I actually don't think the UN thing is quaint and dated. The Unity project is implied strongly to have been a last-ditch international effort to save humanity as the world collapsed into war by mustering all nations together for a cooperative project.
It's dated insofar it feels like the U.N. pretty much lost all of its '90s clout (back when America was still doing things like intervening in Somalia or Bosnia under peacekeeper auspices) since about 2003 or so. But I don't want to get too much into the politics because it just depresses me. The Unity mission being a last ditch thing that was actually achieved through international and inter-corporate cooperation under the U.N. umbrella is kind of cute, okay sure.
SMAC, as originally designed, severely underestimates the force of nationalism as an ideology an ethnocentrism as an extremely prevalent factor throughout world history. That doesn't mean there has to be an ultranationalist faction! The lore very much seems to imply that various ethnicities ended up scattered throughout the factions because the leaders haphazardly had to scramble for the colony pods as the Unity crashed. I do think there should be some way to address, for realism's sake, the ethnic tensions that may have resulted. SMAC tends a little bit in the direction of 90s optimism that racism had already been, or was about to be, abolished.
This I don't think is a '90s mindset, and actually explains why the game is so timeless: it's about Big Ideas, hearkens back to classic philosophical sci-fi. It's dated only in the sense that classic humanist sci-fi that asks big questions is dated to the age of Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, etc. (though there are always more recent works that capture a similar spirit like Cixin Liu.) SMAC's factions all embody basic facets of the human experience that go beyond petty tribalisms surrounding color, culture, or country. It's dated only in the sense that Star Trek: the Next Generation aired in the '90s.
While certainly tribalism is here to stay it makes sense thematically why a Civilization sequel would not want to linger on it. It's too messy and too easily dated to pick one specific country or another. Not to mention pretty tasteless. Better to make all the prejudices sci-fi based instead.
Sure, it's quaint. Every other faction thinks it's quaint. It's actually a brilliant deconstruction, honestly.
True enough.
I think he is the type to try to erase the memory of Old Earth cultures in favor of his own constructed Hive identity.
I think that was always his intention. He was building his own personal Oceania. The Michael Ely novels don't really play up his Asian-ness too much. My favorite portrayal of him is the novel-length fanfic "
Joe", perhaps the most nuanced take on the Chairman and the Hive. Even his stereotypical Orientalist mystic aspects don't sound super-stereotypical.
The niche lore about Yang being part of a successful rebellion to restore a Chinese Emperor would probably have to go.)
Maybe? It could've been a mistake of his youth, something he learned from and moved on. And the whole segment was written confusedly, it sounds like the Golden Emperor was in power, but then a Crimson Succession (which I've just taken to mean some sort of neo-communist movement) overthrows him.
She is very much a stereotype of the USA's Evangelical Right, especially in the 90s, when creationism vs. evolution was still a big debate. Has it aged well?
Well, they lasted as a political force to at least 2008 or the early 2010s or so, but they're definitely on the wane now, and culturally so too.
She's a weird mix of cheesy over-the-top villainous fundie with an occasional reflective side on the ethical implications of certain technological developments.
I tend to think she's only a villain in the game itself because of gameplay reasons- but then again with the A.I. who knows because I just started a Lal game today and both Zakharov
and Deidre declared vendetta on me after failing to extort my energy. In the actual writing she seems much less vengeful.
I think she works much better as a pan-Christian visionary rather than the specifically American low-church Protestant she seems to be portrayed as. In real life we start to see this as the West secularizes: Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and Mormons start slowly putting aside their differences as they feel that their cultures are under threat, and start uniting against the common threat of liberalism.
I think that was always the intention. And I rather like
this short story which gives a very sympathetic portrayal to Miriam, and even places a Jew in her flock.
Although, I do think the "African royalty" thing comes across as a little bit silly and unrealistic. He seems extremely Westernized; he has a randomly Nigerian first name despite being Namibian, an English surname, and is a free-market dogmatist. Maybe he was adopted by rich American expats?
He's pretty much pan-African; the GURPS supplement says he was born in Kenya, out of nowhere lol. Morgan is probably an easy reference to J.P. Morgan.
