Alpha Centauri's narrative tension

I still remember reading the PC Gamer issue in which Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri received the highest rating that magazine had ever given, in which it was implied that this might be the greatest PC game of all time. An examination of subsequent "best of" lists shows that their prediction or their memories failed, but it's worth asking what about the game so captivated its players. I think that in part — and this is something you would not expect to say for a game of this kind — this was due to the story. Other games in this genre, including subsequent entries in its sibling Civilization series, have no greater narrative arc than a grand national romance. Alpha Centauri rises above this tradition with truly differentiated factions that imbue the different societies with real character, an explicit historical story, and a implicit but definite narrative embodied by its technology tree. When these elements work together, this interwoven narrative stands as one of the game's unique strengths. Yet these different influences can also create an unhappy tension with one another.

Alpha Centauri has an advantage over its cousins, the Civilization games, in that the different playable factions represent ideologies rather than nations. As Alex Galloway discusses in Gaming, the "civilizations" don't represent anything more than stand-ins for particular assemblies of AI traits. Unique units aside, the different "civilizations" have few differences, for gameplay reasons and because most real civilizations have adopted very similar patterns of success. In Alpha Centauri this is true to a certain extent, but by using each faction to represent an ideology, the distinction can be taken much farther.

The factions have material differences between them from the get-go, strengths and weaknesses that encourage divergent modes of play. The ecological handiness of the Gaians rewards a priority on interacting with Planet, but hinders population growth. The academic prowess of the University encourages technology-first gameplay, but forces the player to work diligently to protect his secrets from being stolen. While most of the game's "Secret Projects" can benefit any faction or style of play, certain ones become crucial for particular factions — denying them the ownership of these projects can be every bit as strategically important as obtaining the benefits for yourself. In this way each faction truly develops its own character, assisted in this by the recurrent voices of the faction leaders, whose writings and sayings provide context for many of the discoveries and projects.

These "characters" enter an overarching narrative of a fractured society landing on a new world (called "Chiron" or "Planet") already inhabited by a semi-sentient collective intelligence. The various factions are competing with one another for territory and resources, and with the alien life form for dominance of planet. Relationships between factions remain mostly antagonistic, but the game imposes an arc on the interaction between the player and the lifeforms of Planet. Certain events are triggered by the player to make an explicit arc, while the game's technology tree enforces its own narrative of cooperation. Scientific advancement relies on developing a further understanding of Planet, which in turn allows the cultivation of its lifeforms to produce the food, energy, and minerals necessary to survive or dominate. The apex of the scientific approach to victory is the fusing of human consciousness with the collective mind of Planet.

The problem is that this doesn't seem like an outcome that would sit well with every faction, and would appeal to some for very different reasons. The Gaians would happily join with Planet because this idea lies at the core of their civilization anyway. The collectivist Hive would also appreciate the idea, but Chairman Yang would mostly enjoy the power it gave him over all life. Surely a collective consciousness would be anathema to the capitalists of Morgan Enterprises or the Survivalists — though for these factions one could just choose to pursue the economic domination or world conquest victory conditions. That would not escape the fact that these societies are forced to pursue scientific goals at odds with their philosophies along the way.

And what of the Lord's Believers? To say nothing of the theological difficulty involved in acknowledging the existence of an intelligent lifeform not contemplated in scripture (and this would be socially important), the pursuit of immortality by giving up one's soul to an alien creature must surely be horrific to them. If you assume their ideals are honestly held (and in all fairness, the game does not), conquering their neighbors by the sword or filthy lucre would be just as bad.

Of course, the tech tree holds just as much offense for the Gaians as it does for the Believers — surely a bunch of tree-hugging environmentalists would hate to develop synthetic fossil fuels and pollute a whole new planet! And why should they? This is, after all, science fiction... instead of supercomputers, why not let the Gaians learn how to engineer Planet's xenofungus into a problem-solving neural net? Instead of learning to build tanks, why couldn't they biologically engineer armored monsters from Planet's mindworms and locusts? Of course, allowing truly varied alternative technology trees one creates a more difficult problem in terms of balancing, especially if some of the branches are mutually exclusive. However, Alpha Centauri would have benefited, in a narrative sense, from allowing tech trees that were more friendly or more inimical to Planet. An alternate endgame (perhaps one involving a new colonization effort?) might have been of benefit also.

