Without Isaac Asimov, the video game would not have been the same

L'uscita di Foundation, the epic Apple TV + series with the ambitious goal of transposing the gigantic Cycle of Foundations by Isaac Asimov, is probably the television event of the year and perhaps the beginning of the decade: literary work par excellence, in the high skies of the genre together with a few other works by sacred monsters such as Clarke or Dick, the Asimov saga is probably to science fiction what The Lord of the Rings was to modern fantasy, a story able to define the genre in a coherent and modern way.

Yet, the arrival on the screens of this gigantic epic suspended between epic, scientific speculation and political fiction is in some ways only a confirmation of the centrality of Asimov, which has been transposed several times to the cinema, on the radio (above all) or on television, as well as in the video game.

In reality, Asimov's relationship with the history of contemporary science fiction is so visceral that it deserves a reflection on the power of his concepts and his poetics.

A reflection that also touches on video game.

Isaac Asimov, writer and scientist

A Russian-born biochemist and lecturer who emigrated to the USA at the end of the Great War, Isaac Asimov was the symbol of a capable intellectual as much to make great scientific and speculative contributions in academia as to give a strong push to science fiction as a pop genre.

Alongside the Asimov, teacher and scholar, there was in fact the Asimov passionate about stories of bizarre distant worlds spread in the United States of the first half of the twentieth century, not too far from the weird tales, and this is a characteristic that made him author capable of mercilessly shaking philosophical and scientific notions of high value with a simple narrative and therefore able to emotionally involve.

If on the one hand, the Foundation is an intergalactic epic that has in a certain sense a precursor great space-themed political fictional epics (first of all that of Dune, which will only be published twenty years later), on the other hand, all its robot production has managed to develop a type of stories capable of carefully analyzing concepts that would become part of the technological debate and which at times turn out to be marvelously human (the stories of I, Robot), at times they are effectively contaminated with yellow (this is the case of Il Sole Nudo and the others in the cycle of detective Elijah Baley).

What has been the result of all this, in terms of impact on the history of the fantastic international? Which, as happened with Poe and Lovecraft with horror or Tolkien with fantasy, concepts so rooted in Asimov's work ended up infiltrating from work to work, becoming a fundamental pillar of fiction.

And the video game?

It would be very easy, at this point, to list the videogame or playful transpositions of Asimov, who since the age of librigames and role-playing games has been the protagonist of various transpositions and landed in the video game with some products that bore his name, such as Robot City or Robots VCR Mystery Game (more interactive movie than game), but the reality is that to realize what a fundamental impact Asimov has had in the video game it is enough to mention at least four great brands that in one way or another have taken concepts from him.

Let's think about Detroit: Become Human, which is practically Quantic Dream's love tribute to Asimov's Laws and the power of speculative science fiction; we weigh a Mass Effect, and his not too distant son of the Foundation and its philosophical and at times moral approach to intergalactic science fiction. We even think about Bioshock, in which okay, there are not really "robots", but it is quietly present the theme of the relationship between creator and machine within the crazy utopias of Rapture and Columbia.

Even the king of contemporary sci-fi survival horror, Dead Space, pays homage to Asimov with the name of his protagonist, Isaac Clarke (the surname comes from the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey), and starts from Alien, which in its own way potentially contained the man-machine relationship.

It is a tangle of tributes, citations, cross thematic infiltrations, undeclared influences all with the one great Asimov matrix.

Concepts that obviously would also apply to the fantasy video game with Tolkien or Lovecraft with horror.

But, in the case of the Asimov-nerd culture / videogame relationship, there is perhaps a further level of interpretation.

Asimov and robotics: a key to understanding technology

When Asimov wrote his famous three laws of robotics and elaborated a philosophical system around the man-machine theme, he didn't just create a very strong narrative archetype that developed a new genre. In that moment, Asimov has also given a fundamental piece to our "moral compass" in the relationship with technology, at 360 °, and in particular with the central notion of "artificial intelligence", a concept dear to the videogame too.

In general, however, the concepts underlying that narrative have spburned seeds for a series of critical concepts that later became part of our relationship with the digital world and with digital works, in a certain sense suggesting to us how difficult it is to work with technology, to bend it, to make it complete.

Finally, saying that there is a bit of man in the artificial creation, Asimov whispered in our ear how important it is to take care of technology, and find a bit of "humanity" within it.

Which then, paradoxically, that's what we want to do when we enjoy a video game.