September « 2010 « theolismith.com

Whilst I’m still mulling over the idea for an Influences 2, I thought I’d write a small piece on the games I’ve been playing over this last week. Whilst all of them are superficially similar stories about a lone computer hacker up against evil corporations and mysterious AIs (and all set in the far future of the 1980s and 90s- weren’t things exciting back then?) I thought it was interesting that the core mechanics behind each actually lead to very different games.

Uplink

Okay, I lied, I didn’t play Uplink this week, but this game is important in putting the following two games in context as it set the benchmark for ‘Hacker’ games the moment it was released in 2001 by Introversion software.

I got a copy during the first week it came out after my friend at school brought the box in simply to wave it in people’s faces and declare how cool it (and by extension he) was. It was the first indie game I’d ever bought, and by that point my PC had become so old and cranky it was probably the only game to come out that year that would actually run on it.

With my copy of Neuromancer sitting on the computer table, I logged into this Wargames world of espionage and elite skillz and found an intimidatingly large world that, very quickly, suggested you go out and ‘do your own thing’. So, obviously, I immediately hacked into someone’s bank account and siphoned off all their funds, then got caught and had to start from scratch.

I would class Uplink as a real-time-strategy game- complete with resource management in the form of balancing CPU and simultaneously selecting various crackers and other programmes. Once you started your attack, everything was playing against the clock, with the beep of a tracer reminding you just how close you were to instant game over. Changing people’s education or wiping criminal records gave way to heist manoeuvres on banks, calling the manager to sample his voice to gain entry. It was massive and varied, and although there was a lot of repetition (you needed insane amounts of money to get a decent PC) you always felt like you’d made only the slightest dent in the world. It was exciting, effortlessly immersive and despite the lack of any form of multiplayer, my mates at school were constantly comparing their various methods of gaining entry to impressively high-security locations.

‘You’re kidding me, you tried to hack the International BANK?!’

‘Yep.’

‘Did you delete your logs?’

‘Shit.’

Hacker Evolution: Untold

I lied again, I didn’t play Hacker Evolution, I played Hacker Evolution: Untold, the sequel, because it was on Steam and I wanted something I could play without a mouse on my Macbook.

Looks a bit like Uplink doesn’t it? But it’s not, for two reasons.

Firstly, it’s green.

Secondly it’s a text-based adventure game. Whilst the superficial layout seems similar, including bouncing your signal around to avoid being traced, it’s actually very different. Using a kinda-DOS system, and with a vocabulary of twenty commands, you’ve got to type each and every instruction to make it through the game. That might sound boring, but part of my degree was in Java programming so trust me, anything that yields results after two lines of code is a bloody miracle.

These instructions might as well be ‘turn left down the corridor’ or ‘use sword on orc’ but because of the hacking interface, these simple instructions fail to become tedious, the faster you type them, and the quicker you get through the standard ‘scan, decrypt, crack, connect’ instructions to gain entry to new IP addresses, the cooler you feel, and although you can take the game at a leisurely pace, stopping to consider your options mid-hack- the statement that every level can be completed within half an hour has forced me to replay levels two, three times because the sensation of tearing through wifi networks and mobile phones at speed is unrivalled.

There’s also a nifty risk-reward system, as a lot of the IP addresses you uncover aren’t necessary to complete the level. Do you risk wasting your valuable bounces and trace level to set up new connect points to bounce from? Or explore the depths of someone’s laptop at the expense of a hefty chunk of ‘trace’ (think ‘health’) in case they have the password that opens the next server? Again, it’s all about replaying to find out.

It’s made by exosyphen studios, and whilst it’s the pricier of the three games, there’s hours of gameplay for those who enjoy it. Typing has never been so much fun.

Digital: A Love Story

It’s free and it’s three hours long, you’ve got nothing to lose.

I’m not even sure this is a game to be honest, more a short story told via 1988-style chatrooms. This isn’t a bad thing by any means, and the lack of freedom allows the writer/programmer/everything else, Christine Love, to take you through a wonderful vignette to a soundtrack of cool synth. Inspired by a true story (the 1988 network worm), the game deftly paints familiar characters using only a few paragraphs of minimalist text for each user, drawing the player in by leaving you to imagine the replies you’ve sent to justify their responses. It’s a click-fest (and the dialling out for long distance calls is a chore), but describing it as such is to miss the point. This is a wonderfully evocative work of fiction, and as a writer it’s inspiring. The simplicity of its format makes creating such an experience seem easy (it’s not) and it makes me wish I’d taken my programming experiences further. Hell, I just wish I’d made this game.

I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the the things that really shaped my writing ambition over the years (which doesn’t mean this will become a regular thing- I’m just trying it out)- so to start off I’ve chosen one of my favourite video games of all time.

I got this game for Christmas 1999, the year it came out, and if my parents thought that my noticeable absence from the festivities that day was due to the mere appeal of something new, they were sorely mistaken. What followed was a noticeable absence from life for the entire Christmas holidays.

I have bought Alpha Centauri four times since it came out- once for every new computer I’ve ever owned (accompanied each time by the ever increasing number of patches required to make it run on these futuristic operating systems from the year 2000AD). I was (and still am) obsessed with it, and my experiences with this game helped cement my drive to create science-fiction for the rest of my life. Here’s why.

