The Concept of Utopia in Digital Games

The Concept of Utopia in Digital Games Gerald Farca Vitruvius University of Applied Science, Leipzig (Lecturer in Game Studies and Narrative) gerald.farca@vitruvius-hochschule.de University of Augsburg (Memeber of the Cultural Ecology Research Group) Playing Dystopia Nightmarish Worlds in Video Games and the Player's Aesthetic Response (talk largely refers to the contents of the book) Video games permeate our everyday existence. They immerse players in fascinating gameworlds and exciting experiences, often inviting them in various ways to reflect on the enacted events. Gerald Farca explores the genre of dystopian video games and the player's aesthetic response to their nightmarish gameworlds. Players, he argues, will gradually come to see similarities between the virtual dystopia and their own 'offline' environment, thus learning to stay wary of social and political developments. In his analysis, Farca draws from a variety of research fields, such as literary theory and game studies, combining them into a coherent theory of aesthetic response to dystopian games. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4597-2/playingdystopia/ Overview • The Philosophy of Utopia • The (Anti-)Utopian Impulse in Game Design • The Utopian Impulse in Games • Video Game Utopias and Dystopias (Subgenres) The Philosophy of Utopia “Utopia is forward-looking, yes. Always just around the corner, always on the other side of the horizon, Utopia is ‘not yet’, elusive, glimpsed but never grasped. That’s one of the things I love about Utopia. And yet, like you [Ruth Levitas], I want the world to be very different from the way it is now. I want to ride the wave of utopian impulse toward a new now.” Levitas and Sargisson, “Utopia in Dark Times,” 20. Utopia in the 21st century evokes a cautious desire and indicates “a direction for man to follow, but never a point to be reached” (Viera, Concept 22). It takes on “the shape of a process” and “a programme for change and for a gradual betterment of the present” (Vieira, “Concept,” 23) (cf. 22-23). Function of Utopia Utopia shows us “the future as disruption (Beunruhigung) of the present, and as a radical and systematic break with even that predicted and colonized future which is simply a prolongation of our capitalist present”(Jameson, Archaeologies, 228; bold mine). • Utopian Impulse as a warning and disruption of the present Anti-Utopia Throughout modernity … the anti-utopian persuasion has systematically worked to silence and destroy Utopia, but Utopia … has always offered a way to work against and beyond these attacks” (Moylan, Scraps, 104). • Directed against utopianism • Absence of hope • Solidification of the status quo and conservatism • The present world as the best of all worlds (Anti-)Utopian Impulse in Game Design • Gamergate vs. heterogeneity/diversity in games and game design (see Carolyn Petit‘s keynote yesterday) • Triple AAA productions vs. independent games (see Jesper Juul’s keynote before) • Games as capitalists products vs. critique of capitalism • Hostile working environments vs. creation of artworks (function of art) (Anti-)Utopian Impulse in Game Design Alf Condelius (Massive Games) • "It's a balance because we cannot be openly political in our games," Condelius said. "So for example in The Division, it's a dystopian future and there's a lot of interpretations that it's something that we see the current society moving towards, but it's not - it's a fantasy.” https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-10-17-beingopenly-political-in-games-is-bad-for-business-thedivision-developer-says Utopian Impulse in Games Ecogames: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild • Struggle for Utopia as the hero’s ecological desire/journey to restore balance in Hyrule: to appease the four elements disturbed by Ganon’s pollution and have a restorative influence on the land’s ecosystems (Farca et al.) Red Dead Redemption 2 • Nature‘s anarchical structures vs. confinements of modernity. Utopian Impulse in Games • The desire for creation and utopian (game)spaces: Minecraft Utopian Impulse in Games • The desire of exploring unknown worlds and the (infitite) Other No Man’s Sky Utopian Impulse in Games • The desire for creating (online) communities: World of Warcraft: Misuse of Utopian Images The Genres of Utopia and Dystopia: Prerequisits • A story about a better or worse world is not enough! (e)utopia: a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived (Sargent, Utopianism, 6). The Genres of Utopia and Dystopia: Prerequisits (e)utopia: a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis (Suvin, Metamorphoses, 49). Utopia (Mattel, 1981) • Two player game (competition) • Turn-based strategy with RTS elements • Spending gold bars to build • Keeping the population happy • Hunt for highscores.  