I do love the little detail that she was once part of a militant group in New Los Angeles called the Red Panthers during its martial law era, hinting at severe racial conflict in the dying USA.
I didn't think the riots were racially motivated, but given the game was made in the '90s... oh dear.
As perhaps the most explicitly far-right faction besides the Believers, the Spartans seems like they could have the greatest tendency towards ethnonationalism. But like with Yang, I think the lore implies a cultural fusion, except in this case Santiago is more like "I don't care who you are, just fight for me and don't cause trouble," whereas Yang is trying to totally orient culture in his chosen direction.
Given that they idolize Sparta, which is a generic ancient ideal of the perfect warrior-state (it's not like Santiago's exactly focusing on the anti-Persian Empire aspects), I think they're Social Darwinians.
Counter-terrorism makes sense, I guess, but the Spartans are heavily implied (or maybe explicitly stated somewhere, I forget) to have started as a terrorist organization. But who knows, maybe that just makes them better counter-terrorists.
The "Journey to Centauri" novella says they are, and that the Spartan Battalion was a survivalist organization on Earth. I don't much like Michael Ely's stories very much, so I choose what to accept; the idea that the Spartans predate the Unity mission as an organization with a clear ideology is a bit annoying to me (though I've sort of done that with my own custom factions), but the fact they were terrorists that caused Planetfall in the story is really annoying.
It's just a bit weird to have so many bases with only Russian names and not reference other cultures, implying that the University is a Russian-dominated project. Also... what on earth is he wearing?
I think it's nice when the game intermittently references real-world non-English languages. Zakharov is just really invoking the good ol' Soviet Space program, that's all. Also he's wearing Spider Jerusalem glasses, obviously.
She's a bit TOO much of a Borg clone and her "pure rationality, abolish emotion" thing comes across as cliche.
It's especially boring since there doesn't seem to be any sinister aspects to it, either.
Transhumanist philosophy has developed a lot since the 90s so there is a lot more to work with. Maybe give her some quotes explaining how she thinks the human brain is basically a computer and considers emotions to be advanced algorithms, but believes her project is capable of improving on them and getting rid of evolutionary vestiges that mess up society. Like racism or sexual lust. Very cool, very creepy, very... ideological. Maybe she's right? Maybe she's nuts? Isn't that the perfect kind of profound, uncomfortable philosophical theme that a great science fiction game should explore?
Yeah that works. Play up the "we're trying to achieve the Singularity" angle.
I think the only annoying thing is that ever since atheism became a movement in the '00s, and then Rationalism because an internet cargo cult subculture in the '10s, having a faction that idolizes pure reason just seems so embarrassing these days, because the real-world movements have been so lurid and painfully awkward. So the trick is to really focus on the A.I. aspects and crib from the aforementioned sci-fi greats instead of trying to fit in ideas from LessWrong or Slate Star Codex.
Second, she doesn't have a really compelling ideology to hold her society together.
That's really the biggest problem with them, they exist to oppose others, but what happens when you're the Man? The "Joe" fanfic above does a good job with it, basically they're a bit like cyberpunk Amsterdam... and then the faction has to fight a war so basically you have a nascent Police State that needs to secure itself with curfews and a whole lot of nonlethal weapons, and Roze is just pulling all of the strings with her cabal of the most l337 hackers who are undemocratically making the rules for the rest of society.
Come to think of it, it's a little like the concept of a
benevolent dictator for life, as seen in open software projects. I think to come up with the Data Angels' culture, don't just think hackers who crack into systems, think of programming in general and the weird societies and subcultures that sprout up around code.
If updated for the present day, I think their aesthetic would be very different and be, for lack of a better description, a type of super-woke "SJW" society.
I'm not sure. I think there's definitely room for a super-woke faction. I think such a faction could be based heavily on modern social media subcultures, going all the way back to Tumblr in its prime. But I'm not sure what that faction has in common with the Data Angels, who only care about information for its own sake. They're both socially liberal and libertine and a little anarchic in nature, but they've got different priorities.
