There is a problem emerging for future blockbuster roleplaying and open-world games, and I do not think enough game developers are treating it like the design emergency it may become. For decades, The United States functioned not merely as a setting, but as a Faraway Land Of Dreams And Adventure. It gave games a huge reserve of instantly legible myth: the frontier, the highway, the diner, the suburb, the prison, the shopping mall, the desert, the decaying downtown, the sun-blasted coast, the military zone, the casino strip, the strip mall, the swamp, the refinery, the gated mansion, the biker bar, the cop cruiser, the freeway overpass, the endless parking lot, the cheap motel, the trailer park, the port, the neon beach city. (Or even the Pornset, just think of Second Life) … None of this was neutral in nature. It all came preloaded with atmosphere, tension, aspiration, parody, violence, and seduction. Designers did not have to build that invent from scratch. America has binders full of that energy just waiting to be tapped.
That old charge is not just weakening but turning sour. Worse, in some cases it is inverting into something pungent and offensive. What used to feel dirty but magnetic now risks feeling dirty and decaying. What used to feel decadent now risks feeling neauseating or revolting. What used to feel transgressive now risks feeling utterly devoid of class, originality, spiritually exhausted, bland and overexposed. This is not just a politics problem. It is not reducible to news cycles or one election or one administration or one moral panic. It is an aesthetic problem, a libidinal problem, a fantasy problem. It is that feeling you get when seeing too much advertisement on TV and you just want to destroy your TV and never watch TV ever again. That is what the US is becoming. It’s the feeling when you hear yet another billionaire and you ask yourself, what does this person actualy add that he or she is a billionaire?
The point is not that the United States has become “bad” in some ordinary argumentative sense. The point is that for a growing number of players, it is becoming harder to eroticize as playable scenery. US once had open roads it now has utterly has the exact same completely banale and featureless stroads ub literally every state. You can be in a US stroad parking lot and have absolutely no idea in what state you are. It’s literally all the same, and it’s all butt-ugly, depressing and the people there are stressed as fuck.
Such a pervasive leitmotiff is a major issue for game design, because big-budget games do not merely sell mechanics. They sell permission to desire to be part of a continuum. They sell entry, whereas right now most americans are googling how to emigrate. Game designers (and movie makers, or hoteliers, or designers of theme parks) all concoct condensed fantasy that spending forty, sixty, eighty, or a hundred hours in a particular atmosphere will feel exciting, sensuous, curious, immersive, dangerous, glamorous, adventurous, or at least intoxicatingly foul.
Even a bleak, dystopian world has to generate some form of appetite or exitement. Even ugliness has to have charisma. A player has to want to cross the threshold into the experience. Once that basic desire starts to backfire, everything else in the production stack becomes toxic. Better facial animation will not save a space the player no longer wants to inhabit. Better writing will not fully compensate for a backdrop that now feels emotionally repellent. Game designers look at what they are doing, and possibly without fully understanding why they quit, move to another tittle likely outside the US, and work on content that does not carry the same contaminated association.
This is why I think future roleplaying and open-world titles set in the United States may face a genuine problem. There are already major productions either announced or actively in development that exist within that broad blockbuster imagination. Rockstar’s official materials describe Grand Theft Auto VI as a Vice City and Leonida-set crime epic, while CD PROJEKT has publicly discussed the next mainline Cyberpunk game, now referred to as Cyberpunk 2, and has also formally revealed The Witcher 4; Naughty Dog has announced Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet as a new franchise in development. Not all of these are U.S.-set, obviously, but they belong to the same industrial ecosystem of giant authored worlds, premium atmosphere, and emotionally expensive place-making. That is why this matters beyond one franchise or one coastline.
Take GTA VI specifically. Not too long ago, I would have said with total confidence that I was going to buy it. Vice City, Florida analogue, modern criminal spectacle, sunstroke vulgarity, wealth rot, sexual decay, tabloid grotesquerie, boats, highways, nightlife, strip-lit absurdity, swamps, gated enclaves, lowlifes and predators and hustlers under permanent humidity: all these semiotics carried enormous energy. A year later I inescapably start thinking racists, creepy at guys in uniforms kidnapping kids, republican politicians doing stuff with kids, evangelicals wanting women to have many kids for whatever reason, oh well, you can guess the reason probably, and then there’s all these creepy spy agencies and creepy billionaires with creepy faces.
Henceforth, when I imagine Miami, Florida, and by extension the United States as backdrop, I no longer feel the old pull. I feel resentment. Disgust. A low-grade distress. A bodily discomfort in the imagery itself. The scenery does not tempt me in the same way. It does not feel adventurous. It does not feel like a place where I want to roam around being wicked, improvisational, or curious. It begins to feel deeply yuck. Not scary in a thrilling way. Not filthy in a rich way. Just toxic. It is a place I would really want to get the hell away from as quickly as possible. The men or the women there no matter how pretty they are in the game are people a I actually want nothing to do with because they actually might be involved with guns and school shootings or prisons or real awful drugs or the most tragic deaths or they are probably incredibly poor and having to work three jobs and can barely pay the bills. Like I would not find a fantasy game set in adventurous Moscow, running around there attractive with all those grim faces and all the menace and despair, the same unappealing associative drabness has now infused in my mind’s eye the United States. That is a catastrophic shift if you are designing an open-world game whose first duty is to make players want to walk around in it.
