An interview with Konstantinos Dimopoulos
Beneath a Steel Sky’s Union City is a dystopian stratified metropolis. The working class lives in the upper and grey industrial level, the middle-class lives… well, in the middle, and the upper class lives in the colorful and garden-like lowest level. Union City’s geography, and our exploration of the secrets of this city-State, are shaped by its class stratification, and in Beneath a Steel Sky: A Musical Characterisation of Class Structure, Andra Ivănescu explained how even Beneath a Steel Sky’s background music illustrates the differences and the relationships between the urban spaces and the social classes that inhabit them. “Class differences are very pronounced in game cities if you pay attention,” Konstantinos Dimopoulos tells us.
Dimopoulos works as a consultant for video game studios interested in shaping believable game cities (he collaborated on Frogwares’s The Sinking City, one of the rare anti-racist games inspired by HP Lovecraft) and as a game urbanism columnist for video game magazine Wireframe. His latest book, Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities (illustrated by Maria Kallikaki), is, as its subtitle suggests, an exploration of game urbanism from (fake) ancient villages to (digital) utopias and dystopias. A journey through 45 game cities, described both from an in-game point of view, as they were functioning real urban spaces, and through brief insights into their design. The book will be released on November 12, 2020, and on the occasion of its launch we virtually sat down with Dimopoulos and discussed the representation of capitalism and classes in game urbanism [Full disclosure: the author of this article backed Virtual Cities on Unbound and wrote a couple of articles for Wireframe].
In Virtual Cities, game cities are divided into three categories: fantasy, familiar and future cities. So, we asked Dimopoulos if he found important differences in the urban design of those three groups. While fantasy cities tend to be somehow different (many fantasy cities described in the book are based on European Medieval towns and their feudalist systems), “the implied socio-economical systems of both the familiar city and the future city are essentially the same, and they tend to generate very similar urban landscapes,” Dimopoulos explains. “When you have alien environments, or far future settings, obviously the differences are more pronounced, but the urbanism of any cyberpunk future doesn’t have any difference from the urbanism of nowadays. You have this capitalist foundation of society and you create cities that serve it and allow it.”
“One of the reasons why most futuristic cities are capitalist-based is because, as Fredric Jameson said, it’s easier to imagine the destruction of everything than the end of capitalism,” Dimopoulos continues. “You are so wired to perceive the system you are in as natural that even your wildest fantasies need to be inspired by capitalism.”
But, even when fantasy settings based on pre-capitalist ages depict pre-capitalist urban designs, the economy of those games is still based on capitalism. In RPG games, you invest your money to buy weapons in order to kill enemies and earn more gold, creating a surplus value you can then spend buying more powerful weapons so you can kill more powerful enemies and earn even more money. “You copy the structure of the Medieval city, but you don’t copy the functions that created that structure,” Dimopulous says. “It’s very evident in the game of Dun Darach, that’s also in the book, where you have a super ancient Celtic city and then you have banks in it.” A different example is the The Witcher series, where you have a good representation of Medieval social dynamics and urban spaces and then you have the gig economy of the freelance monster hunters called witchers.
So, game cities sometimes suggest an eternal capitalism: capitalism has always existed and it will last forever, you can find it in the Medieval village and in the sci-fi metropolis. But Dimopoulos thinks that future settings at least allow game developers to freely explore topics like class struggle and its impact on urbanism. “In games like Final Fantasy 7 the class theme is incredibly strong. It’s weird that something so mainstream speaks so openly about class, but it’s very common. Maybe the fact that people are talking about supposed futures allows them to talk more openly about this stuff. But while I was writing the book I realized that classes have a huge role in the way those places are shaped and in the way stories set in those places are told,” he said.
Final Fantasy 7’s plot, as well as the starting town of Midgar, is really a clear example of this trend. The ShinRa corporation merged eight different settlements into the quasi-company town Midgar, stripping the villages of their identity and their names and building steel plates above them to host its industrial complex and the residential and commercial areas designed for its own employees. As we saw in Beneath a Steel Sky, in Final Fantasy 7’s Midgar class stratification drives the design of the urban space: the poor live below in the slums and try to survive thanks to their ingenuity, while the upper classes live above in the most technologically advanced city of the game world.
Dimopoulos mentions other strong depictions of class stratification in game cities. In the beat ‘em up game Final Fight you start from Metro City’s derelict slums, with their abandoned buildings and their literally-broken windows, and traversing the urban spaces of the town you climb the social ladder, reaching the final boss in the “Up Town” stage. “This take on the US downtown during the 70s-80s, in movies and games like The Warriors and Double Dragon… this was what the gentrification boom built itself upon,” Dimopoulos claims. “It helped to cement the sense in the vast majority of the population that downtown is incredibly dangerous, incredibly rundown, incredibly blighted. And when something is blighted it must be cured, and how do you cure it? You develop it, so the bad criminals are going away and now you’ll have fancy people living there and everyone will be happy. With the exception of the ones who were thrown out. This approach helped to cement the demonization of American downtown, it scared middle-class people and they became ready to support any action that eventually could change this supposedly horrifying situation.”
Then there’s Silent Hill’s eponymous town, with its “typical representation of a specific class-focused urbanism, the typical suburbia of the typical imagined US city, seen through the lenses of Japanese horror game designers,” as Dimopoulos tells us. Its wide streets appear to him almost as a parody of the car-obsessed urbanism of US cities. And there’s Batman: Arkham City’s city-island-turned-penal-colony, where poor people and political criminals are put together with hardcore criminals like the Joker. But “what’s usually lacking is the capability of classes to transcend and change themselves,” Dimopoulos adds. “You don’t have revolutionary change, ever. There’s no way the poor might get the recognition they wanted”. For example, in Dishonored’s Dunwall, inspired by Victorian London and Edinburgh, “you see that the available political options for the poor that you get to meet are two different forms of repressions,” the dynasty (defended by the playable characters) and the usurpers who are trying to gain control of the government. Crushed between the fight of two élites, poor people embrace the weird cult of an otherworldly entity known as “the Outsider”.
Virtual Cities doesn’t list many modern indie games (in the book we can find cities from Fallen London, The Long Dark, 0°N 0°W and Shadowrun: Hong Kong), so I asked Dimopoulos to tell me something more about class representation in indie games and in their urban design.
“People who are part of big corporations and who otherwise shy away from dangerous political discourses for some reason, especially when they create sci-fi series but also when they approach more familiar stuff, naturally showcase the tension and the dynamism of a city deeply politically divided on a class basis,” Dimopoulos answers. “And this is not something I was expecting. It showed me that sometimes people tend to put more into their art they are given credit for, and tend to be more careful than we think. While indie games sometimes totally ignore these themes. Lot of indie games just have nice settings, or moody settings, or melancholic settings. But melancholy is nothing: melancholy isn’t political, it’s personal. Many indie games tend to be fascinated with the personal, which I find completely dull, unless these personal stories are somehow tied into society. Honestly I’m quite put off by this melancholy, by the depression of well-off middle class creators who simply feel in some sort of way bad for themselves. They are not my problem, and they are not humanity’s problem. We have major pressing, destructive horrible problems and I can’t care less whether a well-off person feels bad about themselves”.
