I do not have any larger point here and I wouldn't necessarily argue it's indicative of any deeper issues (though obviously Fullbright turned out to have Deeper Issues), but I am just really stewing on this game's incidental world building detail that Elon Musk was President of (presumably) South Africa and that "the capital" was named after him in 2016.
First off, the year. Tacoma is set in 2088 and was released in 2017. The game doesn't really position itself as branching from an alternative history event/trend pre-dating its release, making the decision to set it right around release jarring. Judging from the fact that there was a preview build in 2015 with a different premise (in which player character Amy Ferrier is a crew member rather than someone there on a focused assignment) and the game was delayed, it's possible this was originally a "future" event that accidentally became a "historical" event.
Second, South Africa does not have a singular capital. It has three capitals: Cape Town, Pretoria, and Bloemfonteinone, each corresponding to a respective branch of government. Did no one on the Fullbright team know this? It is an unmissable fact if you google "South Africa capital". Alternatively, maybe the implication is that 70 years on South Africa has done away with its three-capital idea. But hang on it's still called South Africa? Basically the entire west coast of the US and Canada minus California unifies under the name "Cascadia-First Nations" (sidebar: if you wanted to speculate on a sovereign Indigenous state or confederation of nations, why would you still use the colonial term "First Nations", which expressly doesn't include Inuit people, who are implied to be part of this fictional country) but South Africa just stays the course name-wise?
Third, President Musk. Unpack that for ten seconds: first white president post-apartheid, presumably through his own party (he could never win the ANC leadership), and that close to the present day at the time of release? I know public perception of Musk was fairly different in 2015-2017 (there was that awful Star Trek: Discovery name drop around then, not to mention The Messenger positively referencing Jordan Peterson like a year later), but even so like...why would this happen, and why then? There's not enough runway. It smacks of the sort of juvenile logic where The Troops would make the best football team and Deadpool should host SNL. Maybe it's a coup? That would explain the name change; it wasn't a reflection of his popularity, but rather his megalomania.
I understand that this was probably a conversation of less than half an hour between at most three people. There's the idea for the crossword, the idea to toss in world-building, someone's like "if space travel is so big, maybe it's because someone like Elon Musk became president", someone else is like "wait he can't be president of the US though, wasn't born here", third person is like "well he's president of South Africa then", and that was the end of it. Then I come along 6-7 years later and get annoyed because I know too fucking much about that stupid fuck, and the idea of him being an implicitly politically important part of a future optimistic enough to include commonplace space travel/residence/industry and actual Artificial Intelligence before the end of the 21st century just boils my brain.
I was not being ironic, I genuinely have no larger point.
First off, the year. Tacoma is set in 2088 and was released in 2017. The game doesn't really position itself as branching from an alternative history event/trend pre-dating its release, making the decision to set it right around release jarring. Judging from the fact that there was a preview build in 2015 with a different premise (in which player character Amy Ferrier is a crew member rather than someone there on a focused assignment) and the game was delayed, it's possible this was originally a "future" event that accidentally became a "historical" event.
Second, South Africa does not have a singular capital. It has three capitals: Cape Town, Pretoria, and Bloemfonteinone, each corresponding to a respective branch of government. Did no one on the Fullbright team know this? It is an unmissable fact if you google "South Africa capital". Alternatively, maybe the implication is that 70 years on South Africa has done away with its three-capital idea. But hang on it's still called South Africa? Basically the entire west coast of the US and Canada minus California unifies under the name "Cascadia-First Nations" (sidebar: if you wanted to speculate on a sovereign Indigenous state or confederation of nations, why would you still use the colonial term "First Nations", which expressly doesn't include Inuit people, who are implied to be part of this fictional country) but South Africa just stays the course name-wise?
Third, President Musk. Unpack that for ten seconds: first white president post-apartheid, presumably through his own party (he could never win the ANC leadership), and that close to the present day at the time of release? I know public perception of Musk was fairly different in 2015-2017 (there was that awful Star Trek: Discovery name drop around then, not to mention The Messenger positively referencing Jordan Peterson like a year later), but even so like...why would this happen, and why then? There's not enough runway. It smacks of the sort of juvenile logic where The Troops would make the best football team and Deadpool should host SNL. Maybe it's a coup? That would explain the name change; it wasn't a reflection of his popularity, but rather his megalomania.
