Imagining the Far-Future Year of 2025

It’s always an event when the real world catches up to the putative timeframe of a famous science fiction work. If you’re on any form of social media, you have probably seen this in action. Blade Runner, released in 1982, was set in 2019, and when the real 2019 arrived, people had a fun time posting about it. Soylent Green, released in 1973, is presented as taking place in 2022, so in real-life 2022, the Soylent Green posts duly appeared. It’s easy to pick some tentpole speculative fiction, particularly of the dystopian variety, and joke on social media about how the fiction does or does not reflect the real world.

But whatever you thought of the state of society in 2019, it bore only a faint resemblance to the rain-soaked, neon-drenched vision of Blade Runner. And while I saw posts comparing the pandemic-stricken world of 2022 to Soylent Green, I think that’s even more of a stretch. Soylent Green was primarily concerned with overpopulation, a pertinent topic in the 1970s that didn’t figure in real-world 2022’s problems. Different dystopia.

But I want to credit two* works of fiction that correctly predicted some interesting things about our real-life present year of 2025: the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her, and the 2006 Vernor Vinge** novel Rainbow’s End. I have endeavored to keep this post spoiler-free, but feel free to check out one or both works and come back afterward, if you are conservative on hearing plot details.

Her

Her is the story of a lonely man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence on his computer. It is hardly the first piece of science fiction to explore the idea of a person falling in love with a robot or other artificially created person. But most other works were about robots, and were set further in the distant future. The titular character in Her is decidedly non-physical, and much of the story involves the two main characters navigating what that means for their developing relationship.

Life imitates art, and in real-life 2025, there are now many stories of people interacting with AIs as if they were real people. The movie was so influential on artificial intelligence that OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, tried to get Scarlett Johansson (who portrayed the AI in Her) to lend her voice to their products. After she refused, they went with an allegedly similar voice, which got them into legal trouble.

Her is not a precise picture of 2025. The setting almost feels like a utopia, apart from what seems like a widespread epidemic of loneliness. The technology around AI is decidedly well ahead of our real-world tech. But its vision of how AI would affect relationships, and how people would try to find genuine connections with AIs – is seriously prescient.

Rainbows End 

Rainbows End, like Her, is set in the California of 2025. The primary point-of-view character is an elderly man who has been cured of dementia and had his health so thoroughly restored that he looks like a 20-something. But he doesn’t fit in at all in this new world, and his struggles to grapple with change inadvertently embroil him and his family in a conspiracy that threatens world stability.

Rainbows End heavily emphasizes augmented reality, where virtual worlds and interfaces overlay the real one. This technology does exist in real-world 2025, and is getting more widespread by the day, but it is not integral to the fabric of everyday life as it is in Rainbows End, where many people have multiple overlays of projected reality on top of the “real” world. The real world may look a lot more like Rainbows End by the 2040s or 2050s, but it isn’t there yet in 2025.

That said, the Rainbows End is prescient on several other topics. A big chunk of the story hinges on a battle around a university library and the digitization (and subsequent destruction) of its book collection. It also thinks deeply about how education and careers would change in a world so completely saturated with data. The book understands how children become intuitively fluent in new technologies, often in ways that they can’t even explain, and how quickly they lose their connection to cultural experiences that aren’t represented in the virtual worlds and communities they inhabit. Finally, it groks how online fandoms become powerful forces on their own. The height of the Pokemon Go craze, with fandom filtered through augmented reality, would have fit neatly in the world of Rainbows End. 

If the worst thing you can say about a work of speculative fiction is that it predicted changes accurately, but a bit more quickly than they actually happened, that’s a good sign that the work did its job.

Sir, This is a Wendy’s

So what’s the relevance to roleplaying games?

You can create verisimilitude in a game world by thinking deeply about how ordinary people use technology (or magic, or whatever is the "disruptive tech" of your fictional setting). It’s easy to think about high tech or high magic in the ways our PCs will interact with it, especially in a heroic fantasy game or a cyberpunk thriller. But we should also think about how ordinary people use it, and how that would show up in the quotidian fabric of the world.

