This is a story I've recently come back to after having written the intro years ago. I still really like the introduction, but I'm not sure I know where to go. I've rewritten what comes after a few times, but it's a lot to tackle.

This was originally planned to be a short story for Here Be Monsters. If I do complete it, it may end up being on the long side of that format. Or perhaps I can find a way to establish a sci-fi universe in just a couple thousand words.

Anyway, here it is so far:

Remigrants

At first, space was filled with young people. It was the bold, the foolish, the restless that felt Earth was too constraining to really find yourself. It would be hard to blame them, then, for not keeping up proper records of what was going on at home. Certainly, many of them had that nostalgia of an emigrant, but did any of them bother to write more than a few wistful blog posts to be archived onto the ship computers? It seems the first travellers were unconcerned with where they came from, almost desperate in their attempts to establish themselves as the new humanity, one that was untethered from the nations of old and belonging only to their ship, or their colony, or perhaps nowhere at all. And this generation raised the next, the first humans that were born on other worlds, looking up at different suns. They were told of Earth, but I don't believe they understood it as an actual place. It was a land in the mists of history, a world of societies perpetually frozen at whatever time their parents left it.

It seems some wished to see their true homeworld, and made the dangerous and long journey back, but there were very few. After all, what discoveries could be found on a planet that had been painstakingly mapped for centuries? Most were finding ways to push themselves beyond the limits that even their parents had come up against.

A third and then fourth generation were borne to the star-faring humans. And, in the slapdash society of shipmates and survivalist colonies, there was little schooling, and almost no one became what would have been called a teacher. By the time I was growing up, the Earth was impossibly far-off and mystical. It could not really exist, we thought, not as our parents spoke of it. I think we would all have wanted to go there given the chance, but its location was in only the most archaic of databases. Even then, no one had bothered to map it to the new navigation systems. It wasn't quite a lost planet, but it was certainly hard to find.

All this, I suppose, is just a listing of excuses. Because, when the time came that it was imperative – absolutely essential – that we get back to Earth, we could not or would not. I wonder now, if it was because we were deeply afraid. What had become of the planet in our absence? And what would they think of us, the descendants of the young men and women that abandoned them?

-- From the journal of Anthony Ipswich

It's one of those last phrases there that has been repeated by the social-viruses since The Call. It was often paraphrased into “What has become of Earth? And what will they think of those who abandoned them?” It was a kind of anti-anthem to the Returners, whose bravado-tinted nostalgia was urging people to join their convoy back to Earth. But, even those that were willing to go back had been tainted by that crystallization in Ipswich's now-public journal – we'd already missed that boat. The goal was simply contain the damage before Earth's infected masses could follow us out and stumble upon our oldest cities.

The thought of Markhesh being bombarded by the un-spliced humans of Earth was enough to make my skin crawl. Some Returners were hoping to reason with them, but I was certain of what awaited them.

Once, I'd touched down to help some people out of a colony that was being overrun by an aggressive spore-thing. At first it was just one family, but then another came aboard. Even as I realized what was going on and rushed to lift off, more and more piled into the hold. I shouted to back away, but they were already past reason. They were just stampeding with the absolute terror of those on a dying planet. It is a special panic when you know that there is no place in the whole world where you can be safe. I started the engines while they were still clambering on the hull from the outside. The shockwave killed most of them instantly, I hoped, because that was better than the creeping demise of the spores.

People like that is all they would find in the Sol system. They would hear no reason. They would simply beach themselves upon the shores of Markhesh or Asp and spew their plague onto our people.

There were scientists working on a splice to protect us, but we knew that the Earthlings would have worked on that as well. And, having failed, would have made the disease nearly impervious to further attempts.

Others tried to determine the origin of it. The feeling was that it was no accidental creation, though whether it was made on Earth or another planet wasn't clear. But even studying the disease was a kind of concession to inaction. After all, unless you were prepared to go to Earth and get proper samples, how much headway were you going to make?

I took advantage in my own way, ferrying people from the baseworld of Asp to points further out. For two months, I spent every day in transit, never staying in port longer than it took to fuel up and take supplies. It was gruelling but lucrative. And, part of me felt that moving people away from the dangerous zones was all I could do. I was simply a transport ship. Some of my colleagues had signed on as Returners, but that was a one-way trip as far as I was concerned.

“Do you ever wonder what it will be like after the Earthlings hit Asp?” I asked Cassidy.

“I don't even know what it will be like when they get there. And I plan on being far away from Asp when that garbage rolls in.”

“Well, exactly. The only people getting off-planet are those with ships, and the rich people we're hauling. Imagine it, Cass, Trellis is going to be full of managers, business owners, and theory-cranks from the uni-collective. Who the fuck is going to feed them? Or build their homes?”

“Ha, can't say I'll be sorry to see a few of those Viva-Tech guys get their hands dirty for once.”

“I know what you mean, Cass, but if they don't get spread around -- hell, maybe even if they do -- they're going to drag the planets down just the same as the refugees. I get a feeling there won't be much reason to haul once that hits.”

“Oh, shut it. You're always waiting on the next thing that's going to ruin your business. You should keep a blog about it: “How to run a successful shipping company by being a total fucking pessimist.”

Firaxis' remake of the classic PC game XCOM was a huge title for me when it released in 2012. I was a big fan of the original game, and found the new version to be an incredibly fun spiritual sequel. There is no better way to experience the thrill and terror of an alien invasion.

