Impressions: Fate of the World

Steerpike is many things, my friends: roguishly handsome. Devilishly charming. Effortlessly-groomed. Witty. Humble.

One thing he is not is well-disciplined. So though I did stick to my guns and refuse to pre-order Fate of the World on Halloween, it is me you’re dealing with… I bought it a few days later. Now, I still have an issue with this game costing £19.99 for the full version (that’s about $40-$50, depending on the exchange rate). Vic Davis of Cryptic Comet Games doesn’t charge commercial-off-the-shelf prices for his games, which when the day is done are quite similar to Fate of the World, only infinitely more sophisticated.

But Fate of the World is currently £9.99 for the pre-order, which gets you the beta, which is one scenario of five included in the full game. And since I have an iPhone app that can beep-boop me when exchange rates reach a certain predetermined point, I just told it to do so when the British Pound slipped into a valley. Thus I got Fate of the World for $16.

A strategy game, your role in Fate of the World is that of chief of the GEO, a new global organization put together hastily by world government, and granted immense authority to stop the specter of climate change. The scenario included in the beta, Oil Crisis, has you tasked with either slashing oil consumption by 90% or preventing a three-degree rise in global temperature before 2120.

To accomplish this, you deploy agents into regions of the world and play “cards” on them. Cards are essentially actions you can take, from encouraging the development of more advanced nuclear power options to funding black ops in a region in order to take down an anti-environment government. You don’t draw cards at random; your hand is based on what you’ve already done in each region and any immediate crises that threaten it. Thus you need to look at news reports, area demographics, and statistics like local unemployment, sickness, birth rate, and, of course,  emissions and energy dependence to make proper decisions.

Oil Crisis is all about the world’s hunger for the stuff, and assumes the (likely) possibility that there’s a finite amount of it on the earth, and we’re nearing a peak production. It’s a scramble to switch as much of the world as possible to alternatives before the oil runs out, the economy collapses, the ice caps melt, or worse.

It’s hard as f… it’s hard.

I’ve gotten a little closer with every game of Fate of the World, but I’ve never really gotten close. It’s a very stark reminder of the corner into which we’ve painted ourselves, and how difficult the solutions are likely to be.

For example, “Switch to Electric Vehicles” is an early card you get, playable at a cost of $50 billion per region, with a 5-15 year adoption time. Seems like a good way to reduce oil use!

Electric vehicles aren’t magic. They just use electricity instead of gas.

Where does electricity come from? The wall.

Where does the wall get its power?

From the power plant.

How do most power plants make electricity?

By burning coal.

So while the electric vehicle may seem like a delicious solution, in a vacuum all it really does is quintuple coal emissions, and when it comes to warming, coal is far, far worse than gasoline. And that’s when the big picture finally materializes and you begin to realize what you’re actually dealing with, because…

Because coal is not oil, and your objective is to cut down on oil. This is barely a taste of of the fiendish cruelty Fate of the World has in store.

What about biofuels, then? We’ve all heard of those. Corn- and soybean-driven cars and stuff. Yes! Soycars! Let’s do it!

People eat corn and soybeans, and if you divert too much of either to the inefficient production of equally inefficient biofuels, those people can starve. In fact, that’s been my traditional problem in most games of Fate of the World: things are going okay until the Biofuel Famines.

Meanwhile, you’re keeping a zillion other balls in the air. Koalas, Gray Whales, Kiwi Birds, Polar Bears, Walruses, Arctic Foxes, Some Stupid Porpoise that Goes Extinct In the First Turn No Matter What; as the GEO, you’re expected to save them.

You’re expected to provide physical protections against rising seawater, prediction and weather control tools (quantum computing and General AI becomes available in the 2070s) to defeat storms and other increasingly erratic weather. Bad weather brings plague, and you’re expected to fight the global pandemics.

Your reforms will cost jobs, and you’re expected to help with that. Global bans will damage economies, and you’re expected to repair it.

You’re expected to tolerate the austerity protests and riots, and keep an eye on global events unrelated to the climate.

You’ve been given a free hand to save the world, but you have to save the world while saving the world.

And so you do what you have to do to save the world.

Ultimately, the lesson is that the global ecosystem would recover pretty quickly if it weren’t for all the damn people.

Thus you stare into the abyss, because the abyss is the only option. You’ll find yourself starting wars, inserting special forces, assassinating opposition voices, crushing dissent, ignoring famines, and looking away from genocides, because it’s the only way. This game is, by design, incredibly bleak.

Each “End Turn” gives you a breakdown of various statistics: emissions, average temps, ocean acidity, hunger, regional opposition, world population—that latter being especially critical, because the more people die, the fewer there are to fuck up my plans for the planet. I am trying to save you, god dammit

It is (mostly) a free world, though, and regions can and do boot you if they’re unhappy with your decisions. You lose all progress and agents in regions where you’re banned, and can no longer play cards to affect them. You can only watch helplessly as they sink into oblivion. And, of course, enacting unpopular policies will cause backlash in regions you do control. Your agents start getting kidnapped and murdered, forcing you to hire increasingly costly replacements from a diminishing candidate pool (“Join the GEO and get murdered!” is a less effective recruitment strategy than you might think).

