FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

What 'Destiny' Tells Us About Sci-Fi Optimism

Bungie's new release is not only a shoot'em up, but a game about humanity and hope.
Image: BagoGames/Flickr

Everyone's sci-fi 101 class should start with Futurama. Not the cartoon, you dorm room dork, its namesake, the famous World's Fair exhibit. A tour of a society to come, a glowing what-if from 1939, the exhibit showcased how technology could make life pristine for the white-collared, white, middle-class Americans. Because that's a starry zenith, from which the narrative began descending.

After the atom bomb, the general tone around technology shifted from radiant possibilities to hungover regrets. Stories of exploration like Planet of the Apes and Forbidden Planet took the space dream ambitions and wondered what nightmares were waiting on the other side of the trip. 2001: A Space Odyssey meditated on the idea that we can only rely on what we build to a point, all the while appropriating imagery from The Jetsons.

Advertisement

After the atom bomb, the general tone around technology shifted from radiant possibilities to hungover regrets

Keep winding along, and human error and horrible consequences become science fiction's central themes, with the notable exception of Star Trek, which seems to function as a generation-spanning vessel for hopefulness. The genre became less about the wonders of invention and more about how those inventions will blow up in our faces.

All images are screenshots from the Destiny trailer. Image: YouTube

In the last decade, it's shifted from specific inventions backfiring to the foibles of society that allow things to get to that point: Children of Men, District 9—films using sci-fi to show how pollution, capitalism, and racism paint us into a doomed corner. For decades, science fiction was here to remind us of how we've fucked up and will continue to fuck up, which is why it's interesting for that tone to slightly, suddenly change just as things look their worst.

The newly released video game Destiny begins on Mars, with an idealistic pod of astronauts hitting the surface as the text flashes through numerous dialects, to suggest this was a group effort. The music sounds like it'll break out in the Star Trek overture at any moment. Humans meet the Traveller, a massive mystical floating orb, which has gifted humanity with invention and interplanetary civilizations.

"It was a time of miracles," said the Speaker, the Travellers interpreter, "we stared out at the galaxy and knew that it was our destiny to walk in the light of other stars."

Advertisement

Wonder-ball had a catch though: an ominous force called the Darkness tailed it, and now, by extension, humanity. "And that was the end of everything. But it was also a beginning," said the Speaker.

In the months leading up to its release, Destiny had an almost lore-like quality to it. There was a background of chatter about fireteams and patrols, a wide-open beta allowed countless players to explore its world before the traditional launch. This gambit by Activision, inspired by open-beta trends, paid off immensely—the gossip leading up to Destiny was more positive than the critical response has been afterward.

Never one to be above the hype cycle, I caved in just like everyone. Drunk after a business meeting (which in my line of work means going to a pub, anyway), I stumbled into a game store, with both belligerence and a newfound determination to surrender my night to seeing what Destiny was all about. In my defence I also picked up Project X Zone and OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast.

In the light of day, I can see both sides of the Destiny sucks/rules debate. It is a wide-open playground for online players, a massive scale that borrows from Borderlands, World of Warcraft and Journey to create interesting ways to meet and play with perfect strangers. It doesn't look exactly like Halo, but it's in a sweet spot between familiar space-armour helmets and decaying environments pulled from an old Heavy Metal magazine.

Advertisement

With a well-developed sense of wonder, the game begins with civilization on the ropes ready to be the comeback kid

On the other hand, the story is as colourful as a cardboard box, the missions can feel incredibly routine in structure, as if we can just save the universe by scanning various space consoles. The idea of being 'the most important Guardian' is funny because it's kind of like the framing at a Universal Studios Orlando ride—the illusion that your adventure is the grandest works only as long as you don't notice there's a ton of other people on the ride with you. Which is funny, considering Peter Dinklage delivers lines to you with the same gusto as a teen employee stuck doing the Jaws ride all summer.

The people who are loving it aren't wrong; the people who don't think it's the bees knees aren't wrong either. No matter the criticism's cost, at worst Destiny is a good game, just not a majestic one. More interesting than the game play, though, is its place in the broader narrative.

Halo, Bungie's previously massively successful outing, always felt at home in its years. American military pastiche was injected into, essentially, a space-scale War on Terror. The first game was in development before 9/11, but it came out just after, when Americans were primed to shoot first and ask questions later of the obviously destructive alien hordes.

Can the same be said about Destiny? With a well-developed sense of wonder, the game begins with civilization on the ropes ready to be the comeback kid. The Tower, Destiny's hub, is a grandiose building, the scale of a sci-fi megastructure sectored into roundtables like Minas Tirith in LOTR. Destiny is full of magic, without elaborating too much on why, and the aesthetics as a whole can be soundly described as Amblin-esque.

Advertisement

Related: Gaming's Feminist Illuminati Is a Real Thing

Not only does the introduction suggest that we'll innovate our way out of today's hardships all the way to a Mars expedition, but it suggests we'll be able to do it a second time through cleverness and camaraderie. If this was an isolated incident, I could shrug it off, but Christopher Nolan's upcoming Interstellar seems to position itself the same way—a troubled planet's inhabitants will solve its problems, no matter how close to the wire.

Now, there are theories emerging that Destiny's story could reveal different, cynical stripes in coming days, that the Traveller is in fact the antagonist and we've-been-the-bad-guys-all along. Or maybe that's just the fans way of justifying an otherwise incredibly by-the-numbers plotline, with something just as predictable. Likewise, Interstellar isn't out yet, and the vibe we've been picking up on could be a product of clever gatekeeping.

But there's something to be said about the paradigm shift that comprises these two blockbusters and Star Trek's return to prominence and popularity. Consider that Halo's main multiplayer function was competitive, whereas in Destiny, it's cooperative. Maybe the optimism in sci-fi looks different now. We'll never return to the naivety of the World's Fair, but we can have flights of fantasy that our planet's march to destruction can be u-turned through our gusto and innovation, and that we'll pull through, and find answers on Mars.

There's optimism in the air and in science fiction again in general, a line that runs from Elon Musk, through Star Trek, and into Destiny. Even if the narratives in video games aren't blowing us away, the narrative they fit into is, rightly or wrongly, looking upward again.