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Extra Credits16 Mar 2016

What Does Tomorrow Look Like? - How We Envision the Future - Extra Credits

Key insights

6 takeaways

01
Establishing a distinct, shared vision of the future is essential for creators to properly examine, challenge, and expand upon the ramifications of modern life.
02
Historical aesthetic movements, such as 1920s Art Deco, 1960s space-age idealism, and 1980s cyberpunk, provided a shared cultural vocabulary that contemporary media currently lacks.
03
Modern video games frequently rely on derivative mash-ups of 20th-century tropes rather than creating original aesthetic identities that reflect contemporary global concerns.
04
The lack of a cohesive, modern vision for the future prevents the gaming industry from effectively engaging with the complexities of current societal issues.
05
Titles like Killzone, Gears of War, and Mass Effect are cited as examples of games that default to generic science fiction aesthetics instead of establishing a unique visual identity.
06
Mirror’s Edge serves as a notable exception by synthesizing modern anxieties regarding surveillance and personal liberty into a coherent, minimalist design.

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Transcript

you may have expected this episode to be about the future of games but I actually mean the title completely literally what is the future visually gonna look like it may seem like an odd question but for most of the 20th century we all had a popular general conception of what the future would visually look like the building's the clothes the cars our assumptions may not always have been accurate but they were still a common vision that we can all draw from and play with but as we stumble into the 21st century we seem to have lost that conception which means that our games and our media set in the future have begun to look more disjointed derivative or just generic let's take a quick trip through what the future looked like in our past in the 20s and 30s you had the skyscraper inspired Art Deco future of metropolis in the 40s and 50s we had the future filled with swooping airplane curves and Reagan architecture so often seen in the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials then in the 60s we saw men walk on the moon and we thought to ourselves

the future is not that far off and so we began to envision a future that mashed up NASA and the hippie free-love aesthetics of the time when we weren't envisioning a future blasted back into the Stone Age by the threat of nuclear war of course by the time the 80s hit the promise and even the existential threat of the future seems to fade into a much more mundane and jaded future where class division and mechanistic corporate greed were taken to their logical extremes leading us to the faded neon megacities of Blade Runner and the Geiger esque claustrophobia of alien which then in the late 80s and early 90s evolved into our chrome filled high-tech lowlife world of cyberpunk filled with mirror shades and leather but then the future stopped or rather we stopped sharing a singular vision of it for the last 15 years we haven't really hit on a defining popular idea of what tomorrow looks like and I bring this up in part because it genuinely worries me because when we look at all those imaginings of the future we find that they were inspired by the present whether it be skyscrapers or airplanes synthetic materials Atomics or globalism something

in each of those two days inspired people's vision of tomorrow so in some ways it disturbs me that we don't seem to have that driving idea but I also bring it up because it's so important for gay games games seem to be the media that actually might be the best student to provide the visual zeitgeist for our modern future after all games have the opportunity to do more than simply provide a canvas they can provide a living breathing vision of the future to walk through but instead of providing this I see a struggle sometimes we play wonderfully with some of the ideas of the past like bioshock's art deco futurism which harkens back to Metropolis in the 20s or fallout satirizing the 50s future by providing us a world where that future has come and gone or even data sex giving us a golden black tinted vision of the 80's cyberpunk vision but more often we end up accidentally mashing together arbitrary pieces from these various visions simply because they're part of our popular consciousness without really seeming to give them much thought Killzone crisis even Gears of War and the more recent halos all fall into this

trap and on the one hand you can say that those games aren't about the time or the location they take place in that's all just set dressing for the shooting gallery but wouldn't they be a little better if there was some fully realized vision of the world you were running and gunning through even Mass Effect which I loved falls into this trap a little bit providing us with a mash-up of Babylon 5 for escape and Star Trek rather than giving us a bold new vision of the future oddly enough final fantasy for all of its stumbling in recent years has given us several unique visions of the sci-fi future whether it be Midgar and Final Fantasy 7 Zanarkand and Final Fantasy 10 hanging edge and academia in Final Fantasy 13 or even just the cars and the clothes that we've seen in Final Fantasy 15 so far these visions of the future may not always be successful much like the series as a whole but it does benefit for the attempt but really as surprising as it is I think the game that's perhaps come the closest to really capturing a new vision of the future is Mirror's Edge if that game had reached a broader audience it's blazing

white world which hides beneath it a state based on surveillance and repression might have had the same impact on our popular conception of the future that Blade Runner did and I won't by any means argue that Mirror's Edge is perfectly executed because it's not but it visually presents a bold different vision that grabs hold of the ideas that were wrestling with today questions of freedom and security of personal liberty in a world where our actions are constantly monitored and it couples that with the modern minimal design aesthetics that are such a product of our post-internet world unfortunately that vision was tied to a game that was filled with good ideas but struggled with its execution and thus never entered the popular consciousness in the same way that Niram answer did when it cemented our vision of cyberpunk or that amazing science fiction did when it occurred in our ray guns and rockets era leaving us to wonder still what does the future look like and we do need such a vision because when we have that it provides us a rich canvas for artists of all types to play in by having this sort of popular vision of the future we can examine its ramifications push its

borders and even see what happens if we break it entirely we can introduce new elements into it or see what happens when we take parts away we can bring characters who don't belong to this vision into it to observe and comment on it but without it we're left with that generic homogenized sci-fi that we too often see in videogames today so if you have any thoughts on what the future looks like or if you think you've seen any examples of modern pop culture that are really defining it for our generation please share them below I'd actually love to hear about them thanks for watching and we'll see you guys next time you

Summary

The visual representation of the future has historically served as a mirror for contemporary societal anxieties and aspirations. Throughout the 20th century, distinct aesthetic movements—ranging from the Art Deco optimism of the 1920s and the space-age idealism of the 1960s to the cynical, corporate-dominated cyberpunk of the 1980s—provided a shared cultural vocabulary. These visions were deeply rooted in the technological and political realities of their respective eras, offering a cohesive framework for storytelling and artistic exploration.

In the 21st century, however, this collective vision has fractured. Modern media, particularly video games, frequently relies on derivative mash-ups of past futuristic tropes rather than articulating a unique aesthetic that reflects current global concerns. While titles like Bioshock or Fallout effectively utilize historical nostalgia, many contemporary games, such as the Killzone, Gears of War, and Mass Effect series, often default to generic sci-fi aesthetics that lack a cohesive, original identity. This reliance on established visual shorthand prevents the medium from fully engaging with the complexities of the modern world.

A notable exception is Mirror’s Edge, which attempted to synthesize contemporary anxieties regarding surveillance, personal liberty, and minimalist design into a singular, coherent vision. Despite its execution challenges, the game demonstrated the potential for interactive media to define a new visual zeitgeist. Establishing a distinct, shared vision of the future is essential, as it provides a necessary canvas for creators to examine, challenge, and expand upon the ramifications of modern life. Without a unified conceptual framework, the industry risks remaining trapped in a cycle of homogenized, uninspired science fiction that fails to capture the spirit of the present age.