Designing the World of Tomorrow, pt 1

Designing the science fiction world of Planetrism is challenging but also something that gives you immense satisfaction. As a game world designer my goal is to make a believable, realistic world with full stack of history, sociology, ecology, economy, technology and all the other dimensions our own world has. There has to be many sides of the coin, so to speak. Not just one truth, or one sided view, but multitude of perspectives on a realistic, living world.

RPG world has to be as complex and rich in content as our real world is, but you also have to extrapolate and use your imagination to build even more layers. But this also makes it easier for players to immerse into this game world. There are some familiar issues and cultural artifacts that you can relate to, although the technology has advanced and humanity has gone to stars. But humans are still basically the same. There are same social, cultural and economic issues, there is prejudice, there is inequality etc.

My goal is to design such world of tomorrow that we can base a multitude of games on it, and even use it for tabletop RPGs. Although the focus in our current development is on frontier colonies, I am also developing Core Worlds and Old Colonies to give the right background flavour to events happening in Fringe Colonies. Why? Because that’s where those humans are coming from and heading to the Fringe exoplanets. They have to have a reason to challenge their fate in worlds that are barely habitable.

The setting of Planetrism is mostly influenced by real historical issues. Thematically it is a mixture of Wild West Frontier, Gold Rush and social ideology of collective communities like kibbutzim. But there are other influences too, like early colonization of America, Australia and Africa. There are basically two layers on Planetrism colonization of exoplanets:

• Exploitation of natural resources of exoplanets by megacorporations
• Hope for free, better living and riches in faraway exoplanets by individuals

This mixture gives a reason and means for people to travel several hundred light years and start new life on some miserable rock which they know nothing about. Although advertisements paint a picture of paradise, the actual living there is harsh at best. But it is their rock, now. Current legislation of year 2242 in Planetrism world prevents megacorporations to own planets. Only collective of people or nations are allowed that. But space travel is very expensive. Starships cost a lot and only nations and large corporations own them (plus some rogue pirates and criminals).

So, those megacorporations sponsor groups of hopeful individuals, giving them short training, a passage and starting equipment to establish a new colony. But those individuals also sign a contract that gives their sponsor exclusive rights and certain big percentage of any exploitable natural resources that are found on that colony planet for a certain period of time. This arrangement means that colonist do a lot of hard work, but megacorporations reap the profits.

But people still want to go there, although they know the realities. Why? Because living in the core worlds is not a picnic either. Earth is overpopulated, polluted and on the brink of a final collapse by economic inequalities, global warming and many other problems. Mars, and older colonies are not that much better. People are under tight control. Even having children is tightly controlled to keep overpopulation under some control. So it is only natural that some people are willing to take the risk and head to Fringe exoplanets, where they can have more freedom and hopefully breath fresh air.

My opinion is that all this game world design is as important as the technical development of virtual reality game. When you expose player to those details of world, the immersion gets more real, since you get the feeling that all this is happening in “real” world. It is not just the immediate scene you are looking, but there is more out there, a world, people, societies.

Published originally 15 Mar, 2017