Culture Clash

(July 2008)

Endgame

Enjoying the apocalypse

The end of the world is going to suck.

And it's coming. Whatever the cause – errant asteroid, pandemic, nuclear war, religious housecleaning, George W. Bush, or defeat in the inevitable armed conflict with the undead, the world is going to end. And there will, at least briefly, be survivors.

Who will be totally miserable. Forget romantic notions of a ragged band of freedom fighters eking out existence as they battle the forces of evil against a backdrop of ruined cities and blasted landscapes, finding love and purpose and redemption and hope amongst the shattered remnants of a civilization they will ultimately rebuild and improve. Those survivors are going to wish they were dead. They will be cold. They will be filthy. They will be hungry. They will have crippling injuries and radiation sickness and scurvy and botulism and insufficient firepower and no television and frostbite and lice and nightmares and holes in their socks. The apocalypse won't wake the best in them, won't turn florists and waitresses into heroes. It'll just be the preamble to the rest of their short-ass miserable lives, and they'll die shivering and alone and the Earth will become a barren and desolate rock in a boundless universe and no one will ever know we existed at all.

The end of the world is going to suck.

And yet we seek it out, hungrily devouring stories about humanity's final days. Film and literature have plenty of offerings, but for sheer largesse of apocalyptic entertainment options, you can't beat videogames. Fallout and Wasteland just scrape the surface. From bombed-out ruins to plague-infested streets, from power-mad warlocks to alien-induced extinction, games offer a smorgasbord of baneful fates for humanity. But in nearly all of them, postapocalyptic life seems kinda cool, an exciting adventure where people who lived dreary, humdrum lives in The Before suddenly matter and are part of something. False advertising!

Why? Because the end of the world is going to suck. Stop for a minute and consider the reality of living in Half Life 2. Sure, fighting the Combine is exhilarating, and you get the sense that you're struggling for a better world than the one the Combine destroyed. Plus there's the chance that Gordon Freeman scores a girlfriend (difficult for physicists) before it's all over. Peel the layers, though: When do you think Alyx Vance last washed her hair? And Gordon hasn't eaten, bathed or slept for at least four days, and his hazard suit can probably walk around on its own by now. There's nothing sexy about it. There are basically two ways you can think about Half Life 2:

1. Wow, if aliens invaded and I joined a resistance, it'd kick ass and Alyx would like me.
   
2. Wow, if aliens invaded and I joined a resistance, I'd be captured by Combine Overwatch and tortured and tortured and tortured and then my mutilated husk would be turned into a Stalker drone, so I could mindlessly serve my alien masters forever, my only memory the torment I suffered at their hands.

Option 1 is more fun to play, but don't think Option 2 hasn't been tried. 1994's Robinson's Requiem went for the realism of being stuck in a dangerous environment with little protection. But Robinson's Requiem was like playing a tax audit or a hangover or Hellgate London; it was miserable. You realized this around the time you twisted an ankle and had to amputate your own leg.

So we know why postapocalyptic games have that keep-smilin' patina over them; that's not tough to figure out. What's tough is… the end of the world is going to suck. Why would we want to simulate it ahead of time, patina or no? Is it the same thing that drives us to horror games – a chance to experience doom under controlled conditions? Unlike most horror, postapocalyptic titles by nature deliver the end of all things , not just the end of a handful of teenagers. But the gulf between those two, so vast, doesn't seem to upset us.

Some might argue that we seek out apocalyptic games and literature because we are insecure, we are irrelevant and insignificant on our own bustling world, let alone the vast indifferent cosmos. If this is the case, surviving the apocalypse is an automatic trip to the cool kids' table. The very act of survival marks you as special, because let's face it, right now people are as common as dirt, and very few of them are special. Plus there's a sense that struggling through the hardships of that time would mean more than today's tedious, meaningless existences – no more get up, shower, go to work, return, play with kids, sleep, repeat. Your days would be unpleasant, but they'd have variety.

This is an interesting thing about videogames in general. Many, maybe the majority, are not about cheery things: from war to survival horror, they explore unpleasantries, up close and often cruelly personal. A lot of literature is this way; we tend to revel in experiences as entertainment that we'd never seek out in the real world. There is, perhaps, a bit of an apocalyptic sensibility in all of us, that we find refuge in Armageddon Empires rather than stories about happiness and fulfillment. Some of the best games feature apocalyptic overtones. The setting has enough potential that designers can explore all kinds of nuances, and the opportunity to live life as one of those grubby survivors is, for whatever reason, appealing to us.

The Mayan people believed the world would end in 2012. That means we don't have much time left. What games – apocalyptic and otherwise – do is allow us to sample the highlights of other lives and experiences without the dull in-between parts, or the painful stuff we'd rather miss. Going to a movie or playing a game about the end of the world doesn't prepare us for it, it just allows us a taste of what's to come.