Megastructures are not a purely modern phenomenon, however. Many older constructions were as large as, if not larger than, purely in terms of physical size, those of the modern day. Christopher Jones includes the Pyramids, Roman roads and aqueducts and early Gothic cathedrals in this description.9 He argues that they, and contemporary equivalents, differed significantly in terms of purpose: cathedrals had a ‘metaphysical and social purpose’, and lacked the ‘calculative utilitarianism’ of their modern successors. Similarly, Larry Penwell and John Nicholas examine the first Egyptian pyramid – the Step Pyramid – and the European Gothic cathedrals as examines of non-modern megaprojects with clear non-utilitarian goals.10 In pyramid construction a dual purpose may have been to handle unrest amongst Egyptian tribes by serving as a unifying and henotic collaborative project11 that members of all tribes took part in, solidifying national identity between disparate groups via the ‘superordinate task’12 of its construction. This view on ‘old’ megaprojects is not universal, however; Ute Lehrer and Jennefer Laidley identify the ‘mega-project’ as fundamentally an aspect of modern industrialisation,13 with earlier similar endeavours being merely ‘large-scale’ projects that did not mobilise the same kinds of labour processes, in the same way, and on the same scale and scope, as their modern equivalents.
We can therefore see two perspectives on the importance of the economic and financial dimensions to understanding these undertakings. On the one hand, some scholars have argued that megastructures are a fundamentally modern phenomenon, arising in the organisation, stratification and globalisation of labour from the Industrial Revolution onwards, and that the attendant modalities of global trade, communication and employment are crucial to understanding the megaproject phenomenon. On the other hand, other scholars propose that any mobilisation of effort and expense that is substantial from the perspective of the society that produces them, or that produces a large or imposing physical structure irrespective of its purely economic costs, merits the label ‘megaproject’. These latter scholars also tend to focus more on the political and social impacts of these creations, rather than their purely instrumental economic costs and benefits. We can therefore begin to see why so many science fiction authors have been intrigued by the concept; if the human race has already produced the pyramids, Gothic cathedrals and kilometre-high skyscrapers of the real world, with their political, social and – most importantly here – economic importance, what kinds of massive physical edifices might a vastly more technologically advanced society create? The fictional worlds of games are at the forefront of answering this question, and it is to these we now turn.
Megastructures in Games
The Halo series is the game series famous for its megastructures, more perhaps than any other contemporary computer games. Halo is a series of ‘first-person shooter’ games in which the player’s vision is positioned behind the eyes of the lead character and controls their actions and decisions directly. The plot of the early games involves battling against the theocratic hegemonic alien ‘Covenant’, an amalgam of multiple nonhuman space-faring races united by a religious belief that the artefacts left behind in the galaxy by the mysterious ‘Forerunners’ will transition them into a glorious afterlife. In actual fact, these ‘Haloes’ – artificial rings thousands of kilometres in diameter orbiting stars and planets, and equipped with climates and biospheres and habitability for life – are superweapons designed to exterminate all multicellular life in the galaxy in order to starve a parasitic organism, ‘the Flood’, of all food sources. In case the ringworlds were not impressive enough, in later games the player encounters a vast construct known as ‘the Ark’, which actually manufactures these ringworlds and is around 100,000 kilometres in diameter, and ‘Shieldworlds’, planet-sized bunkers designed to protect their inhabitants from the Halo weapons. Every one of these items produced by the Forerunners, of which dozens or potentially hundreds exist, is larger and more sophisticated than the entire technological achievements or output of the two factions, human and Covenant, who battle over them. The Halo games therefore depict an SF universe filled with colossal megastructures, all imagined as being built by a civilisation with a very particular set of far-future (to us) economic capabilities.
Valve Corporation’s noted Half-Life series, meanwhile, has two primary megastructures, each speaking to a different economic model. In the original Half-Life the player spends almost the full game within ‘Black Mesa’, a vast government research laboratory built into the side of a cliff and modelled after real equivalents of massive state military-scientific economies, ranging from Los Alamos and Area 51 to Colorado Springs and NORAD. It contains almost everything one might imagine, from missile silos to nuclear waste stores and robotics laboratories to laser testing bays. In fact, it is so large that the player comes across entire seas abandoned, or forgotten, or simply no longer relevant to funded research. Black Mesa is a vast and complex edifice into which tremendous amounts of financial investment and technical expertise have been poured, but is a very different kind of structure from the Forerunner’s achievements in Halo.
