in the first post, I explored what the variables could be on methods of colonizing Proxima Centauri and came up with:
- the length of the journey (in terms of how long it takes to an outside observer vs. how much time the ship experiences),
- who/what is going to be doing the colonizing,
- how many are you bringing along,
- how are you getting them to the destination,
- the design of the ship(s),
- who/what is running the ship,
- where the colony is going to exist at the destination,
- what the colonists are hoping to achieve.
I had initially assumed that the player would be arriving late to the party (hundred-to-thousand-year-long journey) to give plenty of time for the faster/earlier colony attempts to get there ahead of the player so there’d me plenty of stuff to explore.
What made the most sense for a long-term voyage ship would be a generational ship: the colonists/crew living in real time on an enormous city-like mothership or flotilla of ships arriving late to the party. This makes perfect sense for real life, but in the context of making this an exploration/horror game, the realization that communications both with the colonies and back home would at most be a few years out of date.
Kinda sucks the mystery out of the whole game, doesn’t it?
The player would only physically be arriving to Proxima-c sevral hundred years after the first colonies were established, but the player’s colony ship would have been in constant communication with both them and with earth for all the years they were en route.
Sure, we could come up with some convoluted reason communications were cut off, but a generational ship? With literal generations of colonists and crew members? They couldn’t get communications back up after a few months. or even a few years?
So for the sake of maintaining the mystery part of the game, I had to change the player’s initial circumstances: arriving on a generational ship just wasn’t going to lend itself to arriving blind and having mysteries to solve.
So, what colonization scenario WOULD do that?
Players have to have been incommunicado
For us to get our ideal initial conditions for the game, we need a player that starts with a blank slate. Fortunately for us, there are a few scenarios we’ve already proposed that will give us just that: and in some cases, literally!
- Cryosleep: a true classic of the genre. The player is a colonist cryogenically frozen for the entire trip and is only being woken up now that they’ve arrived. They start the game with no current information and all we have to do as game designers is come up with some believable obstacles to the player getting any up to date info from the colony ship’s crew.
- Genetic Library: The player was just stored genetic information until arrival when the colony ship grew them. In this case, the player was literally born yesterday! Trouble is, we’d have to figure out a way to give the player rudamentry knowledge (a language, balance, muscle memory, what food is, etc) without also including actual up-to-date information (here’s the complete history of earth and Proxima-c for 3000 years ago up until 5 years ago on Earth and last week at Proxima-c)
- Stored as Data: the player is a stored human consciousness, which is transferred to a physical form on arrival. As long as the consciousness wasn’t running on any sort of hardware during the trip, it can remain ignorant of any updates the ship might’ve been privy to on the journey.
For our purposes, I think our best bet is cryosleep. This can provide us with everything we need regarding what the player character was expecting when they went to sleep and the wild differences that cropped up during the voyage. Also, for story purposes, this is the most ‘low-tech’ version of the three.
That is to say, we will be exploring other colonization attempts that use the others, but I’d wager the tech it takes to keep a human body on ice and reviving it later is much easier than attempting to train up a human embryo, or hyper-accelerate it’s growth, and a far cry from being able to transfer consciousnesses around between stored data and organic hosts.
In fact, since our player’s colony ship took so long to arrive, it would’ve needed to leave much earlier than the others. This means it was using much lower technology than the following attempts. Think of how much lower tech the first moon landing was compared to what is being planned now, barely 60 years later.
Now imagine it was 600 years later, or a thousand.
Our arriving player would be a bizarre and ancient time capsule when it arrived: a barely held-together spanish galleon pulling into port next to aircraft carriers and mega-yachts.
Who’s in charge here?
We’d want the player to take charge of the colony ship on arrival, but who or what was running the show on the way? of our options, we have a rotating crew, a rejuvinated or augmented crew, or an automatic system.
Rotating crew – regular humans run ship throughout regular human lifespans.
This would be my last choice, as it only makes sense with a generational ship. After all, for a thousand-year journey with a human crew, you’d need all the features of a generational ship to keep the crew alive. Why would you bother keeping the colonists themselves as a separate batch of cryogenically frozen humans when you have plenty on board running things?
It just brings all the problems back that we solved by having the player character start on ice. Why would you run a generational ship with a vibrant and developing/current society and culture and then use millenia-old humans to colonize when you arrive?
It could work, mind you: depending on the goal of the mission. This makes much more sense as a failed scenario the player discovers during the game.
Rejuvinated or Augmented crew – ship run by same group of humans throughout journey
This one also seems problematic for the same reasons as above. It may not be at the scale of a generational ship with a crew that is either functionally immortal or otherwise. Even with a crew of a couple dozen humans running things, you’ll still need living areas, artificial gravity, food production, entertainment, etc. But most importantly, you still have the problem of the ship being in constant communication with the outside world.
