If there’s one thing I can say for sure about modern society, it’s that we’re obsessed the idea of our ultimate demise. Not just death, but the apocalyptic conditions of total societal breakdown, where all the services and authorities we take for granted are suddenly taken away. We’re all about post-apocalyptic narratives and survivalism and all that good, uplifting stuff.
Well, Ubisoft certainly knows that we like to throw dark, and that’s why they’re letting us witness all our doomsday nightmare fantasies with their new Collapse simulator. You’re patient zero of a brand-new, highly infectious virus, and you even get to live long enough to watch said disease lead to the total collapse of human society.
It is one of the most hilariously maudlin things I have ever seen in my life. The trailer below says “Based on real data, experience the fragility of the world through the first end of society simulator, and discover how long it would take for the world to collapse,” which is maybe a half-step away from the panic-mongering nonsense that you generally expect from your local 10 o’clock news.
But what the hey! I figured I’d check it out. Once I got infected, medical professionals decided the most prudent thing to do would be to fly me from my home in the sparsely-populated rural midwest to a highly crowded hospital in a metropolitan city, at which point I promptly spread the infection to thousands. After discovering that the local Walgreens was totally out of pharmaceuticals, I apparently both decided and was allowed to get on an international flight because I don’t know. Within two weeks, I was seeing messages like “The world is plunged into darkness,” and “Governments are powerless.” I haven’t seen so much doom and gloom in one place since I was 17 and keeping a LiveJournal.
This thing is obviously all in the effort of marketing Ubisoft’s mid-apocalyptic online shooter, The Division, which is due out March 8. While I’m sure there’s some degree of science behind this thing since it kept quoting sources at me, the whole doomsday scenario is so bleak that it was a constant source of unintentional hilarity. Check it out!