Half-Life 2, set years later, sees a world overtaken by the ‘Combine’ – pronounced like the tractor, not the verb – which is an alien empire that absorbs other species and alters itself to take the best of what they have to offer. Earth is under their control and dominated by an ever-shifting Protean skyscraper known as ‘the Citadel’, which watches over the newly enslaved and sterilised human race. The construction of the Citadel is never explicitly recounted, but inside we find ‘stalkers’, almost feral human beings stripped of certain limbs and any higher brain functions, who seem to serve a role between that of slave workers, drones in a hive and an expendable workforce for dangerous situations. In the streets below, meanwhile, remaining humans are watched over by a police service of turncoat humans and human ‘synths’ (humans crossed with Combine biology and technology), who keep order and maintain the human workforce. The Citadel was presumably constructed by enslaved humans and stalkers, offering a rather bleaker version of the future than Halo, and the kinds of structures enabled by far-future SF economies. In this case the construction of the megastructure is dependent upon slave labour rather than any kind of far-future technologies that emancipate sentient life from the yoke of economic life, resulting in quite the opposite, creating instead a regression towards ‘older’ forms of labour organisation and mobilisation that undermine the rationalistic and liberal modern Western ideals of freedom and self-actualisation.
These imagined future labour-economic processes of Half-Life 2 become even clearer when we look at the creatures who rule over the Combine: the ‘advisors’. These are large, grub-like creatures with no apparent inherent means of locomotion or manipulation, but some kind of telekinetic power and a set of mechanical arms strapped to their bodies. A tongue-like tendril extends from their mouths, with which they probe the world. The player rarely encounters them, and normally sees only fleeting glimpses of their personal armoured enclosures. They live in safety and comfort, while their bloated and almost larval forms are a stark contrast to the sleek aerodynamic machinery of the broader Combine. They are thus depicted as a kind of decadent ruling class, who manage a technocratic empire without performing even the smallest amount of the labour themselves, preferring to rely on slaves and the cheap labour of conquered worlds. In this way, and the economic model they preside over, they are quite reminiscent of rulers of the past who built their own megastructures; around their necks they wear rings engraved with strange, almost hieroglyphic symbols, perhaps designed to support a comparison with ancient Egypt and the divide between rulers and enslaved peoples. Their seclusion, meanwhile, is so extreme that, based on Half-Life 2 and its expansions, it seems unlikely that the citizens of Earth were even aware the advisors existed, as they act more like behind-the-scenes puppeteers than charismatic powerful rulers. This kind of extreme wealth and power disparity is depicted here as being enabled by the technology of this advanced species, and
shows an SF economy in which a small number of despotic individuals control billions through the power of futuristic genetic and cybernetic technologies.
In the Killzone series, meanwhile, we see a near-future world, with clear allusions and analogies to the Cold War, bisected by a great wall that spans the globe. When it goes across oceans there are constant boat and aircraft patrols to ensure that nobody crosses over, while on land there are carefully monitored checkpoints across which the small number of migrant workers from one faction to the other – the Vektan and the Helghast – sometimes cross. It was built jointly by both sides, the only project on which they cooperated, and marks a massive technological and economic achievement. In many ways the technological level of this world is comparable to that which produced Black Mesa in the original Half-Life, and represents a similar setting in which massive techno-scientific investment and mobilisation seem very believable and reasonable. The wall is larger and more impressive than any other structure within this fictional universe, and, although it was created using substantial economic investment, it is not – as with some of the megastructures explored here – designed to bring economic benefits. Rather, it is a megastructure with political, military and social purpose, into which economic resources have been poured.
The Mass Effect series, our fourth case study, is set several hundred years in the future, in a galaxy with a dozen established non-human civilisations with which humanity has only recently begun to interact. Prominent in the series is an immense space station known as the ‘Citadel’. This Citadel is very different from the Citadel of Half-Life 2; whereas one watched over a docile and downtrodden populace, this one serves as the bustling hub of galactic politics, economics and culture. All galactic government is run from the Citadel, and a large portion of the games missions, both involving conversations and discussions with various actors, and in several instances defending from attackers, take place upon the station. The Citadel’s builders are first believed to be the ancient ‘Protheans’, who – much like the Forerunners of Halo – are revered as an ancient and now-extinct galactic civilisation whose technical capabilities outweigh those of the currently extant species. The Citadel is in turn managed by a mysterious species known as the ‘keepers’, who are apparently unable to communicate with other races but keep the station in working order.
It is later revealed that this is all a ruse, however: the Citadel was constructed by the ‘Reapers’, an ancient machine race dedicated to exterminating all life in the galaxy every 50,000 years, in order to allow new life and species to flourish. The Citadel, and the web of faster-than-light travel technologies that connect the Citadel to every part of the galaxy, were constructed so that spacefaring civilisations would come to base their own technologies around those of the Reapers, and to use the Citadel as a social and cultural hub, in order to make the eventual purge easier and more effectively centralised. The keepers, meanwhile, are revealed to be a previous species of the galaxy seemingly lobotomised and then enslaved to manage (and construct?) the Citadel. This is the second example of slave labour being the underpinning of these science fiction economies; even if the keepers did not construct the Citadel at the behest of the Reapers, it is made clear that they have maintained it for uncountable millennia, a work of labour probably far greater than its actual initial construction. In these economies and that of the Forerunners in Halo, SF technology is used to suppress and control populations, not to emancipate and liberate, offering players clear enemies and a clear political ideology to battle against.
