Biohazard Games: Jeff Barber on using RPGs as a lens for modern concerns
It takes just a quick Google to find well researched and articulate essays on how horror and sci-fi reflect current concerns.
When the West, for example, was worried about an insidious creep of communism, we had movies like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in which people looked exactly like us but were actually swapped out an unseen threat when we worried about nuclear war, the nuclear charged Godzilla levelled cities, worries about advancement in bio-science gave us zombie plagues, and so forth.
Is the same true for tabletop games? Well, Biohazard Games has a Kickstarter live right now, and already there’s maybe a clue in the name, and it’s for Blue Planet: Recontact. I took one glance at it, saw dolphins armed with lasers apparently defending a watery world and immediately thought of the timely relevance to modern ecological concerns.