The Geryk Analysis
Reach for the Stars (Part the Second)
By Bruce Geryk
When Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri came out, a lot of people
went completely out of their minds about how wonderful the “story”
was. In case you missed it, here’s that story in its entirety:
seven racially diverse caricatures of modern-day Earth ideologies
as seen in Mother Jones crash-land on an alien planet. And they
fight. The end. Booker Prize?
Before you send me some crazy email about how there’s so much
more to it than that, and that the Gaians are really a sophisticated
commentary on the Bush Administration’s decision to back out
of the Kyoto agreement, let me explain something: you may very well
believe that’s the case. Even famous game designers and writers
of end-of-manual designers’ notes like Tim Train may believe
this. There may even be people who think that some kind of novelistic
exposition of the events in the game is crucial to the gameplay.
But it’s not. While some people may write scary mash notes
to the (very) fictional faction personalities, that’s a pre-existing
illness and not a result of the game design. The story serves one
purpose and one purpose only: to put things in a familiar context.
So that you can fucking remember them.
Here is a quiz for you. Below is a paragraph from the Reach for
the Stars manual.
The Arimechs are highly intelligent creatures possessing only
crude tentacles with which to manipulate their environment. By
trading ideas with other species they have acquired the necessary
technology to conquer their surroundings and venture into space.
Almost never seen outside a protective exoskeleton, the Arimechs
can live almost anywhere, simply creating the appropriate travel
suit for any environment. Everything about Arimechs is flexible:
ship design, technology, and diplomacy. They are the greatest
traders in the galaxy. They prefer peace but understand war and
have no qualms about prosecuting it vigorously.
Without looking back at the text, what do the Arimechs use to grab
onto things? I had to first read that paragraph and then type it
in and then check to make sure I didn’t screw it up when I
typed it, and I don’t remember, either. That’s ok, though,
because it’s completely fucking irrelevant. Here is something
that is not irrelevant: in Master of Orion, the Klackons are big
ants. Why? Because ants are good workers, and Klackons get production
bonuses. Notice how I remember that, yet I didn’t just type
in a big paragraph about it.
I saw Wall Street way back when it was in theaters, so I’ve
had over a decade to assimilate the now well-known axiom that greed
is good. Therefore, when somebody presents me with a well-dressed
man by the name of “Morgan” and informs me that he’s
very rich, I can pretty much write my own backstory right there.
This backstory then serves as a mnemonic device to make sense out
of all the subsequent arbitrary game devices that Reach for the
Stars has somehow transformed into Arimech tentacles. I know a planned
economy is bad because it’s not much of a leap from Hitler
or Milosevic to rounding people up and dumping them in mass graves,
so when I need to choose an economy for J.P. Morgan’s team,
I know right away that “planned” probably wouldn’t
work. For role-playing reasons. And guess what? It’s prohibited
by the game rules! I could probably sit down right now with only
the Critique of Pure Reason and the dungeon master’s guide
from some space role-playing game and figure out the rest of the
game’s rules just from the leader portraits. By way of contrast,
just now I read the planet suitability characteristics for one of
the space races in Reach for the Stars, and not only can I not remember
what they were, but I’ve already forgotten what the name of
the race was.