You have to play the political game to survive. My worst failure in Fate of the World was my first, when I tried to start with the most underprivileged regions. Things were going fantastic.

I stopped deforestation in the Amazon, I got China off its coal glut, I resurrected multiple African economies. I made the desert bloom. I saved the saltwater crocodile. I relocated (the people of) Micronesia!

Meanwhile, North America, Europe, Russia, China, and Japan (who were paying for most of it while getting none of the “benefits”) were blasting soot into the air at unprecedented rates. The temperature was rising. The so-called First World, stuck funding my efforts, had had enough. The whole thing collapsed by 2070.

So I tried the opposite. I ignored India, the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, and Africa. I focused on the industrialized world, doing all I could to bring the planet’s biggest polluters into line. I also taxed the bejeezus out of them for extra cash.

Things were going fantastic.

I slashed vehicle emissions and migrated entire continents away from coal in favor of clean, safe, efficient nuclear power. I instigated home-and-business greening efforts, boosted the use of solar and even invented and deployed a network of satellites inside the orbit of Mercury to collect more sunlight and beam it home as energy. I ran a number of successful ad campaigns to convince people our efforts were for the greater good.

I banned the mining of oil from Canadian tar sands, forbade the use of shale oil, instigated investments and job-sharing in first world regions tattered by my many reforms. Sure, the GEO was banned from operating in Africa, South Asia, Latin America, India, and the Middle East, but I’d intentionally ignored those regions.

Besides, bans are temporary things. They’d let me in later on. And they did.

Just around the time I was so low on money that I couldn’t even hire agents to deploy there, so one turn later they all banned me again, the swine.

It’s a fascinating game, despite being technically and mechanically a little behind the curve.

Fate of the World offers you an obscene amount of information, provided you know where to click to get at it. You can track emissions by type, you can track unemployment, sickness, population, and tons of other metrics. There’re charts and graphs sufficient to sate Microsoft Excel itself.

And it’s all important, because you have to act based on information. Choosing actions randomly is a recipe for doom. If a species is teetering on extinction, you’d better play a card to save it. If the water is contaminated, you’d better play a card to purify it. If the ocean’s getting acidic, you’d better sprinkle some Tums in there. If wildfires threaten…you get the idea.

Unfortunately the interface, while generally good, makes it difficult to compare things. At the risk of adding more gewgaws to the main display, I can’t help but think that a nice X-COM-like hub screen (after all, both games have a movable globe as their core layout) would help immensely. Fate of the World is full of graphs and charts about emissions and unemployment and pandas, all of which is super-important.

So it’s frustrating that there’s no good system to look back at what you’ve already done, and what it’s led to, either globally or by region. It sucks that you can’t track approval and opposition for multiple regions, and get detailed reports on why you’re gaining or losing popularity, on a single screen. This data’s all available, it’s just not coordinated. Which makes it very hard to follow and remember.

There’s no tech tree; no way to plot how Card X leads to Cards Y and Z. Cards show cost, time to complete, and expected outcome, but don’t explain potential risks or positives and negatives: “Deploy second-generation biofuels.” Okay. What’s a second-generation biofuel? How is it better (or worse) than first-generation biofuels? What impact will it have on regional agriculture and food production? The only way to find out is to do it.

Also, they desperately need to add more ways to raise money. Taxing and waiting are simply not enough. Given how heavily Fate of the World leans into moral ambiguity, I can imagine plenty of fundraising options from the distasteful to the outright horrifying.

Still, Fate of the World is incredibly intriguing and staggeringly difficult. It forces you to do terrible things, to weigh terrible alternatives, to essentially give up all humanity in pursuit of saving the same.

Its greatest strength, aside from the mind-bending complexity of its cause/effect network, is that it shows you—rather than telling you—the likely horrors of the next century, and the scrotum-pulverizing sacrifices we’ll all have to make to have even a chance at salvation. And it backs it all up with an avalanche of data. But it does a poor job putting that data into context, making it rather difficult to act upon.

Red Redemption Software initially did a version of this game as a piece of edutainment for the BBC website, and only after winning an award did they decide to make it a full-on game. I work in eLearning, so I know “good” gamification when I see it; this is as good as it gets. But it’s not an impartial educator. Fate of the World does have a message, and that message, so far as I can tell, is…we’re screwed.

For £9.99 you get the beta, the full game when it comes out, a “special” deck of cards for pre-orders, and a bunch of crap that doesn’t really interest anyone like videos on how actual climate change science was used to make this game as real as possible.

If this game is as real as possible, then we’re doomed. Because if handsome, charming, roguish Steerpike can’t solve the oil crisis, who can?

Pre-order Fate of the World at http://www.fateoftheworld.net/index.html

Email the author of this post at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.