This page assumes that you have read the related book. I will provide brief descriptions of each book, but to truly understand the material, I recommend that you read the book first. I will also be treating the reference materials (the video games) as though you have played them, or at least become familiar with the overall plots. In other words, I will not be giving a synopsis of the games mentioned, and will just cut to the meat of the matter, so to speak.

Also, I think it goes without saying that there will be spoilers abound. You have been warned.

1984 is by far the easiest Dystopian Literature for video games to connect to: a world where everyone is watched by an oppressive regime that brainwashes the masses? This book is usually the default thought when someone says "dystopia", along with images of constant surveillance, dehumanization, and brain washing, among other things.

The first game I think of with that description is Half Life 2, obviously. The whole game is set in a mysterious City 17, which you can only guess is somewhere in the Baltics, maybe? Just like Orwell, the names of (most) places have been renamed, except for Nova Prospekt, which I will return to. For now, let's get the easy birds.

First, surveillance is EVERYWHERE in this game; ranging from the simple identity cameras at key junctures in the city, to city scanners, the people of City 17 are always being watched, and if they are found to be problematic, the Combine's Metro Cops will swing by, and probably kill them.

Personally I find the most interesting part of Half Life 2 is the display of dehumanization throughout the story, or how the Combine take away anything that would make life really worth living, such as sex and pleasure. In 1984, Orwell doesn't really spend explicit time on the subject, only letting the reader infer through descriptions and sparse exposition, Orwell tells the reader about the oppression in a very hush-hush manner. Valve follows suit in a way, by only providing details to dehumanization tactics through out-of-cutscene dialogue, background discussion, and decorative items. The biggest one mentioned is the supression of reproduction, which Breen sums up for the player through a discussion of Instinct:

One thing that quote illustrates is that, at least for Dr. Breen, the lust for power is still masked by a sort of "for the people" excuse that O'Brien dismissed in 1984. The interesting thing about this quote though is not necessarily the words, but the circumstances and intonations surrounding the words.

The quote is spoken the first time the player enters City 17 proper, and is displayed via a giant monitor atop an obelisk, a symbol of the ancient sun God's rays. The juxtaposition is fascinating in this moment, Breen speaks about the irrelevance of instinct and superstition, once forces so powerful that they build the tower his face is presented on, in effect he is attempting to destroy what brought him to this position in the first place. Another thing that can be gathered from this speech, when actually listened to, is that the timing is too far off for it to be completely genuine, or even remotely genuine. There are pauses where there shouldn't be, intonations that are misplaced, and the voice drops in ways that are more akin to sadness than to the mood expressed by the words themselves. It becomes clear very quickly that Dr. Breen is being forced to say these words, assumingly by the Advisors, who are the "true" rulers in the game. What is really interesting about this whole situation is that the Advisors speak through Dr. Breen to begin with; they clearly do not care about humans and show it pretty blatantly, so why then do they have the false fascade of Dr. Breen? Because there is another power at hand: G-Man.

G-Man is a staple of the series, and rightly so. Not only is he able to stop time whenever he feels like it, he can appear inside multiple people's minds at the same time, and orchestrate events so vastly beyond a normal human's scale that it is mind boggling. For G-Man, everything is going according to plan. So what is G-Man? There are a lot of different interpretations of the mysterious man, ranging from mega corporation to God. The one I'm going to focus on though is that G-Man stands for Government Man, because the implications are fascinating.

Obviously, if G-Man stands for the government, then it means that the government has a hand in literally everything that happens in the Half Life universe, from the original Black Mesa incident to the Borealis to the Combine takeover. It can then be construed that the government not only stands for something that is literally all powerful, but also something that is ambivalent to the lives of common people, and incredibly, painfully, secretive. Relating this back to 1984, G-Man can be a symbol of the Thought Police: everywhere at once, and only appearing when needed, and to no one else. What is the ultimate goal of G-Man's organization? Power? Money? It can almost be assumed that nothing good.

