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The Same Old Genres 3: The Show Ain’t Over Till The Alien Sings

This is part 3 in a series of articles where I explore the various genres which games tend to fall into, giving a potted history of each and exploring what they say about our culture as a whole. In part 1 I discussed fantasy games and in part 2 we looked at post-apocalyptica. This week I’m going to talk about more traditional science fiction, epic sagas spanning the galaxy known collectively as Space Opera (Do you get the title now? Good).

Space Opera is not just science fiction, in science fiction more attention is paid to the science and technology of the setting and how amazing it is. In Space Opera the focus of the story is the people, and the galaxy changing events that they’re caught up in. Its all about drama, melodrama, and telling the tale, the technology and science are merely set dressing. True space opera came into being in the 1920s and ’30s with the black and white serials Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Full of high drama they tended to follow the damsel in distress plot and told of a virtuous hero railing against seemingly insurmountable odds. Science fiction, as a genre, has been around much longer of course, with luminaries such as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne widely renowned as fathers of the genre. They didn’t write Space Operas though. Space opera as we have come to know it is epitomised by the Star Wars Saga, it’s not speculative “Long time ago…”, neither is it what is known as ‘Hard SF’ in which the technology is an extrapolation of current science and is the main focus of the plot.

There are some who would argue that Space Opera is merely fantasy themes and motifs given a science fiction makeover, and to a certain extent they’d be right, however Space Opera owe more to the western than they do to fantasy. In westerns the bad guy is the one with the black hat (this is where the term black hat comes from when referring to hacking btw), and hes has a bunch of pretty useless minions. The hero rides into town on his horse (read spacecraft), ends up in jail, escapes, and saves the girl. Then black hat and the hero have a face off at high noon, which usually involves the hero discovering something about themselves. The other idea which Space Opera have inherited from westerns is the theme of space being a frontier, with the lawlessness and conflict that such frontiers always generate.

As I mentioned before, Space Opera really came into the mainstream with the beginning of the Star Wars Saga in 1977. There have been numerous video games released off the back of the most well known SF franchise in the world, which we’ll be looking at on Friday in our May the Fourth special. Only a couple of them truly qualify as Space Opera however. We can immediately discount the direct movie spin offs. These games simply follow the plot of the movie and don’t introduce us to anything new, they have no plot of their own so we already know the outcome and our actions have no bearing upon it, we are not actually part of the drama we are merely re-enacting it. Out of all the games which have spawned from Star Wars, the only ones which truly qualify as Space Opera are the Knights of the Old Republic games.

Elite was probably one of the first games which had some elements of the Space Opera about it, the only drawback being that you had to write your own story, however the theme of the frontier, either upholding or breaking the law, and facing off against bandits were all present. If anything Elite was merely a game of setting, allowing you to write your own, albeit limited, story to go in it, much as Eve Online does today. These days of course there are quite a few Space Opera to choose from; X2, X3, Darkstar One, Freespace, and Eve Online. Each of these games has a plot which you can choose to follow, with the exception of Eve, and a large universe for you to explore. The main thing though is the plot, and this can deal with any of the themes that the plot of any other game can deal with; good vs evil, humanity’s folly, love, revenge, and all the rest. It just so happens that the setting has got lasers, spaceships and aliens.

Next Week: Are You Scared Yet?