On the theory of games, Essay the Second: Playing at Frankenstein, (or:) the Horrible Consequences of Winning Alpha Centauri

As the reader will remember, there is a distinct turning point in Shelley’s Frankenstein. It occurs as the poor Victor finally completes the monster and awakens it by some hard-won method: Rather than feeling joy or pride at this difficult and unique achievement, his initial reaction is an abrupt, rude awakening. After months of hard toil, it immediately becomes clear to him that what he has done ought not be. It is too hideous, it is too perfect. He fails then, and of course for the remainder of the book, to either accept or destroy the monster.



Frankenstein is a tragic character. While he is responsible for much of what passes it cannot be said it was ever a fully conscious effort, as the act of creation seems to have been solemnly a manic obsession with achievement. Partially to prove to himself, partially to prove to the world, partially to simply have done it. In this, I seem to see an interesting correlation with an experience I personally had with a select group of games.



The similarity is thus. Let us see games as a combination of fiction and rule-sets. The fiction may give us a cause, the rule-set may give us means. Part of the common way of reading games is of course to simultaneously believe in the fiction and the rule-set, even though the two often are at odds, or at least uncorrelated. But this is not inconceivably different from real life. In daily life we have a hard, physical world of consequence, and our subjective (experiential, social, moral, &c) reality, which gives meaning to it. Sometimes these even are at odds. To pretend the world is purely objective is to ignore life, to pretend the world is purely subjective is to ignore sense. Even so, in both games and daily life the rules can be optimised in their own right while we ignore other concerns. We can finish a level faster, we can make a car which goes faster, we can make a machine which makes cars faster, we can speedrun a game.

I take the true moment of shock for Frankenstein to be when he, obsessed with working out the physical world, his suspension of subjectivity fails him, as it were, immediately realising the social and moral reality of his actions. This is analogue to playing a game to win, optimising one’s methods, and suddenly realising that what one has been doing is utterly horrendous in the fictional reality of the game.



A small amusing game to reference this to initially is Infinifactory. In Infinifactory the player is (comically) abducted by extraterrestrials and put to work to build entirely automated factories. While initially the factories mostly consist of transportation belts they quickly become more demanding and force the player to find ways to put together complex objects. After finishing sufficient objects the game shows the player a figure to indicate how fast his factory is, to wit, how much time it takes to produce an object. Eager players are wont to want to drive this figure down to the absolute minimum (which by itself has created a little on-line community of delightful obsessives all aiming to be the first to reach the absolute optimal form). Meantime, the fiction of the game, showing the troubled reality of abducted people whose only existence seems to be designing factories, slowly reveals what these factories are meant to do. Initially they may build a simple forklift truck, eventually the player is helping a seemingly aggressive species create guided missiles and tanks.

Of course to the obsessive player the fiction is all very poignant and all, but she has already thought to have found a method to reduce a few steps in the production process, thereby modestly improving her score.

In this I feel I can describe a form of moment of playing at Frankenstein. After long and arduous toil, one reaches a form of factory which can scarcely be improved. All the space available is utilized, small parts move to double-use space, or spring out of the way to allow other parts to take a slightly shorter route. As one puts it into motion, various conveyor belts move objects, arms move in to weld them together, things are lifted, turned, welded to other things, all in one smooth flow.

The game, as an optimisation problem, has been solved to what one thinks the best possible. The first item rolls out of production line into the designated target zone. Then another, and another. If the factory produces ten, that is considered a success. Effortlessly, it does. And so ten tanks, with many more to come, roll off the production line as fast as their construction materials can be delivered. In that moment, when the obsession with the tiny details of the factory suddenly cools off, the fiction rushes back in. You have created a factory which soullessly creates machines of war. When you leave and solve some other problem, it will still continue to produce.

You have created a means of production bereft of common hands, of conscious thought, of responsibility. Perhaps this ought not exist. Perhaps you ought destroy it.



A more serious game (and in the opinion of this author a very significant game indeed) which has a similar event is the Brian Reynolds-designed Alpha Centauri. In Alpha Centauri, humanity, after the desparations of the wars and ecological disasters of the 21st century, builds a space-faring colony ship, the Unity, as a hope for establishing humanity on the planet ‘Chiron’ in the Alpha Centauri system. Tragically, as they arrive the captain is murdered; and a reactor malfunction has the crew split in “seven distinct factions, divided not by nationality, but by ideology, and their vision for the new world.” The factions all land in separate locations on the planet, unknown to one-another. They are forced to make an inhospitable land their own, they are striving to live according to their own ideals, they are slowly expanding and growing in means.