The fact that we've got SJWs on one hand, podcast socialists on another, bluecheck liberal centrists on another, 8ch fascists on yet another, and then Boomer conspiracy theorists on the last one, and these are major mainstream currents of political ideology in the modern day West (not just the U.S., all these movements have international counterparts), is another reason why a modernized '10s/'20s SMAC just feels so
wrong to me. Everything is so dumb these days.
I posit that SMAC was outdated not by just 9/11 and the end of the history, but the emergence of the internet as just this chaotic ball of dumbness that's made everything feel tacky and without gravitas. SMAC has gravitas. The times we're living in? Hoo boy. Miriam was right. Evil stalks the datalinks.
Scrap the opening quote about "life is the jazz" or whatever and make her go all in on the "information wants to be free" thing. Maybe also make her AI very open to tech trading. And, of course, leave a lot of interpretation as to whether she's really just doing her best to abolish power structures, or is just a lifestylist in it for her own popularity and benefit...
I think you could possibly take some influence from
Pirate Parties, which were a neat phenomenon for a while in the near past. Also
infosocialism/
nanosocialism from GURPS Transhuman Space, another sci-fi series that was blessedly created before the dumbification of everything.
If Roze had more depth, he could be a great foil to her, with Roze going strongly for identity-politics while Domai is more interested in improving material conditions and reforming the class structure, thus reflecting a major divide in real-life leftist philosophy. Roze would see Domai as a class-reductionist crypto-fascist who ignores other axes of oppression; Domai would see Roze as a bourgeois idealist liberal who does not act in the proletarian interest.
I can see all of this happening. And I absolutely hate it, because I hate the way internet culture has polluted our politics and dragged it down to the level of Twitter dunks and TikTok memes. How culture wars have somehow infected the left over the past decade. But what you're writing is cogent and yes it would work incredibly well in a 2020s version of SMAC. God have mercy on us all.
I've always been slightly confused as to why he hates Green economics more than Free Market, but it could reflect a tolerance for some kind of distributist guild system while not wanting to impoverish his people for the sake of some mushrooms and mindworms. Okay yeah, I guess I can see where he's coming from there.
It's probably a coal miners want to keep their jobs sort of thing. People over Planet.
So since his group is basically Libertalia or the historic Republic of Pirates (look it up), it makes sense that it also should have a few more penalties since it's not a normal society. But that's more of a balance/realism critique, not whether Svensgaard is outdated or not. He isn't.
You also need to remember there's the whole exploring Planet's briny depths aspect. Which is timeless, I guess. Maybe someone could update him to be a former tech mogul turned submariner (Remember that there's not just one but multiple billionaires engaged in a space race at this point- Richard Branson got into it all the way back in 2004), but that's just cruel to my oversensitive appalled sensibilities.
EDIT: Oh right, there were also aliens. Meh. I think keeping them kind of shadowy and inscrutable works better. They probably shouldn't even be playable except by cheat code. Having them overpowered and imbalanced should be the point. They should probably also have trouble distinguishing human factions. Now that could be an interesting dynamic, a little bit how European settlers frequently held the wrong native tribe to account for "breaking" a treaty they weren't even party to, because the colonialists didn't pay enough attention to native politics.
How I wish SMAX had given us seven human factions before tacking on the aliens. I've always wondered what the remaining two factions could be about. Probably about as thematically random and gimmicky as the others, but still fun to think about.
Here's a lot of words and speculation!
Anyway great analysis, always good to see posts in this sub-forum, glad people are still talking about this game, gives me encouragement to post more here.
Edit: also,
this thread is pretty good too and has some ideas for updated factions.
Zermelane said:
The Data Angels could be salvaged and updated for 2021 by thinking of them as the general-purpose anarchist flashmob, self-organizing Internet culture thing. Something like ***** but without the crazy wingnuttery. And bit of Anonymous, a bit of Occupy Wall Street, a bit of the Arab Spring, and so forth. Basically a faction for What We Thought People Would Do If You Just Let Them Talk Freely To Each Other On The Internet between 2005 and 2015 or so. They could even still be good at hacking, they just would be too young to have watched Blade Runner.
