TRAVEL AND COMMUNICATIONS IN SCIENCE-FICTION
GAMES
by François Dominic Laramée
When designing a science-fiction game, the form of space travel you
choose for your players will have a tremendous impact on gameplay choices
and possibilities. Crossing the vast expanses of outer space as a
passenger on the USS Enterprise and doing so on a generation
starship is even more different than crossing the Atlantic in a jet plane
and doing so on a raft or an antique trireme made of balsa wood.
This article will take a look at several of the modes of transportation
invented by science-fiction authors and game designers, and discuss some
of their gameplay implications.
Generation Starships
The most "realistic" solution to the problem of interstellar travel,
at least given the current state of physical science, is the generation
starship, traveling towards the stars at a small fraction of the speed of
light.
Given the distances involved, such a "slow" ship will take quite a long
time to reach its destination. A one-way trip to, say, Tau Ceti, a
Sun-like star located about 10 light-years away (and around which,
incidentally, Isaac Asimov set the all-important Spacer world of Aurora),
would take about 200 years at a constant 5% of the speed of light. As a
result, the ship would either have to support multiple generations of
colonists (hence the name), or freeze them in cryogenic sleep throughout
most of the trip.
Multi-Generation Ship
A true generation starship could provide an interesting setting
for an adventure game. It is a contained environment that is bound to
evolve its own culture, quite unlike that of the home world, and
especially different from whatever the culture of the people who initially
boarded the ship might have been. How will the settlers transmit the
required skills all the way to the fifth or tenth generation? Will these
descendents want to leave the comfort of the ship they have lived on all
their lives for the perils of a planet's surface? Will they even remember
that they are living on board a spaceship, or will they have forgotten all
about their origins like the strange people in the Book of the Long Sun
series?
Cold Sleep
Assuming that future scientists can develop technology to keep
people in cryogenic sleep for years at a time, a slow starship could be
built to carry a group of settlers all the way to their destination,
without the mess of a multi-generation society. However, while the ship's
crew will have been kept young and healthy by the cold sleep machines,
time will have passed in the outside world; in James White's novel The
Silent Stars Go By, the crew of the Aisling Gheal (a starship launched
by 13th-century Ireland in an alternate universe) age only a
few years during the trip to their new home, but several centuries elapse
on the Earth they left behind.
Any game requiring a relatively small and completely isolated group of
characters and units can benefit from the cryosleep starship concept.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, for example, is a world-building strategy
game in which a new world is settled by the remnants of a doomed Earth.
However, a game of exploration and adventure seems like the most natural
fit.
All Alone
Whatever the type of generation starship that you choose, its crew
will be completely cut off from the outside world. One-way radio messages
between Earth and Alpha Centauri would take over 4 years to reach their
destination; while that might allow the colonists to receive the latest TV
shows, it won't support conversations with Mission Control in Houston. For
a game designer, this is an interesting device: the starship's captain
(probably, but not necessarily, the human player) has no one else to
answer to, no resources but those he brought with him or can extract from
the land, and no one to bail him out in case of trouble.
Time Dilation
The theory of relativity provides an alternative to generation
starships that is, at least in theory, possible: the crew of a ship that
accelerates to almost the speed of light can travel many light-years of
space in many years of real time, but only experience a fraction of that
in subjective time. In theory, you could board a ship, accelerate to
0.999999999999999… times c, and live until the last star in the Universe
dies out before your hair turns gray.
Many ways to reach these super-high but still physically possible
speeds have been imagined: giant sails powered by lasers and solar wind
particles, Bussard ramjets that transform interstellar gas into reaction
mass, ion drives, antimatter drives, even the weird "stutterwarp" drive of
the pen-and-paper RPG Traveler 3000 that blinks in and out of
hyperspace many times per second. Whatever the case, the crew of a time
dilation starship will live in a strange universe indeed: over the course
of their careers, they may visit dozens of worlds, and return home from
time to time, but since hundreds of years will elapse in the outside world
while they are in flight, they will never really see the same
world twice.
The Warp Drive
The Warp drive is the most straightforward, but also the least
realistic, of the options we have looked at so far. It can go anywhere, at
arbitrarily high speeds, just like a naval vessel on the ocean or an
airplane in flight. And it comes in all sorts of flavors:
[] Some variations of the Warp drive connect distant points in
space instantaneously (like the Jump drive in Asimov's Foundation
series), while others, like the one on board the Enterprise, take time
proportional to distance, just like a normal vehicle.