This sets up a game which much follows the Civilization set of behaviour: explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. Unlike Civilisation, the factions have distinct reasons for eventually succumbing to open warfare; the ultra-capitalist Morganites quickly come to disagreements with the dreamy green Gaians; while a faction which claims to be the U.N. (it is disputable) is quickly at odds with the Hive, a faction seeking to move beyond individuality. All this is made all the more tragic by a hostile world in which the ‘mind worms’ terrorise populations and cause badly defended cities to self-annihilate.

To survive initially is a testament to your endurance, to even have your cities grow is troublesome. The dry voice-over which announces the discovery of even more ‘indigenous life-forms’ makes you claw at your eyes in despair.

All this is set to a foreboding science fiction text which combines quotes from the fictional faction leaders (and followers) with citations from philosophers and authors of our real-world history. The curious effect is that a form of credibility is given to the fictional quotes, and an alien form of poignancy to the genuine quotes. Making an advancement in social psychology is greeted with Republic’s wish to “find a better way than office-holding for your rules.” Producing ‘recycling tanks’ in a city, in-game simply boosting its statistics, leads to a wry quote from the Hive’s leader, citing that “it is every citizen’s final duty to go into the tanks, and become one with all the people.”

Finishing a miracle in the Civilization games (generally providing some unique ability for your people, that is to say, an improvement in statistics) was always accompanied by some satisfying video—Alpha Centauri has a few appeasing videos, but mostly shows the reality of these miracles in videos which range from unsettling (the Hive’s citizens slowly dancing in trance-like unison after completing “The Ascetic Virtues”) to outright terrifying (the “Dream Twister” showing the effects of telepathic warfare).

The boon to your faction is always paid for by your soul. The game’s use of citation and videos sheds some light on the living conditions and ideologies of the people and the ways in which they change. Given their desperation, attitudes to recycling humans may alter; given enduring hardship, populations may become ascetic in nature. But, of course, to the optimising player, there is no question but to make these. A bio-lab increases the statistics on certain units, after all.

As time goes on, the game continues to escalate in the duality between increasing statistics and the small cost of some new social horror. Before long the player can build units strong enough to defeat native life and so-called formers to create farms and mines. All this requires severe leaps in technology, from synthetic fossil fuels to genetic engineering, from lasers to ‘shard’ weapons, from energy markets to pseudo-atomic bombs.

Over time the power of the player is titanic compared to their initial state. The formers can now create mountains, drill to aquifers and build improvements which change rainfall patterns, irrevocably changing the shape of the map. Ships spread over the oceans, aeroplanes fill the sky, the ecologically disastrous automatic harvesters crawl the lands and satellites fly up in masses to fill space with botany bays, solar collectors and lunar mining colonies. Dozens upon dozens of cities glimmer on the previously uninhabitable lands. Where war occurs it is large, deadly and massive, with atrocities easily committed for the sake of odds.

The technology thus driven to enables cloning, virtual worlds, self-aware machines, biological lubricants, nanotechnology, the crafting neurological interfaces between mind and machine.

There comes a point in the game where the vast amount of cities, the vast amount of conflicts and the rapid pace of new technology becomes overwhelming. So many new things could be built that by the time one is complete it has become obsolete. The satellites create such an influx of energy, food and minerals that things which previously took years now are done in one turn; yet there is so much to build it never seems to help.

The new moral hurdles can hardly be passed before some new technology creates a new philosophical tragedy. Where the leader of the Believer faction initially had the most conservative, regressive quotes, she now seems like a lone voice of reason, though seemingly teetering at the edge of full mania, when she in the face of it all can only say “we must dissent.”

It is too late in the game for dissension or close examination of ethics, however. To hold back from the march of progress is to lose in any new conflict. And what could the player possibly do, faced with a map of cities needing organisation, armies needing orders, other factions ruthlessly attacking her belongings, and not least of all the effects of climate change creating new problems? Only optimisation remains.

