Comments on Jim Aikin’s SPAG Specifics article on Floatpoint

Jim Aikin wrote a review of “Floatpoint” in the most recent SPAG, which was, I think it’s safe to say, deeply negative. As a rule I don’t answer negative reviews: it looks defensive and lame, and one should, y’know, take one’s medicine and shaddup. Besides, Jim is a guy with a well-known peppery disposition, given to lively rants; I don’t imagine this was meant personally, and don’t take it so.

However, in this particular case the review ignores or misconstrues a lot of the text presented in the game, so I’d like to clarify a couple of things. Jim did email me some time ago and ask me a few questions; at the time it seemed clear to me that he hadn’t seen all the relevant text yet — I had the impression that he hadn’t finished playing — so I wrote back that I wasn’t going to answer because it might spoil things, since I thought he hadn’t found all the backstory that mattered yet. That was the end of our conversation on the point; possibly he took it to mean that I didn’t actually have an answer.

I’d also like to say, before I get into this, that I do hugely appreciate reviews of my work; they give me cause for plenty of thought, and affect the design of things I do afterward. And I think SPAG specifics is a terrific institution, because it lets reviewers roll up their sleeves and get at the meat of a game. There’s a kind of pre-emptive bit in Jim’s review asking

Before we get to the bad news, we need to digress briefly to ask a thorny question: To what extent should works of interactive fiction be held to the same standard as other works of fiction? To put it another way, how much slack are we cutting ourselves here? Given that writing IF places somewhat different demands and constraints on the author than conventional fiction, and given also that the IF community is tiny and not well supplied with Stephen Kings or Arthur C. Clarkes, is it reasonable to expect that an IF author will meet readers’ expectations in the realm of conventional story values, or would that be asking too much?

While this is, er, a bit aggressively phrased, I’d say: of course not. I haven’t read any Stephen King or, indeed, much Arthur C. Clarke, so I can’t speak to their merits, I think IF should be held to high standards, and that the development of those standards is the ongoing work of artists and critics alike. I have some doubts as to whether what constitutes good writing on the page is quite the same as good interactive design, as I’ve written elsewhere; it’s a bit telling that in those cases where a popular mainstream author wrote or contributed to IF, the results were interactively flawed (Mindwheel, Amnesia) or required major overhaul by the assistant who was actually designing the code (Hitchhiker’s) or both (Bureaucracy). But none of that pertains to fundamentals of plausibility in a serious work: of course we should look for well-thought-out narrative.

There are a few points that I’m not going to address, because I mostly want to talk about the approach of the review and the particular misreadings it introduces: Jim also takes exception to my description style and my delineation of characters, and on those things I think there’s no real defense needed or possible. We differ fairly significantly in our aesthetic sensibilities on these things, just judging from his comments on my work and my feelings about his. This is fine.

What follows is utterly spoilery, and it pretty much assumes you’ve both played the game and read the review. (An egotistical assumption, but hey, it’s my blog.)

Floatpoint is science fiction. Even within that genre, if it were a story whose main point was well-rounded characters, or fabulous settings, or fiendish puzzles, then lapses from technical plausibility would arguably be forgivable, or at least less burdensome. But the point of Floatpoint, as already noted, seems to be for the player to develop an understanding of what’s going on. In that situation, my brain kicks into gear.

Considered as “hard” SF, which is the genre to which it belongs,

Well: no, not really. Hard SF is *about* scientific issues; Floatpoint is more, erm, adjacent to them; in some cases quite loosely adjacent. It’s morality SF, I suppose I would say: it’s really much more about the clash of worldviews. More about that later.

All the same, it’s reasonable to pick apart the backstory, except that Jim gets several essential points wrong.

Twenty years or so prior to the events of the game, a terrible plague swept the Earth. We’re told it caused “[b]illions of deaths…; revolutions and crumbling infrastructure; the regress of technology.” How technology can regress is rather a mystery, if you think about it. Presumably technological knowledge would still exist. The thing that could plausibly regress would be the resources needed to put the knowledge to effective use.

Which is indeed what happened.

We also learn that some survivors of the plague need to take regular injections. Possibly they need a second medication that is never mentioned elsewhere in the game, or possibly “vaccine” is just a poor choice of terminology.

This isn’t foregrounded, but yes, they need a second medication to deal with pain, weakness, and shakes brought on by nerve damage in the plague.

