Violence in Missions

[alexanderson1993]

Violence of some form or another is built in to bridge simulators. Space is dangerous and it's often necessary to use force to protect oneself, at very least from debris, other times from hostile ships.

However, I don't want to encourage or glorify violence.

My brother wrote an interesting essay about violence in bridge simulator missions: https://www.brentjanderson.com/writing/violence-in-interactive-storytelling

So there's a balance: Not having some kind of defensive systems on a ship could be dangerous, and at very least limit the number of stations on a ship. And even if we remove torpedos and phasers, it's still possible to use probes, tractor beams, or the ship itself to perform acts of violence. I don't think limiting violence in the game is solved by changing the mechanics.

Which means if we want to promote non-violence, the story is the most powerful tool we can use. A few ideas:

• Write missions where there is no violence against intelligent lifeforms. A Cry from the Dark is an old Space Center mission where the crew has to rescue the inhabitants of a planet that is being bombarded by debris from a rogue black hole. The only thing the crew has to use weapons against is the debris itself, not any other ships. (Though there might be variations where the crew uses their weapons to disarm another ship without destroying it)
• Write missions where the use of weapons has no impact on the end-state. Intolerance features a very powerful enemy ship that is largely impervious to the player ship's weapons, so the crew using weapons has little impact.
• Include variations in missions where a crew can attempt a fully pacifist run, similar to Undertale. Completing a pacifist run of a mission will provide some kind of reward.

What other ideas do you have that can minimize the violence in missions while still providing interesting storylines and meaningful work for the Tactical/Weapons officer?

[brentjanderson]

Since you can't control the attitude of a crew (if you took all sharp pointy objects away, a sufficiently insistent crew would still find a way to employ violence), nonviolence on bridge sims can be broken into two dimensions that are controllable by game designers:

1. Inputs: What are the affordances of the tools or goals presented to the crew?
2. Outputs: How does the simulation react to choices, on a moral spectrum of violence?

Tool Inputs

Agnostic of story, you could run a ship without torpedos or phasers. While doable, that limits available tasks to crew members. Not only that, zapping asteroids is not of particular moral peril and can be a lot of fun.

So, I think the goal is to make it so the tools available to a crew are hard to hold in a violent way.

• Instead of torpedo casings, you have probe casings.
• Instead of making the default torpedo payload explosive, you have to file paperwork (a moral prescription of sorts) that justifies getting munitions out of an armory.
• Emergency overrides to load munitions without first writing a moral prescription may reduce NPC trust, or the crew loses points that affect long-term reputation or overall game score.

Offering tools that are hard to hold in an inherently violent way is the first step.

Narrative Outputs

Story writers are in control of the most important consequences stemming from violence. I would expect that narrative game state would change based on actions deemed as "violent". This bit is admittedly a bit squishy, but if players have a slate of choices in front of them, some of those choices may include post-conditions that modify some moral reputation score, or that inherently flag that a certain branch was taken in the narrative that opens/closes future options.

For example, if a ship shows up and you blindly open fire, the simulation needs to:

1. Track the deployment of entities from your ship
2. Track the consequences of those deployments (changes in ship health, near misses, entities pass through restricted zones or in proximity to other entities)
3. Incorporate that into narrative content and choices presented to players in a way that is coherent to the story

Simulation outputs

As noted before, there are non-narrative mechanics that could track violent actions, either logging events ("$playerShip deployed a thing that got too close for comfort/harmed this other entity") or flattening down to some moral reputation score that's easier to check. These simulation outputs would be deterministic mechanics, things like "If entity X that originated from $playerShip enters the proximity of entity Y, then inflict Z blamePoints on $playerShip".

Moral simulations are something I may need to reflect on further, but being able to key moral impact along a few dimensions ("Are we friends? How surprising is this event?") may unlock richer narrative potential.

Whatever the simulated output, it needs to be easily legible within the narrative engine, so that storywriting can be terse and say "If you employ violence, here are the obvious consequences" and the reactions are natural without being overly verbose.

Storytelling thoughts

Typical hero's journey stories are going to lean more on defeating some antagonistic force. Ursula K. Le Guin proposed "carrier bag fiction" as an alternative. This would feel very different from your classic mission structure, perhaps being less like Escape Velocity and more like Animal Crossing. I'm leaving that out of scope here, but the TTRPG Wanderhome might be some source material.

More notes here: https://brentjanderson.com/writing/nonviolence-and-mechanics-in-bridge-sims