There are ways of making this work: a much smaller scale means fewer points of failure. But that just means fewer redudancies, not NO redundancies. Wipe out the current set of crew members and you just need to thaw out the next crew rotation ahead of schedule is all. Our main concern of communications is still there.
Automatic – ship run by A.I., uploaded human consciousness, or regular computer systems
This seems to be a good candidate for our game. Having one entity in charge during the voyage, one that isn’t human, is our best scenario for keeping the player character in the dark.
Either the ship’s A.I. cut communications itself, was programmed to not communicate, or it could be as simple as the ship’s communications array being damaged en route and the A.I. making the unilateral decision not to use precious resources repairing it when those resources are needed elsewhere.
Mission statement
There are plenty of possible mission goals humanity may have for colonizing our stellar neighbors, but individual humans seldom share them. Often the simple motives of profit, pride, greed, or status drive individual humans, or companies, or governments, to send colonists to the stars.
We’ll need to know why our player’s colony ship was going there, and if that reason changed during the trip.
Since we are supposing that this is one of the first, if not THE first, colony ship to head for Proxima-c, we’ll go ahead and leave off a few of the goals that would require highly advanced technology to do. Chances are, investors are not going to put money into a project that intends to terraform an entire planet or uplift an alien species on arrival when they aren’t even sure they’ll even get there.
So, what are some goals we came up with that a lower-tech colony ship might hope to achieve?
Sister City – Duplicate a culture/society/state to preserve/promote way of life
This is a great mission for a first attempt: it compliments the method of travel as what better way to preserve a way of life than to gather a mass of colonists already practicing that society and freeze them. In fact, this might explain the lack of communications; why risk outside forces sullying your A.I. with notions that the culture it is shepherding across the stars is actually not worth preserving, or may even be detrimental?
I can imagine a scenario where the U.S. is sending out their ship to preserve “The American Way™” and is worried that those lousy Commie Russians Chinese might broadcast a signal to the ship’s A.I. turning it into a Marxist. Best to just cut off communications entirely until you get there.
Utopia – create settlement that solves the problems plaguing human society
Now you might think this is a very steep goal for a lower-tech colony to shoot for, and my answer to that is about a few thousand attempts throughout recorded history to do just this; spanning from modern day attempts like Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, going back we get the Shakers, the Anibaptists, hundreds of medieval attempts, greeks, etc.
The only snag I see is that people trying to form the perfect society tend to either try to spread that idea far and wide (part of why it makes a great colonization goal) or to keep quiet, but maintain survelance on everyone else to make sure nobody else is doing anything to stop them (including doing their own utopias… wrongly, of course). And for either of those tendencies, you’ll want to at the very least keep listening and learning about how everyone else is faring.
As for the colony’s level of technology? It tends to not be a concern for a group of humans thinking they have figured out how to create the perfect human society. In fact, our next goal actively shuns it in their attempts at perfecting the human condition.
Turn back the Clock – revert to a ‘simpler time’ for humanity or earth (middle ages, Eden, Jurassic epoch, etc.)
This is another good goal for our player’s ship to have and can explain the lack of communiction with the outside world, or at least explain the lack of providing any of that information to the player’s character. It might seem counter-intuitive or even hypocritical for a colony ship to use the peak of current technology to travel to a distant star system only to abandon it all on arrival, but there are plenty of groups out there with an ends justifying the means mentality. They might view the tech needed to get the colony to Proxima as a necessary evil in order to achieve their goals.
Also, it is also pretty likely that the ‘simpler time’ they are planning to recreate is not for them, but for only the colonists themselves. They hang on and live a life using all the tech while the colonists live blissfully unaware of them as they live as medieval serfs and nobles.
The only issue I have with this approach is that this makes for a much more interesting colony for the player to come across, rather than originate from. It would eat up a lot of game time if the player starts off living the life of an ancient greek farmer only to discover he’s on board a holodeck and has to learn about space travel in order to free himself.
However, this type of scenario dovetails very well with our last hypothetical goal for colonization.
Play God – establish own little world where the fantasies of one or a few are indulged
Again, the level of technology you have available tends not to curb the desire to be the one calling all the shots. People have tried to play god at all levels of technology in humanity’s past. All you really need is to have a significantly better lifestyle than the ones you’re playing god to.
This again dovetails well into are desire to limit communications with the colonies already there at Proxima. Plus, depending on the attitude of the ones playing god, this will be more than adequate reason to keep current knowledge of events away from the player’s character, at least starting out.