[Below is a review of the video game “Killzone,” which I wrote while in college, over ten years ago. While I admit it’s a little silly to hold a video game to such scrutiny, my conclusions are still valid, and this piece is significant because it was my first attempt to put part of my own future vision in writing, even if it is a critique of someone else’s vision.
This repost will be the first in a recurring series of film and video game “Reviews” that I’ll be doing to assess the feasibility of whatever futuristic elements they depict.
I’ve edited this Killzone review a little for clarity and brevity. ]
A couple days ago I finally finished the game “Killzone” for PS2, and I have some thoughts about it. First, a bit of background: “Killzone” takes place at some unspecified point in the distant future when mankind has mastered interstellar space travel and colonized two new planets, Vekta and Helghan. Vekta looks identical to Earth, while Helghan is barren and polluted.
Over the generations, the humans of Helghan–known as the Helghast–were genetically mutated by their harsh environment to the point of being barely-human freaks. The Helghast are also warlike and have a tradition of military leadership. At the start of the game, the cool Intro video shows the Helghast army invade Vekta by surprise. While the motivations for this aren’t clearly stated, after reading the “Killzone” booklet I believe it was probably done to obtain resources that Helghan lacks.
This is where you, the player, come in. You play a soldier named “Templar,” serving in Vekta’s ground forces (called the “ISA”). As the game progresses, three other character join your team: Luger is the woman, Rico is the heavy weapons guy and Hakha is the Helghast/human “hybrid.” Among them, Templar is the natural leader and all-around balanced fighter while the other three have specific combat specialties. By the midpoint of the game, you have the option of playing as any character you wish at each level. I thought this was a pretty cool touch because each character has unique abilities and weapons that make the levels a different experience depending on whom you choose. Anyway, you blow away a bunch of Helghast and save the planet–from the first invasion wave.
Along with the the selectable player option, I also liked how “Killzone” was neither too short (“Max Payne 2”) nor too long (“Halo 2”). However, there were some areas needing serious improvement. The gameplay could be awkward: You can’t jump period, making it impossible for your big, soldier self to clear small obstacles like a Jersey Wall; grenades are almost impossible to aim and take about 10 seconds to throw and detonate; climbing ladders is an ordeal; and aiming the sniper rifle gives new definition to the word “tedious.” While the A.I. is an O.K. challenge, the enemies aren’t varied enough and there are only like three different types of Helghast soldiers. Your fellow A.I. squad mates are of inconsistent help during gameplay. The game’s story was also pretty boring. Overall, “Killzone” is playable but falls short of what it could have been.
I also noticed some crude demographic stereotypes in the game. On your team, for instance, the leader is Templar: the handsome younger white guy. Luger, being a woman, is weaker in terms of health and physical strength and has to rely on her sniper pistol and sneaking skills as she runs around in her skin tight black jumpsuit killing bad guys. Rico, being the only “colored” person on the team (he looks Latino), is big, tough, dumb, vulgar, and slow, and fittingly starts each mission with a big machinegun/rocket launcher while his teammates have smaller, more precise weapons. Hakha’s bald head and pale skin cast him as the stereotypical older white man, and he predictably uses received pronunciation, quotes passages from literature to the rest of the team, and knows the most about computer and electronics systems.
“Killzone” also presents an extremely incongruous vision of the future. Let’s begin: We are told at the beginning of the game that humans have inhabited Helghan and Vekta for several generations, which I’ll very conservatively assume means “50 years.” Thus, 50 years before the start of “Killzone,” mankind had already 1) mastered faster than light space travel and 2) built spacecraft cheaply enough to allow mass numbers of people to be transported to Vekta and Helghan. The requisite scientific breakthroughs for these two technological advancements will almost certainly not arrive before the middle of the 21st century, and in fact may prove totally elusive. Considering the facts and estimates in this paragraph, we are left to conclude that “Killzone,” at the very earliest, takes place 100 years in the future–2106 A.D.