No Utopia? Utopia: The Creation of a Nation (Gremlin Interactive; Jaleco [SNES], 1991) • Colonization of a new planet, build a colony and improve the life of citizens • Population management, taxes, birth rates, trade. • In competition with an alien race. There are no alliances possible. No Utopia? Mass Effect: Andromeda • positive premise: envisions a faraway future in which humankind searches for a new home in the depths of space. • a promising but flawed world, where arising issues aggravate the struggle for Utopia and demand the continual negotiation between many parties (alien races, ethnicities). • an ergodic struggle for Utopia and an imaginative openness that permeates the gameworld. • ambiguous/hopeful ending, where the future of the Heleus-Cluster remains uncertain, depending on how players treated the individual races. Mass Effect: Andromeda Critical utopia: a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as better than contemporary society but with difficult problems that the described society may or may not be able to solve and which takes a critical view of the utopian genre (Sargent, “Three Faces,” 9). Critical Utopia: Variant I • Predetermined Outcome / imaginative openness / ambiguity Critical Utopia: Variant II • Ergodic and imaginative openness / ambiguity (hopeful, ambiguous, pessimistic outcomes) Classical Dystopia • Pessimistic premise • The prospect of hope lies without the bounds of the gameworld • Ergodic failure to overthrow the dystopian regime • Imaginative hope with the player and in a militant response to dystopia Classical dystopia: a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived (Sargent, “Three Faces,” 9). Critical Dystopia: Variant I • Hope lies within the bounds of the gameworld (utopian enclaves, places of resistance) • Explaining how dystopia came about • Hopeful or ambiguous Endings • Predetermined by the game system Critical Dystopia: a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as worse than contemporary society but that normally includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out the hope that the dystopia can be overcome and replaced with eutopia (Sargent, “U.S. Eutopias,” 222). Critical Dystopia: Variant II • The prospect of Utopia is directly laid into the player’s hands. • But also the failure of attaining it. • Choice of becoming a catalyst of change and transformation • Optimistic, ambiguous, or pessimistic ending. • Ergodic and imaginative openness. Variants of Utopia and Dystopia Negotiating the terrain between the historical antinomies of Utopia and Anti-Utopia Utopia Optimism Classical Utopia Critical Utopia I/II Anti-Utopia Pessimism/Misuse of Utopian Images Critical Dystopia I/II Classical Dystopia Anti-Utopia References • Farca, Gerald. Playing Dystopia: Nightmarish Worlds in Video Games and the Player’s Aesthetic Response. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. • Farca, Gerald, Alexander Lehner, and Victor Navarro-Remesal. “Regenerative Play and the Experience of the Sublime in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference. Copenhagen, 2018. https://gameconference.itu.dk/papers/06%20-%20farca%20et%20al%20%20regenerative%20play.pdf • Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. • Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000. • Levitas, Ruth, and Lucy Sargisson. “Utopia in Dark Times: Optimism/Pessimism and Utopia/Dystopia.” In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, edited by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan 13-27. New York: Routledge, 2003. References • Sargent, Lyman T. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies5, no. 1, (1994): 1-37. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20719246?uid=3737864&uid= 2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21101560295713 • —. Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. • —. “U.S. Eutopias in the 1980s and 1990s: Self-Fashioning in a World of Multiple Identities.” In Utopianism/Literary Utopias and National Culture Identities: A Comparative Perspective, edited by Paola Spinozzi, 221-232. COTEPRA/University of Bologna, 2001. • Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. • Vieira, Fátima. “The Concept of Utopia.” The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, edited by Gregory Claeys, 3-27. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.