Why are dystopian settings so popular? Is that a good thing? What are the consequences and what are the alternatives?

Image by underworth from Pixabay, slightly brightened and contrast-enhanced by Mike

Another relatively short post this week (in theory, if all goes according to plan), because this approach worked so well for me last week – I had time to get more than 16000 words of part 3 of the “Long Road” trilogy done after finishing the piece on Layering Encounter Depth. Not sure that I’ll have as much time left after this one, but I’ll find out! EDIT – actually, it came out as fairly average for a Campaign Mastery article. Oh well. I still had time to add another 9500 words to the ongoing “Long Road” article.

The other week, in passing, I spotted a question on Quora asking why Dystopias were so popular as settings.

While the question probably referred principally to computer games, movies, or TV shows, there are aspects of TTRPGs to which it would also be a fair question.

So, why are Dystopias so popular, is that a good thing, and what are the alternatives?

Popularity

I dislike attempting to read the collective minds of a marketplace. My perspective is not the same as that of someone living in New York City – or in Macon, Georgia, or Edinburgh for that matter, and presuming to speak for the entirety of popular culture is a surefire recipe for sparking disagreements. On top of that, the question will have been distorted all out of shape by the event of a once-a-century Pandemic.

Nevertheless, I have identified eight reasons which, singly or in combination, explain (in my mind, and outside of Pandemic considerations) why Dystopian settings are relatively ubiquitous in popular culture. These are of varying worth as a source of creative inspiration and may be of variable strength in assessing any individual work, setting, or individual reaction to same. There may be others beyond those that I have identified; I’m not trying to answer conclusively, but just hoping that I’ve picked up on the major contributing factors.

    1. Reflected Reality

    It’s a fact that infrastructure built in the early- and mid-twentieth century – both social and physical – is suffering from neglect to the point of crumbling down around us. For the first time in a century or more, the current generation of young adults were facing the prospect of a lower standard of living across the totality of their lifetimes than that enjoyed by their parents and grandparents.

    Realism (or hyper-realism) and the need to connect with the lived experiences of ordinary people in order to make an entertainment enjoyable and relatable mandate that this reality be reflected in the content of that entertainment, and this is true regardless of the medium, be that RPG, Computer Game, Movie, TV show, or literary work. Such reflections of experienced reality are essential to the suspension of disbelief, or so the theory goes.

    Even the current and ongoing existential philosophic war over Climate Change can be viewed through this prism. I’m personally still not convinced by the science, but regard the potential price of inaction to be so great that we can’t neglect the dangers and need to take immediate action. Some of that hesitancy is the result of the many many times ‘the end of life as we know it’ has been forecast and failed to materialize – everything from the Hole in the ozone layer through to the planetary alignment in the 1970s and the Aztec Calendar. The boys have cried ‘wolf’ several times too often. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if climatic change is man-made or a natural evolution with a man-made contribution on the top – the reality of change needs to be accommodated by society and whatever mitigating influence we can exert is necessary to combat the effect. If it is the result of human activity – something I don’t rule out – so much the better, because it indicates that the solution also lies within our hands, as a species and a global society. But all that’s strictly a personal opinion.

    2. Pessimism

    Confronted with such challenges, it’s easy to be pessimistic, especially in comparison to the naive optimism of the 1950s and 1960s. The social and environmental hurdles we face as a species sometimes seem insoluble, especially when there are those who are happy to make the problems worse in the cause of corporate greed.

    It’s a short step from being pessimistic about the future to manifesting such a future in the setting of entertainments.

    3. Potential

    It’s also important to be honest – there is, in general terms, a lot more story potential in everything falling apart than in everything being sweetness and light. This is why the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation fell flat in a number of key respects – the absence of conflict, in good cause, between the protagonists presented an oversimplified society which felt like a fairy-tale reality, as fragile as spun glass. Where were the conflicting priorities? The slippery slope full of good intentions? The outright mistakes and missteps The flawed assumptions? The absence of these things seemed to reflect a radical reinvention or even denial of fundamental human nature. Not even the original series went so far, and it was only when human nature was reasserted that the series popularity grew beyond basic in-principle enthusiasm. Dramatic conflict, even melodramatic conflict, is at the heart of most RPGs and modern entertainments.

    4. Weight & Depth

    It’s a lot easier to demonstrate that you are taking something seriously with darkness than with light. Or, to put it another way, it’s easier to appear to be tackling a serious subject with grim seriousness than with glib lightness that seems vacuous in comparison.

