The end of the world

 Stark and stunning.

Is there any more comforting a thought than 'soon this will all be over'? Someday the great weight of pressure crushing against your chest will finally cave in and from there- total, blissful oblivion? That the great spoke that grinds through the people of this world cannot churn forever, and one day it's gears will rust and the machine will crumble. The stars will collapse. The land will burn. One day it will all be quiet. Do you see the peace in that? I do. I always have. Which might be why the prospect of the apocalypse in media sings so harmoniously with my soul. Whenever I get asked about what fictional world I may theoretically wish to disappear within one day, I invariably go to the the worlds either set in the fictional past or the dystopian future- which had made me something of a connoisseur of dystopias over the years. As such, I want to observe some of these 'worst case scenario' end-of-the-world circumstances here today.

Now the most obvious 'Apocalypse' I can think of is that of a totally destroyed earth, baptised in chemical or nuclear flame- scrubbed clean of the typical make-up to sustain sentient life. Thus is the background for many of the most popular dystopias: Fallout, Wasteland and Metro; and each one brings their only little special something to the mythos of the 'scorched earth scenario' or what would come after. I think the most vanilla out of the titles I'm largely familiar with is Wasteland; a typically lawless desert of sands and blown out old cities largely populated by themed post-world bandits but occasionally home to monstrously overgrown rodents and bugs too. The most unique aspect of Wasteland would probably be it's relationship with robotics, as the post world seems to be dripping in mechanical men, giant robot weapons platforms and tiny dancing disco-bots that all have a penchant for murdering lawmen. (And the players of Wasteland are, usually, Lawmen.)

Metro would be a more realistic spin on the idea of a holocaust, dragging society underground and prioritising limiting skin exposure to the outside pockets of radioactive death. But at the same time Metro leans into the grotesque radiation monsters that came out of the otherside of the nuclear fires, and from them is bred the dramatic thriller side of the Metro formula, as well as some degree of the general moral pathos when you get further down the line. (Somewhat similar to 'STALKER' in that regard.) Fallout would be my favourite post apocalypse in gaming however. Stylised on a fifties-fuelled vision on what a cold-war future would look like, there's just so much burnished and rusted personality glittering under the hot dust of the Fallout wastes. Chatty robot 'love' dolls, Elvis Presley street thugs with hearts of gold, high school American football dress-up tribals: Fallout wears it's wackiest ideas on it's sleeve and carries them with the cool gusto of a kitted-out Jojo protagonist. 

Of course, 'Apocalypse' scenario's don't always have to be so apparent, or so present. Take the techno-dystopia's like the one's depicted in Cyberpunk 2077, Half-Life 2 or even Metal Gear Solid 4. (Before Revengence came out and somehow depicted a post 'Guns of the Patriots' world that seemed somehow more normal.) These are game world are, I would consider, on the brink of totally falling apart as they exist in that special limbo 'teeter' state just before the fall off the deep end where everything starts unravelling. Cyberpunk's Night City is a warzone to survive for even everday inhabitants; the wealth disparity is so pronounced that those who aren't rich live like actual rats struggling to survive in a murder-strewn death pit where catching a stray bullet makes you one of the lucky ones. Half-Life 2 depicted a totalitarian dictatorship of earth under the boot of the extradimensional (?) alien menace who round up humans and harvest them like cattle.

Metal Gear Solid 4's world however is, appropriately given the mind of it's creator, the most complex. A world of privatised and profit-driven warfare where the industry of trading lives has grown to into such a grotesque monolith that every aspect of the modern world is behold to it's influence. That, naturally, lays bear a world state on the world of total collapse the second one external power decides to seize control of those specialised tools of control that manage this dangerous opera of warfare and turn them against their creators. Obvious commentary on the military industrial complex laid bare, just how our man Kojima loves to write his scripts- and a compelling, whilst very unique, way of depicting a modern and moderately functioning world that just beneath the surface is bubbling over the top.

And then there are the dystopias that take the very concept in a wildly different direction, playing on the familiar tropes and turning them on their head. Instead of a world laid bare by scorched fire, how about a world overrun by a mycelial infection represented by nature overrunning the world of man in The Last of Us- or the ecological disaster landscape that sells itself even more into that aesthetic, such as Horizon? What if we take the concept of a 'dead earth' and fast-forward it far into the future such that the only representative of what was are android created in the vision of man, and use that one-stepped removed lens to examine the aspects of the scattered and dead world left behind objectively, a distance from which you can observe the simple beauty in interpersonal connection, or the vapid ugliness in standards of attraction. Oh, that last one was Nier Automata, if it wasn't obvious.

For this concept, one of my favourites is Kenshi. Itself a concept born out of traditional 'world is scorched bare' framework but built upon a wild and twisted alternative world that resembles our own in some aspects and veers off into bizarre creative freeform in other instances. Based loosely on some romanticised version of feudal Japan but spruced up races of robotic skeleton people and cannibalistic insect hive men- all struggling to survive in the ruins of once sprawling empires now smashed down to the stone age by some great downturn of the world's progression. There's a echo of faded beauty in the world of Kenshi, and envisioning the world that was through the muddy graphics and twisted, oftentimes utterly inhospitable, environments brings you closer to just how far the present world has denigrated in the time since.

The world always ends with people. Some one left there after the end to spark the next flame, that will signal the burst of the next age whatever that may be. Maybe a great shade of the fallacy of human optimism, to think that even if we as people cannot conquer death our species is resilient enough to outrun the end of everything, no matter how total it will be. I wonder then, how it would be to come across a totally devoid world where there is no trace of latent humanity waiting to be reawoken into a next age of humanity. Would such a story be refreshing or far too fatalistic? How would you tell it? After the fact or during the last age? See, like I said just thinking about this topic gets me all excited! I just can't help thinking about such concepts because, I think it's a comfort being able to rely on impermanence as that final cure-all to everyone of the vast and overwhelming ills of this muddy world of ours. That, and people won't let you walk around blaring fifties music with all these 'laws' we have in the functioning world- what's up with that?