14 DAY TRIAL // As a long-time fan of PC strategy games and decent fiction, especially of the speculative sort, I am very curious how the upcoming Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth will end up playing.
While I am convinced that it will be another step forward for the Civilization series, I cannot help a feeling of dread when it comes to its allegedly sugar-coated content.
During the Civilization: Beyond Earth announcement at PAX East last weekend, Firaxis used Alpha Centauri as a buzzword to build hype for their upcoming creation, while explicitly stating that their game had nothing in common with it, as far as flavor goes.
I've enjoyed Civilization: Call to Power, despite its many flaws, due, in part, to the fact that the terrain improvement system was revised and does not require you to walk around a dedicated unit to build stuff, but instead has a portion of a city's income go toward public works, which feels like a much better way to handle it.
The other major thing that Call to Power brought was the option to go beyond present-age Earth and explore a bit of our glorious future, which Civ games sadly shy away from. Unfortunately, the game was kind of bad overall, and it didn't manage to capture my interest the way the original Civ games did.
Being a big science fiction fan, I can confidently count Alpha Centauri among my favorite games of all time, and I have been prying into viable alternatives, the same way I have been looking for a modern Master of Orion 2.
Truth be told, I may have actually spent more time sifting through the tech tree and reading the masterful flavor text than actually playing the game, which felt like a sort of bonus tacked on to a speculative fiction utopia.
I love books that explore the fringe of human evolution, and there is no genre better at it than science fiction. Alpha Centauri was designed pretty much by the book, as its creators confessed drawing inspiration from the sci-fi ethos while creating the game.
Its factions are inspired by current social and political trends that have been largely exaggerated and then expanded through creative speculation, and the results are admirable.
A particularly likable aspect of the game was the fact that some of the actions available were questionable in nature, to say the least. Practices such as turning dead bodies into resources, research hospitals, forcing people to join their minds with machines and nerve-stapling dissidents are things that you can casually dismiss while engaged in the game, until you read the actual description and start questioning what the struggle for survival or supremacy is worth giving up.
This was the most striking aspect of the game, from my point of view: once all the clicking and 4X-ing was done, you were left pondering some serious issues, imagining how such a world could come to be and how the darker side of humanity can so easily be embraced, and in so many ways, when you are driven by a single goal and cast any other concerns aside.
I don't fully understand their choice, because pretending something doesn't exist is not exactly inspirational, but rather childish. Experimentation is the basis of all knowledge, and pretending that something isn't there and ignoring the problem solves nothing.
I liked the fact that you can do what is generally considered not polite during tea time in Alpha Centauri, and I would have liked to have even more such options. The suspension of disbelief is a necessary evil, as far as all works of fiction are concerned, but it becomes absurd when you're playing as a docile Genghis Khan, who does not rape and pillage.
What I would like is for the game to either explore humankind's future thoroughly, or to sugar-coat it and present it as the glorious saga of the Teletubbies, voyaging across the stars. Like any decent work of fiction, I fully expect it to be grounded in realism, not in the malevolent and misguided belief that we somehow are not our own enemies.
This thought-provoking value that Alpha Centauri possesses is not present in the other games in the Civilization series, and I am more afraid of a sugar-coated game that pretends "evil" choices do not exist than of a game that allows you to make them and then figure out for yourself why they are as such, and maybe glean some valuable knowledge in the process.
Because getting to a bright future relies not on hope and positive thinking, but on the knowledge of what could go wrong, the wisdom to avoid it and the power to excise it.