So the idea is, the diplomat (i.e., you) is supposed to work out a deal with the Aleheartians in which they will evacuate their freezing planet and relocate to Africa, which has been conveniently denuded of its population by the plague. On arrival in Africa, in exchange for having been rescued, they will use their advanced bio-engineering skills to produce mass quantities of cheap vaccine, thereby safeguarding Earth against a recurrence of the plague.

Never mind that the plague is not rampaging at the moment, which robs the plot of any urgency. I’m more concerned about how the Earthians are planning to evacuate two hundred thirty-seven MILLION Aleheartians across interstellar space, build new settlements for them in Africa, and feed them during the months after the emigration, until their first crops are ready to harvest.

As one should be, because this is exactly the point. Earth doesn’t need the Aleheart colonists back to cure the plague; it needs them (or wants them) because it’s become clear to High Command that the Luddite, anti-biomed-research philosophy adopted over the last centuries has left Earth unprepared against serious dangers. Having the vaccine produced better and faster would be a nice perk given the lack of resources back home, but it’s not the only issue. And then, too, some of HC are genuinely concerned about not having these guys all die out.

Conversation with Pamela contains the exchange

She slips the disk into her handheld computer. ‘I have a preliminary model set up here. It looks as though…’

She stops. ‘That can’t be right. It’s saying most of the surface will be uninhabitable in fifteen or sixteen years. Here, look.’ She shows you a chart whose exact significance is unclear, but all the lines are steeply declining. ‘I thought High Command anticipated a stepped evacuation over several decades.’

This corresponds with what Kruger told you, certainly. More ships need to be fabricated, pilots trained, goods packed, landing sites built on Earth, public relations smoothed, China placated at least enough not to blow the incoming ships out of the sky. The work of years. Even if you started tomorrow afternoon, it’s not clear how you could possibly get the whole population clear of Aleheart in that little time.

Jim apparently reads this as meaning that ships need to be fabricated on Earth. I can see how he gets this, I guess, but it wasn’t my intention, and is indeed preposterous: the Aleheart colonists have the resources and the technology to build interstellar FTL ships, while the thoroughly crumbled command on Earth can barely put together enough people to man the dock where their shuttles land, as an early passage makes clear. The same bit of dialogue also shows that the Earth government was seeing this evacuation as a process of many decades. There are some pointers toward the Aleheart-based space program elsewhere: several computer entries discuss the fact that Aleheart sent a first-contact vessel to Earth, rather than vice versa, after a long disruption of communication, and there’s a line — admittedly off-hand — that makes it clear the pilot of your vessel was an Aleheart native:

Your assignment was sudden, and you have only the phrases you learned on the voyage by skulking outside the engine room. You are therefore restricted to a) insulting your listener’s parentage, diet, and sexual practices, or b) suggesting that he is damaged in the antigravitic propulsion unit.

(I know Aikin saw this, at least, because he mentions the line specifically. Perhaps he didn’t see it as meaningful.)

What the dialogue with Pam also indicates (or was meant to indicate) is that the people on Aleheart have been lying and that there is no realistic prospect of getting everyone off the planet — or even most of them. They’re planning a massive triage, selecting for the best and ditching everyone who isn’t an easy transplant to Earth. The ones left behind may survive or not, or may be killed — but from the point of view of those leaving, it doesn’t matter. What’s more, this is standard operating procedure for the colony: change to survive, and kill what you can’t change. It dictates their genetic practices, their flushing of infants that aren’t promising, their willingness to vote out of office anyone who isn’t performing to specifications. It goes all the way back to the first crisis on the planet, when the colony lost contact with home: they didn’t have quite enough foodstuffs, so they engineered as many people as possible to survive on minimal food and killed the rest so they wouldn’t use up all the rations. (The full explanation of this takes a little digging to get at, but it’s not impossible.) It’s very much a community-survives, individuals-have-no-inherent-value philosophy

But they know that this isn’t necessarily going to wash with the attitudes back on good old Earth, so they try to cover it as much as they can when Earth people are around.