Now that this world exists, there is only one solution to the problem: just finish the game and have it end. Or, really, focus on the optimisation of small factors and allow yourself to perpetuate a world of horrors. And for all your initial beliefs, at this point in the game, it is not such a problem to destroy the U.N., if they became a nuisance. And since the Gaians will not stop attacking you, say, you might as well wipe them out. One of the most troubling miracle videos shows a city automated to such a degree that a man vandalising a wall (scribbling this “we must dissent”) is found, locked in an alley and executed without human intervention. His ash silhouette is automatically erased.



The society you have created has become a monster, living its own life, with you merely a worker to it. The questions force themselves through your simple desires to win: why did I build all of this? Why was all this technology developed? Why was I so happy when small statistics increased? Yet now that it is here: what can I do? Perhaps your society simply ought not be. It is too hideous. It is too perfect.

Like Victor it is impossible to find a way back from this situation.

To win by warfare means to eradicate all forms of disagreement with your faction’s ideology— humanity will lose its diversity of ideology.

Worse, the scientific victory means shedding what is left of humanity and becoming one in something vast and unknowable. To leave behind the last of what you know is, at this point, a relief. Perhaps we are going beyond the veil - but the endless stress will end.

Like Victor, the only way to win, in the end, is to kill the monster or to give up on life.

In this way both Infinifactory and Alpha Centauri touch upon a curious effect in games: that is, the effects of allowing yourself to focus on small-scale optimisation and not noticing, until it is too late, the monster you have created.

But I do feel I have to stress it is not quite so simple that it could be achieved simply by loading the dice. As far as I can tell there are two important factors which are required to have such an effect in a game:



Firstly, the game needs to have a set of mechanics which by themselves are enticing enough to ‘minmax’ and thereby give way to something larger than the sum of its parts. It cannot simply be part of a narrative that the monster is created; after all, the experience is as-if we are Victor, not as-if we are reading about Victor. The horror of Victor is the single act of creation out of obsession. As such, the mechanics in a perverse way need to be able to not have the moment occur. If any player is meant to see the moment happen, it is not an act out of obsession but simply a reality. Not every player will play at being Frankenstein; to volunteer to be Frankenstein is defeating the purpose of playing him. We might say (speaking with Essay the First) that in the hypersurface of the game, there must be a distinct path where mechanics (and fiction) lead to this moment, separate from the ‘normal’ playing of the game.

Secondly, the narrative of the game needs to set up the ethical questions. Victor is not haunted by the ‘physical reality’ of the monster, so to say, but by the ‘social reaction’. A regular game of Civilization does not produce the same effect because the fiction of the game is somewhat colonialist, and adding to that it rarely bemoans the progress of victory. In Civilization, in the end, progression is a familiar recognised ‘oh we did that yes, we got better’, rather than a terrifying step into the unknown. (It might be said that changes a little when the atomic age is reached; but consider that that might be a natural reaction to that era in general.)

Similarly, in FTL the player becomes increasingly powerful but never is a point reached where it is questioned whether that power is good, nor could it be said to have its own life. In an interesting contrast to Infinifactory, the game Factorio frames the creation of factories (admittedly at a far larger scale, too) as an optimistic, life-saving pursuit. The factory is in essence you, its only purpose is its survival. Through this it is not morally judged very harshly; one can for the sake of optimisation destroy stretches of forests and greens, but if the game does not give a piece of fiction it is up to the player to see the horror of it. We may surmise that the player needs to be confronted, like Victor, with the reality, not bring in an external reality judging the game world. The player needs to be suspending the ethical considerations for the sake of optimising the system, then suddenly fall through that form of denial.

I leave it to the reader to ask herself whether she has other games in which she played at Frankenstein, or whether such moments can be engineered more persistently than merely the moment of horrific discovery. I hope, at least, that the idea of it may contribute to the vocabulary of understanding games.



(Let it just be for me to add that Alpha Centauri was, of course, inspired by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom’s The Jesus Incident, which itself was a sequel to Herbert’s Destination: Void. In the later novel, the crew of a ship attempts to create an artificial lifeform when their ship malfunctions, but they struggle with the potential consequences. The chapters are all headed by citations, many of which from Shelley’s tormented novel.)