Shiny object alert!

A few days ago, I visited my local hobby shop, and a rare gem on the shelves caught my eye. A new copy of the board-game Bios: Megafauna, second edition, designed by Phil Eklund.

Eklund is something of a legend in the indie game design world. His designs are less games than they are deep simulative experiences, modeling some scientific or historical phenomenon with considerable depth and detail. You don’t sit down around a Phil Eklund design to play a simple competitive game, with a clear winner, as a light social occasion. You do it to immerse yourself in a system, generate a narrative, and marvel at the surprising results. Designating a winner is usually an afterthought.

Eklund is notorious for writing thick rulebooks in very fine print that look impenetrable, and yet permit the players to learn the game simply by sitting down, working through a flowchart, and playing a few rounds. Again, less a game, more an immersive simulation. He’s also known for his philosophical standpoints, which will become obvious if you read the extensive supporting material and essays attached to every design. Yet those personal biases don’t ruin the aesthetics or playability of his simulative models, and you don’t need to fall in line with them to enjoy the games.

Eklund is also a thoroughly independent designer, usually working through his own imprint (Sierra Madre Games). His business model (and a run of bad luck) means that some of his designs are very hard to find. So randomly spotting a copy of one of his new games at my local store was kind of a treat. I picked up Megafauna and took it home, and then managed to snag what may have been the last copy on Amazon of the prequel game Bios: Origins.

This is a good occasion for me to embark upon a line of discussion that I’ve been wanting to bring up here: the use of simulation games as drivers and inspiration for worldbuilding.

My philosophy with respect to worldbuilding is that I do it to provide plausible backgrounds for my creative work. I want the physical environment, historical narrative, social systems, and so on to make sense, providing the reader with the sense that the story is taking place in what could be a real world. Part of that is just craftsman’s pride on my part, but part of it is also the observation that if the setting for a story isn’t plausible, if it doesn’t make sense to the reader, than that robs the story itself of credibility. It’s hard to get involved in characters and plot if the story appears to be taking place in an arbitrary and chaotic environment – especially if that seems to be because the author couldn’t be bothered to do better.

Simulation games, carefully designed to model a real-world system or event, can be a great place to work on that plausibility. If a result is improbable or impossible in the simulation, that’s a sign that you’re really going to have to work to make it plausible in a related setting. If a result is at variance with the real world, but not at all unusual in the simulation, that’s evidence of a potentially interesting alternate world to explore. Naturally, the process of working through the simulation can give us plenty of back story for the world we end up designing.

To demonstrate what I’m talking about, I plan to work through both Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna over the next couple of weeks, taking notes about the alternate Earth that results. I expect I’ll end up with a physical description of that Earth, an overview of its dominant life forms, and possibly even the design of a non-human sentient species that might appear in my Human Destiny stories. If this exercise actually inspires me to write a new story, we might see that appear here too. I’ll set aside this particular thread in the Worldbuilding by Simulation category, and tag it with the name of the game I’m currently working with. Work will continue on my other projects, and there may be a status report or two on those in the interim.