That Terraforming Itch

That Terraforming Itch

Terraform Mars? Really?

Imagine the recruitment blurb: Come, crash asteroids into Mars and then watch it turn green and blue! Convert plants into habitat-forging tools; make greenhouse gases work in our favour now we've practiced using them to pollute our home planet! Make brute power give birth to eco-delicacy!

Isn’t the whole idea of inhabiting other planets kind of skewed from the start? Maybe; but that itch isn’t going to go away in a hurry, especially if there are games like Terraforming Mars around to scratch it.

This game does a masterful job at selling the terraforming idea. It really gets me believing that lichens will overcome the odds, that solettas will harness the sun, that corporations won't end up tearing each other apart in their common goal to create a habitable planet.

So what does this creature look like? Open the box, and out crawls a huge, pulsating bio-engine smelling of industrial hydrate, of smelted iron and vegetation. First you get cards – a ton of them, most of them entire projects in themselves, honed to parameters, linked up via tags, and priced smartly. Then tiles - pristine oceans and flip-over cities/greenery, a perfect balance for building tough, habitable environments. It’s the mixture of clever intricacy and brute power that will get the job done, clothe Mars in the green-blue garb of earth.

Or not.

Seriously, do we have any idea what we’re doing, unleashing this beast on a virgin planet? At least the resource boards are innocuous enough, with their gold-silver-bronze Olympics-vibed cubes. Whatever battles may come, you always have your little cube-corner, your purring engine to fall back on.

Game play starts harmlessly enough. You're not going to crash many moons with just 20 MegaCredits and a couple of resource cubes. But belching out greenhouse gases certainly ramps up the temperature fast. Greenery meanwhile must wait for parameters to rise. First kickstart your bio-machine by dabbling in microbes, then get fungi crawling out into the red dust. Soon all the brute corporation tanks will be crawling after them, levelling their logoed faces at each other. Things soon start heating up.

Yes, rivalry now starts ebbing insidiously across the planet as corporations get cube-shifting. Before long, polygon cities are getting spewed out and cloned greenery belts are appearing around unlocked oceans in the coldest war in human history.

Ah, the tags! I forgot to mention those. Well, building tags grant solid credibility, whereas science tags can demand steep chaining/investment. Space tags can use stockpiled titanium; earth and Jovian tags - they're a decent longshot if they actually come out in the card draw. Then bio tags can forge entangled self-triggering eco-packages of various animal-plant-microbe combos. Fine, if you're into that sort of thing.

Each corporation though by now is well into their own ‘sort of thing’. Tags, you see, demand specialization. Already you're being forced to leave behind your wide-eyed holistic diversification ideals. Well then, specialize in diversification through other means! Get a bunch of weirdo cards! Attract tourism! Search for life! Sponsor university initiatives! Dabble in stuff you weren't remotely interested in just a generation ago!

Because before you know it, parameter limits are being reached. An overproduction of heat provokes a drastic pull-back on energy production. Ocean products get abandoned, science research projects get suspended, oxygenation initiatives are made obsolete. Suddenly, everyone's diving headlong into frantic building programs and belatedly setting up animal projects while ruefully eyeing their growing steel/titanium surplus.

Somewhere, things got out of balance. But no time to think about that. You still have unreached objectives looming on your horizon, like those seven science tags you once naively proposed to string together - a goal now as far off as the peak of Mount Olympus itself. Reduced to mean conniving, you hatch a new plan financed with your prized stash of titanium. Before you know it, you're turning into a Bard Hunter (though Credicor isn't even your company) as you scheme to bring celestial bodies down to further overheat the Martian crust.

Oh dear, whatever happened to your dream to greenify the Red Planet? Reduced to scavenging off other corporations' greenery tiles, you start planting magpie cities to your rivals' protesting howls. Far from protecting organisms from cosmic radiation, you yourself have become a source of radiation, sending out toxic rays of ambition and greed.

- Wow! Just recounting the game journey raised my blood pressure a notch or two. Seriously, this is a brilliant simulation of reality – and I don’t just mean the science/engineering aspect. I mean the human greed aspect. If terraforming Mars should ever become viable, then a few intensive sessions of TM game play should be included to vet prospective candidates. Just train a camera on them, observe the nail-biting, the glazed-eyed angst, the paranoid glancing at each other’s card tableau. See how few would put the interests of Mars above their own.

I wouldn’t always pass that test (though I do shun deliberate sabotage of other players in the hope that the feeling is reciprocated!). Frankly, I’m not even up to playing a casual game of Terraforming Mars half the time. There’s really nothing casual about it. It's not just a table-hog; it's a time-hog, brain-hog, everything-hog. It demands a serious investment of self that I wouldn’t normally be prepared to make in a mere game.

Just as well there’s nothing ‘mere’ about this one.

The whole thing rumbles with something more than 'game'. System? Mission? A systemized mission/grinding project-thing? TM, TfM, T-Mars, call it what you will, it won’t conform, won’t be tamed. This futuristic beast doesn’t know when to stop, except when it hits its head against global parameter limits or reaches the known borders of the Red Planet. Excess and stockpiling are its glory. It just keeps spewing titanium until you have no option but to spend it on crashing a giant ice asteriod. Did you ever aspire to become a giant ice asteriod-crasher? Not exactly, but … well, you must be true to your corporation self, wave your logo-flag - even if that means occasionally going against your corporation’s avowed goals.

Because when it comes to the crunch, we’re all united in fighting for Mars’ best interests; we’re all together under the same vision.

Aren’t we?

However, don't fret: some of us have yet to cave in completely to the greed of corporate rivalry. We still love Mars; we go gentle on our engine. We hum to the soundtracks of Interstellar and Apollo 13 while offering sage advice, like, “Investment in science research/animal development can pay off more than crisis-crashing asteroids, you know.”

A pity no one listens. Truth is, everyone feels the generations passing. Life is short, you must be shrewd; this is about survival. One small step for man becomes one giant leap of herd anxiety, as harsh fact demands you keep your utopian dreams neatly filed away. Other demands are arising. Already milestones, then awards are knocking at the door, keeping everyone glancing nervously at their tags, weighing their benefits.

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Never mind, you can still redeem your damaged public image. There are plenty of half-baked card projects still lying around. You can legislate against offenders like yourself - hackers, unvetted immigrants, hired raiders, etc. There is media corruption, bribery and sabotage to denounce. And you can always play the noble lawyer, regulating robot use, miners' conditions, politicians' sway and pet ownership.

And you can always warn others not to step on the ants.

There are a thousand ways of terraforming Mars. But when you finally see Mars as the green-blue terra nova of your creation, when all is done and the dust is settled, and you're slapping each other on the back, don't be deceived. Mars is still Mars. The hostile environment is still hostile. Humanity is still humanity.