It contains a reward loop that digs its hooks in, tense tactical battles, and a moderately deep strategic level. It does all of that stuff well. But what it does amazingly well is make character death an exciting part of playing.

Now, there is a caveat to all of this: Ironman Mode. This optional mode makes it so that you cannot reverse the choices you make by loading a previous save. You have only one save file, and it is continually auto-saving so that all decisions are final. I firmly believe that the game is at its best when played like this. You could, of course, play it like this without turning that mode on. But it's there because you'll want to revert a decision at some point. You will regret something when you play this game. Ironman makes you move on despite the regret.

And that's the crux of what I love about it. You feel like your choices matter. Your squad of soldiers from around the world is thrown into bizarre firefights with horrific aliens where lots of things can kill them. If you fall behind in the arms race with the aliens, they die. If you move them to risky positions on the battlefield, they die. If you don't know your enemy's capabilities, they die. Despite the random number generator the game uses to decide what hits or misses, the ball is almost always in your court. And, until several failures pile up, you live with your bad calls. A failed mission is a setback, but maybe one that you can fight back from. Maybe it was what you needed to rethink your strategy and renew your attack. It's both stressful and exhilarating.

It stands out against the vast majority of games in which the only way to progress is to succeed. In a standard single-player game like Uncharted, if you fail at a challenge, the game stops. It seems to make sense (why wouldn't you want to succeed at a challenge), but it creates a very flat experience. It creates a story in which the character always succeeds (since the deaths never happened in terms of the final game story) except where the designers of the game dictated some kind of setback.

Now, other strategy games do what XCOM does and have been for many years. But there is a difference between losing a unit of infantry in a Total War game and losing Jake Smith from Australia in XCOM. It goes to great lengths to make you care about the characters. Even though they can be replaced (apparently XCOM has no problem with recruitment), there is a feeling of loss each time a soldier dies. And the methods the game uses to foster that connection are pretty clever. Every soldier has a name (which you can change) and a nationality. They also gain new abilities, speak in a variety of voices, and (as of the Enemy Within expansion) are awarded medals. All of this helps establish them as a specific soldier as opposed to one more grunt on the front lines.

The Souls series (Demons' Souls, Dark Souls) also use this concept. Those games build failure into the game, making a death a part of the experience as opposed to a simple game over screen. I think it's one of many ways those games have found of creating an engaging narrative. But, in the interests of keeping this post manageable, I'll speak about those games later.

This creates a story that is much more varied. Sure, I was able to defeat the aliens in New York, but I lost Jean-Luc Lamy, the French support soldier that had been in every mission since the start of the game. And now the next mission isn't just another bug hunt outside a crashed UFO, but a shot at vengeance for Lamy's comrades.

This kind of player-created narrative (often called inferred narrative) is one of my favorite things in gaming. And while it would be possible in any game with random events, the emotional connection caused by the high stakes, personal investment, and humanization of game characters makes XCOM really excel at it.

So, go get some fine soldiers killed and enjoy the hell out of the game.

I think a lot about video games. One of my main purposes for this blog is to have a place where I can lay out critiques and thoughts on games. I want to discuss them in a way beyond the like/dislike conversations that you usually get amongst a group of friends (not that I don't love those too).

Often this will come out as a short essay. Sometimes it'll be a kind of review (though I don't think I'll be assigning points, stars, or buckets or whatever).

I tend to lag behind the big new releases, especially on console, so I won't be your source for breaking news. Mostly I'll be talking about games I've played as opposed to speculation on unreleased ones. I'd love to say that I'm not going to get swept up into the fervor around the latest trailer or Kickstarter for game X, but I'd hate to disappoint everyone. Occasionally I'll get hyped enough about an upcoming game to post about it here.

I imagine working in the games industry has influenced my view of games quite a bit. I started in out-sourced QA in 2006, continued on as a QA team lead at EA Montreal, and then started as a Writer/Narrative Designer (depends how fancy I want to sound) at Disney Interactive in 2013. I still feel like I'm just a fan, especially when I'm discussing them as I hope to here, but if I sound like some industry shill at some point, you can blame it on me being on the other side of the fence :)

Of all the different interests I'll be talking about on the blog, this is the one that is the hardest to introduce. Most people don't know what it is, but a lot of the readers of a gaming blog will. I'm going to err on the side of caution for now.

I'm tempted to launch into a history lesson on where Dungeons & Dragons came from and where it is now. Maybe even a discussion of all the things that fall under the umbrella of "tabletop role-playing game". But those are probably all posts on their own. I'll jump right to the big points and let you pick it up as we go.

For the uninitiated, tabletop RPGs are co-operative games where you play through a story in the role of a fictional character. There are rules that determine how challenges are overcome and how the world reacts to the characters. You also can't win or lose. If you threw improv theatre together with an in-depth board game, you might get the right idea.

If you're already familiar with all that, then you probably think RPGs are great. There are very few people I know that have actually played an RPG and don't enjoy it. The spontaneous creation of story mixed with exciting adventures and codified character building certainly sucked me in early. It may have also had something to do with my dad teaching me to play when I was young and impressionable. Either way, I was hooked from a young age and have been playing these games off and on since then.

I'll be posting my thoughts on new RPGs that come out, lessons learned from my own games, and maybe some home-brew creations as well. Plus, I'll point the way to some of the great RPG sites and podcasts that are out there. I tend to like learning new systems and I'm not one to dig in and choose an absolute favourite. I will say that the FATE System from Evil Hat has been a front-runner for a little while though.