Why Videogames Tend Towards Post-Apocalyptic

I’ve set a reasonably modest goal for myself of writing 10 blog posts in April. Let’s see if I can get back on this bike (since I really miss it). This is post number 3. On Wednesday night I had the honor of presenting some very cool work as part of Columbia University's Digital Storytelling Lab's Digital Dozen event. One of the pieces I presented was the video game What Remains of Edith Finch, which tells the story of a 17-year-old girl who returns to an inherited home and finds out the stories of her dead family. In preparing to present I was reminded of a super interesting article by writer, game designer, professor, and all around smart guy Ian Bogost about Edith Finch and the general art of videogames and their obsession with out-filming film. The whole article is worth a read, but the bit about why first person shooters tend towards the post-apocalyptic is my favorite nugget:

In retrospect, it’s easy easy to blame old games like Doom and Duke Nukem for stimulating the fantasy of male adolescent power. But that choice was made less deliberately at the time. Real-time 3-D worlds are harder to create than it seems, especially on the relatively low-powered computers that first ran games like Doom in the early 1990s. It helped to empty them out as much as possible, with surfaces detailed by simple textures and objects kept to a minimum. In other words, the first 3-D games were designed to be empty so that they would run. An empty space is most easily interpreted as one in which something went terribly wrong. Add a few monsters that a powerful player-dude can vanquish, and the first-person shooter is born. The lone, soldier-hero against the Nazis, or the hell spawn, or the aliens.

A perfect case of the medium being the message. -- PS - If you're receiving this as an email and wondering why everything is looking so much fancier, I moved it over to MailChimp. If you're not already subscribed, you can sign up here.