Visions of the future and board games

Science fiction and board games

Science fiction is a fundamental part of what we call geek/nerd culture. Cast a stone if you have never heard about Star Wars, Terminator or The Matrix. Science-themed games as such as Terraforming Mars, Room 25 and Xcom are an important part of the board game market and attract fans worldwide.

But, where did this all start? What are the strands of science fiction? How does it show up in board games?

Parameters

First of all, it is necessary to think about a basic question: what characterizes science fiction?

There are many discussions on this point, but roughly speaking, I start from the assumption that science fiction is the field of fantastic literature – which also includes fantasy and horror texts – that proposes questions about how human nature interacts with technical advances.

Thus, the hallmark of this type of text would be to speculate on what makes us human and what our limits are. This appears from the first writings that form this tradition, such as the question about the relationship between the human and the divine in Frankenstein; it materializes in the doubts about longevity and artificial intelligence in I, Robot; and continues to take shape in cyberpunk texts like the Sprawl Trilogy.

The Utopias

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact birth of science fiction, or who was the first writer of this literary tradition. Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and other authors are seen as founders of this genre, but this is not a consensus among scholars of the subject.

For a long time science fiction, or if you prefer a more academic name, speculative fiction, was seen as the work of naive authors, lacking in aesthetic elaboration and linked to a simplistic view of human dramas.

In the beginning of the 20th century, this image was consolidated due to the popularization of the genre in English-speaking countries. The magazine or pulp era was marked by the emergence of a large reading public that consumed narratives in cheap publications, the pulp magazines, which housed short stories by authors such as Dashell Hammett, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. These tales, generally full of action and fantasy, were sometimes seen as escapist works with no connection to reality.

A little later than this generation, already in the 1940s and 1950s, Isaac Asimov and other writers were dedicated to creating future worlds, in which mankind would have spread throughout the universe by means of wonderful technology, freeing our species from labor and taking flight toward unlimited progress.

This grand vision of humanity in relation to space, which appears in titles such as The Foundation, Dune, and Star Trek, has become popularly known by the name space opera and can be seen as the influence behind games such as Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy and Tiny Epic Galaxies.

The dystopias

The hopeful vision that believed in unlimited progress came under criticism in the 1960s. In a context of Cold War, atomic terror, and fear for the future, a feeling arose that technological advances could lead humanity to self-destruction.

This change of perspective brought with it aesthetic concerns and the use of sophisticated elements, such as narrative fragmentation, multiple temporalities, and stream of consciousness. Not by chance, in the 1960s, universities and academics “discovered” science fiction and began to value it.

Authors like Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote landmark texts such as Ubik and The Left Hand of Darkness, used science fiction to question human nature, society, and reality itself.

With the changes brought about by the 1970s and 1980s, such as neoliberalism, the crisis of Soviet socialism, the Toyota Production System, and the advance of environmental destruction, science fiction narratives began to have an increasingly somber tone, which indicates a deepening of the issues proposed by the writers of the 1960s.

With the birth of cyberpunk we see that futuristic cities were no longer on other planets, but on a polluted, degraded and brutally unequal Earth. Large metropolises where we could see an oppressive state or a society controlled by corporations that massacred the citizens. In these stories, morality degrades and what we see are anti-heroes, subjects who acted according to their own will, while trying to free themselves from a suffocating reality.

This pessimistic vision is present in works such as Blade Runner, in the trilogy begun by Neuromancer, and served as a direct influence on games such as Android: Netrunner and Shadowrun.

Future pasts

The 1990s and 2000s saw the popularization of science fiction narratives that can be grouped in the category of alternative history. In these works what is seen is a narrative development that starts from the question “what if…?”. The trend had been created years earlier by Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle, a work that started from the premise “what if the Nazis and the Japanese had won World War II?”

In the alternative histories of the 1990s and 2000s what we saw was the creation of alternative pasts with technologies appropriate to these periods. If you thought of steam engines, welding goggles, and leather, you were right: steampunk, as well as other sci-fi subgenres, are beginning to emerge in these decades.

The Difference Engine, a collaborative work by Gibson and Sterling, lays the foundation for the steampunk tradition and eventually influenced games like Castle Falkenstein and Planet Steam.

The 21st Century and Science Fiction 

The 21st Century and Science Fiction

In the first two decades of the new millennium, what can be observed is a large production of science fiction in various themes, platforms and approaches.

Possibly the most important mark of the current moment is the multiple possibilities that sci-fi has assumed in recent years: hybrid texts, films and productions are increasingly common, which use the elements present in science fiction, but bring with them marks of other traditions such as the detective novel, fantasy, horror and many other possibilities. The City & the City, by China Miéville, is an example of this hybridism that is called part of the critics’ new weird fiction.

Besides this mixture of narrative genres, we also see the emergence of writers of diverse origins: Latin Americans, Africans, from the East, women writers, transsexuals, which makes these fictions not restricted to a Western, white, male vision. Afrofuturism, popularized by films like Black Panther, shows the strength of this diversity.

Last but not least, at a time when we see the rise of negationist movements that oppose a scientific and rational view of the world, the work of science fiction is also linked to the celebration of science and human capacity, hope being the key word. TV series such as Mars and Cosmos: possible worlds, mark a certain return to the hopeful climate of science fiction of the first half of the last century, which is reflected in games such as Underwater Cities and Luna Maris.