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I like to apply thoughts like this to gaming, so maybe you will to. Basically, it boils down into 'how shitty is this world we're playing in?'. Obviously I have my biases, since I can't look at something without imagining how it will end. Your mileage may vary.
In the 80's, we had a lot of dystopic fiction. I want to point at Neuromancer, Blade Runner, and shit, but it was based in 'greed is good' and something about corporations, ect, et al. This carried into the early 90's, as well. It was about as ubiquitous as the assumption that the Japanese were going to rule to world. If you look around, clearly we're surrounded by mile-high buildings as far as the eye can see and lots the size of small cities full of nothing but slowly blinking high-tower lights and belching smokestacks.
I think in the late 90's, maybe 98' or so, I remember reading an article in Wired about how we were swiftly approaching a critical mass of wealth where the entire first world would be wealthy and happy, with health care and shit, and it was going to be totally rad. If you like, you can place your positive feelings about the approaching 'singularity' in this box, here.
Not to burst anyones bubble, but neither of these things are going to come to pass precisely in this way. Gibson, when asked if his Sprawl Trilogy could be considered dystopian, answered that he never considered it to be so. Neuromancer was written starting off in a slum the likes of which exist today, and if you feel like calling the world as it is dystopian feel free (you have plenty to back you up), but technology and themes aside, it's not largely different then the divide we see today. There are still suburbs and country, and cities where people live and work. Gibson's characters exist and act in some of the weirdest of most extreme-in-one-direction places in the world, so that colors the appearance of the fiction.
On the other hand, that world is still pretty fucked up. There's miles of poison landscape near the 'Sprawl' which is basically a thousand miles of New Jersey stereotype with monstrous cities to break up the monotony. Not really a healthy ecosystem. The line between rich and poor continues to grow as well. In general, you might consider that a downward slide from what we ended up with. Still, on the other hand, space Rhastas. That's pretty neat.
Players tend to walk in to a game with a subconscious assumption about how the game world works, and it's usually fine to let that roll. If you're running the game, you've got one too. For something like World of Darkness or any cyber-punk game where ambiance is important, it might be worth thinking about how decent a place the world is, though. What's the economic divide like? How rampant is corruption? It's going to differ from place to place, but a wealthy place is always nicer then a poor place, even if they're both pretty corrupt.
I ran into a conversation about the singularity on RPG.net, and frankly I don't really buy a point where we hit it and suddenly everything is awesome. I mean, it's post-scarcity, but that's assuming global post-scarcity. Fuck, a bunch of people don't even have water and we could fix that and we don't because we have to dip into our own wealth to do it. That's the kind of place we live in.
In the 80's, we had a lot of dystopic fiction. I want to point at Neuromancer, Blade Runner, and shit, but it was based in 'greed is good' and something about corporations, ect, et al. This carried into the early 90's, as well. It was about as ubiquitous as the assumption that the Japanese were going to rule to world. If you look around, clearly we're surrounded by mile-high buildings as far as the eye can see and lots the size of small cities full of nothing but slowly blinking high-tower lights and belching smokestacks.
I think in the late 90's, maybe 98' or so, I remember reading an article in Wired about how we were swiftly approaching a critical mass of wealth where the entire first world would be wealthy and happy, with health care and shit, and it was going to be totally rad. If you like, you can place your positive feelings about the approaching 'singularity' in this box, here.
Not to burst anyones bubble, but neither of these things are going to come to pass precisely in this way. Gibson, when asked if his Sprawl Trilogy could be considered dystopian, answered that he never considered it to be so. Neuromancer was written starting off in a slum the likes of which exist today, and if you feel like calling the world as it is dystopian feel free (you have plenty to back you up), but technology and themes aside, it's not largely different then the divide we see today. There are still suburbs and country, and cities where people live and work. Gibson's characters exist and act in some of the weirdest of most extreme-in-one-direction places in the world, so that colors the appearance of the fiction.
On the other hand, that world is still pretty fucked up. There's miles of poison landscape near the 'Sprawl' which is basically a thousand miles of New Jersey stereotype with monstrous cities to break up the monotony. Not really a healthy ecosystem. The line between rich and poor continues to grow as well. In general, you might consider that a downward slide from what we ended up with. Still, on the other hand, space Rhastas. That's pretty neat.
Players tend to walk in to a game with a subconscious assumption about how the game world works, and it's usually fine to let that roll. If you're running the game, you've got one too. For something like World of Darkness or any cyber-punk game where ambiance is important, it might be worth thinking about how decent a place the world is, though. What's the economic divide like? How rampant is corruption? It's going to differ from place to place, but a wealthy place is always nicer then a poor place, even if they're both pretty corrupt.
I ran into a conversation about the singularity on RPG.net, and frankly I don't really buy a point where we hit it and suddenly everything is awesome. I mean, it's post-scarcity, but that's assuming global post-scarcity. Fuck, a bunch of people don't even have water and we could fix that and we don't because we have to dip into our own wealth to do it. That's the kind of place we live in.
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