Feature
Dystopian Video Games and Human Nature
Games have never been more varied, yet a striking share of them are set in worlds that went wrong. The reasons say less about the games than about the people playing them.
There has never been more choice in games. Platforms, genres and niche markets keep multiplying, and players can find almost anything they want. Yet a large share of that market is taken by one kind of setting: the dystopia. The literary form goes back at least to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in 1726. In games, it has grown explosively in recent years.
What counts as a dystopia
“Dystopia” has many workable definitions. The useful one here is narrow: a community, world or state where something is fundamentally wrong, frightening or oppressive, and where that wrong can be resisted. Hope and the possibility of action separate a dystopia from simple disaster. Books, films and television use the form constantly (Ready Player One, The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead), and games hold their own in that company.
The range is wide. BioShock offers a city that seems to have no morals left, where science and humanity turn on each other. Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light drive the survivors underground, away from radiation and mutants. Presentable Liberty traps the player in isolation after a virus and its cure, sold for profit, have wiped out humanity. We Happy Few shows a retro-futurist society drugging itself to escape its own guilt. Horizon Zero Dawn fits as well: its people live in the remains of a far more advanced world, surrounded by machines left by vanished masters, with no understanding of how any of it works.
Why playing it is different
Games are more interactive than books or films, and that makes the dystopia more interesting in this medium. The player does not watch a ruined world from a distance. They take part in it, whether the threat is zombies, a corrupt government or machines that have erased humanity. The world can be explored and then, crucially, changed.
The appeal runs deep. These games exercise parts of the mind that daily life rarely uses. They show sides of human nature people would rather not think about, and they can provoke grief or anger because the fiction feels plausible. Some share Thomas Hobbes’s bleak view: without civilisation there is no real cooperation, only a war of all against all with survival as the prize. The Fallout series puts that idea on the map. In Hobbes’s account, society brings a loss of innocence along with the ideas of right and wrong, justice and injustice. Dystopian societies twist those ideas, so the player’s own values come under attack.
Survival without consequences
Nearly every dystopian game is about survival. It lets players act on a basic instinct without real danger. Survival skills come from conditioning, social, parental or otherwise, and these games put players in uncomfortable situations where those skills get sharpened against mutants and tyrants alike.
Two theories for the boom
The first theory is about agency. Dystopian worlds suggest that real change can begin with one person. When choices shape the story and the world, the hours spent playing feel purposeful. Everyone has heard the shrug, “What can I do? I’m just one person.” Many dystopian games reject that helplessness outright and turn a weak will into one that says action is possible and necessary.
The second theory is about recognition. People link a fictional dystopian future to the society, politics and economics of the present, and can trace plausible routes from one to the other. The last century supplied plenty of war, destruction, fear and conspiracy. That history has trained audiences to meet these scenarios with understanding rather than shock. Games use that readiness: they can open with an idyll and tear it away before the player has settled. The Last of Us does exactly that in its first minutes.
If players can connect the state of the real world to the dark worlds they enjoy, then fixing those digital worlds becomes a kind of rehearsal. Survival and resistance are absorbed as tools through experience. Look closely, and often not very far below the surface, and the scenarios in these games are not so far-fetched.
What the popularity says about us
So what does the boom say about human nature? Perhaps people are drawn to death and destruction and want new ways to engage with them without lasting harm. Perhaps uneventful lives keep inventing settings where an ordinary person can become a hero.
Or perhaps it is the obstacle that matters: helplessness. A dystopia puts helplessness in front of the player, and the game is mostly about refusing it.