Introduction
I played Half Earth Socialism the game last night with two friends and have written out my UI criticisms below.
I will first commend the authors in an amazingly ambitious game scope. Their book, 800 Seeds/830 Unsorted Biblio/Half-Earth Socialism, is my favorite book I've read in the past year.
My critique only seeks to further their project which I see has a few aims:
- Educate on trade-offs between different forms of energy infrastructure
- Communicate the viability of planning within an economic culture dominated by free-market ideology
- Offer a "game as simulation" thesis in a world where small-scale planning or democratic planning might be a reality (such as in the vision outlined in their book)
The game is complex and I'd like to do a few more play throughs to understand the intended system relationships and game mechanics before drawing more conclusive judgments. However, I believe first play-throughs are an important testing ground for any game or technical system, as it exposes usability and comprehension errors which would be present in a general population. As someone who has read their book and who possesses an intermediate-to-strong understanding of the concepts in the game (college-level environmentalist bibliography, a handful of environmental projects under my belt), I still had a lot of challenges understanding the game.
Analysis
Game play: Tutorial
The tutorial section was too deep
The game introduces a tutorial that is pretty much the full game experience, rather than give you an overview of the games systems and some on-ramps to learning (simple tasks to achieve).
Initial misunderstandings
Overall, the tutorial section explainer left me confused on first go-around. I feared the big red "go" button because I didn't know what happens when you hit go. I didn't understand how long these epochs were within the timescale of the game.
Recommendations
- This section could be simplified by having less choices to begin with.
- Alternatively, rather than start the game with "pre-history" of the revolution, perhaps begin the game as a story/tutorial where players are given limited choices where we can see how their choices went wrong to produce the current conditions where you start the game. (Imagine you could choose between investments but all of them are politically infeasible, or have an epoch where all you do is change the resource allocation away incrementally) It could introduce the mechanics of the game in a very limited scope and serve to move the narrative along.
Game play: Planning Phase
Choosing between alternative investments had opaque relationships
- There's a color-based categorization of each card that wasn't clear on first play-through
- The information design was confusing creating opaque relationships between different technologies and policies. Why not use a civ-like or RPG-like interface with an actual tree diagram?
- When spending points you bring in the delivery date of investments in infrastructure, research, policy. However each delivery date was posted on the card itself. It would be great to see a timeline of when things are expected to come in (like a gantt chart).
Investment Tab
Political resource allocations were broken down with a logic that indicated a complex system with efforts to make it simple for the user (such as breaking down into categories such as infrastructure, research, and policies).
Some issues I found with the tab include:
- Campaigns (Meatless Monday) didn't seem like infrastructure.
- It wasn't clear why policies could be developed "on the spot" since cultural trends tend to lead policy changes, there's often a long lag time to develop and implement policy.
- Interaction design to increment resource allocation was unclear
- Spending points UI (sliding card up/down) is confusing and used the physical card metaphor, spatial metaphor, rather than an interaction pattern made for screens
- There was some glitches in the implementation, making it hard to slide sometimes.
- Type was too small in places.
- I liked being able to read all descriptions at once (flavor text) instead of one at a time. Flipping the card to reveal flavor text seemed like a wasted opportunity
Production Tab
Production tabs were confusing with regard to current "burn rate" of your civil society
- Exposing the costs of your current society reveal an even smaller interface with more bar graphs? Maddening!
- Choosing an energy production source was confusing with regards to tradeoffs and impacts. There was a text at the bottom of the screen that seemed to be created as a last-minute addition describing the impacts to overall happiness
Other observations
- Energy Fuel distinction odd or unclear to me as a lay person
- Bar graph blocks were either green or blue and were confusing in this allocation system. Further confused by the red blocks (warning you were depleting critical earth systems), and the colored icons.
World map
I have no observations about this as my planning party didn't interact with that tab and found it rather useless. But I plan to go back and see how it was intended to be used within the overall system
Game design
Card metaphor imposed unnecessary constraints that a large screen canvas
The card metaphor created a spatial constraint and implied some interaction design paradigms that didn't seem necessary at times. Flipping the card to reveal flavor text seemed like a waste of space; why not zoom in and use the affordances of a screen-based game? It feels like the game was designed as a card game initially and then glommed onto a digital interface.
Grand strategy lacked narrative coherence
There was a lack of narrative coherence in what strategy the player pursued. You could build in contradictory strategies with no seeming consequence. Perhaps this could be ameliorated by a mechanic such as what is employed by some strategy and RPG games where you "play as" someone, a class perhaps, with different approaches to winning the game.
Calculating trade-offs was difficult and noisy
Conversion rates require complex maths between energy required, etc. They did a noble job of reducing that down but I'd love to look deeper at their system to see if it could be cleaner. We had a lot of color systems going on, and our players reduced down to simple relationships such as "red = bad"
A quote from the fictional area of their book:
"'Transportation is the only thing that makes people hesitate', said Edith, a hint of frustration mixed with the excitement in her voice. 'With a quota that low, we will need serious rationing of long-distance transit, but that's a necessary sacrifice until we can bring more electrified public transportation online. I'm awfully jealous of places like Japan and Switzerland, where they already have extensive trains in rural areas. In the short term, though, we need to rely on biofuels for large parts of transportation, and those just kill the short-term plans with higher energy use. We end up planting so many energy crops that we take up too much of nature's domain. In the long term, I think we will be able to move around almost as freely as in the before times, but there will never again be something like private car ownership. It just can't work with the global plans. But from what the old-timers like He-Yin tell me, driving wasn't much fun, anyways.'"
How can we make the trade-off relationships so obvious in a visual system to enable such comprehension from a lay-person as in above narrative?
Multi-player
Since I was with two other friends and the game was single player this was actually a ripe moment for discussing trade-offs together. However, what emerged was just passing the controller between my two friends. I merely observed and tried to take the notes above.
The funnest parts
Surprise and delight when you run the sim and see what events happen to earth
The commentary of the political characters in the parliament were delightful. We were let down when some investments didn't pan out, is there RNG in this system?
Beautiful aesthetics
Surreal graphics, pixelated art, the music was neither doomer nor too bright, it struck the right balance of discord and up-lifting (I don't know the right music terminology for this).
Humor and comedy
I did like the political agenda characters as straw men for ideologies. We made villains of the consumerist pretty early on.
Conclusions
I recommend everyone try this game. They will learn something and enjoy the experience, especially if they've played any grand strategy games.
I have a dream to re-design this game or elements of this game. I wonder how it would remix or play with Bucky's World Game?
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