Science Fiction

My boardgame Megacorps was released last week. It would, of course, be otiose for me to review my own work, so these are more along the line of design notes:

When Zev "Z-Man" Schlesinger called after playing Megacorps, he said "It reminded us of an old Avalon Hill/West End game." Which startled me, because I thought I was designing a Eurogame. But on reflection, he has a point; Megacorps owes something to the Eurostyle, but also something to the Anglo-American hobby boardgame tradition -- not surprisingly, since that's what I cut my eyeteeth on.

When I started work on the game, I wanted it to require 3-6 players, take an hour or less to play, have a limited set of mechanics, and have very tight rules. To place it square in the middle of the Eurostyle, in other words.

And I did achieve those objectives -- but did not achieve another salient characteristic of the Eurostyle: theme irrelevance.

For most Eurogames, the theme is essentially arbitrary. Designers of such games are concerned mainly with devising interesting and original game mechanics, with the theme just an overlay, a bit of marketing fluff to dress the game up and perhaps inspire some attractive graphics. In other words, you could take the game, reskin it with a different theme, and no essential changes to the game would be required. The designer begins with mechanics and moves to theme.

In saying this, I want to make clear that I am not offering a criticism; a game like, say, Medici may actually have nothing to do with Renaissance-era trade, but that doesn't matter; it's a fine piece of work and an excellent game. Rather, I'm remarking instead on an aesthetic difference between the Eurostyle and the Anglo-American hobby game tradition, and I could quite as easily make a countervailing statement on the aesthetic flaws of the latter kind of game in light of the Eurogame aesthetic: E.g., too much dependence on randomness, the sacrifice of strategy to the simulationist impulse, and excessively long and often tedious play times.

But in this regard, I did almost the reverse of a typical Eurogame designer: Rather than starting with mechanics and moving to theme, I started with the theme. The mechanics of Megacorps almost fell out of the theme.

The original idea for the game came from Kevin Maroney, who, when we worked together at Crossover Technologies, proposed an online-only multiplayer game, with the same title and basic theme -- large multinationals competing and waging war with each other in a future world where nationality is essentially irrelevant. Nothing came of the idea, but later, looking for a boardgame idea, I recalled the title, and thought that there could be an interesting Eurostyle boardgame in it.

Clearly, the players must represent megacorps, the game must be economically-driven in nature, and there must be governments for the megacorps to manipulate. It must also clearly be set in the not-too-distant future rather than there here-and-now, since this is not how the real world works today. (Today, when governments want to take down even very powerful companies, they can do so with amazing speed and thoroughness -- vide Drexel Burnham, Enron, Lukoil, and Lehman Brothers.)

For manipulating governments to be meaningful, governments need to have an impact on the economic game, so we come to the idea of individual companies located within countries and the ability of governments to affect them, if not the megacorps directly. And to make that interesting, we need ways for megacorps to take control of countries from each other.

In a way, the basic mechanics of Megacorps almost designed themselves, falling out of the basic premise of the game. Or so it felt like; I realize that's an illusion. Years ago, I designed a space-trading game called Trailblazer, and after I had finished it but before it was published heard that Nick Karp was working on a game called Star Trader. I worried that the two games would be too similar; it was hard for me to conceive of a way to do a space trading game other than the way I'd done it, that is, as a microeconomics simulation with variable supply and demand curves.

No need to worry; his game was totally different. Trailblazer, too, had seemed almost to design itself; and doubtless another designer starting from the same theme as Megacorps would come up with an entirely different game. Yet the point remains: the theme of Megacorps informed and infused the design in a way that seems alien to the Eurostyle as a general rule.

Secondly, most Eurostyle games can be, somewhat unjustly, characterized as "simultaneous single-player games." That is, in a game such as Puerto Rico, the only real interaction with other players is a mild level of competition for some scarce resources; by contrast, most Anglo-American hobby games pit players directly against one another, with ways for them to directly assist or injure each other. In this regard, Megacorps is somewhere between the two: Most of the time you are acting purely to improve your own position, but the war and government intervention rules do give you a way to attack another player's position indirectly, and at least in the end-game, the use (or misuse) of this capability can be critical to the final score.