Problematically, the world of “Killzone” ignores all of the other scientific breakthroughs and new technologies that will also be made by 2106. For instance, all of the weapons used in the game are simply 20th-century firearms, but with cool-looking exteriors that make them look advanced when in fact they’re not. By 100 years from now, small arms will certainly be much more advanced. I wouldn’t be surprised if directed energy weapons or EMP-powered railguns had totally superseded firearms. I also expect small arms to come with built-in sensors, computers and actuators that allow the guns to sense which target their shooter wanted to hit, and to automatically aim themselves at it. All you would have to do is aim at someone’s body, pull the trigger, and the gun would make sure the bullet went directly through the person’s brain or heart. Not just that, but through the part of the organ that caused the most damage and the most immediate incapacitation. The gun’s computer would also automatically shuffle between different types of ammunition to inflict maximum damage on the target and could also automatically adjust the velocity of the projectile. As a result, the small arms of 2106 will require almost no training to be used effectively. And if they incorporated nanotechnology, future guns might be able to make their own bullets and conduct self-repairs and maintenance, meaning the weapons would be self-cleaning and would last almost forever.
But the more fundamental problem with “Killzone” is that humans will be obsolete on the battlefield by 2106. Think about it. Even the most hardcore, well-armed, futuristic supersoldier still needs hours a day to eat, sleep and take care of other personal needs. He or she still feels pain, questions orders, makes mistakes, and is subject to irrational and unpredictable emotions. A machine, on the other hand, would suffer from none of these faults. Machines are also expendable whereas humans are not, meaning that it would be easier politically to wage a war if a nation’s casualties were solely machines. A human still needs at least 16 years of growth and development to be physically and mentally able to handle the demands of combat, followed by months or even years of specialized military training. A combat machine could be built in an afternoon and then programmed with its military training in a few minutes. Clearly the future of warfare belongs to machines. By 2106, fighting machines will make war a cruelly unfair environment for human beings, where only the most desperate or foolhardy members of our species will dare set foot. Without direct human participation, the battlefield will become totally devoid of all the camaraderie, honor and bravery that stand today as the few positive attributes of war, and warfare will complete its evolution towards becoming a totally cold and anonymous endeavor.
It probably looks petty for me to spend so much effort lambasting “Killzone” because it’s just a video game. That is certainly true, but the fact remains that games like “Killzone” embody and reinforce the ill-informed visions of the future held by most people, and I believe that critiquing the game is the most immediate way I can help people examine their own ideas. I think few people realize how unrealistically our future is portrayed in popular culture. Things like “Star Trek,” “Star Wars” and “Halo 1 & 2” have created the preposterous misconception that the universe is filled with humanoid, alien intelligent life forms that are all +/- 50 years our same level of technology. Considering 1) the age of the Universe (13.5 billion years old), 2) the fact that the planets are oldest at its center of the Universe and youngest at its fringes thanks to the Big Bang, 3) the fact that 3.5 billion years separated the appearance of the first primitive bacteria to the evolution of intelligent life on Earth, and 4) that chance that cosmic events have seriously altered the pace of Earthly evolution, we can conclude that the Universe is certainly populated with intelligent species of vastly different levels of technology.
To have human space explorers discover an intelligent alien species close to our level of technology is akin to having you randomly pick a name out of a three-inch thick phone directory and finding out that that person shares your same year, date, hour, minute, and second of birth. It is overwhelmingly likely that you will instead randomly pick someone who is different from you, and similarly, it is overwhelmingly likely that alien civilizations we encounter will be vastly older or younger than we are and thus either vastly stronger or weaker than we. So this recurring sci-fi trope where humans are fighting future space wars with aliens is ludicrous: any war with an alien species is certain to be very lopsided in favor of one side, and hence very short. This is actually where “Killzone” gets a bit of credit, since the plot has humans from different planets fighting one another. Sadly, I can see that as realistic even in 2106.
I also take issue with “Killzone” and most other sci-fi portraying the racial makeup of our descendants as being essentially the same as it is in contemporary America: The majority are white people, with smaller, roughly equally sized minorities of blacks, Asians and Hispanics. NO. Eighty percent of the current world population is nonwhite, and in the future, once Third World areas have closed the economic and technology gap with the West, we will see the world’s true racial character more vividly in everyday life. Multiracial people will also be much more common.
Another demographic shift very rarely portrayed in future sci-fi is the graying of the population. Average human lifespans have been increasing steadily for more than 100 years, and there is no reason to expect this trend to abate. By 2106, expect average people to be living to 120, if not indefinitely. Moreover, they will be stay active much longer thanks to better medical technologies. The means to slow, halt and reverse the effects of age will probably be achieved. “Killzone,” like all other Sci-Fi depictions of the future, fails to recognize the societal implications of these new technologies. Older people will look and feel DECADES younger than they are chronologically.