Another element of 1984 that is rather troubling is the idea of constant war being necessary. Video games like to delve into stuff like this a lot, ranging from the subtle, implied idea of it, like in Skyrim or Team Fortress 2, to the direct discussion of it like in the Metal Gear Series. Going into the series as a whole would require a term paper in of itself because holy shit is it convoluted and intense. One thing that is pretty much constant throughout the series though is that war is not something that Snake, or really any character that is on Snake's side, wants. During Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Snake goes into a talk about the concept and implications of the War Economy. The concept is that the name implies, and in the near-future world that Snake is in, the War Economy is not only in full swing, but impossible to stop, because doing so would cause a massive economic collapse of all the world's superpowers. While not exactly the same reason that Oceania depends on war, they rely on it just as much as the Patriots do.

Stone Butch Blues was an intersting book in this series, because it wasn't a futuristic look at a potential dystopia; it was a real, current, accurate portrayal of the present day, and it is a dystopia. The world that Feinberg shows us isn't an imaginary would-be could-be, it is a true picture of what it is like to be sexually divergent, to be statistically fringe, to be different.

Gone Home came out in August of 2013, and is the kind of game that people question whether or not it even is a game. There's no enemies, there's no time limit, there isn't even a definitive narrative. All you do is walk through your house, on a night when your family is out, and figure out what happened. What you learn is both sad and beautiful.

Your sister is a lesbian. Through tidbits of paper and audio narration from your sister, you learn the story of her falling in love, being shunned by society, being scared about the future, and finally escaping it all. Gone Home isn't dystopian in that it tells you what can happen if we follow our current path, it tells us what has already happened to those who follow a different path. Gone Home gives a glimpse into the counter culture of new age feminism, of the lesbian culture, and even of the gay scene before the 80s, through a story about the previous owner of the home. It shows how love can come in all these different forms, and that we only choose the ones that we think are right, even if those aren't the most genuine, as we learn about the protagonist's mother.

True, Gone Home is not nearly as ruthless or heart wrenching as Stone Butch Blues, but it is product of the time. Stone Butch Blues was written before the gay rights movement really started to flourish, or at least flourish as much as it has in current times. Gone Home was created at the height of that flourish, when states were accepting gay marriage, and culture was embracing it. Gone Home reminded us that things were not always like this, that there are still a lot of people out there who cannot express who they truly are, without losing their Home.

Initially this one seems a bit tricky: how many video games are there about being a teenager in LA with fuck-tons of money and seemingly no moral code? Well, actually, a lot. There are a lot of games where the player doesn't really care about the consequences, or really anything. That seems a bit shallow though and if I've learned anything about Less Than Zero it is that the characters are not shallow, they just have a different moral code. So picking a game that reflects that depth and interest is something that I would like to do. What kind of game though is set in LA, involves boatloads of money, and treats morality and compassion in a complex manner while at the same time making a commentary/exposition of the LA culture?

Grand Theft Auto 5 was the most expensive game ever produced at about $300 million dollars, as well as the most grossing game, earning $1 billion dollars in less than a week. What better game could there be to talk about high-money culture? What I like the most about Grand Theft Auto 5 isn't that it has a tongue-in-cheek method to portraying the LA culture, but has actual, serious, discussion about not only the culture itself, but the environment that allows such a culture to exist.

So, how exactly is Less Than Zero a dystopia? Well, the detachment shown by the characters to the rest of the world is part of the dystopian setting and discussion, but the more interesting dystopian element is not really mentioned in the book at all: the environment of classism and capitalism that allows such people to exist. As anyone who has followed politics can tell you, America has a huge disparity in wealth, and for those of you who do not believe me, type in "disparity" into Google and the first suggestion is related to wealth.

Grand Theft Auto 5 makes some comments on this, namely through having most of the "villians" be wealthy white guys. Most of the discussion (or implied discussion) comes from the initial settings for the game, and the environment itself. GTA 5 is one of those games that speaks about the world the player inhabits not through heavy exposition, but through suggestion and subtlety, exactly like Less Than Zero. For instance, why were Michael and Trevor pulling heists to begin with? Why is Franklin with that shitty car salesman at the start? Because the only way to make it in the world is to do what they do, Michael doesn't do heists just because he thinks it's fun, he does it because he is forced to.

