How sci-fi game worlds take on capitalist promises of success

Since 1984’s Elite, and in sci-fi before it, space has promised careers of freedom. Work for yourself, work only when you want to, make your own adventures. For better and for ill, space is sci-fi’s wild west, a lawless frontier to explore and find independence. Our actual future isn’t as glamorous, even if those frontier promises are the same ones made by the gig economy. Endless startups, sites and apps have promised our generation that we’ll never need to work a job we don’t want to. We’re all gonna be renaissance people working freelance — driving people around, writing editorials, getting our illustrations in magazines, and making music for wealthy patrons.

They don’t tell you that freelancing is mostly tedium. There’s a lot of secretarial work, and complicated taxes. And all for a few extra bucks of spending money. And for my money (the few extra bucks of it I’ve made), it’s unsurprising that our games are reflecting our new existence back at us. Some, capture the grind perfectly, like alien sci-fi worlds Desert Child and Diaries Of A Spaceport Janitor. Those dreams of freedom we fell for shown, instead, as the reality of being a cog in the capitalist machine, and how it jars compared the glory that was originally promised.

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