I understand that this was probably a conversation of less than half an hour between at most three people. There's the idea for the crossword, the idea to toss in world-building, someone's like "if space travel is so big, maybe it's because someone like Elon Musk became president", someone else is like "wait he can't be president of the US though, wasn't born here", third person is like "well he's president of South Africa then", and that was the end of it. Then I come along 6-7 years later and get annoyed because I know too fucking much about that stupid fuck, and the idea of him being an implicitly politically important part of a future optimistic enough to include commonplace space travel/residence/industry and actual Artificial Intelligence before the end of the 21st century just boils my brain.
I was not being ironic, I genuinely have no larger point.
3 Comments
As someone who loved Tacoma, I was a little iffy about the President Musk thing, but I think it works because its signalling corporate hellscape, and the whole premise of Tacoma being space travel built on corporate scrip and indentured servitude, which was kinda prophetic because this was before Musk even said anything explicit about that. It's not like Star Trek: Discovery or The Simpsons where they're clearly trying to kiss Musk's ass and are trying to paint him as the new Einstein or whatever. Though it does beg the question of how he became president of South Africa, but it could've been through a coup or something like that, as you said. I certainly hope Fullbright included it thinking “Yeah, this is fucked up, and we know it's fucked up too, but it certainly seems like something Musk would do,” and in that case it'd work given everything else going on in the game's speculative fiction future.
I will say though, given the U.S. no longer exists, I don't think they had to pick South Africa. In the event of the U.S. dissolving, I could totally see Musk trying to carve out his own little fiefdom somewhere in the former U.S. Certainly more realistic than him becoming president or dictator or whatever of South Africa, at least.
My explanation for ‘First Nations’ being used is that the term has a slightly different meaning in the future than it does now (helped by the fact that it's implied that Canada doesn't exist anymore, so their definition is no longer relevant), referring specifically to the Indigenous peoples of Cascadia. My logic for this is that, present-day, the U.S. side of Cascadia is the only place outside of Canada where I've heard the term ‘First Nations’ regularly used to refer to Indigenous North Americans, with some Indigenous people preferring it over ‘Native American’ or ‘Indian’.
I will say though, given the U.S. no longer exists, I don't think they had to pick South Africa. In the event of the U.S. dissolving, I could totally see Musk trying to carve out his own little fiefdom somewhere in the former U.S. Certainly more realistic than him becoming president or dictator or whatever of South Africa, at least.
My explanation for ‘First Nations’ being used is that the term has a slightly different meaning in the future than it does now (helped by the fact that it's implied that Canada doesn't exist anymore, so their definition is no longer relevant), referring specifically to the Indigenous peoples of Cascadia. My logic for this is that, present-day, the U.S. side of Cascadia is the only place outside of Canada where I've heard the term ‘First Nations’ regularly used to refer to Indigenous North Americans, with some Indigenous people preferring it over ‘Native American’ or ‘Indian’.
For the record I did enjoy the game, I just didn't have anything novel to say about what I thought worked and this detail got under my skin.
While I agree they are going for a corporate hellscape vision of the future, I find that gets undermined by the broader context of the setting. Basically everything about this ostensible dystopia--a space station between Earth and the moon with simulated gravity, greenhouses, cryostasis chambers, and conscious AI--is miraculous. Not only is it all highly unlikely to be achieved by the end of this century technologically, but it implies an Earth that has the resources and production capacity to make all this. Even if those corporations are treating human life as disposable and engaging in horrific crimes (like always), them actually delivering on the most pie-in-the-sky future technology instead of wasting billions on dogshit virtual reality or producing fantasy tv shows is on some level optimistic and favourable. My understanding is early in development on the game, Venturis was instead called Virgin-Tesla; even if their point with this is Musk and Branson are soulless monsters who want the world under their heel, it is on some level drinking their kool-aid by depicting them as capable of achieving that.
I get that this sounds pedantic, like no shit the space station game needs to assume humanity is able to build a space station, and at the end of the day it's about its story and not about predicting the future accurately. I just find it generates tension with what they're aiming for thematically, especially given the game is trying to lure you into digging into the minutiae of its world. This dovetails with the use of First Nations, because again if there are sovereign Indigenous states in North America by the end of this century, something will have gone radically right in a way that seems at odds with there being mega-corporations that have the natural resources to sustain and sell residences in Earth's orbit. Those things seem at worst entirely contradictory and at best like the kind of thing that distracts critical, progressive-minded players that the game seemingly wants to court.
