The Singularity

     I've been addicted to the mindless cascade of dopamine that is The Fermi Paradox ever since I bought the alpha version a month ago.  Its an oddly meditative game, sparse in actual mechanics and very hard to outright lose.  You play the Galactic Gardener, an unseen, anonymous observer who influences the development of sentient species who, at least initially, have no knowledge of one another.  You win when they obtain the ability to communicate instantaneously with one another, at which point you are unceremoniously dumped back to the title screen.  What fascinates me the most about this game is how, if you remove the superficial distinctions between its eras of history, there is no fundamental difference between each era.  This remains true even after your pet species colonize new worlds, a mechanic that makes it even harder to lose the game since as long as extinctions happen with low to moderate frequency there will always be some sentients somewhere ready to repeat the cycle.  Let me explain.

    The Fermi Paradox's difficulty revolves around the fact that each species is attempting to piggyback off of a planet with finite resources in order to emigrate to the stars.  Which resources are at stake and how fast they're being consumed changes throughout the game, but the logic remains the same.  In the modern era, you can run out of oil; in the so-called "nautical age" (a tired euphemism for colonialism) you can run out of ore; in the stone age, at the very beginning of the game, you can run out of trees.  No matter what ideology or objective material circumstances shape the society in question, its economic logic is always the same.  The only choice is whether to eat the world fast, or to eat it slow.

    Actually, there is another choice.  If a planet runs out of resources, it induces a crisis event wherein the entire society collectively decides whether to become more tyrannical, more egalitarian, or to just get really violent.  Even so, no matter how utopian your society gets (an attribute that is measured on a literal one dimensional axis) you will still experience an indefinite number of resource crises until at some point society finally draws a bad hand and gives up on living.  It's ironic to read the principles the developers were committed to in the text but be unable to escape the logic of extraction and consumption that would stop these successive crises from occurring at all.  Actually, in order to win the game your societies must grow up and away from these transient utopias, leaving behind harmony with their environment to choose power, knowledge, and growth once again.

    As the Anthropocene kicks into high gear, I've been thinking a lot about the real Fermi paradox.  It's pretty much inevitable that we are witnessing another collapse akin to the Bronze Age collapse and the invasion of the Mongols, and coming to terms with that is imperative for those of us planning on surviving it.  All of our revelations about the Earth's worsening climate have come alongside increasing evidence that going to space is a genuinely terrible idea, not to mention how inhospitable any of the planets in our immediate solar system are to human life.  Vague gestures towards "terraforming" aside, I think it's about as likely that we will colonize Mars as it is that colonizing Palestine will bring about the Rapture.

    By limiting our relationship to the environment to one of consumption, we also prevent ourselves from seeing protecting the environment as anything more than conservation.  There is no question of how we eat, or what we eat; the only options on the table are eating fast, or eating slow.  This is what frustrates me about The Fermi Paradox.  The game is clearly interested in presenting a fresh take on the 4X genre.  Rather than being driven towards military conflict, players worry about inequality, population growth, and the effects of climate change.  However, by the game's own logic the ultimate difference between a green utopia and a dystopian nightmare is only skin deep.

    Strategy games in general have a bad habit of reproducing the ideals of the capitalist hegemon, which isn't that surprising considering they are literally capitalist products.  I guess I shouldn't expect much more, but I especially feel the need to criticize them when they purport to be more than that.  We've begun to come to terms with the fact that climate change is real and happening, but we are still stuck in the mindset that human beings are a separate and ultimately negative influence on the climate, an idea that will ironically kill us in the long term.  The thing is, this linear relationship of consumption, production and waste is not at all the only possible human relationship to the Earth.  Instead, as evidenced by such world wonder as the Amazon and the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, human intervention can not only be a preserving force but a generative one, capable of bringing into existence some of the most complex ecosystems to ever exist on Earth.

    Is it possible to "game-ify" this philosophy of regenerative ecosystem management?  I think it comes down to changing the status of the player.  So long as our goal is the survival of a nation-state or a single, monolithic culture we will be pushed to make decisions that are objectively terrible for the well-being of the lives trapped within it.  Consider Stellaris's notorious "purge" mechanics, or the way the Civilization series tends to treat so-called barbarians as minor military threats with no other purpose than to be exterminated.  It's Sunday and I cannot remember its name, but there are some short indie games out there that play with the meaning of a city builder.  It would be nice to see this scaled up to the level of abstraction of a 4X game, maybe with the addition of a crude simulation of climate change as one of the mechanics.  Given that art drives our imagination of what the future could be like, this might be more important than we think.