    5. Permissiveness

    I’m sure, too, that some of the appeal lies in the unfettering of choices of action. The restrictions that bind society together in less dystopian settings function by taking certain choices off the table on moral grounds. In a nutshell, you can get away with more in a dystopian setting, and that can be cathartic

    This is the fountainhead that produces Murder Hobo campaigns, amongst others. It is also why the darker visions of The Dark Knight were so popular, and why there was an appeal to infusing that darkness into Star Trek (with the franchise reboots) and Star Wars (with the modern sequels) and Superman (with the Cavill reboots) – and, paradoxically, why the latter were not accepted by audiences; Superman was supposed to be an ideal, an expression of hope, and it was felt that those ideals were tarnished by the dystopian grim-and-gritty take on the man of steel.

    6. The Cautionary Tale

    Exposing the fragility of the world that a lot of us take for granted has yielded dystopias from War Of The Worlds to the Matrix to Terminator to Aliens. Cautionary Tales have been fertile ground for Science Fiction practically from Word One. There has not been as great a presence of the Cautionary Tale in fantasy, though even there, examples can be found; this rarity surprises me somewhat as Fantasy offers the opportunity to examine social issues divorced from questions of, and the role of, technology.

    Some of the most popular entertainments of the 20th century have been, or can be interpreted as, Cautionary Tales – from Robocop to The 6th Day, to Outbreak, to Total Recall. Even Age Of Ultron and X-men can be viewed in this light.

    Initially a motivation for the creator to make his setting a Dystopia, the existence of the Cautionary Tale then justifies the Dystopian trappings to the audience – no Dystopia, no Cautionary Tale.

    7. Dark Is A Color, Too

    Grim and Gritty have always had their place. Arguably, even many of the American Pulp adventures with their hard-boiled detectives and sinister underworlds can be viewed as Dystopian Expressions, a manifestation of the harsh realities of the Prohibition era. Even more strongly representative of this theme are the Gangster movies of the period.

    There are some stories which will inevitably work better in a Dystopian setting, just as there are stories that inherently carry Dystopian overtones. Artistic exploration of the darker side of the moral palette is a perfectly viable and reasonable justification for a Dystopian setting.

    The Matrix is inherently Dystopian. The Truman show can be seen as its Utopian counterpart – both portray their protagonists as becoming aware of a Darker reality outside of their everyday experiences in a constructed fantasy environment.

    8. Laziness

    Such stories are generally exceptions, however. More often, the darkness of the Dystopian setting feels tacked on, an attempt to impart existential credibility at the expense of entertainment – lazy writing, in other words.

    This is, by far, the least acceptable justification for a Dystopian setting.

    And sometimes, the reason for audience acceptance of a Dystopian form of entertainment or setting is simply because that’s what has been offered. That’s laziness of a different sort, but no more acceptable as a justification.

The Lessons Learned

Those eight reasons, of differing levels of validity, are the justifications that can underlie the choice of a dystopian setting, and its acceptance or even popularity. Personally, I always feel like its not the setting that is popular or unpopular, it’s the story that takes place within that setting; a great setting with a poorly-conceived or poorly-executed story will never be as successful as a great story in a poorly-conceived or poorly-executed setting – and, to hit a home run, everything needs to be in sync.

The clear implication is that sometimes, a Dystopian setting is an enhancement, and sometimes it’s a detraction. A great setting needs both dark corners and deep shadows in well-lit areas.

But that’s all very generic and general; are there any specific factors that can be pointed at in an attempt to answer my second question – is the ubiquity of Dystopian Settings a good thing?

    Darkening Days

    One point that was teased in the preceding discussion is, to what extent are Dystopian Settings a reflection of living in an increasingly Dystopian world in real life?

    It’s a known and observed fact Heavy Metal rises in popularity in times of despair, struggle, and economic strife. These are loud, angry, and aggressive – cathartic venting of frustration and despair.

    Dystopian settings offer an opportunity to do just that in a different medium.

    It has to be accepted that in dark times, dark tones can provide a safety valve for some, and to that extent, the popularity of Dystopian settings can be a good thing.

    More often, though, the darkness without can feed and exacerbate the darkness within. Depression opens the door to acts both self-destructive and harmful to others, and being already predisposed to depressive states can make you more vulnerable to the negatives at the heart of Dystopian settings. This is, unquestionably, a negative outcome, and – for all that it may be more rare than the venting – it can be argued that the consequential manifestations are more harmful overall than the positive gains.