The fiddliness of some of the game's rules fall partly out of the same quasi-simulationist impulse, and partly out of a need to break symmetry. Thus, some of the Megacorps begin in control of countries with which the corporations I'm mocking are connected -- Mokia with the European Union, for instance -- and the event cards, too, try to have a game impact that actually has something to do with their name and theme. But symmetry breaking is also important; by that I mean that any game which begins with players in identical positions runs the risk that all players adopt identical strategies, which is often a recipe for dullness. By giving players starting event cards that offer potentially useful options, and by allocating some countries to players initially, the game begins in an asymmetric landscape, encouraging players to take different tacks. The risk of this kind of approach is, of course, that the asymmetry gives some players clear advantages or disadvantages relative to the others, unbalancing the game; I think I've managed to balance the positions reasonably well, but went through quite a few iterations to get to this point.

I'm aware that what I've semi-accidentally hit on with Megacorps -- a sort of synthesis of the Euro- and Anglo-style -- is not unique; 1960 and Pandemic, notably also by American game designers, have some of the same characteristics. But it occurs to me that this may be a fruitful synthesis, something that provides both the strategic purity of the Eurostyle and the color that only a meaningful connection to theme can provide. I look forward to working further in this vein.

{See also The Future History of Megacorps.)

Misspent Youth is a game of youthful rebellion against authority. As with some other indie RPGs, like My Life with Master, almost everything about the game's setting and conflict is produced through collaborative negotiation among the players and GM. The givens are these: There is an Authority against which the players are rebelling. The players are all friends, between the ages of 12 and 17. And there is some science fictional aspect to the setting. Other than these, almost everything is up for grabs.

When you read histories of videogaming, you might well be excused for thinking that it all sprang full-blown from the brow of Nolan Bushnell, or possibly Steve Russell, or maybe Ralph Baer or Willy Higginbotham had something to do with it. If there's any attempt to reach back before then, the talk is all of pinball and arcade amusements.

On November 19th, Microsoft launched "the New XBox Experience", which included a lot of big changes to the XBox 360 dashboard, including "avatars" (think "Miis"), Netflix movie streaming, and the ability to dump games from disc to your hard drive, making them run faster (but still requiring the disc to launch the game).

A feature of the New XBox Experience that flew under the radar of most game websites, however, is "XBox Live Community Games" -- a subset of XBox Live Arcade games created exclusively by hobbyists and tiny companies, using a free programming framework provided by Microsoft.

If it isn't clear, in the socialist realism cover of this novel, the fist is holding a D20.

I've read Harry Turtledove for decades. He is not a great writer. If you were to make a list of the hundred best novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, he might conceivably sneak on somewhere at the bottom of the list. But he does have a firm grasp of the pulp virtues -- closure, drive, and sting -- and they are indeed virtues, whatever, say, Paris Review readers may think. Or to put it another way, he's not the Joyce of alternate history, but he surely is the Michener of it.

Which is why I read him, of course; he knows how to tell a story, and he's exceedingly knowledgeable about history, and I love a good alternate history tale.

The Gladiators is part of his Crosstime Traffic, a series of YA novels with teen protagonists set in alternate histories. The common backdrop of them all is that one universe, the "home timeline," has invented crosstime travel. It's apparently much like our own world, but a century in the future, with America still the dominant power (not likely); resource constraints cause them to trade across time with other histories, to earn resources scarce in their own world. The books are fun.

What makes this one worth noting here is that it deals with games, at least peripherally. In the world in which it's set, the Soviet Union won the Cold War, and every power of any size is Communist. In the People's Republic of Italy, in the city of Milan, is a store called The Gladiator, which sells board games. Among the games it sells is a rail game, perhaps not all that dissimilar from Ticket to Ride. In this game, you earn profits, invest them, and compete with other railroads. It is, in other words, highly subversive, in the context of a Communist world.

The shop is run by crosstime travellers from the "home timeline," seeking to subvert the Soviet-dominated world, and reintroduce notions of freedom (and capitalism) through the, at-surface harmless medium of a game.

Some days ago, we reviewed Tempest in Crescent City; the only places that linked to it were New Orleans-based blogs that seemed to uniformly take the line that a game based on their city's tragedy was in se offensive, because how dare anyone try to create entertainment out of that horror, and anyway, games cannot possibly have anything meaningful to say. It's not a great game, and what it has to say is fairly jejune, but you know... how dare they! If you can write and produce movies on Katrina, why the fucking hell can't you create games on it?

