Survivalism

With the recent release of Tom Clancy's The Division, I think now's as good a time as any to do a brief examination of the post-apocalyptic concept in fiction. Post-apocalyptic fiction is defined by a few major traits:

1) Regular people turn into unstoppable thugs, as if they were waiting their entire lives for an opportunity to become irredeemably evil and aggressive.

2) Everything is scarce except for guns and prepackaged food, both of which are commonly found for centuries afterwards.

3) People become incapable of building anything more complex than "a pile of corrugated sheet metal in the shape of a house".

4) Some people actually participate in communities and work together to make the most of their situation, but those people are boring. The interesting people are the ones who go around living off the land and murdering the aforementioned thugs from point 1.

"Post-apoc", is, in short, a fantasy for the masculine "self-sufficient" survivalist. It allows for the unrestricted use of violence and the machismo of the struggle for survival. It allows one to condemn the "coddled" modern world and see oneself as a lean predator who'd be manly as hell if only he had the opportunity. And while that makes sense in works like Mad Max and Fallout 3 - intentionally braindead, and designed to plug into that instinctual desire - the problem comes when it actually spills over into what people think is "realistic".

Take 2014's "This War of Mine", for example. Ostensibly patterned after the Sarajevo Siege of '92-'96, TWoM has less in common with the reality of that situation, and more in common with the average zombie survival game. Another writer covered the issues with the game pretty thoroughly, so I don't feel the need to go point-by-point about it, but in short: the game was patterned after the assumption of a scarcity scenario, not the reality of it.

TWoM is not a game about cooperation or negotiation. It is not a game about communities working together. It's not even a game about invaders versus inhabitants. It's a game built on a fictional model, because people at this point have seen that fictional model so often that they think it's real.

And then you get into games like "I Am Alive" or "The Last Of Us" or even "Alien: Isolation", where "hostile survivors" throw themselves at the protagonist until one party is utterly destroyed. Like, do you guys know what "survivor" means? Anyone who throws themselves into mortal combat with the first human they encounter is not actually going to survive very long. Do you get opportunists in scarcity scenarios? Yes, absolutely. But the thing about an opportunist is, they're concerned with self-preservation. They're going to run or surrender if the opportunity presents itself. That is how they survive.

The core idea that permeates our media of the "perpetually hostile, never surrendering antagonist" exists for one purpose: because proportional violence is boring, and disproportional violence is BADASS. So we craft scenarios where disproportional violence is wholly justified, and then, inevitably, we repeat that fantasy so often that we start to think it's what would really happen.

And then, in 2016, our society produces a game where heroic soldiers shoot evil looters, then heroically loot things themselves. Although really, "Dead Rising 2" had them beat on that account, but who's splitting hairs on that one?