At the same time, the longer you take to make a decision, the more colonists are going to have to die, because the less time there will be to do anything at all. That’s where the urgency is — but it’s an urgency the colonists feel more strongly than HC does. This is why HC has largely been faffing around; why they’ve sent several ambassadors without coming to a final conclusion; why the colonists are under such growing stress and are looking at changing their own leadership in the hopes of pushing Earth to a conclusion. Without, of course, ever explaining why they need the conclusion instantly. This also provides a bit of explanation — well…

Back to Aikin:

In one of the optional endings, Short gives us to understand that these folks obviously won’t fare well in Africa, so they won’t be evacuated. They seem to be depressed about this fact.

How about shaving off their body hair? How about depilatories? Or — hey, here’s a thought — how about using some of that advanced bio-science to get rid of the body hair?

(The modifications go beyond additional hairiness, too.)

This is not an off-the-wall idea, because the hair is clearly artificial. It isn’t the result of evolutionary adaptation, because the impending ice age is a recent development. It can’t even be the result of genetic manipulation of eggs and sperm in order to give the next generation of human colonists an edge against the cold weather, because the intro of the story strongly hints that the impending ice age became a problem less than 20 years ago: “It would have been more convenient if they had had this crisis twenty years ago, but Earth can still use it.”

Again: this is a line in the PC’s head, and spoken in ignorance at the time. It would have been useful to Earth if Aleheart had made contact back then. They didn’t — but the whole process of trying to resolve the ice age has been going on for longer, as gradually becomes evident.

In the center of the museum — a one-room museum — is a display case. In spite of its eminent place in a nearly empty room, it has been given as little physical description as the tusk. The case contains only one object: a pink card. Here is the description of the card: “The pink card appears to say ‘cure/serum fatal-sickness primitive borrowed — research center room 58 — card-that-grants-access.’”

This is odd in several ways. First, what is something as humdrum as an access card to a local research center doing in a museum devoted to Earth culture? Second, the instructions the diplomat has received from the High Command (which is to say, the instructions the player has received from the author) include the following: “acquire vaccine from the Museum.” How the High Command, which is back on Earth, knew the card would be in the museum is never explained — but yet, the HC got it wrong, because the vaccine isn’t in the museum.

Everything in the museum, such as it is, was recently sent from Earth, on ships that we know have restricted cargo limits, at least as far as fripperies are concerned. HC knows what’s there, because HC sent it. The Aleheart colonists borrowed the vaccine to do experiments with — mostly to see how easily they could replicate it quickly and in quantity — so they left a note to that effect, along with a way to retrieve it if anyone needs it. I suppose it’s possible this struck some people as cryptic, in which case I suppose I can work on buffing it up a bit.

Jim goes on:

There’s more to the story than this — linguistic difficulties that force you to converse with the locals using symbolic social gestures, a departing Earth ambassador who has had some kind of spat with the local authorities, a meeting
with a local dignitary at which an important symbolic gift is to be presented, messages from your boss and girlfriend back on Earth that arrive from time to time in the communications room, a handheld computer and local technologies that fill in the background information, and so on.

Nyrm. Again, some of this is true, but lots of it isn’t. Valenti isn’t called home because of his troubles with the colonists, but because Kruger doesn’t trust him any more. Jane is *not* your girlfriend, and the game goes out of its way to point out how weirded out you are by thinking you might have feelings for her, maybe, sort of, when you missed her on your voyage. And it’s not just your linguistic difficulties that require symbolic social gestures as a replacement: Valenti spoke their language fluently and would nonetheless have had to go through the same procedures, because that’s how they do major social contracts on this planet. And Liam, like just about everyone else you meet, starts the game by concealing the extent of his understanding of Earth life, language, and culture.

Elsewhere Jim cites Kruger’s off-hand comment, “they’re losing climate control” — but this is, indeed, an off the cuff comment by someone who doesn’t know the situation on the ground at all well. Here we get into territory that I admit I may have miscalculated, but it’s not quite right to say I didn’t think it through at all. Aleheart was originally only very minimally terraformed, as it was surprisingly close to Earth normal; the atmosphere seeded with volatiles in the same collision that caused the planetary rings. The colony has never had a soletta, a mirror directing extra sunlight on the planet’s surface; they didn’t need one to start with, and they haven’t built one recently because the amount of ring-junk and constant meteoric decay in the atmosphere would disrupt it too much. (I admit I haven’t worked out figures for this, so maybe there are orbits in which one could plausibly put such an object that would keep it out of the way of decay from the ring system, but it struck me as potentially unworkable, so I decided not to raise the possibility in the game at all; it seemed a distraction rather than a healthy reinforcement of the plot.) In recent times the colonists have made some attempts to cover the larger ice fields with blackening substances in order to lower the albedo (hence the black strata in the glacier you see in the first room).

