October 2025 "Late Stage Capitalism: Only Fun in Games" by Will Williams

Spooky season is among us, so it seems appropriate to talk about what to me is the spookiest thing of all: late-stage capitalism. The surveillance state, overconsumption of natural resources, and the overwhelming wealth gap are all sources of incomprehensible horror for many. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that a few men control the many. This is the American way. For a long time, video games have been at the precipice of storytelling involving a very specific breed of dystopian narrative: one in which oligarchic techno-corporate greed is the common denominator.

     Cyberpunk 2077 is a fantastic recent example of this, one in which the player is dropped into the world of Night City, where the corporations are the government. Imagine in your own mind what effect this would have on a society, and you are probably not far off. This imagined system is possibly the only true capitalist economy, and as such, the proletariat is naturally abused to lengths beyond their own recognition. Shantytowns, drug use, proliferation of instant-gratification tools, trash heaps as far as the eye can see, a deadly climate, not an animal in sight. All are hyperbolic means of showing just how much can be taken from you without you even noticing. Like a frog in boiling water, all for the sake of hitting those 4^th quarter projections. In the game, this is carried so far that corporations can literally steal your soul. SoulKiller is offered as a technological service by corporate Arasaka that offers to “save your soul” from eternal death, instead uploading your psyche onto a physical chip, which can be inserted into another body at a later date. Through this, though, Arasaka owns you. Every memory you’ve made, every emotion you’ve carried, is now theirs. It seems a natural conclusion to a very real process that can and will take away any bit of your livelihood possible.

     The game series Fallout shows greed through a different lens, one in which corporate hands pressed down on the conflict of the Cold War until someone broke. This world is set amidst the nuclear fallout of an alternate Cold War, and in turn functions as a critique of scientific innovation, asking the question of how far humanity is willing to go to achieve discoveries. VaultTec is the corporation responsible for creating the long-term fallout shelters in this world as a safety net for the off-chance of a nuclear Armageddon, but when they did, they saw an opportunity for scientific innovation, which could only be compared to horrid real-world examples like the human experimentation of Unit 731. Intentional exposure to radiation poisoning, extreme genetic alteration, violent power structures, forced drug addiction, and cruel culling of individuals deemed lesser all occurred. Pressing the psychological, emotional, and physical buttons of the vault inhabitants certainly left its toll, killing most of the inhabitants of the 122 vaults. But of course, VaultTec had to ensure they would have the opportunity for their cruel experimentation, so naturally, they were the very force that quite literally pressed the big red button, initiating the nuclear war from which they would prosper, by destroying the world and rebuilding it in their image, and enslaving the survivors of the vaults.

     In The Outer Worlds, control of the proletariat is very much tied to an Orwellian control of the flow of information. In this world, a new colony has been established far from Earth in the Halcyon solar system, at the helm of the oligarchic Halcyon Holdings Board of Directors, a collection of the corporate executives of the colony. It is truly an industrial setting with a science fiction overtone, where all a citizen may do and experience is overseen by the corporate overlords. Earth is too far away to contact, so the Board has full authority in shaping this new world for the benefit of only themselves. And they do not relent.

     Twelve-hour shifts, wages so low that costs of living can barely be afforded, zero days off per year, no healthcare, no workplace safety standards, and an exorbitant cost just to die all plague the common laborer in Halcyon, whose only two options are submitting to this system or living entirely off the dangerous, unfamiliar land of planets Monarch and Terra 2. These struggles sound familiar to many, I would bet. The censorship of information, though, increases the extremity of Halcyon’s situation, as this indoctrinated society could not possibly comprehend what it is to be free of corporate chains.

     These stories remind us of this eternal struggle for our own prosperity. As author James Baldwin said, "The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it." Stories are power, stories are uniters, stories are the core of human experience. They have the unique quality of reflecting on people their own struggles, triumphs, wins, and losses. They have the power to make people think critically about their own lives and how they might better them. They hold up a mirror to truth through strong emotional appeals. In a twisted sense, we are more invested in the fate of the fictional hero than of our own compatriots. This is not from lack of empathy, but because the fictional hero can be more vulnerable and honest with us than our fellow humans could ever be. Humans are short-sighted creatures: out of sight, out of mind. Dystopian stories, and stories of tragedy in general, are palatable packages of pain for us to indulge in, for each other.

     The above stories are some of the highest examples of social and political commentary found in video games (a medium much more relevant to young people), and their importance cannot be overstated. In the context of increased political polarization in the Western world, it is essential to remind the working class of their commonalities rather than their divisions. These stories accomplish this through harsh exaggerations of just the opposite, through hyperbolic worlds where the only united force is those who capitalize on the time, resources, and livelihood of anyone they can. We can be different, though, if we choose. We can be united as a people. In reaction to the infamous “Pale Blue Dot” photo, which was a photo taken of Earth from six billion kilometers away, astronomer Carl Sagan said this:

Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

We are all one people, united every day by our fight for the basic rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The only people who are truly opposed to you are those who fight every day to take these rights away from you. Greed may not be the first sin, the one that divided humanity from God, but it is, without a doubt, the sin that has divided some men from their own humanity. The first step to cutting out greed from our souls is to be aware of the manmade systems that allow for it to manifest, which video games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout, and The Outer Worlds all accomplish in unique and equally significant ways.