The Geryk Analysis
Reach for the Stars (Part the Third)
By Bruce Geryk
I'm involved in a PBEM game of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
with a few of the people who read this site instead of working at
their jobs as game writers. We heard this Sid Meier guy was famous,
and then one of us was like, “Damn, maybe I should check
out one of his games” and then the rest of us got nervous and
asked if we could join in the checking-out process so that no one
got an unfair advantage for the next article one of us wrote for
CNN about how this whole “computer gaming” thing was really
this close to becoming mainstream. So we decided to all play
at once. Together. Anyway, I took a few minutes in lab and temporarily
reprogrammed some of the incredibly complex equipment we use to
torture animals for no reason that I could explain to you right
now and have you understand. Basically, I just devised a few algorithms,
ran some tests, and analyzed every possible position that could
exist in any Alpha Centauri game up to the game-year 2355. (It’s
hard to go beyond that for hexadecimal reasons.) A lot of these
writer types, though, aren’t so good at math – it’s
why they became writers, y’know? Anyway, in terms of the actual
game they don’t stand a chance, but this is irrelevant because
with a game like Alpha Centauri, it’s not really about who
wins – it’s about the deep and complex backstory, in which
a group of characters who mysteriously happen to be ideological
archetypes battle for control of an alien planet. It’s a way
in which computer games make a significant contribution to political
discourse: all you have to do is play the game for a while, write
down what happens, explain how it’s all the Morganites’
fault, and send the resulting article to The Nation. So these other
guys can still get some meaningful work done and not worry about
losing. It’s a win-win situation for all concerned.
In Reach for the Stars, though, they’re toast. There actually
is a long and complex backstory, but it got overwritten when they
burned the actual game to the CD, so there’s really no way
to access it while you’re playing. There’s no way to access
it while you’re not playing, either, so in many ways it’s
like a lot of cemeteries that you might find in Canada. That means
that instead of having your misunderstanding of current events help
you make sense of the game, you have to fall back on your ability
to associate abstract concepts with mathematical relationships.
Which formation works better against echelon: line or vanguard?
But here’s the tricky part – which works better in
space? I don’t think it’ll come as a surprise to many
of you to learn that the answer is DGº = -RT ln k. That’s
another way of saying it depends on which elf it is.
After all that, it will probably come as a shock to learn that
the actual game mechanics of Reach for the Stars are far better
designed that those in Alpha Centauri. In Alpha Centauri, you eventually
have so many units and possible uses for them that successfully
finishing the game is sometimes used as a clinical test for autism.
Reach for the Stars, on the other hand, has a limited number of
planet facilities, technologies, and things to do with them. The
problem is that when you scale up a game like the original Reach
for the Stars, you eventually cross the threshold between games
that can essentially be represented by a single screen of data and
thus don’t make you remember anything except that an asterisk
looks more like a star than an X does, and games that have Arimech
tentacles and as a result make you have to remember basically everything.
Alpha Centauri made its equivalent of Arimech tentacles stuff that
everyone knows intuitively, like that the U.N. can’t do anything
right and that Sparta was the ancient land of Pericles. In Reach
for the Stars, I can’t even see enemy fleets in transit, so
if an opposing armada suddenly leaves its base planet, I have to
actually write down what turn that was and then calculate all the
possible places it could be in, say, three turns. If your game requires
me to take notes while playing, you’ve failed in your attempt
to make a computer game and have accidentally created homework.
Since I can get homework for free, I’m statistically not all
that likely to buy it in a box for $40. Likewise, if I have to use
the tool-tips to remind me which picture of a spaceship is a battleship
and which one is a troop transport, you’ve failed. Game over.
And I don’t mean that as some kind of gamer trying to be hip
by using cliché phrases from twenty years ago to up his street
cred. I just mean it literally.
When games had a playing field that could fit on a single screen,
and your fleets were just numbers that moved from one capital letter
to another, you were essentially just playing space chess. If you
take the space chess but make the board ten times larger and throw
in a lot more techs and environments and invisible fleets but don’t
include any way to keep track of it, you have Reach for the Stars.
It’s a shame, because parts of the game are just brilliant.
But without a familiar scapegoat, The Nation isn’t going to
take your Reach for the Stars article. Which means you won’t
get paid. And since a man’s gotta eat, that pretty much seals
it right there.
