Utopia is Latin for "no-place", as many academics enjoy pointing out, and a lot of our fiction is devoted to making it seem impossible. Stories are always better-suited to the dystopian, because there probably isn't any conflict to be found in a society where everything's hunky-dory. This is why every novel in Iain M. Banks' Culture series involves a giant utopian culture of machines and people living in harmony without pain or want, but sets all of the plot somewhere far away from them.
In games, it's surprisingly rare to see a hero fighting to make a better government. The number of villains who want to make the world better are countless, but they're villains and they're usually also in it for intense power and become corrupted no matter how pure their intentions. If they didn't, after all, there wouldn't be a story. The role of the hero is to oppose things like this, and to fight through oppressive paradigms instead of trying to make better ones. Mirror's Edge, Half Life 2, Frozen Synapse, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Deus Ex, and countless other games are all about rebellion against overlords and political systems.
But utopia is a cause worth fighting for, almost by definition. Even in cases where it causes suffering, it is the ultimate good. Do the ends justify the means here, then? It's an interesting question, and it's not explored in nearly enough depth.
The original utopian dilemma, a question equally of ethics and politics, can be phrased as "Would you be willing to live in a perfect global society, where every human being is happy, if it means that one person must be tortured to keep the society going?" The most immediate answer to this is "No, torturing someone is wrong even if it means that everyone on the planet gets to be happy." This is the conclusion that most people come to, and which most books and Saturday morning TV agrees with- the ends don't justify the means, at all.
One readily-launchable criticism of this, though, is that the status quo being chosen over that almost-perfect society involves the suffering of many more people. Western society is built on war, pain, disease, cheap labor and discrimination, things that have affected millions of people and still are. Choosing to live in a society where only one person suffers is lengthening the lifespans and increasing the quality of life for all of the people who are suffering now, so in a sense rejecting that society means that the person is alright with all of the suffering currently in the world as long as they don't have to feel responsible for it.
Of course, that position can be defended by saying that it is different to choose to force someone to suffer, and that it is an immoral action, and that the world now is just as bad as that perfect society and should be improved.
"Well, if they're both equally bad, why not choose the one where there's less suffering? More people would consider that good, and then you can work on fixing the rest of it. Besides, I don't think you'd be so willing to deny the option if it hit closer to home. What if torturing someone was the only way to keep your loved ones alive?"
"Making that decision is something you can't come back from, and it's not worth it. Even for the sake of something like keeping your loved ones alive, it's crossing a line that just shouldn't be touched. Doing the right thing is much more complicated than choosing the lesser evil. People have to accept the world's problems because it's what they're born into, but could anyone's conscience really live with a perfect world if they had to be aware that one person was suffering for it directly because of them?"
"You might be born into the world unable to change it, but if you would choose this world over that near-perfect one, you're making a conscious choice to favor this one, and you're responsible for the suffering either way."
"No, I'm just not letting blood get on my hands. No one should have that kind of choice in the first place, there's no right answer and it's just too corrupting."
Et cetera.
This is a topic that's easy to explore and offer different takes on in games. Linear storytelling must advocate one of these answers over the other, while interactive media can jump past that problem and give the responsibility to the player. An entire game could be built around this one question and the arguments for each of its answers, in the same way that a setting could be designed to show off the features of different forms of government. The Utopian Question Game could be a matter of showing the player the feelings of a large group of characters and letting them make an ultimate endgame decision about which world they'd rather live in. This could be a fast artistic game, something played in about twenty minutes, and it would certainly have an audience in some niche corners of the gaming world.
But more basically, there could be games which are set in an actual utopia and are based on keeping it utopian. These would have to provide a suitably good perfect society, which is a challenge in its own right, but it would be interesting to defend that society from external and internal threats. Or there could be another utopian game where the player is trying to convince powerful forces in the world to help them create a better one, and must deal with complications, diplomacy, disasters, enemy forces, and moral choices to make this happen. Any game that wants to explore this in depth would be about argument, although there need only be a couple points where the player must truly defend their positions, in something like Human Revolution's debate-based boss-fights.
It's a difficult subject matter to deal with, especially fairly. Plenty of people have worked towards noble goals like a perfect world and failed horribly, while others have committed atrocities in the hope of some mythical fruit of their labors. Even deciding to go for it isn't a simple matter, and our narratives should reflect that and help us decide exactly how we should be making the world a better place.
Sources:
Bobonich, Chris. "Plato on utopia" 5 Dec 2002. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 5 Oct 2014.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution | Confronting/Persuading Taggart - Throwdown Achievement. OneManArmy. 9 Sept 2011. YouTube. 5 Oct 2014.
Utopia. The British Library Board. 5 Oct 2014.
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