrible things you may have learned.
And that goes back to my original point. The players are shown that something like that is a one-off thing, so they subconsciously take that to the real world. "Oh it's not possible all our politicians could be baby-blood-drinking satanic demons. Like maybe one guy, probably Trump."
"Or, if they did do that, it would probably be absurdly over-the-top, and the player just kills all of them. And the world will probably seem unaffected and that's it. You defeated Satan Inc. There's no crushing realization that the lone player is actually utterly powerless, and the game ends like most dystopian games should, on a downbeat note where the real lesson is that you are no hero, and you've got to live with the terrible things you may have learned."
You just described the upshot of Werewolf: the Apocalypse
I don't know about later games but San Andreas had "thug NPCs" among the crowd that would randomly steal cars, yours or other NPCs. It is true that the most dangerous threat your own car was ever at risk of was being deleted by a cutscene. (when you parked too close to the red marker)
A bit off topic, but my favorite 'crime spike' story is that one Jew who singlehandedly drove up antisemitic hate crimes worldwide by calling in a bunch of bomb threats on synagogues. He, on his own, influenced the data to a significant degree...again, worldwide. Pretty amazing stuff.
You got a name? That's one for the history books.
I think it must have been this that I'm thinking of. That's an older archive, here's the live page, since the archive is taking forever.
It was some autistic Israeli kid who apparently made hundreds of threats, and extorted a bunch of crypto, too. But a disgraced reporter, fired for making up quotes (dude interviewed Dylann Roof's imaginary cousin!), got in on the action too and called in eight bomb threats to frame his ex-girlfriend. The journo was essentially signing his ex's name on these threats, lol. Truly the cream of the crop.
GTA 5 actually has quite a bit of random NPC actions that will happen, where various thieves can try to mug you or steal your car (or other NPCs). However you have to really stop and observe for a while to notice it, as its kind of subtle and its also very very easy to interrupt NPC behavior via your own actions (accidentally antagonizing them, fucking up their pathing, etc).
Nice post. You may some very good observations. In general I would say a lot of this is less intentional propaganda these days and more that it all apes off the same old tropes from the 'punk genre that came of age in the 1980s. To be fair that does include overt anti-corporate propaganda as a matter of course, but more balanced works frame a general "fight the power" message, of which corporations are only one variety.
There were more legitimate investigative journalists then too. Of course as many other posts here point out, when their ideology came to power suddenly they can find no corruption in the halls of power. Some new types of dystopian fiction could definitely rise up out of this new globalist era, and our experience with modern systems of control.
I 100% agree with you on the original Deus Ex. They caught lightning in a bottle. The writers basically just mashed together all the contemporary conspiracy theories they could think of with a little creative glue, and in the process ended up creating one of the most relevant and predictive works of this generation. It's like Alex Jones Was Right: The Game. Oh and speaking of reporters, don't forget Joe Greene. ;)
Not to take away from your (correct) points here but some interesting trivia is that "paying rent" was yet another cut feature of the game. The email you can read at the beginning demanding V pay the rent is left over from that. Though I don't know if they cut it for dev time as much as they realized it would be an annoying game mechanic, and it made less thematic sense after they added the story with Keanu.
You bring up good points, but keep in mind that you are talking about entertainment media that is written by people who are completely brainwashed by the media. Their idea of a "counterculture" is merely a playground set up by the media, the government, and the corporations. There are "antagonist" media, corporations, and government entities, but in order to maintain the astroturfed counterculture, there are also "good" media, corporations, and government entities who stand in the name of progress (and diversity!). It's a palatable type of anarchy that allows the media, corporations, and government to silence or wipe out anybody that is deemed a threat. They venerate the journalist who is a voice for good archetype because that type of journalist is more than willing to shut up in the name of progressive values.
Can you provide examples? Because in the dystopias I watch, read, or play, the government are usually absolute shits, authoritarian, torturous, etc. They're absolutely atrocious, and a lot of dystopian fiction involves rightfully casting them down. Sure, there's also usually an undercurrent of corporate greed/oppression/abuse, but I don't think that really detracts from that the government is doing the same. The good guys, if there even are any, usually seem to come from outside of the system.
The closest any game got to the 'heroic CEO' was Deus Ex Human Revolution, where your boss, David Sarif, may literally be the only person in the entire game that isn't a massive insufferable fucking asshole. That list does include Adam Jenson himself, too, btw.
All the same, he really didn't do much. I guess his act of heroism was turning Adam Jenson into a murderous cyborg, more or less against his will.
A little spoilery, but I thought the CEO who developed a solution to the "telepath" problem in Babylon 5 was, in some respects, portrayed in at least a "not necessarily wrong" kind of way.
Was his plan a bit nefarious or unethical? Absolutely. But even so, he recognized a huge and potential danger to the human race, and concocted a solution that was at least more elegant and less vicious than jumping straight to outright genocide.
His idea was simply to apply a measure to restore some balance of power against what could easily become the more dominant members of the human race, given the chance.
Can you provide examples? And, it's hard to say that without sounding antagonistic, but that's totally not my intent, for the record. I really am just curious which specific dystopias you're thinking of, where the governments are the good guys.
To be fair, the intelligence agencies being absolutely horrendous fucktards is completely on brand, but I get your point. Generally the Big Bad is a private actor, some big bad gajiillionaire gone rogue or something.
