On a related note, the game Satisfactory is a sci fi factory building game set on an alien planet, and there’s a big ass spiral galaxy in the night sky. When I saw it I had to stop for a minute and think about the lore implications. Either this is millions of light years from Earth at least, or billions of years in the future.
Either way the fact I’m playing an indentured servant practically owned by a mega corporation hell bent on rapaciously expanding their factories throughout space is fucking bleak.
Now, maybe the artist just put it there because it’s pretty and spacey, but the devs are clearly massive nerds and I would 100% believe that they intended that implication.
I mean I’m into it for the “as much as things change they stay the same” aspect, but I’d rather we rest with solarpunk than cyberpunk.
At the same time, because I’m not familiar with the media, I hope it’s meant to be billions of light years away or a physically impossible universe. Unlikely the galaxy would be able to maintain a spiral being close enough to see dominating the night sky in an average system, since both have huge gravitational fields and frankly galaxy merging is super interesting advanced physics… (no I’m not fun at parties ;) )
Idk. I’m big into sci fi, and big into real science, and most of that is cyberpunk dystopia… and I kinda get it because I’ve met people… people lead you to dystopic thinking. Because people suck.
But man I could see the solarpunk utopia just as easily, yet it doesn’t tend to make a compelling story…? It does but mainstream producers aren’t into it… maybe because they think it’s unlikely and unrelatable… and cyberpunk is likely and relatable… 😔
I really do prefer my hopeful speculative fiction much more these days, this is the one that sticks out the most to me recently: It Could Happen Here | CZM Book Club: The Lost Roads by Sim Kern, as well as the game Terra Nil. There’sa really healing quality to seeing someone else’s imagination of a better world.
Satisfactory is fascinating though. At first I was wondering why it was such a beautiful game. They made a stunning alien world.
Then as I slowly decimated the landscape and covered it in brutalist industrial architecture the message became clear about how the drive towards infinite growth is so destructive. Nobody made me do it, but to advance according to the company’s incentive structure I had to. I try to compactify and grow vertical, and offshore my big structures, and that’s arguably better, but then the vistas are always marred. You can actually use geothermal energy, but in order to get there you need petroleum for plastic for computers, and the byproducts of that basically guarantee you will be fossil fuel dependent by that point, and even then geothermal can’t sustain your whole operation. It’s an incredibly well constructed ludonarrative.
Also you can’t sleep. At all. There’s a bed but you can’t use it, you just work all through every night. I’m pretty sure the company has augmented the character with cybernetics to make them the perfect worker.
Then I saw that galaxy and I was like oh… oh no. We are the universe-eating scourge civ that Fermi was theorising about. We will destroy everything in our path.
Yeah tbh I couldn’t find a better picture, because as we all know internet search has gone to complete shit. Andromeda is 220 thousand lightyears across, so much bigger than MW, that was what I tried to reference in my title
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