To go in a bit deeper on the naming point, for context I am a settler who grew up in Unama'ki/Cape Breton and now lives in Tkaronto/Toronto. I have friends who are Mi'kmaq, Ojibwe, and Métis. I do my best to refer to people the Canadian government would group together as First Nations by the name of their own nation and to use names they used for their lands, just as I prefer someone would say I am descended from Scottish people rather than British people. It is a small decolonial practice I have worked on over the past decade as I've studied history and law. That said, I know Mi'kmaq and Ojibwe and Métis people who use various combos of the terms Indian/First Nations/Native/Aboriginal/Indigenous, either in a specific legal/academic/cultural context or just because it's the terms they're used to. There's no right or obvious answer and I'm not the nomenclature police; people obviously continue to use inappropriate or inaccurate names in reality, and if the in-fiction logic is "it's a compromise name for lack of anything better all these nations could agree on" that makes a sort of sense. But it's the accumulation of small details like this that gives me the sense that Fullbright didn't really think through the implications of their world-building, or maybe more accurately imagine both the good and bad possibilities of the future in a way I find unrealistic.
While I agree they are going for a corporate hellscape vision of the future, I find that gets undermined by the broader context of the setting. Basically everything about this ostensible dystopia--a space station between Earth and the moon with simulated gravity, greenhouses, cryostasis chambers, and conscious AI--is miraculous. Not only is it all highly unlikely to be achieved by the end of this century technologically, but it implies an Earth that has the resources and production capacity to make all this. Even if those corporations are treating human life as disposable and engaging in horrific crimes (like always), them actually delivering on the most pie-in-the-sky future technology instead of wasting billions on dogshit virtual reality or producing fantasy tv shows is on some level optimistic and favourable. My understanding is early in development on the game, Venturis was instead called Virgin-Tesla; even if their point with this is Musk and Branson are soulless monsters who want the world under their heel, it is on some level drinking their kool-aid by depicting them as capable of achieving that.
I get that this sounds pedantic, like no shit the space station game needs to assume humanity is able to build a space station, and at the end of the day it's about its story and not about predicting the future accurately. I just find it generates tension with what they're aiming for thematically, especially given the game is trying to lure you into digging into the minutiae of its world. This dovetails with the use of First Nations, because again if there are sovereign Indigenous states in North America by the end of this century, something will have gone radically right in a way that seems at odds with there being mega-corporations that have the natural resources to sustain and sell residences in Earth's orbit. Those things seem at worst entirely contradictory and at best like the kind of thing that distracts critical, progressive-minded players that the game seemingly wants to court.
To go in a bit deeper on the naming point, for context I am a settler who grew up in Unama'ki/Cape Breton and now lives in Tkaronto/Toronto. I have friends who are Mi'kmaq, Ojibwe, and Métis. I do my best to refer to people the Canadian government would group together as First Nations by the name of their own nation and to use names they used for their lands, just as I prefer someone would say I am descended from Scottish people rather than British people. It is a small decolonial practice I have worked on over the past decade as I've studied history and law. That said, I know Mi'kmaq and Ojibwe and Métis people who use various combos of the terms Indian/First Nations/Native/Aboriginal/Indigenous, either in a specific legal/academic/cultural context or just because it's the terms they're used to. There's no right or obvious answer and I'm not the nomenclature police; people obviously continue to use inappropriate or inaccurate names in reality, and if the in-fiction logic is "it's a compromise name for lack of anything better all these nations could agree on" that makes a sort of sense. But it's the accumulation of small details like this that gives me the sense that Fullbright didn't really think through the implications of their world-building, or maybe more accurately imagine both the good and bad possibilities of the future in a way I find unrealistic.
To be clear I figured you didn't hate the game or anything like that, the fact that you have so much to say about its worldbuilding makes it pretty clear you've thoroughly explored the game.
In regards to the whole thing about Musk, I haven't really thought about it like that before, but I absolutely agree that depicting Musk as capable of revolutionizing anything regarding space is sort of buying into his con.
And yeah, the game's attempt at doing a “some things will be better, some things will be worse” sort of thing is definitely YMMV. I enjoyed the trace amounts of optimism about the future contrasted with the whole corporate dystopia stuff, but it does definitely clash at points, like there appears to be a (successful) Socialist European Federation yet Venturis is from Italy? Maybe Europe is better at dealing with the corporations and its less of a corporate hellscape compared to the rest of the world, but I still found it odd.
I get what you mean about it seeming unrealistic that land back would happen in a world like the one Tacoma depicts. Honestly, to go back to the utopia vs. dystopia thing, it kinda feels like Tacoma should've been two different games, like the one that takes place on Station Tacoma should've been a complete dystopia (post-climate change, post-economic collapse, corporations have a stranglehold on the world, the planet is dying, etc.) and they could've had another one that takes place on Earth in a Star Trek-style utopian future? Just spitballing and I'm not sure what the setting of the utopian one would be, but yeah.