Just like the characters from Less Than Zero, our intrepid trio is far from the initial moral judgements of over-protective moms; Franklin has a moral code that is far superior to most anyone I've ever met, asnd while Trevor is a deranged psychopath, he has borders that he refuses to cross, as well as seemingly random bouts of moral rigidity. While Michael can be a heartless killer, and a shrewd liar, he recognizes his faults, and spends most of the game trying to tackle them; if you ever went to therapist in the game, you know how conflicted and troubled Michael is about his life as a whole. These are not shallow, one dimensional characters, they just have a tougher surface to crack.

Now the question is, how is Grand Theft Auto 5 dystopian? Well, it's a look at what would happen if everyone in LA acted like the high-class of LA. It's a look at how people would act if there was little to no repurcussions for killing people, or if it were actually that easy to steal from the Federal Reserve. It's a look at the image-driven society that says it's okay for a girl to fuck someone on live TV for the publicity, how people can fake interest for the sake of money, or how someone can kill a whole croud of people and immediately call his wife like nothing happened.

Fight Club isn't about beating the shit out of each other and being redundant about rules that are meant to be broken; it's about the inevitability of dystopia. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? No matter what you do, someone, somewhere, is going to think it is a dystopia. You can fight it all you want, and prevent a dystopia happening for that person, but then someone else somewhere else is going to that that new system is a dystopia. Fight Club is all about fighting the system, right? Because the system is a fucking dystopia, where everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. So then what happens when you take that too far, when you want to fight the system too much, and it turns into trying to blow up a building in order to crush a museum? What the fuck then, right? Are we just making a new type of shit hole for someone else to make a Fight Club against? So what games take shit too far? Or not far enough? What games, when you play them, make you think you're helping out the world, when really you're fucking it all up?

Assassin's Creed 2 follows this kind of mentality to the nose. It starts out innocuously enough: you just beat up a bunch of dudes (and then throw them in the river to drown if you're sadistic like I am) and then go back to your girlfriend's place and hook up. Once your family gets killed though you start to get a purpose: revenge. You start by just trying to figure out who it was, but once you learn that just about every politician and his mother is part of this larger oganization, holy shit do you need to step up your game.

So you start killing. You kill corrupt politicians, you kill guys who give you sass, you kill anyone who even seems like they are a part of this larger problem, even the fucking Pope. You know what though? You always say "rest in peace" when you kill them, or at least you do when it is someone important, so that makes up for it, right? Right. Continue on with Ezio through later games and experience the joy of Ezio killing waves of people, blowing up entire fucking ships, towers, and starting an entire cult behind his cause, all in the name of justice.

Is it really justice though? Eventually the player learns how the whole "killing everyone" thing was super helpful for a race of I don't even know whats that are trying to enslave the entire human species. So that's cool? Ezio's crusade might have accidentally enslaved the entire world. Even if the whole alien thing wasn't a deal, what was Ezio expecting to have happen whenever he killed the head of a city, or the Pope? Was he going to install some new guy that no one knew? If he was, he would literally just be conquering Italy and installing a new regime which most people wouldn't be okay with. So no to that, Ezio.

Maybe he would just let the people vote for someone new? Well what if they voted for another guy from that same organization? Or someone Ezio thought was "unjust"? Would he just kill them too? Who the fuck is Ezio even fighting for anymore? He kills the guy that kills his family pretty early on, so is he just making sure that no one else fucks with him again? I don't think so. Ezio wants something specific, and, chances are, everyone is going to hate it.

Superheroes. This seems like a pretty easy subject to find video games about, but hold on. It needs to be a game that doesn't just have superheroes fighting a bad guy, it has to have heroes who are hated by their people, superheroes who fight one of their own, and superheroes who are powerless. That is a little bit harder to find.

The reason this one is so tricky is that there are lots of games that fit some of these, but not all of them at the same time. There are a lot of games where the player is hated by the people they are trying to help, such as Batman: Arkam City, but Batman is just fighting bad guys the whole time. There are games where one of your own turns on you, like in Mother 3, but again the characters are mainly fighting a known and clear evil, nor are they hated by the general populace. There are too many games to count that include heroes who are powerless, but none of them really match up to the rest of the criteria to match it up with Watchmen. All but maybe (maybe) one: Spec Ops: The Line.