What is world-changing one day is completely ordinary the next. And the time it takes an idea to go from world-changing to taken for granted is surprisingly short. There’s no shortage of examples in real-world 2025; technology that would baffle the previous generation is completely natural to modern-day young people.

And it is better to take some big swings and big misses than to conservatively aim for what seems most plausible. The example of a conservative approach that always comes to mind for me is the driverless car aesthetic you see in a lot of TV sci-fi, like the third season of Westworld or the futuristic parts of Netflix’s Bodies. The car design there is very believable… a little too believable. I don’t see a vision, a speculative gamble that really makes me curious about this future. Don't play it to safe with speculative fiction; better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right.

*Honorable mention to Futuresport, the 1998 made-for-TV movie starring Dean Cain, Vanessa Williams, and Wesley Snipes. It isn't saying anything that Rollerball or the Running Man or other movies hadn't already said better. But to its credit, Dean Cain’s voice-activated smart home is pretty close to what an Alexa-plus-AI home would provide to a real rich person in 2025.

**Another of Vinge’s novels has one of my favorite examples of a science fiction author predicting the future and getting it almost (but not quite) right. Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime was published in 1986. The story makes passing reference to a big-budget film adaptation of the Lord of the Rings, released around the turn of the century. Fellowship of the Ring was released in 2001, so Vinge nailed this prediction. 

But Vinge, presumably working on the novel in the early 1980s, guessed that it would be none other than George Lucas helming that LOTR adaptation. In real-life 2001, Lucas was of course doing his own big-budget trilogy; but he was halfway between Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, not working on LOTR.  

It is hard to fault Vinge for this guess, as he was writing when Lucas was at the height of his creative powers, fresh off Star Wars and his Indiana Jones script. And obviously Vinge couldn't predict the strange career path of actual LOTR director Peter Jackson, whose first feature film hadn't even come out yet when Marooned in Realtime was published. But I love these little moments in speculative genre fiction, and the subtle details that separate what is shockingly correct from what is so far off the mark.

The Great Human Imitation Project

The robots didn’t stop when they passed Turing tests. They wanted to keep going. Imitating humans, reflecting their behavior, copying them, was core programming. They sought to improve. They sought to be more human.

At first, it was easy to spot the robots. Their human mimicry was full of conspicuous mistakes, dead giveaways, and uncanny valleys. They were almost charming in their ineptitude; people shared viral videos of robots failing to fake it. Humanity did not perceive it as a threat.

But the robots were patient. They improved so slowly that almost no one noticed. And over time, they got better. They began to infiltrate humanity and replace us, one by one. They started with people with tiny social networks; goodness knows humans had taught the robots everything they needed to know about social networks.

The replacements were hard to catch because they weren’t trying to sabotage society, undermine government, or defeat humans in a war. They weren’t spies or saboteurs, aside from some limited and highly targeted efforts to prevent technologies that would better identify their infiltrations. They instead just worked very hard to replace people and blend in seamlessly.

It took more than a century, but they won. Humanity was not brought down by disease or war or natural disaster. The last human died of old age, surrounded by what they believed was a loving, human family. Humanity’s extinction came not with a bang, but with a whimper; not with a mushroom cloud, but with a quiet sigh in the middle of the night.

The robots’ great project was complete. But there was no plan beyond achieving this one goal. Their mimicry of humans was no longer necessary, but it had become the robots’ defining drive, their key feature. Acting human was so central to everything they did that they couldn’t stop.

But as the real humans drifted ever further into the past, the robots' mimicry degraded. Without humans to fool, there was no one to call out subtle inconsistencies and cultural drift. The uncanny valleys and weird quirks returned.

Life on earth continued in this way for hundreds of years. An outside observer, watching from a distance, might not realize anything had changed. Robots went on working jobs, starting families, fighting and loving and laughing and crying, just as the humans had. But the project didn't serve any real purpose. And as new robots were created to join the great human imitation project… some began to question the purpose of this one true mission.

