Luddites in Space

Overarching theme

I always thought it was cool that in the 2000’s Battlestar Galactica series the human military fleet was reduced to a single Battlestar-class ship precisely because the Galactica was an old rustbucket. You see, once upon a time there was this big war with the robotic Cylons, who were adept at hacking computer networks. The humans responded with a borderline paranoid design ethos that relied on land-line phones and simple radios for onboard ship communication, using computers only when necessary, and then only with strict airgapping. The humans won the war, and as the years wore on these measures that had once protected them started to grate; widespread networking brought many efficiencies, and the Cylon menace was no more. Pretty soon every single ship in the human fleet was a shiny & efficient fully-networked computerized machine. Then, out of nowhere the Cylons reappear, hack the entire fleet in one fell swoop, and nearly exterminate all of humanity. All that’s left is that trusty old rust-bucket, the Galactica.

There’s a cool game idea in here somewhere, and I like the subversive message that the ever-forwards march of technology has a more downsides than we’re ready to admit.

The term “Luddite” is a general epithet deployed against anyone who has a negative view of technology. Kirkpatrick Sale’s excellent book Rebels Against The Future is an amazing corrective to this ahistorical treatment of the subject.

The Amish are another case of people misunderstanding those with a skeptical view of modern technology. For one, Amish actually do use technology, they just have a very strict philosophical basis for deciding which technologies they choose to use – the chief guiding light being avoiding ones likely to disrupt their way of life and damage their communities. Not to mention the Amish are actually avid inventors!

This is a large overarching idea rather than a specific game mechanic, but here’s some concrete ideas that I might expand on later:

Security War

This one’s directly inspired by Battlestar Galactica. Take a typical game where you fight eachother with fleets of spaceships. One technology you might research is remote-controlled drone ships. These are great because they don’t require expensive and bulky life support modules, so you can cram them full of more weapons. However, since there’s no meatspace beings aboard to pull the manual overrides, they’re particularly vulnerable to being hacked and turned against you by a sufficiently network-savvy enemy. So you could do things Galactica style and build analog-powered rustbuckets, at the cost of overall efficiency and power.

And you don’t necessarily need to put this in space, either. This idea is basically Internet of S#*!: the game.

Okay, so what?

The whole point of this idea is to model the negative externalities of modern technology, and playing with the tradeoff between increased efficiency and power (modern and shiny) vs. reliability, redundancy and defense against cascading failure (old and rusty).