Travelogues and Constellation Gaming

"la-nana-naaaa-na-na"

Loreena McKennitt - Marco Polo



Robert Heinlein's 1952 Space Family Stone (or "The Rolling Stones" by its more popular name) stands out as likely his most cheerful book. Twin teenage boys plan a commercial spacefaring escapade and instead of disabusing them of the notion, their father, mother, grandmother and younger sister and brother all board for a few years' worth of bumming around the solar system. Though all Heinlein's stuff tends to bank to some extent on the characters' snappy repartee, this story maintains a constant plateau of friendly banter throughout. The grandmother and the twins spend half their time firing off verbal barbs from seemingly bottomless quivers, with the rest of the family registering a potshot now and then.

To some modern nerds, the book's action will probably read like a "let's play" of Kerbal Space Program for all its hard science descriptions of rocket flight. Jetting off from their home in a lunar colony* the Stones loop around Earth, stop off on Phobos, sell bicycles and buy tribbles on Mars then dodge around the asteroid belt on the equivalent of space jet bikes, then finally set off for the rings of Saturn. Every step of their journey is replete with chatter about reaction mass, orbital maneuvering, minutely managed momentum and other tech-talk. As always, Heinlein snuck in plenty of social commentary on the topic of personal freedom, and much of the story's humor comes from mocking the family's continued form of income: selling TV scripts for a decidedly soft science fantasy series parodying the cheesy Buck Rogers and Flash Gordons of early 20th century space operas. In fact The Rolling Stones is so thick with jeering asides that it would easily have become annoying if not for Heinlein's talent for keeping things... rolling. As it is, it easily draws the reader into the little space yacht's explorations with each new orbit and landing, a delightfully humorous travelogue.

Come to think of it, that's one thing we've been missing lately: travelogues. They used to be a staple of romantic-era exploration stories, many of which were framed as shipboard journals, and which initially transitioned more or less  seamlessly into science fiction. These days, Google Maps has us thinking we know everything about the world, space exploration's decried as a tax-sapping cold war anachronism and a fictional character exhibiting a sense of wonder and adventure will likely get derided as a starry-eyed loser. Star Trek used to be about trekking, about strange new worlds. Now its about disruptor battles. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books banked heavily on descriptions of the Martian landscape... but even that was over two decades ago. In computer games, plumbing the exotic depths of this and that was a de facto core feature of many adventure titles which progressed through a more or less linear sequence of 2D backdrops. As late as Y2K, some of the most memorable ones like Myst or Syberia deliberately maintained the aesthetics of romantic voyages into darkest [insert exotic location here]

I was reminded of this recurring obsession of mine with bringing back the eight...een hundreds by the previously mentioned webcomic Tangled River. Through Tanya's sheltered adolescent ignorance we glimpse that crucial yet all too easily ignored virtual world virtue of perspective.

"I wish I had words to describe it, like a whole other world so big and beautiful. And looking back down the way we came, suddenly the map came alive for me."

A simple sentiment, yet fruitful for any adventure story and too easily ignored. It's how The Hobbit and the rest of Middle-Earth enthralled so many of us, tracing the fellowship's quest across each grain of hand-drawn map. They didn't just visit locations, but entered and exited Moria and Dale through distinct cartographic vectors. Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul were not just places but geographic attitudes, squaring off against each other across the mighty Anduin. Robert Heinlein in turn made the solar system come alive by tracing his protagonists' journeys mile by millions of miles. Robinson made us taste the rusty grit of days-long rover journeys across the Martian landscape.

In computer games, quite a few have helped their immersion by situating your playable zones on a larger map, RPGs in particular. Sandbox games go further in lending these map distances actual relevance. While most will be more familiar with the Elder Scrolls series (which barely qualify as sandboxy, if at all) a better example of melding a large-scale persistent environment with first-person agency would likely be Mount and Blade, where armies, bandits, caravans and basically the entire map keeps evolving as you swash and buckle your way around, and your world location (proximity of mountains, trees, rivers) determines your terrain for each battle.** MMOs should by all rights have been the ultimate encapsulation of this duality, but betrayed that hope as they copied WoW in devolving into "kill ten rats" grindfests. This old hope still fuels players' excitement for projects like Dual Universe or Camelot Unchained but it remains to be seen whether large-scale persistent multiplayer worlds will ever make good.

As a last thought, that travelogue feel can be achieved not only in a single game, but across multiple ones. Back in 1996 the now-defunct (in all but name) Maxis launched Sim Copter, letting players pilot a rescue chopper in a bustling metropolis. Playable maps could be imported from the company's trendsetting city simulator SimCity2000 and though the process was far from perfect, it did give you a unique feel for trying to actually live in the overcrowded hellholes you designed as a SimMayor. They repeated the feat (albeit in a supposedly shallow fashion) some years later with SimCity4 allowing players to import their Sims. How hard can it be to design a series of games importing such data from each other? Fabricate your own big and beautiful other world, then make it come alive for yourself by diving into it first-hand. Create a play-by-mail grand strategy title which can incorporate conquerable cities with stats based on a city simulator, "random" events imported from RPG campaigns and generate survival maps based on the aftermath of strategy campagins.

So, Al likes strategy, Bob likes city sims, Chuck likes roguelikes and Dana likes survival horror. They don't all have to buy the same game. Each can just shill out for SimMegalomaniac, SimFatcat, SimErrolFlynn or SimShitYourPants. Bob can design a thriving elf utopia for Al to conquer and militarize, which Chuck and Dana can import to generate their latest first-person adventures. If they survive, Chuck and Dana's characters can then become ministers or generals in Al and Bob's continually developing worlds. (Until Al gets mad at Bob and razes his city, but that's another story.) Given that we've seen some attempts at importing user-generated content (Spore jumps to mind) and No Man's Sky, even if it achieved nothing else, demonstrated the vastness of procedurally generated environments, why don't we have this yet?

I would guess one significant hurdle for such clustered games has been advancing technology. Graphics and interfaces have improved tremendously over the past couple of decades, and by the time one game was finished, its parent company would be champing at the bit to move on to the newest tech. It wouldn't have been reasonable to expect players to mire themselves in the clunky, 2D pixelated chore of mid-90s gameplay for the sake of cross-compatibility. But now?

Some of the more popular game engines like Unreal and Unity have been around for some years. They've demonstrated themselves both malleable and reasonably scalable, and even their less ambitious embodiments are aesthetically apt for both ease of use and immersion. We've reached the point of "good enough" where we can sacrifice further prettiness, as the popularity of Good Old Games and the "neo retro" fad can attest. Shouldn't the countless programmers already familiar with current technology be able to create interconnected, cross-genre gameplay to last through decades' worth of titles? I want to "Fallout" my way through the cities I nuked last year in Civilization. I want to populate a city with all my RPG companions. I want to be a stone rolling through a solar system I myself terraformed.


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* That's the very same lunar colony in which Heinlein would eventually set The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; grandma Stone is the same Hazel Meade Stone seen as a teenager in that later prequel
** Dwarf Fortress might qualify, but having not yet tried its "adventure" mode, I'll refrain from passing judgment.