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zdashamberTonight I played a Mike-invented oneshot RPG version of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. We were 6 people on the ship sent from Earth, and went though roughly the decisions faced in the game from leaving Earth until setting up a second city on Chiron. Much of the game was in how we would chose to throw weight behind various factions of SMAC, and thus the setup was different from the computer game's in that everyone stayed together on the ship and founded the first settlement together. (Re: Chiron, every one of the players agreed that "Planet" was a fucking idiotic name for the place, so we were apparently the 6 holdouts in the 1000 colonists who kept to using the formal name.)
1000 colonists. We heard that and several of us blanched. Mike assured us that there were plenty of other ova stored, so that was fine, up to the point where we realized that there were no artificial wombs and the cretins who designed the mission put in only 500 females. This triggered a simmering player character feminist movement among the three of us playing females (Mary, me, and Bernie). Together with Dave who played a genetic engineer (and could thus be lured some by the calling of the artificial womb), we nearly had the makings of our own real faction to fill a lack in the computer game. Alas, we didn't have enough of a grasp on where the rest of the inequities were, or proposals on what should be done about them.
It mostly didn't affect the game, being unplanned for; the only intersection of SMAC personalites with any ideas of gendered equality was when the capitalist guy lost the hope of our help after he failed to grasp that pregnancy was labor deserving of payment. For various reasons, most of us settled on a pairing of two wild-eyed radicals, the "let's all tinker with our genes so we can live amongst the xenofungus" guy and the "let's have an internet-based direct democracy/communism" guy. I think it's got interesting promise; the first guy's stuff just makes sense, and the second guy, well, hey, we were all the kinds of crazy romantics who made one-way trips to colonize unknown planets... New forms of government are nothing compared to that.
1000 colonists. We heard that and several of us blanched. Mike assured us that there were plenty of other ova stored, so that was fine, up to the point where we realized that there were no artificial wombs and the cretins who designed the mission put in only 500 females. This triggered a simmering player character feminist movement among the three of us playing females (Mary, me, and Bernie). Together with Dave who played a genetic engineer (and could thus be lured some by the calling of the artificial womb), we nearly had the makings of our own real faction to fill a lack in the computer game. Alas, we didn't have enough of a grasp on where the rest of the inequities were, or proposals on what should be done about them.
It mostly didn't affect the game, being unplanned for; the only intersection of SMAC personalites with any ideas of gendered equality was when the capitalist guy lost the hope of our help after he failed to grasp that pregnancy was labor deserving of payment. For various reasons, most of us settled on a pairing of two wild-eyed radicals, the "let's all tinker with our genes so we can live amongst the xenofungus" guy and the "let's have an internet-based direct democracy/communism" guy. I think it's got interesting promise; the first guy's stuff just makes sense, and the second guy, well, hey, we were all the kinds of crazy romantics who made one-way trips to colonize unknown planets... New forms of government are nothing compared to that.
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Date: 2006-03-09 10:29 pm (UTC)You asked the wrong guy to pay you to get pregnant. The CAPITALIST doesn't believe that things "deserve" payment. He thinks that people should pay for things that they want, which other people are willing to give them for that fee. At the time that you asked him, he wasn't particularly interested in you getting pregnant... And he certainly wasn't about to advocate a government program that subsidized pregnancy for all women. That's not exactly what laissez-faire capitalism is all about.
Now, if you'd put it to Lal, who's an old-school liberal type, he's exactly the kind of guy who thinks that the government ought to subsidize things that it conceives to be in the general good. If you'd put it to Aki Luttinen, who's hyper-rational, she'd have thought that incentivizing behaviour that one wants to see more of would be very rational to do. Yang or Zhakarov might've been persuaded as well, or even Deirdre, though I think she's probably a bit too hippy to really like the idea of putting a price on the miracle of childbirth, etc. etc.
In terms of weirdly sexist things in AC, by the way, I discovered when I was setting up for the game that the computer game tends to refer to male faction-leaders by their last names, and female faction-leaders by their first names. So, we have Deirdre, Miriam, and Aki (admittedly, in the game, it's Aki-Zeta-5, and she has a different background, but none-the-less, her original name is Aki Luttinen), while the males are exclusively referred to by their surnames. The only female faction-leader who's referred to by her surname is Roze (full name: Sinder Roze).
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Date: 2006-03-10 01:27 am (UTC)A vaguely related note is that the monetary system the game had was crap--energy credits? There's a reason we're not on the gold standard...