Forgot Something

One thing of note about this prototype is the discussions we had getting to our idea. After Tron was shot down, and we pivoted to Missile Command, our teachers had us choose a theme other than spaceships and outer space - for good reason, it's a bit overdone.

We sat down and discussed some themes and ideas, and pretty soon came to an idea of aliens coming to a planet and the player choosing to let them in or not. Some members of our team wanted to make a game about immigration. And the player would choose which aliens or which spaceships we allowed into our planet.

This conversation pretty quickly made me uncomfortable. I'm all for making a serious game that makes a strong editorial point, or discusses a topical issue that either proposes possible solutions or shows the player the complexity of a situation. But the design we started talking about was having the player choose which alien races they would allow on the planet, and which he would reject and shoot down. We would determine this based on the shape of the spaceship, or some other characteristic. To me this approach felt very discriminatory and even racist. We talked about immigration, and people's political views on the subject started emerging. This was fine, as we're in an environment where we should be able to freely discuss these viewpoints.

I had some philosophical disagreements with some of the premises that people were building the design on. My fundamental argument was that our immigration policy is not working, and it's not a system that is very good at deciding who we should let into our country and who we shouldn't. That it's impossible to know which individuals would contribute positively to your society, and which would have a negative impact. And even more complexly, which of a person's descendants would contribute positively or negatively. In our game we disagreed about the proper way to select which immigrants we let in, and which we should turn away. It made me want to study more about immigration, because I'd like to know when we started limiting immigration in the first place, what were the reasons and criteria for it, and how has it evolved over the years. 

I was happy building a game that discussed this topic, I just felt our design wasn't saying anything positive or constructive, but was just promoting the player to be discriminatory and racist. I suggested building randomness into the enemy ships so that the player didn't actually know which ships were good for the planet and which ships would harm it. In my opinion this would show the ineffectiveness and truth or our system, that it's very difficult to judge which individual should be allowed in the country. This idea was quickly shot down because such randomness would frustrate the player quickly. Which I thought made for a good statement. While this might be true, it also made for a lousy game. So we moved on.

We conitnued to discuss the merits of such a game and it's design, until a member on our team had the clear-mindedness to ask if we were sacrificing the fun of the game to force a political statement into it. And we all agreed we should probably just make a fun game.

After this I let them know I was going to California for a vacation and would be back within a week. When I would return I would find their design and art style pretty settled on a game we would call Entropy.