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What Has (Video Game) Man Wrought?

So I was playing Xenoblade, right? And I'm at the point of the game where I've met the customary haughty advanced civilization of duders with wings on their heads. Since getting to this big silvery future JRPG city, I've been bombarded with assholes telling me how effective their anti-badguy defenses are, and how they've existed for blah blah years before us dirty humans blah blah blah. Curiously, all the side-quests I've received have been stamped with the "temporary" icon, suggesting that I should do them sooner rather than later.

Because Xenoblade is currently being about as subtle as a Buster Sword to the chops, I've decided to talk about some other ancient and/or advanced civilizations that came a cropper for one reason or another. Spoiler: That reason would be hubris, with the "another" reason also being hubris.

List items

  • Starting with a nice obvious one. Zeal literally fell due to their hubris in switching their magic-based technological empire from natural magic to siphoning it from Lavos, already busy siphoning from the planet. All you're doing is just adding a terrifying eldritch middleman there, stupid Zeal. None of this ends well, as I'm sure those of you watching the ER well know.

  • The reclusive technological utopia of Esthar doesn't necessarily fall so much as come close at least twice in its long history, suggesting a distinct lack of pattern recognition. The first time was while under the tyrannical yoke of scary hermaphrodite sorceress Adel, whom they eventually trap in a geosynchronous satellite that ruins the TV reception for everyone else on the planet. The second time, they get assaulted by all manner of monsters beaming down from the moon because of Final Fantasy logic. These instances are generally related to the fact that they decided to bury all their stupid catastrophic technology instead of blowing it up. Nice translucent walkways though, we'll come back to those momentarily.

  • Or now in fact. The transculent walkway-infested Zanarkand is the setting for the prologue of FFX, as we're introduced to surfer bro Tidus and a brief recap of the end of the Zanarkandian civilization at the hands of eternal rivals and sore losers Beville and their giant magic apocalypse whale. The game would move on for a good while before fully elucidating us on the sad fate of this civilization, who believed they could conquer nutty religious insanity with science and reason and a national sport that drowns people. Food for thought, Dawkins aficionados.

  • The poor Protheans weren't so much undone by hubris as they were hoisted by the same clever petard that every organic species had fallen into since time immemorial masterminded by giant robot crayfish who like to say "fathom" a lot, presumably because they originated from the briny deep. Of space. The trap required that the newly space-faring organics came across some bizarre futuristic ruins in a spooky nebula that was maintained by weird bug monster technicians and decided to make it the center of the civilized galaxy. Yeah, that old chestnut.

  • The dwemers were undone by their thirst for technological mastery and in part due to a side-project of turning their enslaved snow elf brethren into horrible sightless cannibals. Because all advanced civilizations are totally reasonable people. They eventually all mysteriously vanished, leaving behind creepy robot spiders and ugly heavy bronze shit everywhere. They will be missed.

  • It's not quite clear what the Chozo were all about, other than they liked orb-based technology and raising poor little orphan girls. As well as being the intergalactic bird alien answer to Daddy Warbucks, they spread around a lot of advanced technology and hippie musings on the many planets they briefly habituated before also vanishing. Maybe they all became energy-based beings. That seems to be a thing in Sci-Fi.

  • The First Civilization, frequently brought up during the eleventh hour of any given Assassin's Creed II game (which, like Street Fighter II, is more or less a franchise of its own) when they need something completely off-the-wall to happen as a cliffhanger, were taken down by sunflares. Yeah, like in 2012, the Roland Emmerich movie with John Cusack. No number of fancy ancient hologram scientists will ever convince us that a disaster predicted by that unfortunate mess will ever come to pass. Sucks for us.

  • The Precursors, from all accounts a race of intelligent giant shaggy monsters (and I suddenly find myself empathizing with them), created the first federation of sentient races before going off somewhere like an inconsiderate host. This federation was fairly stable until a race of evil tribbles convinced the bug members to kill off everyone else. The Precursors in this case weren't so much a fallen advanced civilization than a particularly poor matchmaker.

  • When your world's physical reminder to live in equilibrium with nature are a bunch of adorable rainbow dragons, you're entirely justified in building an utterly pointless giant floating, mana-draining fortress to say "fuck you!" in return. Too bad those rainbow dragons went all Voltron to become the Mana Beast, which subsequently destroyed the entire world so it could start anew. Who'd have thought there'd be consequences to an advanced civilization being arrogant jerks? Not this list.

  • Star Trek's Federation is a utopian space-faring gathering of various races co-existing peacefully in the pursuit of knowledge and championing the happiness and advancement of all sentient kind. Surely their end is not far off?