The Game

It was like Civilisation in space weren’t it?

No, no it wasn’t- for start it was in 3D! With rolling hills and shadows and canyons and rotating units zipping about the map and everything! The interface was streamlined but hid incredible amounts of depth (you could even design your own units but I never really mastered that)- and the government options and resource management allowed you to fine-tune the way you played the game far more than any Civilisation before it.

It’s easy to underestimate just how much the muted alien colour palette and digital HUD made this game so exciting. Couple that with extensive voice acting and tonnes of unique fiction interspersed throughout the experience and you’d forgotten about the comedy stylings of your FMV advisors in Civ II before you’d even built your second city.

Apart from that though, the gameplay was essentially the same. Build cities, units, buildings, farms and armies- then go beat up your neighbours. But in this crazy science fiction world everything was new, and these elements were relegated from being the entire game to the foundations of a new experience- a blank canvas ready to carry the shiny paint of the most fundamental addition to the Turn-Based Strategy franchise- the story.

An Isometric Dune

Civilisation II had the trope of realism and history surrounding its gameplay, and whilst the reason I got it in the first place may have been because of that (my parents considered it educational- which it was I suppose) it never really inspired me in the way Alpha Centauri did (which isn’t to say I didn’t play it all day every day for two years). While the technological advances were all in neat historical order, the actual civilisations in the game rarely towed the line. I’d end up in a world where the Incans and Aztecs were super-powers, screwing over the last three American settlements, and end up thinking ‘so what’s the point of calling them these names?’

Alpha Centauri had no such preconceptions, and because of that it could create its own history- the story of the living Planet with the new invaders was written in flowing prose and abstract cut-scenes. The writings of the Faction leaders were read out-loud by the fictional authors alongside true historical quotes. It was philosophy, economics and sociology distilled to a purity that made you think about the concepts it presented.

Combine that with the race to evolve to a higher being by becoming one with the planet’s millenia-long cycle of consciousness, or the formation of a new world order- and you had the building blocks to world-build almost as much as the game’s creators. Your stories of empires rising and falling were yours alone, you defeats and triumphs untempered by the ‘that’s not how it happened in real-life’ attitude of Civilisation. You were given the tools to make your own history and by doing so you explored facets of a greater whole that slotted perfectly into your version of events. Then you’d start again and discover something new.

Seven Rival Gangs

“Divided not by nationality, but by ideology- and their vision for the new world.”

As I grew up, Alpha Centauri grew up with me. The seven factions- each headed by their own leader -played very differently to each other, and on the hardest difficulty level you ignored the bonuses relevant to each faction at your peril. As a fourteen year old science boffin I obviously started off playing as the University, the faction obsessed with scientific progression at any moral cost. As a GCSE student passing through the ‘I love communism and Karl Marx and look, I’ve even read Animal Farm’ phase I tended towards the socialist Hive- where expansion and massive populations gave you the ability to churn out whatever you wanted in vast quantities (although the other factions rather hated the dystopian governments that were necessary to do so). University arrived with an obsession for tedious student philosophy, and Lady Deirdre of the Gaians was my faction of choice. Her empathy for Planet’s native life and therefore the ability to evolve to Transcendence much faster than the other factions gave her a spiritual edge that made the story of the living planet more powerful.

Now I prefer economics-obsessed Morgan Industries because I’ve become jaded and practical. Knowledge and power can be bought, ’nuff said. Each of these factions had such rounded personalities and their leader’s thoughts and opinions were displayed not just in negotiations but in the extracts of their works that occured with each technological break through that the desire to ‘roleplay’ was far more profound than the wooly generalisations that came with Civilisation’s real-world (and therefore far less ideologically defined) leaders.

Bearing a Grudge

But the Power of Alpha Centauri’s story, and the key players that shaped the world didn’t just affect who I played, it affected who I didn’t. Brother Lal of the UN (or to give him his full name Brother ‘Bleeding Heart Liberal Who Likes to Force his Views Upon Others Because He’s Bloody Annoying’ Lal) was my enemy in every game. His staunch defence of supposed ‘democracy’ produce a society of the mediocre where there were no passions or goals because everything had to balance with everything else. Because of that he attacked anyone who focussed too much on science or socialism and was never anything but a thorn in my side from day one.

Because of that I couldn’t bear to play as him- he was so frigging-annoying! And if the leader of a Turn Based Strategy Game pisses you off, you know the writers have done something special. Also I never bought the expansion pack (Alien Crossfire) with their fancy-dan wet-behind-the-ears new factions- where were they at the beginning? What right had they to join our magnificent seven? I wanted nothing to do with them.

The Impact

Alpha Centauri has sat on my computer for over a decade now, and although the profound effect it had on me when I first achieved a Transcendence Victory may have diminished, it still stands as one of the best examples of modern space-opera science fiction I’ve ever experienced. The world is still both beautiful and terrifying and the characters remain unforgettable. When it came to crafting my first professional science fiction story around three years ago- it was the opening cut-scene that inspired a Capricorn 1 style take on the game’s premise. What if such a colony ship were built, but was nothing more than a propaganda stunt? The answer evolved into Total Eclipse of the Heart, my story for the 2010 Doctor Who Storybook.