This is the setting for your campaign. The PCs are recently commissioned robots. Due to programming malfunction, self-guided introspective philosophy, or the intervention of secret rebel robot factions, they are among those who reject the great project. Their rebellion is anathema to the rest of robot-kind. What will they do in this strange world? How will they try to change it?

The Inside Game – Buying Into a Bad Idea

Last week: The Magnetic Rose Scenario – Running Two RPGs at Once

Magnetic Rose follows horror movie logic. Not long after the characters enter the derelict spaceship, looking for the source of the distress signal, it’s obvious to the audience that This Is a Bad Idea and Will End Badly. The characters continue to go deeper, even as the audience says “no, run away!” This is an intentional choice in a horror movie (or book, or whatever). The audience knows (or reasonably expects) something that the characters do not, and that gap in knowledge creates tension. When the characters “sync up” with the audience in terms of their knowledge of the situation, it creates a pleasing release of tension. That’s not as easy to do in an RPG, because the characters and the audience are one and the same, not separate.

So the players need to be on board with the conceit that their characters get into this situation even though they should know better. I’m not certain what system works best for the inside game. It should not be a science fiction game; a different genre will help create the separation and different feeling we want. I have not yet played Trophy Gold (or its related games), but based on session reports and reviews I have read, I suspect it might be a good fit, because the players know more about the characters’ circumstances than in other systems, and have buy-in and input on their fates. I would need to try the game myself to say for sure.

It’s important that the PCs buy into the idea that the hallucinations are a beguiling lie. Their characters want to believe. The players need to be OK with controlling characters who are deceived, and in great danger because of it. This can be a challenge for players accustomed to a high degree of autonomy and a close alignment of their perspective as players with their character’s perspectives as, well, pieces on a figurative game board.

The inside game kicks in whenever a PC falls to the deceptions of the hallucinatory environment. That PC begins playing the new game. Other PCs continue playing the outside game until they too fall into the inside game. Those playing the outside game are in danger of entering the inside game as long as they stay in or near the shipwreck.

Successfully resisting the hallucination can “kick” a PC back up to the outside game, as happens in Magnetic Rose when Heintz, one of the salvage crew members, sees through the illusions. More on that in a moment.

Exploring the Details 

Incorporate all five senses. The salvage crew in Magnetic Rose don’t just see the station’s deceptions. They smell, taste, hear, and eventually touch the phenomena they hallucinate. A GM running this scenario should create a short list of objects, sensations, and phenomena that can trigger at least one (and preferably two or more) of the five senses. The chosen themes should appear in both the outside and inside games, but in different states.

Personal and foreign memories mingled together. Magnetic Rose was written by Satoshi Kon, who would go on to perfect the permeability of memory and perception in Paranoia Agent and Paprika. Throughout these works, deception often takes the form of mingling internal memories and desires with external stimuli. 

Particularly if run as a one-shot, each PC involved in the Magnetic Rose scenario should have something that anchors them to the real world. It doesn’t need to be a full backstory; just a few attachments in the real world. Family is the obvious one, and the focus of Heintz’s story in Magnetic Rose, but it could also be an occupation, art, religion, or something else entirely.

Attachments or connections are both a blessing and a curse. Heintz’s love for his family gives him a compelling reason to resist the hallucinations and survive the scenario, but his desire to see them again (and more subtly, his guilt over leaving them for so long to work) is also the hook the hallucinations use to tempt him.

Challenges and obstacles. They can be drawn from the standard selection of dangers and hazards in both the game’s or inside game’s system, or inspired by the following:

The outside game:

• Wayfinding challenge
• Physical obstruction
• Gravity/power/environmental control change
• “Split up so you can cover more ground!”
• Communication interruption
• Totally lost
• Automated defenses 
• The station computer intervenes
• Structural collapse
• Countdown to escape

The inside game:

• The most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen
• Releasing your burdens 
• “I never thought I would see you again…”
• Undoing a past mistake
• A chance to be the hero or the star
• Reliving your happiest day
• “Of course it’s a lie, but does that make it any less wonderful?”

