The drudgery of acquiring food, fuel, and munitions that plagued Neville for a majority of his book seem to be the only experience that game designers deem interesting in life after The End.ĭesigners have trouble separating Armageddon from the chore of scavenging for shotgun shells.
Oligarchy armor games series#
Popular series such as Left 4 Dead and Fallout care more about the run-and-gun combat of molotovs and Mad Max- style DIY armor than social critique found in the works of Richard Matheson or George A. However, game designers often shy away from depicting cultural machinery and instead fill their games with the rote tasks of survival. The tradition continues to this day in videogames, which feature miles of derelict cities and radioactive countrysides. As a genre, the post-apocalyptic story allows authors to explore what it means to be human in the wake of some cataclysm-be it bomb, plague, or climate. Instead of presenting plot arcs, Bogost argues that games should present “ machinery that shows us something about the world outside ourselves, something incomplete and grotesque even, but something we ought to see.” Not surprisingly, Matheson’s story demonstrates that literature has a much longer history of representing social machinery. This interpretation of Matheson is not far from game critic Ian Bogost’s recent claim in The Atlantic that videogames represent complex systems. In that final line, “I am legend” shows the reader how individuals lose identity and get swallowed up by the monster myths of civilization. On the final page Neville utters the book’s title because he understands that brutally killing the vampires while they slept during the day made him no different than the villain of Dracula. Instead he learns that the infected survivors have formed a new society, and he is their boogeyman. Unlike the disastrous movie, he does not manage to find a cure.
Robert Neville, the last human left in Los Angeles, spends much of the story studying a vampiric plague that wiped out the world. The last sentence of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend is where I wish more post-apocalyptic videogames began.
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