    This highlights that there is an environmental factor at work: Dystopian Tales are arguably at their worst in terms of community and social good in times that are already dark and gloomy, but that in times of optimism, they can highlight and accentuate the positives. It is also arguable that these are the times when such entertainments are at their least popular, though.

    Pessimism to the contrary

    Others find equal or greater value in counterbalancing dark times with hope and optimism. This is the complete converse of the impact described in the previous section, and the same environmental considerations are at play here, too – during dystopian times, people need expressions of hope and victory over problems more than at any other time.

    As an antidote to the pessimism ingrained within Dystopian Times, Utopian themes of hope are potentially powerful, and this argues that Dystopian settings are not so much enthusiastically supported as tolerated, especially when times are bad. Creators may have valid artistic motivations in creating Dystopian settings for their entertainments, but those motives are rendered almost irrelevant in this context, which paints Dystopias as an unquestionably bad thing, overall, that can sometimes be tolerated – no matter how popular they may be in the context of the times.

    Hang Us All, Separately

    There is an argument that Dystopias are essentially about the individual verses the world around them, while Utopias are more about mutual support and collaboration. I’m not convinced that this is the whole story – it’s very rare for a protagonist to have to go it completely alone; even if they are the spearhead, there is normally a supporting mechanism or group in back of them, so much so that the absence of such only makes their efforts to resist the impact of the Dystopian setting all the more heroic.

    The same pattern can be observed in real life – during hard times, there is a natural tendency on the part of society as a whole to either come together or become insular and self-absorbed, and the former is celebrated even when the latter may be respected.

    One of the great strengths about Australian culture is the way we come together in times of trouble – natural disasters and the like. Even the ‘greed is good’ eighties couldn’t erase that propensity (though it surely tried); even today, in large part, those seen as obstructing such collective efforts (or worse, trying to take advantage of them) are characterized as “rat-bags” at the very least.

    Dystopian settings undermine such unity with the inherent pessimism that they contain. The subtext is that such efforts are doomed to failure, so why bother? Look out for #1, instead. The inevitable outcome of this attitude is one in which personal responsibility is completely undermined by personal liberty, as has been amply demonstrated in some parts of the US in response to the pandemic. To be fair, there are other factors at play in that situation, so it’s unfair to lay the blame entirely at the door of the Dystopian trend in entertainment – but even if only some small part of the responsibility for that problem can be attributed to this cause, it’s an entirely unacceptable price to pay.

    This line of argument leaves no doubt that the popularity of Dystopian settings is a ‘bad thing’ even if they are only a reflection of such attitudes and not a driver of them.

Overall, the collective picture that emerges is one in which Dystopian settings can be valuable, in moderation, ubiquitous Dystopian settings and stories are at best only tolerable in inverse measure to their reflected social situation around them. Whatever minor non-artistic merits they may have are solidly counter-balanced by non-artistic downsides. The issue, then, is one (as always) of balancing the artistic merits with the non-artistic downsides; it is no better to look at life through rose-colored glasses.

It is this assessment that leads me to that strong condemnation of Dystopia through laziness or simply because it’s popular with which I concluded the first section.

And that leads me to the part of this analysis that will hopefully be of greatest benefit to readers – a broad exploration of some of the alternatives.

Alternatives through Dystopian Dynamics

In particular, as a starting point, it leads me back to the basics of drama, and to The Truman Show as evidence that a Dystopian setting (with all its implied pessimism and hopelessness) isn’t necessary to the exploration of dystopian concepts and themes. In fact, there are six alternative structures to consider – and if it is accepted that some stories are better served with a Dystopian setting and structure, then it also has to be accepted that one of these might be better suited to both the times we live in and the stories that we, as GMs, want our players to participate in.

    A. Descent Into Darkness

    Instead of a Dystopia-in-place, tell the story of the slide into darkness, with the PCs fighting to preserve honor and personal integrity and other virtues. The problems may ultimately prove too vast for them, but they can be a beacon of hope that things will get better. And if the campaign runs for long enough, they may attract enough people of like mind to begin a cultural counter-movement, and actually climb back out the other side.

    Endings matter a lot in this sort of campaign – simple retirement with sanity restored to the world lacks the sharp punctuation. Most creators opt for pathos – the PCs achieve their goals but most never get to enjoy the fruits of their labors, paying the ultimate price to get over the finish line – or for hints that the darkness is still out there, physically or metaphysically, and looking for a way back in.