Yup, also true. The stories that have a corporation or CEO or so on be the hero are few and far between and, even when they are, it seems to be because they got betrayed and were forced to have a change of heart, or see things more from the perspective of the common man, or something. Seriously, the few I can think of where some rich CEO type ends up the hero...never really presents as such. They get betrayed and end up on the run or something, basically filling the role of the common man, but an ex-rich/CEO person.
I can't think of much in the 'dystopia' genre, but I mean, they're still churning out shit like Jack Ryan which is "The CIA are your friends".
What was the Bob Odenkirk John Wick-esque movie? "Nobody" or something? A fun movie, Bob Odenkirk is always great, but the entire movie is literally "the CIA actually has agents to murder American citizens for wronging them (but they were super bad guys, trust me! Even though the Bob Odenkirk origin story is him killing a guy for fraudulently misusing government funds to buy himself stuff), and then even after they're retired, they can walk around doing whatever they want to whoever they want, murder hundreds of people, and when they're arrested and in custody, the government will make one phone call and they'll walk away completely free, no questions asked".
Modern presstitutes are corporate cock slobberers, sure. But there are actually people that want to get the truth out there and cover real stories like James O'Keefe or Julian Assange.
Good topic, but I'm not sure I agree, or at the very least I wouldn't go quite that far. I think it's often just a little stilted and not so subtle, but not necessarily outright pro-dystopia propaganda. They just want to make sure it stands out, so they use over the top examples.
Real world media bias, while clear to those in the know, is a little hard to portray to a wide audience as clear bias. You almost have to use exaggerated examples. I agree there can be downsides to that, but I'm not sure it's outright malicious. Nowadays you could probably be a little less exaggerated...but that's only because the real-life media has gotten more exaggerated and absurd. "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests," anyone?
Like, look at the actual real world dystopian news we already have, with the climate hysteria, race baiting, criminal protecting, and wrongthinker hunting that goes on.
Here's something to think about: If you'd made a completely non-biased, fact-based documentary about, say, 2015-2023, and traveled back in time to like the '50s, people would tell you to get lost. They'd accuse you of being over the top.
So I think it's natural that people trying to portray future dystopias do exaggerate and accelerate the existing issues. Again, if even a quarter of your players watch CNN/MSNBC, subtle and more reality-based portrayals of dystopia won't even land...it will just seem like actual news, because our current news is that dystopic.
This is getting long, but I'm just going through my own thoughts and trying to capture it. Basically, I think it makes sense that people writing from within the current reality have to write over the top things while making fictional dystopias. I'd probably do the same thing, were I in their shoes. To make it feel dystopic - accurate or not - you have to turn it up to eleven. Otherwise it just feels like what we're currently living through.
Another example would be portrayal of authoritarian authority figures, be they police, military, or politicians. We already live in a time where they have ridiculous levels of influence over us, and we're used to - not all the time, but often - them behaving like absolute thugs and tyrants. So a fictional portrayal of them has to be worse. But that doesn't make it pro-dystopia, it just makes it effective story telling.
Consider the dystopia in It's a Wonderful Life. That was supposed to be some sort of absolute hellhole of a place when that film was made, yet that is...basically how things are now. Except instead of an individual who owns everything (and who could conceivably be gunned down if things got desperate enough enough) it's some giant hedge fund run by someone who will never come within 1000 miles of your town.
And even if he did, there's a backup amalgamation of faceless suits at the board of directors who will just keep the machine running.
Though Cyberpunk 2077 actually did reflect this. Johnny Silverhand literally detonates a fucking nuke to wipe out Arasaka's stateside headquarters and kills thousands of them, and the company just kept right on working, turned the rubble into a memorial, and built and even bigger, more odious tower in the same place.
Yup. We're living in a dystopia right fucking now. So it's going to be hard to portray a fictional dystopia for the modern audience without being over the top.
It would be an interesting experiment to try, though. Just do a game (or show/movie/book/whatever) that takes elements straight from Current Year (+/- 5) but tells the story in such a way that it's obviously bad. Again, "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" should make an appearance. Maybe along with some Insurrections™ and some Pandemics™. Throw some Bad Orange Man in there for the leftists, even.
I know what you mean, and same goes for me. Despite being exposed to clips and such, being around a TV that's actually playing the channels still weirds me out. It's both inane and dystopic.
Chatgpt tl;dr
That's fucking eerie.
Chatgpt 4 is pretty good. The feel I'm getting is a LOT like when google was first released, and my ability to handle novel problems increased 10-fold.
Great post; very insightful. This is an old joke/concept by now, but hey remember in V for Vendetta where the government created and released a virus onto their own people so they could justify increased control? Hahaha what a crazy movie
Been a while since I played, but I remember it a bit differently from this. Peralez is a true believer and is presented as being an idealist, if somewhat naïve. He was the only council member to vote against a change in the law giving the large corps in night city a big tax loophole. Its implied that the money in the Caymans is either a false flag or is being misrepresented for political points. Holt (his opponent) on the other hand is definitely corrupt - you witness him getting into bed with Arasaka during the initial heist mission, and you find out later in the game that he covered up the death of the previous mayor. The twist is that Peralez is the victim of some Manchurian Candidate style psyop, but you never find out who is behind it (it's implied it might be an AI), or if he was always the idealist he is now, or if it's something he's been manipulated into thinking.
This was one of the most interesting missions in the game in my opinion, even if it was left somewhat open ended.
... after reading this i have just one question, ever thought about drafting a game script?
Check out Neuromancer the book. It went downhill from there