There are also many other megastructures in the Mass Effect games, such as the ‘Shroud’ (a tower designed to stabilise the atmosphere of a world trapped in a nuclear winter), the ‘Crucible’ (a Moon-sized superweapon designed to stop the Reapers) and the ‘Collector Base’ (a massive space station orbiting within the accretion disk of a black hole), which were instead constructed by the galaxy’s civilisations for military-political-economic reasons, much like Black Mesa and the Vektan–Helghast wall. Mass Effect therefore displays two of the themes beginning to emerge here in these playable science fiction economies: slave labour and the use of technology to control large portions of the population; and political-military techno-science as underpinning the construction of megastructures and megastructure-like projects and undertakings.
Destiny, the 2014 game by the developers of the original Halo games, Bungie, further showcases the preoccupation with megastructures that now seems common to the studio. Set in a future version of our familiar Solar System devastated by a great war and facing an influx of a variety of strange and enigmatic alien races, the Destiny universe is replete with tremendous and mysterious constructions. There is the ‘Traveler’, a seemingly benevolent city-sized sphere hovering over Earth’s last remaining city; the ‘Citadel’ (now a familiar name in these games), a towering and geometrically peculiar structure built on Venus that defies traditional laws and expectations of physics and architecture; and the Black Garden, a seemingly infinite yet clearly artificial space replete with strange plants and hostile ‘gardeners’, who protect it from outsiders. None of these has known construction methods, nor, in some cases, is any information even given about who built them – or who paid for them. Destiny abounds with structures of this sort, in all cases speaking to economic processes that can bring together tremendous amounts of labour and raw materials, or that perhaps don’t even need to involve labour and represent technologies that are simply capable of reshaping matter itself.
In all these games we see some commonalities: science fiction universes with tremendous megastructures of various sorts, produced – as we will now examine – by a range of predicted economic models about the future (or parallel-universe extrapolations upon the present, as in Black Mesa’s clear positioning within a Cold War or post-Cold-War context). Some of these economies, such as massive techno-scientific investment, are familiar to modern historians, while others are either forms of labour and economics that we generally understand the world to have moved beyond, or are inconceivable to our current financial worldview.
Economies and Imaginations
All these science fiction megastructures therefore reflect different ideas of future or near-contemporary economies, with a focus upon the economic and labour impacts of science and technology. We can reasonably split them into three categories, which show us much about the interests and concerns of these game designers, and their economic and political visions of technological futures: oppression and slavery; techno-scientific excess; and post-scarcity economies. Crucially, each of these can be explored in these games, allowing the player to walk around and experience these SF economies and the structures they have created, and explore how space and place have been restructured and shaped by the architectural creations of these economic systems. In this section we explore each of these three models in depth, focusing on the games that depict them and their commonalities, and begin to consider why their depiction in games is especially interesting, as opposed to literature, cinema or television, and how this alters the experience of the viewer – in this case the player – who comes across them.
In Half-Life 2 (the Citadel) and Mass Effect (also the Citadel), the most visible megastructures have been constructed – or repaired and maintained – by various classes of slave or otherwise impoverished labourers working under the command of near-omnipotent overseers. Whether it is thanks to the stalkers and subdued humans who serve the Combine, or the keepers who maintain the Reapers’ trap, these structures are reliant upon the unwilling labour of tens of thousands, or potentially millions. In this we see a fear with regard to future economies, in which technological development enables new forms of population control and their use as cheap labour. These economies of science fiction are at once deeply familiar, in their similarities to comparable real-world practices throughout history, but also new and frightening, and fundamentally dependent upon futuristic forms of technical expertise: ubiquitous surveillance, cybernetics, genetic modification, a
nd so forth. These are fictional economies that undermine and challenge traditional emancipatory techno-utopian discourses, presenting instead the potential for technology to capture and constrain, not liberate, thus showing the economic models of large-scale slave-led production and maintenance that this form of techno-mediated social order enables.
In Half-Life (Black Mesa), Killzone (the Wall) and Mass Effect (the Crucible, and so forth), these structures are instead the creation of policies and economic structures designed to lend massive support to experimental techno-science. Black Mesa, the Half-Life 2 Citadel, Mass Effect’s Crucible, Shroud, Citadel and Collector Base were all built for military purposes, as was the Wall of Killzone, although in that case it was a result of war rather than directly for military purposes. War, conflict and the battle for supremacy between factions are what motivates these massive economic undertakings. The most obvious comparison is with the military mobilisation of the so-called ‘Superpowers’ – the United States and the USSR – in the Second World War and the Cold War, the close intertwining of high-technology research, economic development, mobilisation of resources and expertise, and geopolitical ramifications of this same research. As opposed to the above category, this category consists of those that present what we might consider ‘near-future’ science fiction. These economic and labour processes and practices are very recognisable to us, and that makes these buildings immediately familiar and understandable; what we know of the construction of the Burj Khalifa, the Channel Tunnel or the Manhattan Project is easily transferrable into these fictional settings.
Economic Science Fictions Page 21