& LIGHT-YEARS! - TRS-80 Color Computer Archive

Games Aren't Books
But are these games good science fic
tion? Yes and no.
I remember 1977, when a friend
at work told me about an incredible
new movie called Star Wars. We all
took a long lunch hour (nice boss!)
and went to see it. It was wonderful.
All the ray guns and blasters and
aliens and space battles we had read
about in science fiction were up there
on the screen. I could finally see it
with my own eyes.
None of the hokey cardboard sets
and sound-stage planets of "Star
Trek," none of the witless writing and talentless actors that
had been part of science fiction film and television almost
from the start. With Star Wars, somebody had finally made
a space movie that felt real as you were watching it.
We loved it. We raved about it for days afterward.
My friends knew I had sold a few science fiction sto
ries, though none had yet been published. It was almost in
evitable that one would say, "Hey, Card, don't you wish
you could have written something like Star Wars?"
It felt like he'd spit in my face. Write something like
Star Wars? What a humiliating idea. Star Wars was a
wonderful movie, but it was straight out of 1930s pulp sci
ence fiction. Written science fiction had outgrown that
space-opera stuff decades ago.
That's the way it often is with science fiction games.
We love them because they finally give us a chance to act
out some of those old science fiction stories. Asteroids ac
tually lets us feel how tricky it would be to pilot a ship that
moves by rocketry—it can't slow down without turning
around. Star Flight captures the feeling of exploring where
no one has ever gone before.
But compared to good science fiction, they aren't even
in the same league. If I can't invent a better alien than
those in Star Flight, I'm out of business as a storyteller.
The point is, you don't measure games the same way
you measure books. They do different things.
A game isn't going to be very good at characterization.
Point of View vs. Mapping
Game designers use two strategies to take you through their
game worlds. One is mapping: You are looking down on the ac
tion, watching your player-figure (vehicle or character) move
through a flat map of the world. You can see all around your
player-figure, to the edges of the screen.
The other strategy is point of view: You are seeing the
world from ground level in a 3-D display. Far-off things are
small; you can't see what's behind a wall until you go around
the corner or through a door; and to see what's behind you. you
have to turn around.
One strength of mapping is clarity; you know where you
are. Also, mapping is very frugal with memory. Maps can be
graphically gorgeous (like the planet surfaces in Sentinel Worlds
or the terrain in Firezone), but they do it by repeating certain im
ages over and over again. One symbol always means moun
tains, while another always means trees.
Point of view, however, attempts to give you movielike im
mediacy. You're actually seeing things, moving through the
world yourself instead of maneuvering a player-figure around on
a map. The trouble is that 3-D graphics are slow and they eat
up memory in unbelievably large gulps. Each new angle of view
30 COMPUTE!
But then, it doesn't have to be, since
the hero of the game is the player. The
player supplies the character's motiva
tion—game heroes do what they do
for the players' reasons.
Nor can you have an intricate,
logical plot—not in a good game.
That's because a game has to give the
player options, give the player the
power to make choices and carry them
out. Games that force you to follow a
plot step by step aren't all that much
fun the first time, and once you've
acted out the story the game designer
has forced on you, there's no reason to
go back and play again. So a good game has a whole bunch
of incidents and adventures, but players discover them in
fairly random order. Again, the player supplies the plot.
World Creation
There is an area, though, in which a game can be good sci
ence fiction—sometimes better than anything in books or
movies. Science fiction writers call it world creation.
This doesn't mean simply inventing planets with neat
aliens. Look at the movie Blade Runner. It takes place in
Los Angeles. No aliens at all. But it isn't the L.A. we know.
It's set in the near future, and things have changed. Lots of
things, moving through the background of the film, give us
a powerful sense of being in a strange new place, a place
we've never seen before. And yet it feels absolutely real. We
believe that the future might be this way, and so we believe
in and care about the characters, even though their prob
lems could not even exist in our own time.
Science fiction is the literature of the strange. If the
story doesn't differ from the known world in some im
portant way, it isn't science fiction.
The same thing applies to science fiction computer
games. They are the opposite of sports games and flight
simulators. Instead of letting us act out a real-world activity
like playing basketball with Michael Jordan or landing a jet
fighter, science fiction games let us do things that can only
happen on the computer screen.
requires a new picture, so you not only have to have a picture
of each place, but you also have to have a new picture for every
conceivable angle!
The solution is usually to use vector graphics to draw the 3-
D display. At a primitive level, this means straight lines to repre
sent the bare walls of rooms, with one view for each of the four
cardinal directions. When you turn, you lurch a full 90 degrees at
a time.
Space Station Oblivion and The Colony both attempt far
more ambitious 3-D displays. Instead of having four views of a
room, you scroll smoothly through dozens of different angles.
The result is very satisfyingly realistic movement. Unfortunately,
the cost of this is that you can never get the lush pictorials of
mapping, and even on my speed-demon 386 machine, it can be
a bit slow.
As long as computers place limits on speed and memory,
these tradeoffs are going to be unavoidable. But both strategies
have been proven to work well, and some games now move
easily back and forth between them—most notably Sentinel
Worlds, which at one level uses mapping and point of view on
top of each other.