If you're wondering why so many video game narratives seem oddly poignant right now - #Fallout76's new storyline about inoculating people against a virus, #Destiny2's narrative about impending urban disaster, #TheDivision2's pandemic New York - that's called premediation /1

Premediation is the idea that media - news, TV, film, and video games - is constantly presenting us with frightening possible futures in order to control our reaction (ie. prevent traumatic surprise) to them through a constant low-level anxiety /2

This is an idea put forward by Richard Grusin and it isn't just about trying to dictate our reactions it's also about trying to control the future. No matter what happens, we can say we knew it was a possibility. Media has already mediated our response. /3

Is premediation good or bad? Like most things, it's either or both depending on how people seek to exploit it and how people navigate it. Regardless, it's one of the reasons why video games might suddenly seem so tuned in - they've always been imagining this future as present /4

They also reassure us that we can - and will - overcome these eventual, potential futures should they ever become the present. And this is true: we can and will overcome the pandemic. But they also ask us to consider alternatives to what our world can be /5

Those alternatives serve certain ideologies that predate the crisis. For instance, universal health care and socialist redistribution of wealth aren't exactly the solutions #TheDivision2 calls for in the face of global pandemic and the resulting economic collapse. /6

This is why it can be bad and it can be good - part of premediating a crisis is setting expectations and entrenching political and ideological positions before the event occurs so that when it does people are pre-inclined to support it being resolved in a certain way /7

This is why it is important to ask ourselves how media has, is, and does present crisis. What do video games advocate for in how they resolve the future-crises they invision? Is it a solution we want to see enacted in the real world? What are the consequences of that solution? /8

Or is it just fun? Because sometimes the goal (no less ideological) is just to distract or comfort by way of entertainment. Gamification is how video games premediate crisis. They prepare us for disaster by assuring us that our fears - which they engineer - can be conquered. /9