Imagination is different from prediction, which is important to note here. Utopia is fun to think about, and something to aspire to, but dystopia is certainly the more likely of the two, and it has potential for compelling SF as well. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream has a pessimistic yet highly imaginative vision of the future. This dystopia, rather than being systemic, is perpetuated by what is basically an angry god who torments his few remaining subjects with the same inexplicable power that a more benevolent god might use to create a utopia.

I'd like to take this opportunity to compare Skynet to its inspiration, AM. AM is no stranger to the rhetorical sublime - the game begins with a shot of a monument of his hatred, engraved upon which a fragment of his hatred for humanity which he narrates for his captives. The opening words of a game are as important as those of a film, if not more so, because their implications have longer to play out, and the interactive medium tends to key players in more to such implications.

This tolerance is the focal point of the backstory in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. War had become so ubiquitous across the globe that the development of a bloodthirsty AI that fought wars automatically sounded sensible. Nobody with the power to stop it said anything until AM had begun indiscriminately slaughtering all of humanity. The massive, self-aware machine built to exterminate nations was perfectly docile and unthreatening to the civilian populace... until it wasn't.

This question, "what if I...?" is important in any kind of interactive system, but especially in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. The story is framed as a game within a game, a game that AM ostensibly has complete control over, and an assumption he is invested in the player (as the characters) maintaining. However, if the player thinks outside of AM's pessimistic box, they can find that there are paths that AM did not anticipate (although the actual game developers certainly did), and as such, the player saves humanity through ingenuity rather than power.

A glaring omission here is point-and-click adventure games, the genre to which I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream belongs. This genre relies on simple inputs from the player, usually clicking on an item in the inventory and then clicking on something in the environment to use it on to produce some kind of favorable effect. The relatively slim number of variables in such a game make them great vehicles for interactive narratives, and so I find their absence here strange.

Satire almost always seems to be made irrelevant by reality. The world marches inexorably toward the future, and satire, for good or for ill, seems to predict dystopias not yet realized by society. I sometimes wonder if quality satire just ends up giving bad people good ideas.

"During this time period" I wish this wasn't still happening. One grim upside of the pandemic is that it hobbled Hollywood enough to slow the ever-churning wheel of remakes. The Will Smith genie still enters my mind on occasion, unbidden, and makes my skin crawl.

These games drew directly from the 'action hero' trope, basically allowing players to become the main character in a film. However, this kind of calls into question how and why games are fundamentally different from film, aside from their interacitivity.

This section doesn't really touch on the 90's, but Independence Day is a real return to form for this type of film. I've heard that film called "a post Cold-War victory lap" before, and I feel like it's an apt enough description. In the 90's, sandwiched between the collapse of the USSR in 91 and 9/11 in 2001, the United States almost seemed to be asking for a challenge.

SF film is often regarded as "behind" simply because it's hard to pull off the worldbuilding of the written word visually while still being concise. Books can afford to describe bizarre scenarios in languorous detail, but the audience of a film has a naturally steep drop past even the 2 hour mark.

This makes me think of The Wizard of Oz's Tin Man, who while very obviously a fairy tale character and not a true synthetic intelligence (with everything that would entail), endeavors for a heart, combining his silly, slapstick nature with an earnest, almost transhumanist desire for empathy.

This makes me think back to Dr. Moreau, who was arguably both of these. His plans were ludicrous, but the film took them seriously, and thus we have a mad scientist villain who poses a serious threat to humanity with his private army of furries.

From what I've seen from Happy Days, the main cast seems to be more of a family with each other than their blood relatives. Has the drive to see family as patriarchal blood couched in "traditional values" ever actually made sense?

(Once again I find myself unable to post this to our group. I remember the instructions from last week, they just aren't working. My only options are to post publicly or privately. I can't say what's causing this.) This fear always struck me as somewhat misplaced. We, as humans, instinctually fear the unknown because we're hardwired to worry about survival - there could be predators in the dark, or consequences for pushing that boulder. However, humans have not yet discovered a force more destructive than ourselves, and to find such a thing would probably lead to us trying to harness it, making us more dangerous to one another.

(I'm not seeing an option in the dropdown menu to post this specifically to our group, so I'll post this publicly for now.) This definition of genre doesn't even particularly make sense to me. Like, for example, 'animation' is a medium, not a genre - there exist animated SF films that I would consider better touchstones of SF than many live-action films. To me, this just says that critics and academics tend to be out of touch. Maybe things have changed in the 12 years since that list.

(I'm not seeing an option in the dropdown menu to post this specifically to our group, so I'll post this publicly for now.) This, to me, says that trying to quantify what a genre is, ultimately, is just a waste of time. Like I mentioned last week, the spectator's perspective is the only one with any weight because collecting empirical data on film is a pointless endeavor.

This tendency in SF always struck me as odd, especially in SF that looks toward the future. Like, I know futuristic SF has a tendency to shed light on contemporary, real world issues, but sexism always seemed incompatible with the future to me. Like, you mean to tell me humanity has developed itself to the extent that we can live in a post-consumerist utopia on a space station, yet women are still considered less worthy than men? For some reason? This applies to various other identities as well – these futures also tend to be focused on white people, or at least on what people call the “global west”, which is basically a dogwhistle for white supremacy – but that’s not what this chapter is about.

As much as I love transhumanism as a concept, a lot of it does tend to be bound up in this idea. Like, changing how we define humanity and modifying ourselves would ultimately be a social good, but there is the risk that this would be the result: scientists (especially corporate scientists) contracting into isolated consciousness literally, not just figuratively, and in doing so viewing their fellow humans with even less empathy than they already do.

cool