by Bryn Gelbart for Deep-Hell.Com

The best way to tell a story about the present is to write one about the future. Reality is all too real to say anything actually meaningful about the human condition.

Real life is complicated. It requires lawyers. It requires, if you are writing an Oscar winning screenplay, making sure you aren’t being too honest about the people who could sue your ass for defamation. So we can’t make up stories about Google or Amazon and try to sell them as the next great American novel or video game. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t found ways to tell stories about how technology impacts our everyday life.

To me, the most prescient pieces of speculative fiction lie in the near-future. The believable tomorrow, set five or fifty years from now, is often just a mirror for the present. A jumping off point for visual worldbuilding. A bulletproof vest protecting against corporate fiends who would rather not have stories written about them. Speculative fiction is creeping up as a popular mode of storytelling in games that are increasingly interested in talking in great detail about the issues plaguing the games industry, a hellish place itself born out of big tech.

The developers behind Tacoma, Eliza, and Neo Cab know as well as anyone what working in an industry that relies so heavily on freelancers feels like. The struggles of living in a world dominated by corporations trying to maximize profit from each individual it employs is reflected in each of these games. Contract workers prop up every little facet of the modern world that tech has built. The gig economy binds us all; from contracted animators and VFX artists making sure each Marvel movie makes it out the door to me, taking money from struggling anarchist games writer friends to pay my own bills or hopefully even one day pay that forward.

The first time I felt that a game had nailed this specific feeling of a “believable future” was in 2018 when I finally got around to playing Tacoma, a game I like to introduce as “clearly better than Gone Home.” This Sleep-No-More inspired take on the walking sim spins a speculative fiction tale of labor and AI liberation.

Tacoma crosses past near-future and well into the world of sci-fi, but the world it crafts feels like the logical conclusion to a path we, as a human race, have been on for years. Venturis, the first of many stand-ins for Amazon or Google or Apple discussed in this piece, has subcontracted a group of workers to maintain the Tacoma. Their work is mundane, but important, and in it they are all stuck together with the same goal: keep the station alive, stay alive, and stay fucking sane.

Tacoma’s core juxtaposition exists within this work space. The Tacoma crew’s attempts to partition off spaces where the work happens from the space where they live feels all too familiar as we enter year two of the pandemic. In the abstract, not being granted access to employee benefits after sleeping in your office every night for two years sounds ridiculous. In reality, how many Uber drivers are forced to sleep in their cars every night? Isn’t the Tacoma the same thing?

What makes this a decisively anti-capitalist work is how dug in deep everyone is with Venturis. When you can successfully pull off a monopoly on education and the workforce, as Venturis has, you successfully monopolize debt. This consolidation of debt is a core theme of a notable contemporary anti-capitalist dreamscape Kentucky Route Zero. In both games, the characters are trapped by their debt; trapped with their dreams of a better future, and trapped together with only their relationships to live for.

The situation echoes the reality of many gig worker’s lives. These characters are stuck in space for a year, their entire existence is their job and yet they are not granted full-time employee privileges or even really treated as humans. At the end of the day, this is sheer calculated business for Venturis. These humans are less valuable than AI, making them more disposable. It’s never explicitly discussed, but the costs of providing oxygen, food, and housing to a human crew are evidently the root cause of the corp’s push to complete automation.

The space station Tacoma is littered with quotidian objects that occupy every nook and cranny, some containing allusions to grand geopolitical changes that have occurred in the past 65 years. Tacoma is bursting with this type of world-building we’ve grown accustomed to in the immersive sims that inspire Fullbright’s work. A believable future is communicated through these objects, and the space itself, but how do you craft a convincing vision through a form not concerned with physical space?

Like Tacoma, Eliza — a visual novel from the crafty Zachtronics — is concerned with tech. Not just technology in the abstract, but ‘big tech’ as we’ve come to collectively understand the term. Eliza begins by tackling the intersection of big tech and mental health, but evolves to be a story of complicity and the role of individual actors in the acceleration of technology.

After a three years depression spiral Evelyn is working as a contract proxy for Eliza, an AI therapy program she helped develop before leaving the company for personal reasons. Her job is to read the script Eliza provides her to make the sessions feel natural. That summary is loaded with connotations about trauma, labor, and psychology, all of which play a major role in Eliza’s story. All of these themes are set atop a backdrop that is as similar to modern day Seattle as is humanly possible. The setting draws immediate comparisons to Amazon, but Skanda — the company responsible for Eliza — could be Microsoft, Apple, Google, anyone in big tech. Really, it is all of them.

Crucially, it is also none of them. Speculative fiction allows a barrier, a way to say “it sure is good no real company is doing something this transparently evil.” If that makes you laugh, well, I think the games are laughing with you.

