Generally speaking I’m not a huge fan of massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming, preferring my pretend worlds to be free of the sort of interpersonal and political complexities that I navigate in everyday life.

However I found myself jumping back into the genre recently when space flight simulator Elite Dangerous came out.

The technical achievement is remarkable. Using a combination of progressive algorithms and real astronomical data, creator David Braben’s team has created a replica of the Milky Way mapped out in-game at 1:1 scale, with every known star and planet included.

Flight within that universe is achieved in-system with a seamless Star Trek-style impulse drive and a Star Wars-ish hyperspace jump for interstellar distances. Traversing it is a genuinely wonderful experience.

But as with so many games, it is let down by a crudely-drawn vision of the future, produced for MMO audiences which have always been ill-served in this regard.

The setting alone is ripe for a sci-fi storyline bingo game...

• A harsh uncaring universe

• Feudalism is common, and democratic capitalism is the best that can be hoped for

• Economics revolve around a dominant trans-galactic series of powerful corporations interacting with often weak planetary governments

• The only vitality to the universe comes from Ayn Rand wunderkind (you) wheeler-dealing in an amoral sort of way to grab as much power as possible.

It mirrors large chunks of fellow sci-fi MMO Eve Online, could easily take place alongside rival space shooter Star Citizen and echoes story tropes which have dominated almost every big futuristic franchise for the last 10 years.

Partly this may simply reflect the times we live in. If you’ve missed out on Ursula Le Guin, Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod etc you may not have much of a vision beyond the obvious dystopian future that seems to be careering towards us like an unstoppable locomotive.

But it is also symptomatic of a deeply embedded intellectual conservatism based on both audience pressure and games designers’ limited conceptions of what “challenging” means.

MMO audiences are key, in that they are partial originators, continual enforcers and ongoing victims of such sensibilities.

Designers tend to be drawn from a core of these audiences, who they listen to and reinforce under the maxim “profit first” — which trumps Silicon Valley’s usually laughable slogan proclaiming its graphene-thin commitment to iconoclasm, “break everything.”

Elite Dangerous provides a strong example of this. Braben’s vision for the Milky Way of 3,300AD has a strong political element to it, in which the feudal Empire, reactionary-minded democratic Federation and loosely-aligned Alliance are vying for power.

Within the Alliance and independent systems an array of governments are to be found, but these are of quite limited variety. Beyond the above, early developer notes revealed chaos zones, corporate states, religious cults, autocratic dictatorships, co-ops and, er, communist dictatorships. Apparently Star Trek-style federations don’t get a look in, let alone democratic socialisms, organised anarchisms, or even fascisms for that matter.

For gaming, such forms are rare unless they are to be the overarching antagonist facilitating our Randian hero. Nuance does not exist when it comes to communism, it’s dictatorship or nothing.

And for the Western gamer in particular any other consideration breaks a long-held taboo potentially worthy of serious online repercussions in the form of personal insults, threats, blogs, and even campaigns.

In Elite Dangerous, Braben is justifiably proud of a mechanic where players can affect the alignment and politics of a star system by their actions. It’s an exciting idea, allowing groups of players to actively change the ongoing game environment.

But what was the first attempt at this? Attacking an independent communist sector called Eranin.

It’s no coincidence. Gaming culture is all too often infested with a self-reinforcing McCarthyite sentiment, led by “dedicated gamers” — the sort of person who has the funds and time to dedicate themselves wholesale to virtual worlds — who shout down dissent with as much zeal as any reactionary mass media presence.

As a result even relatively progressive-minded designers find themselves either bullied into self-censorship or battling hard for the simplest of changes.

An interesting take on this comes from the Foldable Human online video series, by Dan Olsen. In his analysis of the execrable #gamergate phenomenon, Olsen argues that much of the pressure being brought to bear against campaigns for more women in gaming is rooted in a desire for stasis, from a homogeneous community which claims gaming as its own and rejects all else as alien and threatening.

This is the core demographic whose obsession with denying change has been helping to hold back gaming from producing more interesting, rounded and intelligent stories to go with often superslick gameplay mechanics.

Olsen’s piece has interesting echoes of Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent, highlighting the existence of lively debate within blinkered terms that are sharply guarded.

And as is so often the case, the guard dogs must be brought to heel if society is to progress.