Review: Starfield Is Really a Video Game About Government

Bureaucracy vs. freedom in outer space

Starfield, the latest role-playing game from Bethesda Softworks, is set in a far future when humanity has moved to the stars. Two rival states dominate. The United Colonies are centralized and bureaucratic but safe and rich. The Freestar Collective is more loosely governed and prone to lawlessness, but merchants and entrepreneurs have more freedom to go about their business.

Other forms of governance are always hovering at the fringes, like LIST (the League of Independent Settlers), a ragtag group of settlers who find even Freestar's political structure too overbearing. They've struck out on their own, but they've found themselves beset by attacks from lawless rogues. As a LIST farmer explains, "The promise is freedom. True freedom. If you can fend off all the spacers and pirates the settled systems can throw at you."

At heart, Starfield is a game about the fragility and contingency of state power, competition between forms of government, and the unexpected ways that private, nongovernmental power steps in to fill the gaps and voids left by states.