Josh Sawyer started in the industry in 1999 at Black Isle Studios, where he worked on the Icewind Dale games. Since 2005, he has been at Obsidian Entertainment, where he has directed Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, and the 2022 narrative adventure game Pentiment. He is currently Obsidian’s studio design director.
We Are Always Living in the Final Days
FROG 2024 – Keynote
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction always tends to reflect the collective social fears of the times in which they were created. A generation ago, the fears reflected Cold War escalations and post-Cold War fears about rogue nuclear weapon perfusion throughout the world. In recent years, our fears have shifted to those of pandemics and climate crises. Despite the material circumstances of our collective downfall, post-apocalyptic games focus heavily on the depths of human depravity and ruthlessness in desperate and lawless times.
This talk will examine this trend and propose that there is room for more portraying more hope, ingenuity, and perseverance in humanity even in the wake of devastation. Our imagined apocalypses necessarily draw blueprints for our destruction, but they can also contain the seeds of hope for the future.
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