I am also a settler, born and currently living in Anishinaabewaki (the land of the Anishinaabe). For the record, I get the issues with the term ‘First Nations’, namely the way Canada weirdly excludes Métis and Inuit people in the term. I also understand the importance in referring to specific nations by their names (I also try to use the names they use to refer to themselves, e.g. Diné rather than Navajo and Haudenosaunee rather than Iroquois, as the exonyms are colonial names that were often adopted from their enemies and are regarded by the nations in question as esentially slurs). But a collective term can still be useful. Like yes most Scottish people understandably don't like being referred to as British due to their fraught history with England and the way ‘British’ obfuscates identity, but it's fair to use British as a collective demonym for the island of Great Britain.
Obviously being a settler I don't have any say in the matter, but from what I've observed at least, First Nations appears to be the least problematic term commonly used (if only Métis and Inuit people weren't excluded for whatever reason). ‘Native American’ has been criticized for being obfuscating (it makes it seem like all these people are the same when they're not), ‘Indian’ is just objectively incorrect (they aren't from India). First Nations makes it clear that these are different nations by being inherently plural (I also appreciate how it makes it clear that these people were, and are, nations; with them even having their own countries, and weren't just “primitive tribes” despite what settler history would have you believe).
As you said, “it's a compromise name for lack of anything better all these nations could agree on.” (To be clear I 100% get what you mean about the accumulation of small details, as I said earlier it's definitely a problem in Tacoma, just wanted to add my thoughts.)
Sorry if any of that comment was a mess or worded poorly, it's currently 2 AM and I don't have long before I need to get ready for bed. Hopefully I made sense, though!
In regards to the whole thing about Musk, I haven't really thought about it like that before, but I absolutely agree that depicting Musk as capable of revolutionizing anything regarding space is sort of buying into his con.
And yeah, the game's attempt at doing a “some things will be better, some things will be worse” sort of thing is definitely YMMV. I enjoyed the trace amounts of optimism about the future contrasted with the whole corporate dystopia stuff, but it does definitely clash at points, like there appears to be a (successful) Socialist European Federation yet Venturis is from Italy? Maybe Europe is better at dealing with the corporations and its less of a corporate hellscape compared to the rest of the world, but I still found it odd.
I get what you mean about it seeming unrealistic that land back would happen in a world like the one Tacoma depicts. Honestly, to go back to the utopia vs. dystopia thing, it kinda feels like Tacoma should've been two different games, like the one that takes place on Station Tacoma should've been a complete dystopia (post-climate change, post-economic collapse, corporations have a stranglehold on the world, the planet is dying, etc.) and they could've had another one that takes place on Earth in a Star Trek-style utopian future? Just spitballing and I'm not sure what the setting of the utopian one would be, but yeah.
I am also a settler, born and currently living in Anishinaabewaki (the land of the Anishinaabe). For the record, I get the issues with the term ‘First Nations’, namely the way Canada weirdly excludes Métis and Inuit people in the term. I also understand the importance in referring to specific nations by their names (I also try to use the names they use to refer to themselves, e.g. Diné rather than Navajo and Haudenosaunee rather than Iroquois, as the exonyms are colonial names that were often adopted from their enemies and are regarded by the nations in question as esentially slurs). But a collective term can still be useful. Like yes most Scottish people understandably don't like being referred to as British due to their fraught history with England and the way ‘British’ obfuscates identity, but it's fair to use British as a collective demonym for the island of Great Britain.
Obviously being a settler I don't have any say in the matter, but from what I've observed at least, First Nations appears to be the least problematic term commonly used (if only Métis and Inuit people weren't excluded for whatever reason). ‘Native American’ has been criticized for being obfuscating (it makes it seem like all these people are the same when they're not), ‘Indian’ is just objectively incorrect (they aren't from India). First Nations makes it clear that these are different nations by being inherently plural (I also appreciate how it makes it clear that these people were, and are, nations; with them even having their own countries, and weren't just “primitive tribes” despite what settler history would have you believe).
As you said, “it's a compromise name for lack of anything better all these nations could agree on.” (To be clear I 100% get what you mean about the accumulation of small details, as I said earlier it's definitely a problem in Tacoma, just wanted to add my thoughts.)
Sorry if any of that comment was a mess or worded poorly, it's currently 2 AM and I don't have long before I need to get ready for bed. Hopefully I made sense, though!
NikitaZimonja
1 year ago