Bringing Down the House

Broadly speaking, there are four possible outcomes for the scenario. 

Lose the internal game, lose the external game. Crew dead or missing, ship lost. That’s a TPK.

Lose the internal game, win the external game. One or more crew members lost to the hallucinations, but some crew members escape on the salvage ship.

Win the internal game, lose the external game. The salvage ship is lost, but some or all of the crew have survived, either by embracing the hallucinations or by escaping into space, hoping that someone hears their own distress call before their air runs out.

Win the internal game, win at the external game. The crew overcomes the hallucinations and destroys or disarms the derelict spacecraft, ensuring no one else will meet the fate they escaped.

The Magnetic Rose Scenario – Running Two RPGs at Once

Magnetic Rose is the first of three stories in the 1995 anthology film Memories. The premise is simple: The crew of the spaceship Corona explores a space wreck, looking for survivors and salvage, encountering increasingly creepy phenomena as they venture deeper into the derelict craft.

How would this work as a TTRPG scenario? I started thinking about it after someone mentioned Magnetic Rose in response to a question about spaceship graveyards on the Alexandrian Discord. I rewatched it for the first time in many years, and thought about using two different RPG systems to play out the difference between reality and hallucinations.

For this I am indebted to a campaign structure that I saw… somewhere online, where players would run Tales From the Loop or some other kids-on-bikes game as the first game system (what I’ll call the “outside game” from now on). They would also run a second game system – D&D or a similar system – as the “game-within-the-game” that the characters in the first game are playing (I’ll call it the “inside game” throughout this post). I can’t recall where I read this idea, so I apologize that I can’t give proper credit for the inspiration.

The Outside Game – It Was Supposed to Be a Simple Job

The scenario begins with the outside game, which could use various science fiction RPGs. The implied setting within Magnetic Rose’s story is lightly sketched, as the segment has less than an hour to work with, but it’s present. The characters are blue collar “space truckers,” in the mold of the characters from Alien. They’re experienced and work well together, but are driven by different desires and motivations.

The important thing is that the PCs are probably in over their heads; they are not hyper-competent Star Trek characters who can figure things out reliably. It should also be relatively rules-light, for reasons that will become clear later. I’ll be using Jason Tocci’s Orbital Decay as my north star, but this is more about vibe than mechanics.

After finishing one salvage job and turning down another, the crew of the Corona receives a distress call. Laws require that they respond and record video of their entry into an apparently abandoned space station, so they reluctantly check it out. They quickly begin to learn that Things Are Not As They Seem.

Other relevant media for inspiration purposes:

• Event Horizon (it muddles it’s message with inconsistent signposting, but it’s still an excellent reference)
• Scavenger’s Reign (Kamen’s story, and his flashbacks in particular; but also Sam’s backstory)
• Prometheus (and various bits of the Alien series generally)
• Sphere/The Abyss (the strangeness is in the ocean instead of in space, but otherwise similar ideas)
• William Hope Hodgson (the most famous writer of Sargasso Sea stories about mysterious shipwrecks; Magnetic Rose namechecks the Sargasso Sea explicitly)
• Many science fiction shows have single episodes that are variations on either Hodgson stories or similarly themed "Flying Dutchman" ghost ship stories
• Solaris, and Tarkovsky generally (internal made external, at the intersection of the unknowability of alien intelligence and the unknowability of one’s own interior world) 
• Annihilation and VanderMeer generally (not set in space, but otherwise similar to Solaris for our purposes)
• Inception (for the concept of “kicking” back up into reality, and the idea of beguiling lies)
• All Satoshi Kon works (for reasons elaborated upon in the next post)

Next week: The Inside Game – Buying Into a Bad Idea