Recently I've been playing through Signalis with my best friend as part of our weekly stream. Beautifully and deliberately art directed, at its worst Signalis shows you retro-future imagery that looks extremely cool and has nothing to do with anything, and at its best uses retro-future imagery to build a context and history of a complicated world where people lived and suffered and loved in a brutal surveillance dystopia. As a German-developed game Signalis can say absolutely whatever the hell it wants about totalitarianism and fascism and I will simply shut the fuck up, but I'm trying to make a game about the contemporary American dystopia (or the global english-speaking neoliberal dystopia more broadly?) and our world looks nothing like this.
Our dystopia has already arrived, immediate and brutal, but its graphic design sucks, its architecture makes no lasting impression on the eye, and its ideology has no consistency and no tangible form. Does it even have a shared goal? Or a leader? What are we actually living in? Almost every day I see something that makes me say out loud "we live in hell" because no other word really articulates what living under this world feels like. I hope you will join me while I search for a way to paint a picture of that hell.
First, the imagery of totalitarian dictatorships simply doesn't cut it. There's no way for someone in the USA to evoke any of the imagery in (say) Signalis without the result resembling WWII nostalgic jingoism or the red scare of the cold war era. Americans recognize the controlling, all-seeing, all-powerful government as obviously evil; it isn't a coincidence that all of our reference points for totalitarianism happen to be historical enemies of the US, monolithic cultures controlled by government censorship and thought police. While the center/left loves to invoke fears of dictatorship, the right also gets to gleefully exploit this language, by substituting oligarchs for librarians with dyed hair and distributors of state violence for queer college students. When a dystopia gets too generic, you can substitute anything for anything, and it becomes worse than irrelevant to the present.
Margaret Atwood's most well known for The Handmaid's tale, but even she had to write two completely separate dystopias, following up a story in 80s about the religious right and the moral majority, with a trilogy starting in 2003 about corporate supremacy and environmental collapse. Swap monsanto for tech bros and Oryx and Crake is the more prescient of her two dystopian visions, but it's not like the Handmaid's Tale simply went away—it hovers like a specter parallel to corporate and fascist dystopias, and it is real, present, and quite alive and dangerous. I think her shift is telling—at one time she saw one vision of the future as on the cusp of victory, important enough to write about, and in a decade and a half another had emerged. Just one dystopia isn't enough. Even William Gibson shifted from a fantastical far future cyberpunk dystopia to post-9/11 near futures.
The fundamental limitation of dystopian fiction is that it focuses on exploring a single ideological victory and what its complete takeover of society would look like. The unconscious premise is that there will only be a single dystopia, and that dystopia must rise above the others to become absolute. In reality, all of these dystopias can compete and ally with each other; we have a cyberpunk dystopia living right next to a fascist one, separated by a state line, a county line, or living within each other, parasites within parasites. But what if none of these factions need to seize total control in order to make our lives hell? What if they are already doing whatever they want?
In one state, we have corporations so powerful they can completely halt the development of public transportation in favor of personally-enriching projects that lose billions. In another, we have state senators making a grab at establishing a theocracy. We don't need state-sponsored censorship when a talk show host can call for a public censure of some random college student with dyed hair. The contemporary right-wing griftocracy machine is a revolving door of ideology tailored for whatever seems fashionable and marketable at whatever given time and place they believe they can win in. The right's current strategy seems to consist of dismantling as much of the government as possible except for the state's capacity to inflict violence, and then let the coalition that won fight each over over whether they want a theocracy, a plutocracy, or some wild libertarian daydream. A hydra that bites its own heads off, each with its own wild nightmarish fantasy for the future that to any one of us would cause suffering almost indistinguishable from the other.
It’s inaccurate to say we live in hell; we live in a thousand hells. A shapeshifting dystopia that never quite fully assumes its final form but never relents in its capacity for violence. These bickering, co-existing right-wing ideologies have forged a unique dystopia of many separate dystopias. The fundamental limitation of dystopian fiction is that they show us a vision of the future, but the horror of our present is that the future does not need to come to pass for us to suffer. They can fight over the future for all eternity, while we’ll slip further and further into powerlessness and oppression.
I'm starting a solo dev project and learning to code, 3D model, and draw. Part of this work involves research architecture and graphic design from the last century to draw up a believable world whose culture and beliefs are evident in the way they've chosen to communicate with each other and the places they built to live in. While environmental storytelling has traditionally been the placement of skulls in toilets, I think games have the potential to really say something by using this alternate school of thought. Still, while there are lots of games with breathtaking graphic design and highly realized worlds with plenty to say, our signifiers of fascism and oppression are archaic and outdated.
Unifying, totalitarian graphic design and architecture won't be capable of describing the present dystopia. We're subject to a thousand petty and hypocritical tyrants, each with their own petulant little aesthetic and wild dreams of a nightmarish future. What unifies these factions is a lack of imagination, lack of history, lack of integrity and context that the fascism shares. To make this dystopia believable, it needs to show the distinctiveness of the different factions and also how they hold their essential values of power and violence in common. Each is a little fantasy of how they want their personal dystopia to look, and what they want it to be ugly in a specific way. They play against each other, and they play their oppressed citizens against each other, and they are unique but each shows up in the same tailored suit to the same board meeting, dreaming of their own perfect hells.
