Why I'm Doing What I'm Doing

The topic for this blog is how popular media, such as movies and video games, influences the way that we as a culture view the natural environment. I struggled a while when I was trying to come up with a suitable topic, but since the environment and popular media are both within my interests, I figured that both of them could come together and form something interesting. The overlap area isn’t something that’s often discussed, even though popular media shapes our perception of the world more than we can sometimes point out.

            Pop culture, especially pop media, is a way to discuss important ideas in a low-brow, safe environment. While some pop culture may become controversial if it’s too far out there or too offensive to the general audience, most of the ideas I hope to investigate are simple enough that the general audience doesn’t balk at them. The environment in movies and video games, after all, is just the background. If it enters into viewer consciousness at all, it’s because it’s pretty or ugly or useful to the characters or player in some way. Virtual environments aren’t especially critical to the public consciousness because they’re pretend.

            Movies like "The Hunger Games" or "Mad Max: Fury Road" raise few eyebrows with their post-apocalyptic landscapes or genetically-modified organisms, but both those movies rely on one thing: the end of the world and destruction of civilization, brought about by mankind.
            Video games such as "Minecraft" give players free reign over entire worlds, while games such as "Ark: Survival Evolved" put the player at the bottom of the food chain. In both of these games, the player is the only human in a vast, dangerous environment almost completely devoid of humanity or structures. "Fallout," especially the new "Fallout 4," is a game franchise built entirely around a fictional '60s-style universe, post-nuclear warfare that has destroyed and irradiated much of the United States.

            I want to dig deeper into these issues that pop media brings up, especially those ideas that sit quietly below the surface. Why is it that popular media, and thus human beings, are so interested in the destruction of the earth? It’s become inherently “cool” to have things set in post-apocalyptic wastelands. Why? And just why do wastelands serve more as jumping-off points rather than cautionary tales? Is it possible for these kinds of fictional futures, such as "Fallout" and "Mad Max," to serve as both a romping ground and a caution?

These are some of the questions I want to pursue through this blog. I hope to learn something new about the human condition and why we interact with virtual environments the way we do.