MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America, Takuyaki Tatsumi describes the futuristic city in science fiction and cinema as a space that borrows heavily from present-day Asian cities to create vertical constructs in which high-tech services, condos, and upper-class inhabitants cohabitate with grease, damp alleys, illegal technology and substance abuse. Many video games indeed also represent the futuristic city following this trend, and, in doing so, they recreate and expand existing economic and social systems, exacerbating the technological centric elements of such dystopian visions of the future. If Paul Virilio in Speed and Politics claims that cities during the 19th and 20th centuries were built to facilitate the efficient management of the subjects of any given political and economic system to guarantee its own perpetuity, then the Asian-inspired vision of the future expands on this by making the city the absolute enforcer of systems that dystopian texts represent: one in which vertical space separates the rich from the poor, the legal technology users from the hackers and drug dealers, and the pristine from the dirty. There is, however, a second form of reproducing dystopian futures; one in which the current social system, as well as its cities, does not keep gargantuanly growing, but instead breaks down while humanity goes back to its roots. These roots are, for many games such as the Fallout saga, Wasteland 1 & 2 and to some extent, Mad Max, a return to a re-imagined American West where wastelands and a new frontier are populated by gunslingers, radiation, and lawlessness (but never by horses). This paper will study the dystopian reinterpretations of the West in video games to highlight the specific ways video games borrow tropes from more traditional forms of the Western while implementing other features that are specific to games.