    But there are other choices as well; not all of them will work with every campaign. Another popular choice is the protagonist who is forced to accept a job that he doesn’t want to do because he’s the only one the rest of the ‘world’ trusts enough to do the job. One variation that I have used is to find a way to let the bad guys win while transforming them enough that they are no longer bad guys. They might not be perfect, they might still have feet of clay, but they are sufficiently redeemed that the ‘defeat’ becomes a victory.

    So think very carefully about the ending you want and begin laying the groundwork for that outcome and a satisfactory resolution of the campaign long before you get there.

    B. Climbing The Mountain

    This starts with the Dystopia in place and tells the tale of how the world emerged from the dark times. It’s like the second half of the proposed Descent Into Darkness campaign described above. It’s often a greater challenge because if society has yet to fall into Dystopia, you have the capacity to make preparations for the future; if society has already fallen, you are starting from nothing.

    This imparts quite a different flavor to the campaign. Early on, it’s all about survival, and desperation, and potentially not a lot of fun – and the GM will have to remedy that, and find or instill the entertainment value in the setting.

    The Matrix and The Running Man are both examples of this kind of story. In the beginning, the Dystopia is entrenched, and potentially even hidden from view. Once it is revealed, and challenged, it will attempt to crush the upstarts – so this phase of the campaign would be all about survival. But little-by-little, resources would be gathered that makes survival easier and presents opportunities to strike back, and ultimately, to overthrow or overcome the forces creating the Dystopia.

    Unlike the previous version, this naturally lends itself to a climatic battle at the end, with the characters becoming symbolic but physical manifestations of the greater social forces at play.

    C. Flirting With Danger

    The road to hell is paved with good intentions. it is sometimes said. This can be a campaign without villains, in which everyone is trying to do the right thing – but methods and objectives clash, and there is no consensus as to what the right thing is. There may be no villains, but there are enemies.

    This is neither Utopia nor Dystopia – but attempts to achieve the former leave open the danger of the latter. There is usually some concrete manifestation of the danger in question – but that is ultimately just a representative symbol.

    If you then one or two actual villains into the mix, the odds of Dystopia go way up – but as a counterbalance, you have also introduced the PCs. And suddenly, the choice is theirs – they can choose to shoot for the stars (Utopia) but only if they are willing to risk complete failure (Dystopia) – or they can simply aim to preserve the status quo and leave it up to others, who may be less qualified, to make the bigger decisions.

    D. Muddling Through

    Most of the time, the real world is neither Utopia nor Dystopia (though it may occasionally take steps in one direction or the other), and the ultimate questions never get asked and are never in a position to be answered. Progress comes from the tension between the two – between business aimed at profiting at the expense of others and the individual, the maverick, and the good aimed at helping others. The big issues are too big to be resolved; all you can do is make sense of the chaos immediately around you and do the best that you can.

    The West Wing is that sort of show. The goal is never to reform the world and make everything sweetness and light; it’s to leave the scene, when your time is up, a better place than you found it.

    Taking the existential issues out of the equation also takes the extremes off the table, and that can be a good thing, because they tend to dominate whenever they are part of the picture.

    E. Utopia: The Challenge

    If Dystopias lend themselves to lazy writing, Utopias must represent the hardest challenge for a GM or writer – how to make life / the game interesting in such a setting?

    The answer is that there must be 1000 different ways that the setting can fall from grace, and it’s the PCs job to stop any of them from happening.

    Utopia is often a double-edged sword; maintaining it strips a lot of power and choice from the hands of those who could use them, or abuse them. Protecting the rights of the individual, for example, would require strict rules and adherence to procedures for obtaining limited scope for infringing on those rights. This is often the world of the police procedural.

    F. “And I wanna know, who’s responsible?”

    There is a seeming utopia in this concept, but it is flawed in ways that are not immediately evident. The PCs start uncovering those flaws, and this puts them at the heart of the moral dilemma – reveal the truth, ruining life for endless others who can’t do anything about it, or find the agency – be it person or corporation or government, who through malice or mistake, have brought the snake into paradise. In other words, there is an apparent utopia but there are dystopian cracks in the facade, and the PCs can either widen those cracks or wallpaper over them.

An uncertain Premise

It may be a little late to admit this, but I’m still not 100% convinced of the premise. Certainly, you can look at any action film, select the part where the hero(es) are at their lowest ebb, and it will look very dystopian – but a broader view of the entire work gives a more balanced perspective.

