Something strange happened to me recently. I’ve been working in game testing for a while now, and I find myself playing the games I grew up reading about all the time. But here’s the weird thing: Sci-fi authors designed the games I’m testing today.
I’m not exaggerating. I work on NPC artificial intelligence programs that change based on how players treat them. Stuff I used to nerd out about playing Mass Effect for the first time is standard functionality on games nowadays. It’s made me reflect on just how prescient science fiction often is, and frankly it scares me.
Let’s start with the communicators on Star Trek. To me as a teenager replaying Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns, those things were the coolest. When my college friends were calling each other on their payphones, I was jamming to Kenny Loggins with Captain Picard on our communicators. Ten years later, I got my first Motorola Razr cell phone, and wow did those communicators suddenly look outdated.
Skip ahead another decade, and my smartphone renders those cell phones ancient history. George Jetson would have killed for a flip phone back in the day. But you know who didn’t have a smartphone? Gene Roddenberry. And yet that “cellphone” on Star Trek was a vital piece of his vision of the future.
Roddenberry created that smartphone because he wanted people to be able to talk to each other instantly, no matter where they were. Cell phone technology may have advanced far past those prototypes the Trekkies helped design, but science fiction inspired the technology in the first place. I’ve met science tech developers at game conferences who will openly tell you science fiction media lit the fire under their careers.
This is how most of gaming gets made. Developers will toss cyberpunk books around like cultural touchstones during interviews. Last year I was QA testing a game literally ripped from the pages of Neuromancer . Yeah, Neuromancer was written in 1984 – when most people didn’t know what the internet was. Cyberpunk 2021, man. William Gibson invented the word “cyberspace,” and now I debug virtual realities where gamers plug in (okay, don headset) and exist totally separate lives.
The point is, science fiction authors have been predicting the future we’re living in far too accurately for my taste.
Worse are the predictions about what terrible things we’ll do with our future tech. I recently rewatched Blade Runner , and it was…different, knowing I work on games with AI tech that becomes more sophisticated every month. Sure, we don’t have rogue replicants running around out to kill our robotic protagonists. But my office is having the same moral discussions about AI as that movie had thirty years ago. What constitutes life? When do rights come into play? Who cares? These aren’t new questions, folks.
I can’t speak for philosophy, but sci-fi answered these questions back in the ‘60s.
None of this even compares to Black Mirror , though. Charlie Brooker predicted the future so accurately, it’s less science fiction and more surveillance journalism. Remember when everyone rated each other on social interactions and jobs in “Nosedive”? China just happened to copy that plot and create it IRL. Want to know what actual augmented reality feels like? Try playing the game I just debugged. It’s a virtual world viewed through contacts that augment the real world with digital information. We call that AI “machine learning” these days.
I had to take a break from Black Mirror because it was impacting my ability to do my job. How could I properly QA a game that directly mirrors a dystopian tech plot when the fiction felt real to me? My girlfriend says I have the imagination of a paranoid lunatic, but then again she likes reading high fantasy where the dragons don’t spontaneously become real.
The scariest sci-fi to me is hard science fiction. Things that nail the technical minutiae of science, not just the future it creates. Shows like The Expanse make other science fiction look silly with their research into how space actually works. No FTL drives. No willy-nilly gravity simulation. Newton’s Laws of Motion still apply, and laying in zero-G is still a disgusting gamble with your internal organs. Now that we’re regularly launching civilians into space via Elon Musk’s playground, a lot of what The Expanse dreamed up about the culture and difficulty of off-world living is probably spot-on predictions of our future with SpaceX.
I’ve started to realise that a lot of science fiction predicts the future less by forecasting inventions and more by exposing the social dysfunctions those inventions will create. 1984 wasn’t about telescreens following you everywhere you go. It was about government surveillance. Now we have cookies and radios in our pockets we can’t live without. Guess which government keeps tabs on those? Gattaca wasn’t about genetically modified humans. It was about classism and elitism behind gene selection. Now we have the tech to edit our DNA with relative ease, and people are protesting about everything Gattaca predicted in the movie.
My job has given me insight into how games are created and how science fiction influences that creation. Every pitch I’ve read or attended includes references to movies, books, television, you name it. I sat in a room less than a year ago where someone compared their game idea to Black Mirror but with happy jokes instead of existential dread. Science fiction created the blueprint, and game developers are the architects.
Take The Matrix as an example. That movie didn’t just predict VR, it gave us the language to discuss virtual reality. Red pill, blue pill? We’re still talking about that damn movie twenty years later. The idea of choosing reality over ignorance is gospel to tech developers. Why? Because The Matrix made millions off that concept. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls you and dumps two billion dollars into your company’s research and development just to advance that concept, you bet your investors people are going to Matrix-dom.
Neuromancer established the template for our collective virtual reality consciousness. Exploring the information superstructure as if you were traversing a physical world. Mega-corporations policing that world and restricting access. Hackers gaining access to that digital world through analog means. Augmented reality. All of it seemed so far-out in 1984, and now it’s Tuesday. I debug video games for a living where players live another life on the internet, complete with real-world economic ramifications. Catfishing? Internet scavenging? Identity theft? Welcome to Gibson’s tomorrow.
This hits home for me because I work in media as well. The games I test now will influence science fiction, which will influence future technology. Maybe I’ll find a glitch that could prevent some Orwellian nightmare. Probably not. But some gamer out there will.
My problem is we got the surveillance tech from 1984 but not the leftist utopia of Star Trek. We figured out AI assistants that listen to us but can’t cure cancer. Entertainment scared us about these things, but we built the damn toys anyway.
Science fiction is important because it tests the concepts of tomorrow. When I recommend science fiction to people, I’m not just giving them good stories to read or watch. I’m showing them the best analysis of future technology we have to offer. It’s not prophesying, hell it’s just watching trends and asking “what if?”
Enjoy that silly sci-fi movie you’re watching. Live in awe of that ridiculous future tech article you just read. Someday, somebody is going to make those things reality. The smartphone was stupid until it wasn’t. Artificial intelligence being self aware is sci-fi until some grad student makes it an objective. Virtual worlds started as escapism until someone figured out you could make bank living in them.
Science fiction isn’t dreaming up the future. It’s testing our present. And believe me, when you’re debugging the future, that sort of thing needs to be tested.
Logan lives in Minneapolis with too many consoles and just enough opinions. He explores how sci-fi plays differently across games, TV, and film—celebrating great world-building and calling out lazy tropes. Expect passionate takes, sarcasm, and the occasional Mass Effect reference.