Spec Ops is really more of a video game adaptation of Heart of Darkness, but it can fit really nicely into Watchmen as well, if you decide to take a more psychological approach to the criteria I listed above. Think about it: the player is fighting their own and imagining them as bad guys, you are CLEARLY hated by those you are trying to protect, you fight yourself, and you are definitely powerless throughout the entire story. The only fallback is that there are no true superheroes in this game, or I should say no beings who posess a power above normal humans.

In terms of dystopian ideas, Spec Ops is really a massive anti-war game, which is interesting considering how it doesn't really illustrate it until the very end of the experience. The reason it does it that is, in my opinion, two fold: first there is the idea that having it hit at the end leaves the rest of the game open for generic shooter and war-hyping type stuff like blowing up an entire skyscraper, along with the idea that it puts the gamer into a Call of Duty mentality of shoot first ask questions later. The interesting thing about that second point is that Spec Ops takes a viewpoint on gaming that I take as well: making games just for entertainment is a bad idea. Why? Because it propagates mindsets that are most easily seen in Call of Duty and Halo's multiplayer scene: narrowmindedness.

If, and ultimately when, I recommend this game to people, I tell them to go in blind; don't look anything up about it, don't look at the achievements, just hit play. Why? The game is an incredibly personal experience, where you are guilt tripped for making decisions that in other games would not get a passing thought. This game takes every other generic shooter and asks "what would happen if you actually did this, in a real zone of conflict?" It takes a realistic view on the glitter and glam of war-games. It does to video games what Watchmen does to Superhero Comics, and holy shit do I love it.

Just like Watchmen as well, Spec Ops takes a good hard look at the real world's politics as well. First off, it's set in Dubai, which does two things: brings in the discussion about current activities and mentalities about the Middle East, but also puts in an extra commentary on ultra-capitalism. Although never directly addressed in the game, the whole premise behind the conflict drives home the idea that even having immense wealth can't really help you in the long run: a super wealthy, incredibly powerful, city, succumbs to sand. Nothing else, just sand. A similar ring to how Dr. Manhattan, a being who was viewed as a God, still could not prevent a nuclear destruction.

An interesting discussion of this game comes from Extra Credits, who take a bit more of a game design perspective (as well as PTSD viewpoint) on the game, which I highly recommend watching.

Originally this one was going to be about fighting games like Mortal Kombat, and how the characters were desensitized to the fighting they were participating in, just like Alex was, but I feel like that would simplify the book down too much, and also, I wanted to take this as a chance to make a sort of segue to talk about a very problematic ethical issue in gaming.

In A Clockwork Orange, Alex is not only desensitized to murder and violence, but also to rape. In fact for all three of these he is actually more attracted to them than anything. Games are oft accused of having similar traits: Grand Theft Auto is basically all about killing and fucking shit up, all while singing along with your favorite radio station. One thing that games never, ever, touch lightly is the idea of rape. Last year, Hotline Miami 2 got into a lot of shit for treating a rape scene casually, and any games that does so and has the guts to actually publish it won't get much positive attention. It's strange how we have this sort of weird double standard concerning the portrayal of lawbreaking in games.

What is even weirder is what happens when we try to justify the actions of video games. Namely, it comes down to an issue called the Gamer's Dilemma, which states that any argument that can be made to justify virtual murder can also be used to justify virtual pedophilia, which, if rape alone is bad, you can easily assume how the industry would respond to a lighthearted portrayal of pedophilia. As a side note it is worth mentioning that all of the actions that happen in A Clockwork Orange have happened in some video game or another. Lots of games have done the violence thing, games will sometimes use rape as a motivator for the main character (usually the rape is only implied however) and there are rare instances, such as in LA Noire, where pedophilia is directly discussed. However, the only one of these three that is ever treated as lighthearted is violence. Why?

Because we inhabit a world created for people like Alex, people who love the idea of violence, who revere the violent. As Spec Ops points out, video games idolize the violent, because society idolizes the violent. We love war, we love that scene in Apocalypse Now where the helicopters are destroying villages to the tune of Flight of the Valkyries, to the point where the two are almost synonymous with each other. Who else thought of destruction and death when listening to classical music? Alex.

