Games That Make Me Think: The Outer Worlds
Typically, science fiction universes are world-built from alternative political economies that are then stressed and stretched to their limits by the hostile or at least indifferent otherworldliness of other worlds. For instance, the childishly naïve, hyper-inclusive utopian socialism of Star Trek or the over-the-top fascistic, militaristic republicanism of Starship Troopers. The Outer Worlds (TOS) simply takes the smiley-faced corporatist liberal capitalism of the present day and stress tests it in an inhospitable alien environment. Love corporatist liberal capitalism or hate it, you’d have to confess it is satirized brilliantly by The Outer Worlds.
TOS has been compared to Fallout, but I’d call it more of a Deus Ex (DX) as space comedy (Nathanicus’ First Law: All modern games converge towards Deus Ex). The in-game fighting is more real-time FPS than V.A.T.S.-style of smuggling turn-based RPG combat in a dynamic open world milieu (there is a bullettime feature motivated by actual in-game story; a side effect of seven decades of cryogenic hibernation, as it were). Though the character development schema via attributes, skills, and perks is pure Fallout.
The game makes a mockery of the corporate form and the ineptness of the company man with its farcical world of shills, hagglers, hustlers, and incompetent middle managers. In addition to being a satirical meditation on political economic philosophy and a study of the character of Homo corporatus (the Company Human), TOS is fun to play. The combat is light on detail and far from truly multi-faceted, but challenging enough to be interesting. There is a basic tactical choice between combat or stealth and, when choosing the former, melee or ranged combat—ubiquitous in DX-style fight-or-slight combat systems.
TOS meanders on a gentle curve and takes about ten hours or so of gameplay to hit its stride and for its game world to be appreciably fleshed out in full view. It is a game replete with decision points and meaningful moral dilemmas. Good basic science fiction is a Star Trekesque balanced mix of accessible technical science, philosophical musings, and interesting moral dilemmas. TOS contains all of those things plus absurdist humor and scathing satire around every turn. The first moral dilemma the player faces is, in pursuit of a power regulator to fix “his ship,” he must decide between literally disempowering the Edgewater tuna cannery and the dreary town grown grown up about it or the upstart ecology-focused colony of company deserters.
The key to the satirical effectiveness of the game—in addition to of course the appropriate level of ironic detachment—is just how vicious corporate liberal capitalism becomes when faced with the natural scarcity of a space colony environment and how risibly absurd it becomes when it tries to veil its blood red teeth and claws. The game features corporatized industrial concerns offering their meretricious products to credulous consumers with glaringly false promises. The worker-consumers exist in enclosed corporate enclaves and are vassals of the enterprise, stuck in a loop of alienating labor and empty consumption, with alternative being life-forfeiting deviancy. And their vassalic privilege is the privilege of living itself. It is the East India Company model of capitalism exported to other solar systems. This is what capitalism is like in conditions of intense scarcity. We don’t see that because our patrician ancestors and the slaves, indentured servants, colonists, and wage laborers they exploited already paid that price in epidermal tissue and various assortments of bodily effluents.
A good game is fun to play. A quite good game is also fun to discuss. I will continue to discuss this game over the coming days.