Dave's Hybrid Rainbow

Is Dave's latest effort, Hybrid Rainbow, a political game? That's the category in which it was entered for the inaugural Video Games of Merit awards to be given at the New Yorker Ideas Festival. (Sadly the VGMs have been overshadowed by the New Yorker's decision to invite and then disinvite Steve Bannon to the festival. Bannon had no role in selecting the finalists for the VGMs.)

In a sense Hybrid Rainbow is free of politics. In the game, the player runs an engineering company hired to design various exotic structures on alien planets. Functionally the game works much like Kerbal Space Program, except that the engineering is terrestrial and generally conducted on a much larger scale. One of my favorite assignments required me to build tracks for a bullet train along the entire equator of a large planet—I had to build bridges to scale valleys and tunnels to go through mountains, and I ended up using a long string of dirigibles to lift the tracks above a vast ocean. Unfortunately it turns out the game's weather simulator is fairly realistic, so I won't be doing any more projects for that planet.

Throughout all of this, the player has very little choice of what to build. Assignments are put out to bid and the player tries to win them. There is no way to influence the society's priorities. For this reason, critics have argued that the game isn't political at all. Or if it is political, it envisions politics as a technocratic exercise, the solving of optimization problems.

I think this criticism is unfair, or at least incomplete. What it ignores is the way that the game forces the player to observe and participate in the sad trajectory of planetary civilization. At the beginning a given planet, in the first flush of economic success, tends to fund projects of varying degrees of frivolity (such as my ill-fated bullet train). But over time, planets fall into political and economic dysfunction. Environmental problems mount, and more and more resources have to be spent furiously trying to lift the biggest cities above the rising waters, or protecting citizens from an increasingly toxic atmosphere.

And it is at this point that the game can be seen as a political one. The player still doesn't have any power to affect the political choices that planets make, but the player is an involuntary witness to a bleaker and bleaker struggle over planetary resources. By the time a planet has descended into environmental disaster, often the only paying clients are hyper-wealthy private citizens willing to spend vast sums to preserve their luxurious lifestyles at the expense of the rest of the planet. Even in the best-case scenario, where a reasonably free and democratic government remains in control of resource allocation, the hard reality is that only so many cities can be propped up, only so many domes can be paid for. The fate of most democratic planets is to turn to increasingly desperate engineering projects as most of their cities sink beneath the waves.

I feel somewhat embarrassed admitting that this tragedy is also the most visually appealing part of Hybrid Rainbow. After a continent has been submerged, you can still make out its shape just beneath the water, the light blue outline set against the deep blue of the old ocean, swirls of bright clouds swelling over the warm water and then expending themselves over the cold impassive oceans. The violence of the initial onslaught of waves is long over, and only a tranquil patch of shallow sea remains. Here, where the water is a bit darker, is the deep canyon I built a highway through. Over there, you can still see the ghostly shape of the titanic arch that I built over a long-dead city. Coral grows over the financial district where I built a monumental tower, topped with an aluminum statue now cloaked in seaweed.

But little remains of the rich, vibrant society that paid for all those projects. A few floating platforms remain, powered by the sun, stolidly paddling away from huge blooms of colorful toxic algae. They can't afford my services anymore, but I pad my bids on newer, richer planets and use the profits to keep their machines running. As long as I have work, they'll have a shot at survival and, who knows, maybe some kind of renaissance centuries down the line.