Could games contain ideas? Could they, in the right context, be subversive? The One State seems to think so, at least per Turtledove.

One of the things I tend to find tiresome in the Crosstime Traffic series is precisely the "freedom = good" message you get in almost every book. It's not that I disagree, it's more that I ultimately get tired of being hit over the head with a sledgehammer. This is why I no longer read John Barnes, for example. And yet, in the context of The Gladiators, at least, and in the context of our own recent history, it starts feeling less like being hit over the head with a sledgehammer, and a bit more poignant. Once upon, the notion that American citizens could be held permanently without trial, habeas corpus not considered to apply, purely on the President's say-so, would have been considered outrageous. Once upon a time, the notion that our security apparatus could listen to our phone calls and read our emails without a search warrant, would have been considered un-American. And yet even our Democratic presidential candidate has voted to allow the latter. Freedom is good, and in an era in which we are losing it, that fact is worth restating.

It used to be that card games were about rank and suit. Even in non-traditional card games, like Rook or Milles Bornes ,the cards were simple and served only one function. This, naturally, constrained what it was possible to do in a card game.

Then came Magic: The Gathering. Magic pitched fundamental assumptions about how card games work out the window. Deal out hands from a deck? Not so fast: every player gets his own deck. His own deck with whatever cards he wants to put in it. And the cards! They were crammed with icons and text, because each card broke one of the game's many intricate rules in some way, and its graphic design had to explain how.

So in addition to loosing the plague of collectible game components on the world, Magic also smashed the constraints that limited what a card game could be. And that’s how we have Race for the Galaxy.

The gameplay is simple, like a sock, and also like a sock, it can be turned inside-out. People or robots are coming down a conveyor belt. Click to slam down your machines, killing the people, building the robots. A partnership for a better tomorrow.

You can get a refreshing sense of pace out of mastering this, the efficiency you take in to maximize your score -- leave no robot incomplete or human alive. It's kind of chilling, in a totally innocuous, Habbo Hotel-esque pixel-sprite kind of way. As you the player internalize the efficiency you need to thrive, you become more roboticized. The use of complementary play modes could be extremely interesting until you realize it's the same mechanic, same dynamic, just different aesthetics. So you have to wonder, would this same vibe come from a different mechanic?

Overall, a solid arcade game with a clever subtext, with some leverage between them.

In the early 80s, hobby game publishers produced a whole series of small, relatively inexpensive tabletop science fiction and fantasy games--starting with the "Microgames" from Metagaming, and including the "Capsule" games from SPI, and games from Mayfair and many smaller manufacturers. Steve Jackson got his start in this medium (with Ogre), and much of my earlier work was in it as well (The Creature That Ate Sheboygan, DeathMaze, et al).

Heritage, mainly a miniatures publisher, produced a series of 8 titles--of varying quality, but some excellent--under the "Dwarfstar" name and the aegis of Howie Barasch and Arnold Hendrick (who later went on to a stellar career as a game designer for Microprose and IMagic). Some time ago, Reaper Miniatures, which currently owns the rights to these games, made them available as free downloads (you'll need a color printer to produce the maps and counter images).

H-Craft Championship looks surprisingly good for an indie racing game--after all, major publishers spend millions polishing the graphics for games of this type, and its impressive that a small team was able to produce something that looks so nice.

It's science fictional, in that the racing vehicles are hovercraft that apparently tool along great superhighways in the sky. Also apparently, in the future, road safety is not a major concern of the authorities--perhaps the world is overpopulated and they want people to plummet to their deaths--so that failure in steering doesn't mean, as in other games, that you go off road and lose speed, but instead lose the game.

If ever a game deserved a second chance, it's Eric Chahi’s Another World. Something of an homage to Jordan Mechner’s original Prince of Persia, at least in terms of similar gameplay and rotoscoped graphics, Another World offers both that game's precise platforming as well as an inviting science fiction landscape. Since its release in 1991 it has survived largely on its reputation as an old favorite of countless designers--but few gamers have heard of this classic Amiga title, and fewer still have played it, largely because of its limited distribution.