So, since this isn't real pertinent to any of the habbenings right now, I'll post it in this slightly empty thread.
Video games and their accidental predictions. I'm playing Shadowrun: Hong Kong right now, and have played another Shadowrun game by Harebrained Studios. In the Shadow Run universe, sometime about 2020 (help me on lore if you're more familiar) there was a great Awakening (note capitolization) after which metahuman were a thing again, magic was visible/usable … and the dragons (were there seven of them? I think there were seven) that emerged to terrorize the people.
Tech didn't stop working, so eventually two of the dragons were killed (in Dragonfall, you find out that wasn't quite true, as you have to decide what to do with a now-insane injured dragon whose soul has been forcibly bound to a young dead girl for six decades or more) the remaining five "go underground" as it were, and pull strings from behind the curtain.
Thus we sometimes learn the hard way the truth of one of the settings idioms. Never cut a deal with a dragon.
The world you see is through the eyes a shadow-runner. SINless (System Identification Number) you effectively don't exist, and will need fake ID to go through the nice parts of the city. Nuyen is tranferred electronically, similar to our credit cards of today, and even the SINless don't use "cash" so much as cryptographically signed statements of value ("credstick" with $X nuyen available to whoever is carrying it) similar to paper wallets of cryptocurrency you can have now.
The corporations are the law; elected officials are just talking heads well paid for keeping the appearence of peace. Whole cities are operated by wage slaves. Not hopeless people who don't know they shouldn't be satisfied with a minimum wage job, but literally owned families, crammed into tight, if well maintained planned cities who are fed because they do middle-class paper pushing faithfully. The faithless in those cities starve, or find a way to leave.
The major difference between that world and this though, is that no one is under false pretenses; the tri-d have no reason to report falsehoods so every one knows their votes can't really choose which megacorp buys the politicians. But so long as everyone is safe, no one rebels. Corruption might be a fact of life there, but multi-city organizations that can organize their payments to other cities newsanchors is still unheard of in this broken post-multiapocalyptic world, so the average person can, if they want to, piece together from other cities' news reports, what's actually going on in their own. Usually, anyway.
What do the anons think? Is this DnD-alternative from the '90s show unreasonable prescience, or are these just the tropes of the human experience under the onslaught of dehumanizing cell phones and ever-present internet connections?