This, then, is the respect in which Alpha Centauri's narrative falters. The technology tree creates an implicit story for every faction, and the problem with this is that it is the same story, for societies that are radically different. A more flexible and varied technology tree, with defined, exclusive routes towards more varied endgames and units, would have benefited the game by allowing each of its "characters" a destiny that fit, rather than contradicted, their principles.

Note: I played Alpha Centauri as part of the fun at Vintage Game Club. We're starting our next game, Majora's Mask (available via Ebay for N64 and Gamecube, and through Virtual Console on Wii), next Friday. If you're interested, we'd love to have you join in the discussion.

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The falling action

Most games, even particularly interesting ones, are hamstrung by the fact that they end too soon. I don't mean that the gameplay itself ends too quickly; indeed most games would be served by chopping out a few hours. What I'm talking about here is that the story gets cut short. Whether RPGs, shooters, or brawlers, the finale of most games goes like this: climactic boss battle, short non-interactive cutscene, The End. Sometimes the short cutscene gets replaced with a long one, but the basic pattern is widely accepted. This hurts game narratives because it forces the player to assess the implications of the game's climax while almost entirely outside of the game world. It is left to the player to imagine what the world of the game is like after, and while this occasionally fits a narrative design it does not always do so. Fallout 3 reached a positively manic climax with Liberty Prime's assault on Project Purity, then dove right into an abrupt (and almost inexplicable) closing sequence. The recent downloadable content, "Broken Steel", feels like an attempt to add a real denouement to the Enclave arc, and in this it largely succeeds.

Most quests in "Broken Steel" differ from those of the main game in that they are essentially devoid of meaningful moral choice. The events of the add-on represent a single infiltrator's actions in a military campaign, and as such most of its quests amount to extended dungeon crawls. While a number of new and extremely powerful enemies appear across the Wasteland, none of them take the form of Enclave soldiers — the new Hellfire Trooper is not significantly more effective than his compatriots — and when this is combined with the elevated level cap, the effect is a slow reduction of tension throughout the adventure. Sure, things can get a bit hairy during some segments (particularly the harrowing encounter with Reavers in the Presidential Metro), but every time you face the Enclave they feel weaker than before. In the final act of the add-on, I infiltrated the Enclave's mobile base and single-handedly took down their elite Sigma squad in the space of a few seconds. Things never really got any harder after that.

Broken Steel doesn't have any grand finale to match that of the main story, but that's not the point. The new content isn't about a heroic charge against overwhelming odds to conquer a fortified position; it's about stomping bugs. There's no new antagonist to confront, nor even an old one, as the new segments don't seem to notice if you let Colonel Autumn live. All you have are progressively less dangerous firefights, gradually easing off the pressure until you demolish the Enclave's last stronghold with fire from the sky.

The accessory quests don't add much in the way of gameplay or new areas, but they do allow the player to consider the non-military impact of freeing Project Purity. Notably, the Wasteland still has problems — cleaning up the water didn't immediately eliminate the widespread contamination, mutation problems, or raiders. Solving some of those problems simply created new ones: now the challenge is to ensure that the distribution of the pure water goes smoothly. These quests don't really have much in the way of interesting moral choices, but they help put the player's earlier decisions in perspective, allowing him to reflect on the implications of the choices he made earlier.

The weakness of "Broken Steel" is that it has little to offer beyond violence. The quests are mostly straightforward battles, and allow none of the flexibility inherent to some of the main game's more interesting missions. The player can't side with the Enclave, or even use his powers of persuasion to help destroy his enemies from within. The only choice the player can make is to shoot or die, and while that approach has its uses it's unfortunate that players who take advantage of the full range of character customization available in the game aren't rewarded with interesting alternative routes to victory.

The impression one gets from interviews is that the developers at Bethesda believe players reacted negatively to the fact that their game ended. For me, at least, this wasn't the case at all. It wasn't that Fallout 3 ended, but how it ended that felt unsatisfying. The assault on the purifier didn't feel like a personal triumph, the conclusion of the adventure came as a surprise, and the in-universe reason for ending it was contrived and ridiculous. After the events of "Broken Steel", however, I feel like the game could have stopped without any trouble. The powerful weapons and increased level cap slowly deflate the tension of the narrative throughout this episode, and the final crawl through the Enclave's mobile platform feels like the player's expression of personal dominance over their military engine. Despite its weaknesses, this aspect of "Broken Steel" is quite welcome: it makes the player feel like the story really is at a conclusion, by moving the end of the game away from the climax of the story.

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