[] Some can be activated everywhere, while others don't work or
work erratically when turned on too close to a planet's gravity well.
(Escaping from a tense situation is much harder in the latter case, of
course!)
[] In Star Wars, any puny X-Wing fighter can make the
jump between stars, while the shuttlecraft in the original Star Trek
series and most of the small fighter craft in Wing Commander could
not.
[] Some designs of Warp drives even provide a sort of "reverse
time dilation", where events can take place on board the ship while no
time at all passes in the real world. Q-Space in Star Control II is a
partial example: the player's ship can spend as much time there as it
wants, but no game time will have passed when it gets out. However,
nothing important happens in Q-Space, except for discussions with the
Arilou, so the usefulness of Q-Space as a gameplay device is strictly
limited to instantaneous travel between points in space.
Since they are so intuitive, Warp drives are appropriate for just about
any kind of game. However, in war scenarios, the Warp drive is likely to
give players headaches: space is big, and a Warp ship can go anywhere, so
how do you defend your borders? The answer is: you don't. Open space is
just as worthless to you as it is to your opponents, so there is no point
defending it, no matter how much manpower the Federation wastes on patrols
of the Romulan Neutral Zone. The fighting will be concentrated around a
small number of points of interest: resource-filled asteroids,
high-population planets, refueling starbases in regions of space devoid of
populated worlds, etc.
However, in a Warp scenario, any planet is always in danger of attack,
so defending an empire requires either very fast ships that can answer a
911 call in a few minutes, or local fortifications everywhere. Both cases
are feasible premises for games; a fast rescue battleship would be a nice
player avatar, while ships that take a while to travel between stars would
be nice game pieces in a strategy game.
Wormholes
Technically speaking, a wormhole is an instantaneous (and so far
entirely theoretical) connection between two points in space. By going
through a wormhole, a normal space ship can cross the vast distances
between star systems in no time, without having to use any special kind of
propulsion system.
A world where space travel is based on instantaneous wormholes, or on
their cousins the "space roads" that speed up transition significantly
(like the "equipotentials" in Larry Niven's The Mote in God's Eye),
is a natural setting for a space war game. The fewer wormhole gates that
link a star system to the outside world, the highest their strategic
importance; for example, if an empire's stars are all connected to each
other, but only one gate in the entire empire connects it to the outside,
that empire can mass its defenses in the star system hosting that gate and
be virtually impervious to attack.
An extreme case of the Wormhole concept is the teleportation pad, like
the ones found in every home and on every street corner in Larry Niven's
stories of Known Space: step on the pad, dial the number of your
destination, and you are transported there in no time. Obviously, while
such a mechanism can be amusing in a first-person exploration game, it
becomes a nightmare in a defensive situation: how do you fight off an
invading army when its soldiers can teleport back and forth at will?
Probability Drive
The probability drive is a device that may or may not transport you
where you want. Usually explained as a macroscopic manifestation of a
weird quantum mechanics effect, it is the sort of calculated risk that
will only appeal to the highest rollers. Basically, activating a
probability drive can either transport you to your intended destination
instantaneously, thus giving you a tremendous advantage – or it can
backfire, sending you anywhere it wants, including never-never land, and
blowing up in the process.
A probability drive can provide an interesting gameplay twist in a
strategy game world where "normal" interstellar travel is slow or
cumbersome. However, a single ship acting as a player avatar is hardly an
appropriate support for a probability drive: either it works well, in
which case the player wins too easily, or it doesn't, in which case he
will reload the game and try again. Not much fun there.
Ansibles
Originally suggested by Ursula Le Guin (I think), the Ansible is a
communication device that allows instantaneous exchange of information
with a partner anywhere in the universe – even if actual physical travel
between the stars takes an arbitrarily long time.
For the player, the existence of an Ansible can provide numerous forms
of help. The captain of a starship can ask Mission Control for
instructions. An admiral can order his fleets to change course while in
superluminal flight. (No more cursing at Master of Orion 2 because
an enemy fleet has just materialized near your capital while your forces
flutter between stars, out of radio contact!) And the many planets of your
empire can maintain a shared culture even if starships drop by only once
every 50 years.
Conclusion
Any society is profoundly influenced by its ability to interact with
the outside world. A completely isolated colony, like Botany Bay in
Australia, and one under the constant supervision of the motherland, like
New England, will evolve in vastly different fashions.
This paper has examined several science-fictional concepts related to
travel and communications; most of them translate easily to real-world
counterparts. When designing your game, exploit its setting's
peculiarities to the fullest, and you will provide your players with a
richer experience.
