RedShirt – to boldly go where no social network parody has gone before
As much as I love Star Trek, it has always been guilty of proposing a highly idealised notion of humanity in the distant future. Everyone on the Enterprise is sensible, serious, compassionate… they work for each other, they care, they emote out loud. Issues arise but they're usually sorted out fairly quickly, perhaps by Kirk punching someone, or by Data reading out a humorously laborious poem. Whatever, everyone grows and learns, and everyone pulls together.
It's lovely, but it's bullshit, really. It's not going to happen. And game developer Mitu Kandaker knows why.
For the last year she's been working on RedShirt, a game about life on a space station in the distant future. But this is no Mass Effect-style action adventure; it is instead a sort of futuristic parody of social media. Everyone on the vessel is obsessed with a site named – wait for it – Spacebook, where they arrange events, chat to each other and seek to build and cement relationships. "Social interaction and social simulation are really interesting areas," says Khandaker. "Social media dominates our lives so much and I think it definitely affects the way we interact with each other. It's something that's worth parodying. It's almost dystopian in the way that it's affected our lives."
Originally, the game was just a straight contemporary parody of social networks, but then Khandaker got together with the publisher PositechGames, responsible for science fiction titles like Starship Tycoon and Gratuitous Space Battles. The company's founder Cliff Harris suggested a sci-fi theme. "I thought, yeah, that works even better," says Khandaker. "I asked myself, well, what will life be like if we're still obsessed with social media? The Star Trek version of the future is this sort of beautiful utopian society, but people aren't going to be like that! People will still be self-obsessed - it's just that they'll be self-obsessed in space. That's what the game's about."
In RedShirt, then, you play as a new arrival on the station, trapped in a dead-end role as a transporter accident cleanup technician. The action plays out entirely in a Facebook-style display, with windows showing upcoming events, friend lists and current career information as well as the all-important timeline cataloguing everything that's taking place in your growing social circle. It's all about surfing the station's social caste system, making influential pals and attaining ever more lucrative and aspirational employment.
Brilliantly, Khandaker has hinted that, in the background, there's a major event brewing - perhaps even some sort of intergalactic war - but the player only finds out about it through vague social updates and news reports. The implication is, everyone is so obsessed with micro-managing their relationships on Spacebook, no-one really cares about or even notices wider issues. Which of course, slyly comments on the narcissistic echo chamber that contemporary social media has become.
But has it been difficult to point out things like that, without the whole thing becoming too much of a polemic? "That's one of the key challenges," says Khandaker. "How do you parody the annoying aspects of social media, how do you offer a commentary, while still keeping the game fun and interesting? I like to think that the tone of the game is cynical but lovingly cynical. I'm very aware that I'm as embroiled in the world of social media as everybody else. But I do think there is an element of it where certain people approach it as a game… I just imagined people in the future doing the same thing."
For the player then, the aim is popularity not heroism. As some sort of cataclysmic event approaches, you must ensure you have risen above the rank of RedShirt – because in classic Star Trek style, if there's a major threat and you're conscripted into action with a scarlet top on, you're not coming home. In effect, the failure state of RedShirt is the opening of most science fiction games: one lowly soldier against a galaxy at war.
The action revolves around building your network, inviting people to parties, and, well, liking stuff that your peers are doing. As Khandaker explains, "there's a range of different Spacebook events you can arrange or get invited to, from various Virtuo-Augmento-Deck programs (!) to playing Zero-G golf, to sophisticated soirees. The activities don't have any inherent 'coolness' factor themselves, but the coolness is kind of defined by exactly who is there. So, for example, a dorky holo-workshop on paperwork filing strategies becomes infinitely cooler if the current Commander's Assistant happens to be making an appearance!"
-by gaurdian.
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