M3 Project

One of the areas of home-based work I have come back to repeatedly is independent computer game design. It is a field that was once often touted as a promising basis of 'electronic cottage' employment but which soon evolved into a kind of feud between a Hollywood-style culture of in-house game development elites constantly declaring independent game development 'impossible' and a community of independent developers who are constantly proving them wrong by exploiting overlooked angles of low-cost innovation the elites are too self-absorbed to notice.

Because mainstream game development has been driven to stratospheric costs by the cold-war like escalation of production value driven by competition and the growing over-complexity of operating systems, I have, like other independent designers, sought to exploit angles where simple software tools and unexplored game concepts offer low-cost development possibilities. This has led me down some very unusual paths, including such things as erotic multimedia games where the sophistication of my designs proved to be something of a liability.

My most recent effort concerns a concept inspired by my interest in Futurist studies. Observing that an interesting proliferation of tactical combat and simulation games has emerged through the inherent modularity and frequent licensing of their game engines, I conceived of a simulation game that could serve as a kind of extensible 'what if' simulator for the new millennium. Dubbed M3 -short for Third Millennium- the game is based on the premise of competing space advocacy/development groups seeking to be the first to establish a successful settlement on another star system, colonizing the solar system in the process.

This game begins, of course, on Earth where each player takes the role of chief visionary and administrator for a space development group and can choose various approaches to founding the establishment of initial facilities on which to build a space transportation and industrial infrastructure. Players can choose a variety of approaches more-or-less dependent on government and more-or-less driven by profit. Players can also choose to concentrate facilities in special communities with the potential to grow into arcologies or even independent countries or can disperse their facilities among the pre-existing communities of the Earth and even assume the control of pre-existing government space programs. In establishing their facilities or community settlements players must choose types of architecture, transportation, industries, and science, technology, and product development and must either provide facilities for a resident labor population or must provide transport means and incentives to attract workers from surrounding pre-existing communities. The game precludes combat on the premise that these development groups represent a more sophisticated society than the mainstream and thus are intelligent enough to realize the unprofitability of military conflict in the contemporary age. However, they will have to establish defenses against possible threats from the more primitive elements of the pre-existing civilization as well as cope with crime within their own communities.

Once established on Earth, players expand their efforts to space, cultivating their own space transport systems and orbital and lunar facilities and from there continues an outreach to the rest of the solar system with the establishment of a variety of settlements and interplanetary transport. A hierarchical display system switches between close-up views that allow players to manage the composition of individual settlements and facilities and several levels of overviews based on planetary maps and real-time orrery views which allow viewing and scheduling of long range transportation. To win the game players either eliminate all competing development groups through competition or attrition or they become the first to establish a settlement on one of several nearby stars.

One interesting option the players may explore is to assume the role of a special group called the Cyber-Cooperative, a community of artificial intelligences which must cope not only with competition from other development groups but also the complications of conflict between their community and an organic human community which sometimes treats them with fear and resentment. The Cyber-Coop enjoys powerful intellectual capability and extremely low life-support overhead which makes them ideally suited as a space-borne society. But this is tempered by a dependence on automated industry and a need for greater security to protect themselves from anti-AI terrorism. This group has the dual objective of survival as well as the cultivation of a spacefaring civilization, their ultimate goal being the superseding of organic human civilization by a new cybernetic human civilization and the restoration and preservation of the Earth and its diversity of life forms and cultures as a natural novelty generator from which their virtual reality habitats are derived.

The common science fiction crutch of aliens is left largely out of this more serious Futurist game. Alien civilizations make their presence known only through possible chance encounters in the form of discovered artifacts, passing exploratory space probes (in the manner of Arthur C. Clarke's Starglider and Rama concepts) intercepted radio communication, and the discovery of other alien settlements when reaching other stars. The premise here is that if there were aliens of even moderately greater technical sophistication than ours anywhere in the stellar neighborhood we would most likely already be swept-up in their civilization. So most likely they are either not there or too far away to reach out to us in any significant way.

Currently at the design stage of describing, designing, and cataloging unit and event types in a hypertext database, my development plan for this project is to adapt a pre-existing simulation game engine, using one of a variety of these which have been offered for licensing lately. I have also been looking into the possibility of teaming up with NASA, other space agencies, and other space advocacy groups which could exploit the game as a promotional tool while also also providing advice on science and technology issues. I'm also waiting to see what development options emerge with the transition of the Macintosh platform to the new UNIX derived OS platform, which at the moment is leaving my options for tools a bit up in the air. Unfortunately, this is yet another project that has been stalled by my increasingly desperate need for safe housing, though I have often been unable to resist putting time into it.