Alex isn't an outlier case in his future dystopia, he is a reflection of our current mentality. Some of the best selling video games are those that have this kind of kiddie, ridiculous air to them, a kind of air that dimishes the whole idea of murder. Why do you think Grand Theft Auto 5 sold so well? It wasn't because of all the stuff I mentioned up there, it's because it made it fucking fun to gun down wave after wave of police officers or thugs or civilians. Video games are where we get to live like Alex.

This category is mainly for games that either have non conventional dystopias displayed, or discuss them in a manner that is fresh and interesting. Mainly, these are games that I want to rant about and am giving myself an excuse to do so. Ready or not, here I come.

First off, is one of if not my all time favorite game: Journey. If you have not played this game, I strongly recommend that you play it, because it gets to people. What I mean by that is that it strikes something in people that I have rarely ever seen a video game do, and brings about vivid meaning through incredibly little. How little? This game has no dialogue, and the only text is at the very end: listing your companions. That's right, this is a multiplayer game too. However, there is no voice chat, nor is there a way to tell who you are playing with. The only communication done in the game is through these sort of chirping sounds. The rest of the game's meaning is brought through the music, dialogue, and gameplay.

So how is this game dystopian? Well, the surface level (har har) history of the race of.. whatever used to be there, which I will refer to as the Elders, is incredibly dystopian: Elders discover scarf power, which grants them rapid growth both economically and mentally, growth turns into overgrowth, which turns into greed, and finally, war. This war is what inevitably wipes out the Elders, along with most of the scarves. It is painfully easy to connect this to the real world through oil and natural gas.

What I find more interesting than that though is the commentary through gameplay that Journey makes on the gaming community. When Journey came out, people were shocked to find out that the multiplayer element of the game had players not only playing nice, but even being incredibly attached to their companions, to the point of following them off of cliffs and showing genuine excitement at finding their partner again. I can tell you from personal experience that the compassion shown in this game is remarkably deep, and it is all done without any dialogue. In fact, that may be the whole reason why it works in the first place, and also why this effect in the game is a commentary on the community as a whole. What do I mean? Well, if it is true that the only reason there is so much compassion is because there is not tangible (understandable) communication between companions, then it stands to reason that communication actually destroys compassion in the gaming community. Anyone who has played Halo or Call of Duty knows what I mean when I say that some people just shouldn't be talking in game. Journey beautifully brings some of those same people and not only quiets their anger and hostility, but actually refocuses that energy into dialogue and compassion.

Watch_Dogs is quite a shift from Journey's peaceful wandering, but is painfully dystopian as well. Set in a near-future Chicago in which everything is controlled through one operating system called CtOS, protagonist Aiden Pierce hacks into everyone and everything in a very obvious Grand Theft Auto gameplay ripoff.

I'm not gonna lie, this game does not have a lot going for it beyond the hacking ability, but my god is the hacking nice. You can tap into just about everything, from setting off car alarms to watching people from security cameras to raising and lowering bridges, this game is terrifying. This one is fairly obvious in the message: do not put everything on the same network, because is someone hacks into it then they get literally everything the city has. Everything. However, Ubisoft did more than just make Watch_Dogs, they promoted by showing how the game is already kind of true, through things such as assessing your Facebook profile to figure out if you would be a viable target, to mapping not only the entirety of real Chicago's streets by accessing Instagram, to showing a lot of Chicago's infrasctructure such as traffic lights in real time. Holy shit.

I could have put Watch_Dogs under 1984, but I felt like it went beyond just observation, because in-game you can hack into other systems as well, such as bridges, cranes, and transformers, which brings in a whole new element to the discussion: assassination. Countless times in game you can murder someone from literally blocks away by hacking into a security camera, and then using the view from that camera to hack into a transformer that someone has decided to lean up against, or hack into a crane and drop a shipping crate onto someone. Imagine how dangerous a world like that would be, where someone with a little bit of tech know-how could destroy all kinds of things, and bring mass mayhem. Oh, did I mention that there is a hack that can cause a city-wide blackout? One guy could literally affect the entire city.