While I don’t have as much time for gaming these days, I have been making a little bit of time for the PlayStation, and taking advantages of some special deals that are currently available. While this means that I sometimes play games that are not exactly current, it does mean that I get the chance to play high quality games at pretty reasonable prices, too. Most recently, I’ve been playing The Outer Limits. Anyone familiar with my politics will possibly understand why I was drawn to this game – as well as being an action RPG and first person shooter in the order of Fallout 3 and 4, the game itself supposedly has an explicit anti-capitalist focus. After all, in how many other games do you get to organise – or break – a worker’s strike?
There’s nothing that’s particularly new in The Outer Limits – at least at first glance. You’re awoken from cryosleep by a crazy scientist/ criminal type, who promptly sends you on a mission to the first planet – Terra 2. Upon landing there, your contact has had an unfortunate encounter with your landing pod, leaving you essentially free to roam the countryside, on the way to the first town. There’s the usual smattering of marauders roaming the countryside, and ever-hungry local wildlife, too, but it’s not until you reach the first human contact that The Outer Limits departs from a well-trodden – but still good – script.
The inhabitants eke out a miserable existence canning fish for a subsidiary of one of the large companies that the ‘bad guys’ in the game. Through interacting them, you learn just how far under the boot heel of corporatism they’ve been crushed – for example, many of the interactions are about the ridiculous working conditions, the lack of rights, the omnipresent and invasive surveillance and the requirements for self-reporting about anything and everything. More subtly (although even then, it’s not particularly subtle – the game adopters more of a hammer than a scalpel to some of its messages) there are also workers who will sing the praises of the particular boots they are forced to lick, even as they are being crushed under it. I liked this aspect – it showed the inability of some of the workers to conceive of an existence beyond their corporate masters and mistresses.
And so it goes on throughout the game. Later on, you meet those who dare to challenge this corporate hegemony, and the cost that the independence has exacted upon them, in the form of a free space station, and even later, a planet abandoned by its corporate masters.
The Outer Limits is, of course, a parody. In the vein of cyberpunk fiction before it, it takes the pervasive influence of capitalism and especially corporatism and pushes it too far, stretching it beyond what might be seen as reality. This makes it seem comic, but also impossible, which is perhaps not so bad. It is a game, after all. What the game fails to provide, however, is much of a solution: or rather, the only solution is through violent means. Of course, that’s the nature of the game, and the genre – but it does raise the question: what might a game be like that truly called for revolution?