The Outer Worlds, a video game set in the 23rd century, shows a future governed by megacorporations, with citizens ready to go all out for the sake of work and profit. A prediction that takes on a disturbing meaning, especially after Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day supported by the most famous billionaires on the planet.
Inauguration Day. Among the front rows, awaiting the entry of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States, there are Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg. They are the richest men in the world. Each of them represents megacorporations such as SpaceX, Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta. Among the political exponents, the prime minister appears Giorgia Melonithe only European leader present. A glimpse that testifies to the influence and the power of companies compared to states.
A 2019 video game had already framed this trend which has now become evident, hypothesizing a universe in which it is no longer the institutions that govern, but the corporate magnates. Let’s see in detail what kind of future awaits us The Outer Worldsa dystopian Sci-Fi role-playing game developed by Obsidian, a Californian studio that also worked on Pentiment and Fallout New Vegas.
The world of work in the future of The Outer Worlds
In The Outer Worlds, humanity managed to leave the Solar System to arrive in Alcyone. However, behind this result, there are no government or international agencies, such as NASA or ESA, but fictional megacorporations. Rizzo’s, Auntie Cleo, Brook & Olson are just some of the thirty companies managing the colonization of the Alcyone planets, which began in 23rd century. In the role of the protagonist, we will film in space cities whose only mantra is work. For this reason, company owners are considered visionary geniuses, as they have enabled ordinary people to give meaning to their lives through employment with their companies. It matters little if it is degrading, underpaid and puts your health at risk: the important thing is not to be unemployed.
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It is thanks to this vision that the entire lives of the people of The Outer Worlds gravitate exclusively around work. There is no time or justification forotiumsociality, family, much less for illness. Every minute you don’t work is wasted, this means remaining at the bottom rungs of society. It is no coincidence that when we decide to work with the main character in favor of the workers, they do not say thank you, but they look at the fight against the system with fearbecause however, despite everything, companies give them a profession and therefore a way to earn and survive. A survival driven by the dream of being like those who “made it”.
THE OUTER WORLDS | Outside the walls of the first city, there is the cemetery where the citizens/workers are buried: of course, only those who can afford it.
For the owners of corporations it is a perfect society, from which to draw cheap labor, whose exponents jostle to prevail over their peers and obtain the desired social redemption. In political terms, this translates into a total absence of workers’ rights, a lack of environmental protections and constant corporate rhetoric. All in the name of profit. As for creativity and culture, they are fading. “Production has eaten up the time of workers, who instead find it entertaining to offer additional work to companies, as it tickles their perception of finally being considered worthy employees” explains the video game criticism video “The Outer Worlds – What if Elon Musk led the future?” by the Deepplay channel, “they have therefore lost any ability to imagine and therefore invent the future”.
A not-so-distant dystopia
To tell this worker dystopia, The Outer Worlds uses a sarcastic and humorous toneand above all he resorts to aesthetic and conceptual expedients that make his criticism against it even more powerful. Space remains a wild frontier to be colonized through power and violence. A reference to the rhetoric typical of the Cold War of the last century. Even the industrial cities that dot the Alcione System have a retro-futurist aesthetic that looks to the Far West – to return to the reference to the dominion of the frontier – but also to the beginning of the 20th century, the years in which the American industrial elite was formed , made up of personalities such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford“captains of industry interested in the profitability, efficiency and expansion of their businesses”, as the Americanist historian Arnaldo Testi defined them in “The Century of the United States”.
THE OUTER WORLDS | In 2018, Musk launched a Tesla into space. Megalomania behind space waste or an enterprising and visionary gesture?
Through these stylistic and narrative choices, The Outer Worlds places a lens before our eyes as players that allows us to look at all of this with comfortable detachmentas if the hypothesized one could never touch us. And instead, continuing the adventure, we manage to grasp all the meanings hidden by the humor and retro style that criticize a world that is actually very close, due to common perceptions and visions. Just think of the weight that companies like SpaceX have for space conquest, Neuralink for biotechnology or even X, Meta and Google for information control and public debate.
As emerges in “Science fiction. History of the stories of the future” by Angela Bernardoni and Andrea Viscusi, from its beginnings, the Sci-Fi literature he demonstrated a great ability to read the present to hypothesize the future. A few examples among many: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Forest World by Ursula Le Guin and The Neuromancer by William Gibson.
At times exasperated reinterpretations which however envisaged cultural impoverishment, war as a means of resolution and environmental devastation as well as the all-encompassing intrusion of technology into everyday life. The Outer Worlds fits into this trend, imagining a future where work and admiration for companies are at the center, whose concepts are already found in our current society. What we saw on Inauguration Day on January 20th reminded us of this in a bitter way.