Jim also complains of the fact that Aleheart is still accessible at all (though mostly denuded of inhabitants and with many of its buildings ruined and under ice) when global calamity is so close. My rationalization is that the climate is at a kind of wild tipping point: the planet is at a low point in its volcanic activity, weather patterns are changing. Now things are about to go from “really bad” to “beyond beyond really bad” in the winters, making agriculture unsustainable and raising the energy costs of survival too high to meet. The reason for the especially dire winter temperature swings is the planet’s ring system: when the planet is tilted at the wrong angle to the sun, the rings heavily filter sunlight, making winters very, very much darker than summers. There are some remarks in the game, in descriptions and elsewhere, indicating this much; it may be a miscalculation but it is not entirely unsupported in the game text.

Now: many of these points are made less forcefully than others, because Floatpoint rather riskily starts with a misinformed player character, lets other characters make deceitful or misinformed comments all over the place (after all, no one has the whole truth), and allows the player not to encounter quite a lot of the backstory-productive elements. It also gives only the vaguest indications of background issues like the constant meteor fallout (though if you hang around outside after dark you should see this) and the ice-cap coverage (not, I think, actually explained other than by the physical evidence, whose significance may not be at all obvious). So yes, some of Jim’s comments probably derive from things I designed insufficiently clearly.

I do accept the criticism that it’s a bit odd from a game-play perspective the restrictions I put on Liam’s communication patterns; this, and the pacing, are things I mean to expand in rev. 2, and the main reason that this is a non-trivial undertaking. It’s evident from player comments that people want much more time with the planet to get to understand these sorts of issues; so in a sense, though many of Jim’s specific gripes misread the text or miss hints in passages I know he read, they may indicate that I’m not coaching the player through enough of it. I think. There are also a few points where he seems to have just flatly misunderstood sentences, which also happens. We’re all human.

What Jim doesn’t talk about, astonishingly, is the one place where I did take a wild, unsupported leap into the realm of fantasy. Maybe he never got to this part of the backstory, or maybe he just thought it was covered by a Grand Implausibility License that allows for lies about physics but not lies about economics.

But just for the record, here’s the bad bit, from an article on the colony:

Sometime after Aleheart Colony was established, it lost all contact with Earth, in the so-called Separation. The colony was picked up again only two years ago, orbiting a star in the wrong place, and so much changed that at first contact Earth-command thought it had heard from humanoid aliens.

Also in the backstory but not really emphasized too hard is the time differential: a much greater period of time passed on Aleheart than passed on Earth during the separation of the planets. Now this stuff, this is nuts. It’s possible to get time dilation effects if someone accelerates away and back again, but in this case it should be the Earth that accelerated, in order to have less time pass; how did that happen? When? Why? How in the heck did Aleheart jump suns at the same time, or are our stellar maps just that totally wrong?

In short, whuh?

There’s no explanation of it, or attempt at explanation. In his diary, Valenti speculates that

If you ask me, the separation was the result of some kind of boneheaded physics experiment they did themselves. Who knows? Of course they wouldn’t say, if so. But where do they get the floatpoints from anyway? Collective act of will so they’d never have to touch anything ever again?

…but in fact it becomes clear that they didn’t do it themselves and have no idea how it happened.

There are some seriously underexplained physical forces in the universe here, and though one could try to make up a lot of nonsense about black holes and antimatter and god knows what, Floatpoint doesn’t try: it puts this all firmly in the category of “their technology, not ours”. But I’m happy to admit it makes no sense — because this isn’t hard SF. I tried, where possible, to do some research to support the plausibility of the whole thing, but the fundamental determining factors in this universe are moral and thematic, rather than scientific: distance and proximity, attraction and repulsion of the strange; truth and lies, compassion and justice. The antigravity, FTL travel and communication, the Separation and the first contact, are physical manifestations of a social and cultural problem: that we love and desire and fear and hate the strange.

One can argue that if you have to explain this kind of thing about your work, then the work failed, and that’s quite likely true. But it failed for reasons different from the one Jim points out.

There. You’re not reading any more, but I feel a little better.