Computer games are often seen as a means to escape reality. But every so often, they come uncomfortably close to modeling reality.
Take Bioshock. In this game, the player explores in a glorious underwater metropolis… A metropolis founded by a billionaire who follows a version of Ayn Rand’s positivist philosophy. Fiction? As I walk around in that underwater city, now on the brink as its society collapsed due to extreme poverty, drug use, reckless medical experiments and worse, and as I listen to the rants of its founder, Andrew Ryan (a name that is an obvious play on Ayn Rand’s) I cannot escape the eerie sensation that I am listening to an alter ego of Elon Musk. While Ryan offers his “plasmids” for gene manipulation as he rants about the “parasites” (basically, anyone who needs any help from someone else), there’s Musk playing around the virtual metropolis of Twitter, now his personal playground, peddling his dogecoin (even swapping out Twitter’s logo for that stupid dog symbol) and labeling NPR as “state-affiliated media”.
And then there’s this classic text game, now nearly forty years old, from the legendary Infocom: A Mind Forever Voyaging. What an incredible experience it was to play that game, playing as an AI (!) protagonist, exploring simulations of a city ever further into the future, trying to find the causes of societal collapse. I read words like, “There is a factory on the eastern corner, and on the northern corner a boarded-up soup kitchen. To the west is a vacant lot, and south of here are some dilapidated apartments. The smell of stale urine wafts from a stairway leading down to a gloomy Tube station,” and suddenly I am reminded of very real images of present-day streets of San Francisco full of homeless tents, or the ever rising number of beggars at major intersections or downtown streets even here in shiny Ottawa. Please, folks, AMFV was supposed to be fiction, a cautionary tale, not a manual.
Homeless in San Francisco (2021)
Of course the Elon Musks of the world have a point: having grown up in a country with a communist regime, I know it only too well. But those who warn about the rising income and wealth gap, the vanishing of affordable housing must also be heard. Their concerns are real and pressing.
Perhaps, like Captain Kirk in the famous Star Trek episode, The Enemy Within, our societies also need both: a little bit of statist communism and a little bit of corporatist fascism to stay healthy, open, welcoming and, ultimately, stable and democratic?