Starfield and The Haves and Have Nots

 

The beauty of Starfield. Realism in Science-Fiction is a remarkable achievement.

While people may criticize Starfield for being too big, there is something that most criticisms seem to miss entirely, the social commentary. 

Having social commentary can be tough, especially in capital heavy projects such as video games. The people who at the corporate level, generally speaking tend to be very pragmatic about art. They are kind of individuals who artists do not like dealing with. However, they are important people behind the scenes, and they have influence in order to prevent artists from going off course. While some artists decide to not deal with this and become auteurs, people who are interested in their creations alone without any interference from anyone. However, such auteurs tend to be rare in America.

The Entrance to Akila City

Starfield is a game that aims to be mainstream but also has the touch of auteur in some ways. The game has the touch of ambition from a studio that has been trying to make a game such as this for many years. It isn't just a mainstream in the way that the previous Elder Scrolls game was, especially Skyrim. This is a game that is really made for the people who loved playing space games in the earlier years of the Video Game industry, especially during the 1980s.  In that sense, Bethesda's game are being made by Generation X's and older Millennials, who have grown up on Capitalist social satire that was not really present in previous generations. However, in Starfield, the game embraces social commentary in a way that was really missing in the Elder Scrolls Games.

There is a great amount of social commentary in Starfield that is really focused on the haves and the have nots, especially when it comes to social stratification.

The Free Star Collective's headquarters

The issue with talking about the haves and have nots in Video games is that it has a tendency to be really hard on the nose and lacking nuance that ends up alienating people in the Video Game industry. Starfield is a game that attempts to do this without alienating players, especially with the way it depicts the wealthy and powerful in the game. Starfield is set in a time where man's ability to go into space and also move the home world from Earth to Jemison but have not put away the issues of class or wealth away. This makes Starfield more than just a clone of some other Science-Fiction that tends to talk about humanity in these really unrealistic ways. Humanity has flaws and it isn't something can be written out of a story. That makes Starfield all the more interesting. 

As I described before, Starfield has an interesting take on wealth as man becomes a space-faring civilization. Akila City, while being the capital city of the Free Star Collective, is a rather poor place, with the haves living in the higher parts of the city while the middle Class make do in Mid-town and the poor trying to subsist in the Stretch. The divide between the wealthy and the poor in Starfield shows that class structure remains and there is no post-scarcity consensus. This makes the story a lot more interesting.

The ability to see such poverty being depicted in a video game is truly remarkable. It shows that the medium is maturing and getting more realistic.

I think that the criticism of the game is really missing this aspect of Starfield. There is a truly remarkable game that is hiding behind all those complaints about an overly complex game.

I will be writing more about Neon, as it is the city where the Haves and Have nots is really emphasized in a way that isn't the same in other cities. In Akila, it's visible all over, while in New Atlantis, it is hidden underneath the main city.