Space Combat

"In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles,. [...] The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: 'What appears is good; what is good appears.' The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply."

-Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Gratuitous Space Battles (GSB) is hardly the top-down big-corporate mass-media product that Guy Debord denounced in his in/famous 1967 Society of the Spectacle, but neither is it the pointed procedural commentary of, say Molleindustria's Kosmosis. It's not a RTS, though it looks like one, and it's not a tower defense game, though the game's own advertising copy comperes it to one. It is a limited-resources design game, a little like Spore was supposed to be; a quirky, original little strategy game; and a procedurally-generated spectator sport. The game is a bit of a paradox, being a “casual” game for grognards and/or a RTS for turn-based strategy gamers. GSB is playable in small chunks, simple in interface, complex in statistical model, and hands-down the prettiest 2d game to hit the market since Peggle. It is also, intentionally or not, a commentary on the state of the gaming industry and the evolution of “the society of the spectacle” in the digital age.

I designed Vector 3 back in 1979, and am releasing it here for free under a Creative Commons "attribution non-commercial" license. Actually, I've made some fairly substantial changes to the game.

Vector 3 is a 3D space combat board game; its virtue is that players learn the essentials of vector arithmetic and Newtonian mechanics by playing. On a number of occasions, people have told me they learned more about this from the game than from lecture courses. I could see using it in the context of a high-school math or physics course.