Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 40
Page 6
Freeman’s romp takes him through the shattered ruins of Earthly civilization, eventually bringing the fight to his oppressors and rallying the people to rise up… for whatever good it will do.
In the Thief series, we meet Garrett, a purse-snatching rogue who lives like the Artful Dodger in a city rife with political intrigue. It seems that his society is gripped by an invisible war between at least two ideological factions: the Hammerites, who advocate an industrial revolution replete with steam-driven machines and mechanized factories, and the Woodsies, a sect of fanatical pagan nature-worshipers who see machinery as an affront to the natural order. When Garrett gets himself in a spot of trouble — strung up by vines and having his eye plucked out by Woodsies — he decides to work with the Hammerites to exterminate these troublesome fanatics.
This is the storyline behind Thief: The Dark Project, a high-class steampunk adventure released in 1998 by Eidos Interactive. Garrett is a crafty enough antihero to lend considerable strength to the Hammerite cause. In time, the Woodsies are defeated. All is well… or is it? The game ends with Garret receiving a dire warning about the dawning of the “Metal Age.”
Thief II: The Metal Age delivers on this foreshadowing. The world Garrett has created through his defeat of the pagans is now overrun by monstrous automatons who, true to the Woodsies’ prophecy, are choking off the world. The Hammerites soon prove to be as fanatical as their bygone enemies, and Garrett must soon contend with them.
By virtue of its financial success alone (even in times of economic downturns) the video game industry is a juggernaut, handily defeating Hollywood box office sales. In fact, the line between the two has been blurring for a while. Actors like Keith David, James Woods, Ron Perlman, Seth Green, Michelle Rodriguez, and Ray Liotta have all lent their vocal talents to games, and each major release sees a growing stable of talent defecting to the digital domain. The storylines behind today’s best games are no longer cursory fluff, but rather are the main motivation to keep playing. And gaming continues to provide an unequalled facet to the science-fiction genre: the player can actively shape the experience based on his or her actions and decisions. Possibility — that central component of all science-fiction — is especially organic in a medium empowering player choice and ethical considerations.
The landscape of science-fiction can now welcome video games into the big tent. If current trends in gaming and multimedia persist, that tent is about to get a whole lot bigger.
About the Author
Brian Trent is a genre-spanning writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared multiple times in Clarkesworld, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, Atomjack, The Humanist (including a cover piece on human longevity research,) Boston Literary Magazine, The Copperfield Review, The Eclectic Muse, Bewildering Stories, Writers Digest, and many others. He twice won Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbards Writers of the Future contest last year, and was a panelist at Yales science-fiction symposium “Literary Visions.”