The Stripy Strudel's Journal

Is there anyone who never played strategy computer games? Even those who aren't fans of the genre know that all strategy games model development. From primitive communism to capitalism, from cabins to skyscrapers, from a village to a megapolis, from a savage tribe to a superstate. This is what all the strategy games I've heard of are based upon. As you advance through them, the infrastructure becomes more complicated, more technologies become available, weapons advance. As a result, all modern strategy games are essentially reimplementations of several immortal prototypes, just with new graphics and sound effects. Among these prototypes are Dune, Civilization, King's Bounty and some others. It's time for something new. So, as usual, exercising my rights as inveterate dilettante and pencil-pusher, I hasten to publish my idea for a strategy game.

In contrast to traditional strategy games, the goal of the new game will be retrogression instead of progression. As we know, progress is not only good for you but also bad for you, and some of its bitter fruits our generation already has to enjoy. Let's make as pessimistic a peek into the future as we can, and we'll have the starting conditions for the new game. The player is entrusted with a country suffering from various negative effects of technical, economical and social advancement. Not a big or small one, just your typical fictitious country with a western-type mentality. The ecology is rubbish, the gene pool keeps degenerating, the national health fades away before your eyes, the society suffers from poverty and unemployment, the birth rate is plummeting down. Without player's intervention, the whole population is doomed to extinction in a century or two, which would be several hours of playing time. The only way to fix the situation is to gradually abandon the achievements of progress: hazardous industry, pernicious technology, unhealthy lifestyle.

Every next mission in the game starts off with a worse situation than before. The first mission has it just slightly harder than what we currently have in Russia. The further, the worse it gets, and closer to the end of the game people live under transparent domes because the air outside is poisoned by hazardous production. They've forgotten how to walk because they get used to individual vehicles since infancy. Nobody can see a thing without glasses with huge lenses. All kinds of information about a person, from the ID to the preferred flavor of synthetic meat, is stored in the centralized database, and one can't even go to the toilet without access to it. Only few courageous couples dare to have kids because the last healthy baby has been born maybe a century ago. Until the age of 6 or 8, every child usually lives in a hospital where they usually undergo primary education — of course, through a computer. Even prohibition of abortion and contraception wouldn't help increase the birth rate because of the popularity of adult entertainment technologies that substitute for the real sex. Prohibition of these technologies as well, and any other prohibitions or sudden changes can easily lead to a sharp increase in suicide rate because, as one might have guessed, a healthy mind is also a rare occasion. As a result, the population would still go down, so there aren't any quick and easy solutions in the game. Ultimately, at the last level, a human is essentially a brain with life support systems connected to the Internet, and it's up to the game developers whether it's going to be at all possible to complete this last mission.

In the beginning of each mission the player is given a goal consisting of several conditions. Each of the conditions has to be met in order to complete the mission. One of the conditions will always be to achieve a certain rate of yearly population growth (though the growth is always negative at start, that is, the population is diminishing). The other conditions are specific to the mission. For example, they can be to bring the infant mortality rate down to a certain threshold, to abandon the radioactive production, to have a thousand people who can walk on foot, or even (at one of the last missions) to have one baby born naturally, without in vitro fertilization or artificial incubation.

A fairly standard set of strategy game tools is at the player's disposal. One can construct and demolish buildings, adjust economical parameters such as taxes, run incentive campaigns that economically stimulate those meeting certain criteria (for example, parents with two kids), change the legislation within certain limits, encourage or discourage some scientific, social or cultural activities, and (this is one of the most powerful tools) use the highly developed mass media to induce one or another way of thinking and acting and affect the popular preferences.

One point is so important that it's worth reiteration: there can be no quick and easy solutions or winning strategies. For example, you can't simply remove the transparent domes because the air outside is poisoned. If you stop the hazardous production that poisons the air, people will starve without the resources they need. This means that an alternative has to be prepared. All transitions have to be smooth, and any radical action does more bad than good. One of the responsibilities of the quality assurance department when testing the game should be looking for winning strategies. Any very simple algorithm that leads to completion of the mission should be considered a grave defect that has to be fixed, most probably by adjusting the weights of various factors and interdependencies in the game model.

Unfortunately, I'm almost sure that this idea will never be implemented. Hardly any game manufacturer will be impressed by it (most probably, they won't even find out about it). But I'd really like to play such a game myself, even though I'm not a fan of strategy games.

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