I had to nick the title from the parent article, it was simply too good. Here's the background story the game Fuel of War is set:
Sometime in the near future, gas will cost about $20 a gallon. It gets worse: China and Russia will form a military alliance that threatens the security of the United States and Europe.
Amid hunger, water scarcity and power outages, the two sides will go to war. Soldiers will descend upon bombed-out cities and abandoned villages, where rusting appliances and old car engines litter the streets.
Games like this are disturbing yet somehow honest. They recycle existing fears instead of inventing new sources for them. The terrible awareness that the apetite of the modern world is out-of-control - the fear that the once infinite sphere we live on is drying up - points to a kind of panic that only needs a uniform and a sub machine-gun to feel right at home within a nationalist geo-strategic, island-mentality..
We might ask why the play isn't built around sustainably solving the problem of a lack of oil, looking at other fuel sources and/or coming up with infrastructural changes that privilege other modes of transport. Perhaps that'd be too abstract, it just wouldn't speak to the fear.
Thanks go out to pix for the link. Click here for reccommended reading on this topic.