True Dystopias are relatively rare. Mad Max was set in one, but even there, there was hope, so it was not absolute. Most dystopias are relative (distinguished with a lower-case ‘d’); while things could look grim, there is the potential for circumstances and situations to improve.

A lot depends, I think, on the status of the PCs when it comes to applying this thinking to TTRPGs. If they are a lone band of rebels, the setting is a lot more Dystopian than the exact same setting if they are but one band of many seeking to put things right (or at least, to make them better).

That’s because, while some will fail, others will succeed and improve things just a bit, giving new hope and encouragement to future bands. It may take years or even generations, but so long as cumulative gains outweigh cumulative setbacks, the narrative is an optimistic one.

The Constraints Upon PCs

Perhaps a different perspective: The less constrained by rules, regulations, and laws the PCs are – the more willing officialdom is to bend to the whims or needs of a select few, whatever the justification may be,, the more the trend of the narrative is to Dystopia, no matter what the background. Should that background already be fairly dark, you have what could legitimately be considered a Dystopian game in a Dystopian setting, and the PCs – no matter what their intentions – are part of the problem. Things can only get worse, no matter how much they seem to improve superficially – the heart of the tree is rotten and will not weather the storm at some point.

This puts the social dynamic of a campaign, beyond any initial starting point, in the hands of the PCs, regardless of what genre of campaign you are running. The first Zenith-3 campaign started in an extremely dystopian 1960s – McCarthy was President, there was something akin to a police state, the police were corrupt, the courts were bought, and Organized Crime ran the streets. It took two game years to change all of that – not to perfection, but to something better, in which there was hope that the future would be even brighter – and another year to oust the alien infiltrator who had enabled it all (lest he corrupt things all over again). Yet the villain always did what he did with the best of intentions. Though the setting was Dystopian, the story was of climbing the mountain. The current campaign is in a superficially more Utopian setting – but there are cracks through which a number of Dystopian currents flow, and they are slowly gathering in strength.

Ultimately, there will be a confrontation – but before you can have one, you need to identify the responsible agency, and right now, there are just a bunch of people with good intentions who disagree with each other – and by putting their vested interests ahead of the long-term good of society, they are engaged in dragging the utopia down. A broad social movement like this is hard to arrest (and it’s not the only such movement), but this is a superhero campaign – the players know that sooner or later someone will (metaphorically) put their hand up to be target #1. The key point: Neither were designed to be pure dystopias nor utopias – they were designed to be places where interesting adventures could happen. What about my other campaigns?

The Zener Gate campaign was always about Dystopia becoming Utopia (while sowing the seeds of its own potential downfall). It won’t be long before the PCs are in a position to undo the dystopia – or, more correctly, confine it to a single Presidential term.

The Adventurer’s Club campaign is altogether more optimistic in setting, but with parts of the world succumbing to a Dystopian Horror in the rise of the Fascist powers, and various villains seeking this or that at the expense of the relative Utopia. The setting is not perfect, but it’s getting better in some places – in part, thanks to the PCs and their allies – but there are enemies both foreign and domestic with whom they have to grapple. Perpetually set in a mid-1930s in which the Great Depression was less severe than in our world, and so did not spell the doom of the 1920s-style entrepreneur-inventor, everyone can see a future World War on the horizon, and most view it with the optimism that was rife at the start of the historical war – “There and back, six weeks tops, be good to teach Mr Hitler a lesson!” While there are realists who know it will be longer and more difficult than that, they are generally ignored by everyone as doomsayers. So this is a Utopian campaign that is slowly descending into Dystopia – while holding that darkness at arm’s length. The PCs, of course, make regular excursions into it to beat it back and preserve the virtues they represent – ‘truth, justice, equality and opportunity for all’ if I were to put it into words, which they would not – for one more day / week / month / year.

Most of my Fantasy games have some sort of Lurking Darkness that attempts to corrupt a simple medieval near-utopia, taking advantage of the corruptible nature of humans. But a “simple medieval near-utopia” is not necessarily that pleasant an existence for many; what they have is hope that things will get better.

What about your campaigns? Where do they sit on the scale between Absolute Dystopia and Absolute Utopia, what is the trend from forces outside the PCs, and what is the observed trend of their actions – which way is your game society headed? And do you want to take advantage of that, or fight against the rising tide?

Perhaps, regardless of the backdrop, any reality in which the common folk and ordinary people have such hope is not actually Dystopian at all. Food for thought, isn’t it? And with that rather cheery thought to end on, I think I’ll call this a wrap!


Discover more from Campaign Mastery

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.