Aside from the program Eliza itself, there is not much that distinguishes the world from 2021. You don’t actually see too much of the city, it is communicated to the player through its residents and their daily routines. I cringed as I saw a bit of myself in each of the sessions Evelyn facilitated. The stuffy sexually frustrated student reminded too much of myself at 20. The artist who wouldn’t stop comparing herself to peers, social media enabling hopelessness spirals. The unending dread of climate disaster. It was all too familiar.

Regardless of the severity of their trauma or mental illness, each character shares the collective trauma of living in a world spiraling out of any individual’s control. A world where technology helps us indulge our worst obsessions. A world created by and for big tech. And now it is up to us to put our faith back into these corporations to heal us? It is a nightmare. And that is what Eliza delivers. A quiet, subtle dystopia that has crept up seemingly overnight. But Evelyn knows that’s not true. Evelyn knows her patients’ problems are — at least partially — her responsibility. She sees her impending choice coming. I think she has seen it for all these years. It is the ongoing trauma and the cause of her guilt.

This guilt drives Evelyn to explore her creation. Is Eliza helping or is it just a mirror? By extension, the game asks if all psychotherapy is just a mirror. Eliza may not answer the question of whether or not AI therapy is a boon to the evolving world but it gives you the ammunition to form your own answers. The solutions it proposed may be speculative and fictional but the problems Eliza’s characters struggle with are universal and part of our daily lives in 2021.

Tacoma’s story is more focused on the state of contract labor and how that intersects with AI than Eliza’s tale of guilt, complicity, and depression. Both are stories, however, about how our lives become even more tied to the companies we work for in the future — even when we are just contractors.

Like these games, Neo Cab is very explicitly speculating on the future of contract work. Lina, a Neo Cab driver, moves to west coast metropolis Los Ojos to move in with her estranged best friend Savvy when she suddenly goes missing. What follows is a visual novel that is mostly told from the front seat of a cab.

We are supposed to immediately see ride-share app Neo Cab as the obvious stand-in for Uber and Los Ojos as LA. Neo Cab is even less subtle than Eliza about how it is a near-future story about the present. That baggage you have with Uber or Lyft, those experiences you’ve had as a passenger or driver, all these are going to be brought in with you. It’s impossible to live in a modern city and not bring your own experiences to the game.

Like Eliza, Neo Cab is a game where the characters tell you about the city, the conditions of which influence our politics and ideologies and in a more immediate way our decision making. Like Tacoma, Neo Cab is a game about obsolescence and the imminent threat of being replaced by AI.

That shared anxiety — the anxiety of precariousness, of being a contract worker, of worry that you will one day be rendered obsolete by some billionaire who used people like you to get where he is—  that is the shared DNA of all these games. It is a springboard to tell stories about how we, the working class, all have to cope. Constantly underneath our romances, our poisonous friendships, our mental health and journeys to dependency and recovery, underneath all that is a shared fear. A feeling so ubiquitous that even when a thousand people tell it, it still reminds me I’m afraid I’m not in control of where my life is going.

The decisions tech companies make over the next handful of decades will determine our future, irrevocably if they even so much as slightly fuck it up. If you are reading this, you probably don’t have the power to change that. I know I don’t.

I’ve spent my entire professional life torn between working in tech and doing what I really want to do. Ever since my first startup job when I was 20, it’s been there looming — waiting for me to fail and come back. When I graduated, I had two years experience writing about music, film and tv, and games. I worked the worst summer job of my life for 3 months, leaving my partner every weekend to sell ice cream in Williamsburg or on Governors Island. I started working for a tech company in September. A calendar year and one new anxiety disorder later, I lost that job.

In Neo Cab, Lina has to accept that her best friend is manipulating her and how to best move forward with that relationship. In Tacoma, the crew has to accept that Venturis left them for dead. And then they have to find a way to survive. In Eliza, Evelyn has to accept that her creation has a future. And then she has to decide whether or not to have a role in that future.

Games criticism has been my future for the past decade. It was never all that believable. Now that it’s been my present for nearly the past two years, I understand why. Gig workers hold up games journalism. I’d reckon a significant majority of the best games critics working are either freelancers or on YouTube. As media companies flounder, as the gulf between staff and management needs widen (never a bad time to reread this), more games writers get laid off. The freelance pool grows more competitive. Oh and yeah, it’s nice to be writing about video games, I guess.

The places I once looked toward as prospective futures are now tainted with histories of hiring and encouraging abusers. I’ve written for major websites only to have pieces killed and budgets slashed. Everyone I know doing this has stories like this and most of them have much worse. At a certain point I have to ask myself, is it worth this to do the only thing I’ve ever truly wanted to do?

Hesitation comes. And then a second, more depressing question enters my mind. Is it really that different, anywhere else?