In 2020 Secret World Legends feels like a period piece

The Secret World launched in 2012, and the Mayan Prophecies that that paticular year would be the end of the world are referenced and reframed in the game as the beginning of the end, but playing the game in the memetic hellscape of 2020 I'm sometimes struck by just how dated this modern day setting already feels.  It's only eight years old, but in a way TSW/SWL has become as much of a period piece as the stories of H.P. Lovecraft that it draws upon so heavily.

Soon after arriving in Blue Mountain there's an encounter with a group of soldiers and their liason from the Department of Homeland Security.  Through the game there's no shortage of references to real world institutions, but it's mostly in generic terms - The Military and The Government and The Church.

That the DHS is namechecked isn't really a surprise in itself, seeing as it's become as much a go-to symbol of shady and sinister government overreach in 21st century popular culture as the CIA was in the 20th century.  What's interesting to me is that the DHS agent isn't painted in an especially negative light, and that in turn makes me reflect that were SWL truly a game of the modern day, of 2020, it would likely be a different experience.  It's hard to imagine that had these sequences been written during the last few years they wouldn't have hit some different notes.

Some might balk at the idea of the game's narrative being so directly influenced by the politics of the day, but this has always been the case in fiction across all media.  The paranoid and cynical conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s didn't come out of nowhere, but were informed by everything from the Kennedy assassinations to Watergate, and the unapologetically flag waving action movies of the 80s, like Rambo and Red Dawn, are undeniably products of the Reagan era.

There's an old saying that science fiction is never actually about the future, but rather it's about the time in which it was written.  This is why criticisms that this or that piece of sci-fi failed to accurately predict the future are missing the point - sci-fi doesn't predict the future because it isn't trying to.  At most sci-fi shows what we hope the future will be like, or fear it will.

(Another reason I've been thinking about this is because I've recently been rereading the old sourcebooks published for the board game Car Wars in the 80s.  They may be set in the future of the 2030s, but the attitudes and social commentary are very much of the 1980s.)

The same point is just as true of other genre fiction, like horror.  This is about far more than who the designated bad guys are at any point in popular culture, and one way in which it commonly manifests is in how authority figures - particularly government agencies and the police - are portrayed.  In that sense my encounter with Homeland Security in SWL reminds me that this is the USA as it was seen in 2012, not as it is seen today.*

 

*It's also worth noting that it's being seen from a non-american perspective.  Funcom is, after all, based in Norway, and the european perception of the United States is different.  That's not to say it isn't well done - it's brilliantly done - but this game's portrayal of the american psyche will never feel as authentic to me as that of Fallen Earth.

 

In an era in which open supporters of the Qanon conspiracy theory are poised to be elected to high office in the government of the United States, and where the administation counts amongst its closest allies the kind of crazed evangelicals I thought went out of style in the 80s, the portrayal of the Illuminati and the Templars covertly exerting their influence in the corridors of power comes across not as eerily prescient but as quaintly understated.  It's the difference between the image of the bearded, bomb throwing anarchist of the 19th and early 20th century and what we think of as a terrorist today.  The weirdness of the world we actually live in has outdone the fictional version we explore in Secret World Legends.

 

And that's a lot scarier than any shambling zombie or tentacled monstrosity coming forth from the dark corners of the Earth.