Mutually Assured Destruction: Part Two

Last week, we explored how the Fallout series of games has had its outlook on life and society influenced by the American Dream and the experiences of the developers who grew up in the Western world during the Cold War. Today, we are getting our papers in order and crossing the Iron Curtain into the former Eastern Bloc, and looking to how life in Ukraine and Russia under Soviet rule has affected the worldview of the Metro series of books and the subsequent games created by 4A Games, a studio formerly based in Kiev.

By bringing this world to the virtual space, 4A Games showed that they could still flex their bleak, post-apocalyptic muscle, as many of the team had worked on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games in the past. Metro though is less fantastical than both this and the Fallout franchise. The game retains the idea of irradiated mutant animals and people, but for the most part the game focuses on the human tragedy of the post-apocalyptic world.

Metro is set in a universe almost identical to ours, except for a worldwide nuclear exchange occurring at some point in the 2010s. Billions are killed in the war, and millions more choked to death on the toxic atmosphere or have died in post-war conflicts between the survivors. From here we see that Metro has a far more cynical view of how people interact in the post-apocalypse compared to Fallout. The game takes place only 20 years after the bombs fell, and the Muscovite survivors have splintered into different factions based on what metro line or station they occupy. Very few people in this new world are benevolent or altruistic, and most are more concerned with their immediate survival over an idealistic plan for the future.

4A Games, 2014

This societal disconnect is reminiscent of a societal breakdown that occurred in the Soviet Union before it collapsed. The governments of the East continued to pretend their system was working, but the populace could see that it did not. With each lie a distrustful attitude set in, where people simply stopped believing in their government or even anything at all, a sociological process called Hyper-Normalisation. Nobody planned for a future without this fake reality because they were an intrinsic part of it, and it became impossible to see beyond it.

Building upon this, the various stations the player gets to explore in the metro adhere to this mistrust of the world. Many pre-war technologies and objects are modified, re-purposed, or replaced by things that the survivors have made themselves, as if the handcrafted objects are more trustworthy. Train carriages are cut up and placed on the platforms and concourses of the stations to create rudimentary housing, and trains are mostly replaced by handcarts and small combat carriages created entirely from scratch. Pre-war weaponry, too, is modified and often replaced by devices made by the metro’s gunsmiths. This is a symptomatic rejection of the past in favour of a new, post-apocalyptic reality.

4A Games, 2018

Some scavengers do return to the surface, however, to collect items like gas masks, air filters, and military equipment like night vision goggles and assault rifles; anything that is useful and valuable. The player is given the opportunity to do this too, but finds that these items often cannot be trusted to last for long. Gas masks are frequently found with cracked eyepieces, air filters are half depleted, and that Kalashnikov may be in better condition than any other weapon you own, but when it’s firing the sub-standard ammunition made in the tunnels, it’s simply another peashooter.

The only real item that appears to benefit the player in a meaningful way is the metro’s currency – military grade ammunition. Just like the bottle caps in Fallout, these are great items to use as money, due to their rarity and the difficulty in reproducing them. However, the metro’s money is dual purpose, as it can still be used in the player’s weapons. The military grade ammunition is far more accurate than the cobbled together bullets made by metro gunsmiths and packs a heavier punch, but the player then has to choose between wealth and survival. This dilemma implies that the player needs to put their faith in something other than their wealth, and again looks back on the distrust for the Soviet economy as it crumbled.

4A Games, 2018

But why this bleak outlook on life and survival? The events in the Eastern Bloc between the 1970s and 1980s had a profound effect, not just on Eastern European society, but on Eastern European science fiction. The novel Roadside Picnic was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in 1971, and is the story of a group of people exploring an anomalous zone of extra-terrestrial contact, where nothing is as it seems. This story and its themes directly influenced Glukhovsky’s original Metro: 2033 novel, along with the Stalker film and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series of games. 4A Games could also be argued to have a connection to both Soviet lies and nuclear disaster, due to their proximity to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and the attempted cover up and denial of the extent of the Chernobyl disaster occurring within living memory of many Ukrainians.

Alongside the cultural influences, there are the political and economic factors to consider also. In the immediate post-Soviet era, much of the East continued to lag behind the West economically, and the government corruption and lies that were meant to end alongside communism, instead, continued. What’s more, this was soon augmented, in Russia at least, by a system devised by Vladislav Surkov and Vladimir Putin where all major political parties and figures received money from the Kremlin, denying the Russian people direction and a viable opposition. The majority resigned to surviving their daily lives, and simply let the world happen around them.

I’d love to say this is where the depressing topics are going to end, but alas there’s more. But we’ll save the big one for a couple of weeks time, as I need to pluck up the courage to complete the essay...s.

If you'd like to see more stuff as relentlessly cynical as the above article, check out the video essays of Adam Curtis. They're available on BBC iPlayer and else where on YouTube. I've used several of the themes from his latest film, Hypernormalisation, above, but there are many more to watch and fill you full of distrust and paranoia. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!