This matters because America used to work in games even when it was being mocked. In fact, it often worked best when it was being mocked. The satire was juiced by residual glamour. There was always still some shine under the slime. The beach city was ridiculous, but hot. The military machine was monstrous, but cinematically powerful. The wild west was violent, but mythically alive. Industry was dehumanizing, but visually and materially spectacular. Capitalism was grotesque, but exuberant and going places. The United States as game-space could be absurd, corrupt, ugly, cruel, stupid, psychotic, and still remain playably charismatic. It kicked ass. Developers could count on that. They could rely on the player’s mixed fascination. Even contempt came with appetite.
What happens when contempt remains but appetite disappears? That is the real problem. A setting does not die when it becomes immoral. It dies when it becomes unaesthetic and uncomfortable and deeply cringe. It dies when its symbolism no longer produces attraction, curiosity, dread, hunger, or even scandal, and instead produces deadened revulsion. A player can admire the craftsmanship of a world and still not want anything to do with it. I am not interested in a Grand Theft Auto set in Dubai. Jezus the idea would be so incredibly boring. The most dreadful police state ever, and the most plastic contained boxed in pretty men and pretty women all predated over by old men? Ew. Such backdrop is a much worse association than mere outrage. Outrage has heat. Outrage means the setting still has electrical charge. Numb disgust is colder. Numb disgust means the world may no longer be functioning as fantasy habitat.
This is why I urge designers should hear the sirens when players start expressing not “this is evil but compelling” but “I do not want to spend leisure time there.” The distinction is enormous. For a long time, the great romantic clichés attached to the United States granted designers a endless subsidy. The Wild West, the road movie, the heist city, the military thriller, the corporate skyline, the suburban horror zone, the post-industrial wasteland, the celebrity coast, the vice capital, the borderland: all of these carried their own emotional labor. The designer only had to tune, remix, intensify, subvert, or weaponize them. But if those clichés are now culturally exhausted or morally poisoned to the point that they no longer feel cool, then that varnish disappears. Designers have to generate charisma from scratch.
That is much harder than people think. Recognizability is not enough. Most blockbuster settings are extremely recognizable. The problem is that recognizability can become a trap. A landscape can be iconic and still emotionally dead. A visual grammar can be deeply familiar and yet no longer attractive. This is what I mean when I say the United States is no longer sexy. I do not mean there are no beautiful American landscapes, no interesting American stories, or no remaining myths. I mean the old package deal is breaking down. The automatic conversion of U.S. scenery into playable desire is no longer reliable. The beach no longer guarantees heat. The skyline no longer guarantees awe. The military hardware no longer guarantees grandeur. The capitalist excess no longer guarantees decadent fun. The signifiers still exist, but their charge is unstable.
Studios may not yet appreciate this process and naively conclude the answer is simply to become more cynical. Make it darker. Make it more satirical. Add more nudity. Make it more self-aware. Make it more morally compromised. But critique alone cannot revive a dead fantasy. Satire works best when there is still something lush to desecrate. You can only mock glamour if glamour still has some pulse. You can only expose the rot in a myth that retains enough vitality to be worth exposing. If the thing has already become emotionally stale, then more critique just makes it feel flatter. It does not deepen the setting. It smothers it.
This is part of why certain local zones still work brilliantly while larger national frames do not. A place like Dogtown in Phantom Liberty works because it is not relying on “America” as seduction. It is not saying, come marvel at the great imperial fantasy. It is saying, here is a dense, localized, diseased district with its own internal economy, paranoia, weather, debris fields, improvisations, and social metabolism. It is specific. It is tactile. It has bodily logic. It is less a national symbol than a pressure chamber. That kind of setting can still absolutely seduce a player, even when it is filthy and horrifying, because it is concrete enough to feel alive. Local ruin can remain charismatic long after national myth has gone sour. Dog town can exist anywhere, but it is still inalienable an artefact of a failed localized dystopian United States.
This suggests a larger lesson for future AAA design. Developers may need to stop assuming that the United States can function as universal default blockbuster scenery. They may need to work far harder at specificity, locality, subculture, and atmospheric precision. The successful worlds of the next decade may be the ones that stop leaning on giant inherited mood boards and instead build environments with their own internal metabolism. Not “America, but gritty.” Not “Florida, but crazier.” Not “California, but satirical.” Those formulas may no longer suffice. Designers may need to make places that feel less like recycled civilizational shorthand and more like strange living systems.
It also raises an uncomfortable thought: perhaps some of the most iconic U.S.-coded game spaces were always running on deferred cultural capital accumulated in earlier eras. They were sexy partly because cinema had already made them sexy, because advertising had already made them sexy, because American myth had already made them sexy, because rebellion, wealth, violence, militarism, celebrity, lawlessness, and freedom had been fused into one giant export machine. Games inherited that energy and spent it magnificently. But what are the current exemplars of America if not utterly awful?