Fate of the World: Red Redemption interview

Posted February 28, 2011 by Matthew Lee.

Fate of the World has to be one of the most ambitious games you’ve probably never heard of. The turn-based grand strategy title from indie developers Red Redemption casts the player as the shadowy head of a agency trying to influence environmental policies across the planet by fair means or foul, despatching agents to different global territories to sway governments into making decisions that could either save the planet and its inhabitants or damn them.

There’s a range of set scenarios to test yourself against, and a huge number of options to experiment with. Like Red Redemption’s earlier flash game for the BBC, Climate Challenge, you spend each turn choosing cards to play that dictate what you’d like each territory to do. You can try and invest in health care for everyone, green technology and heal mother earth. You can crush the populace under your boot, killing the old and useless and ruling whoever’s left by fear. Or you can find some happy medium and see if that works.

Informed by cutting-edge scientific theory and research, and fuelled by a love of classic PC titles going back down the years, Red Redemption’s tiny team have built a game that serves as a thought-provoking look at what might happen to the world if the human race carries on the way it’s been going, whether or not we can ‘save’ ourselves and even – if you feel like it – a way to send us all to hell in a handbasket, killing off every living thing for a giggle.

I talked to Gobion Rowlands, one of the co-founders of Red Redemption, about what went into Fate of the World, how the developers hoped to make something educational fun to play, and what they hoped to accomplish with it.

Here’s the first part of our huge (seriously, this thing is big) interview.

‘For me it’s got to be led by the gameplay’

BeefJack: I would hazard a guess that the hypothetical gamer has never heard of your company.

Gobion Rowlands: I’d say that was probably true. Because I mean for about five, six years we were a games company that basically faced the mass media but not really the games media? So we used to get a lot of  coverage in, you know, things like Newsweek, or the LA Times, or the Sunday Times but for… various reasons, because we were making a lot of Flash games at the time, most people in the games media hadn’t really heard of us.

B: Your website only lists Climate Challenge, as well as Fate of the World.

G: The first game we made back in 2003 was a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, called Steel Law Online. That was basically a spy game. It went quite well, I mean, it was only ever a small MMO, we only ever had sort of two and a half thousand people, but it was really as an experiment more than an attempt to compete with World of Warcraft or something. Then we did a whole swathe of Flash games. As well as Climate Challenge we did one called Operation Climate Control for schools, and Troubleshooter, and – we did a lot. We also used to do a lot of web stuff, as a lot of Flash companies did.

B: Were the ones after Climate Challenge developing the same ideas, or…?

G: Yeah, at the time it was kind of – those games were experimenting with elements of what went into Climate Challenge to see, you know, what worked and what didn’t. And we had some successes and – you know – not so successes. (laughs) I mean Climate Challenge did really well -

B: I was about to say; was that the most successful of all of the different ones?

G: Yeah. Definitely. On a number of levels. I mean it was successful first and foremost in the number of people who played it -

B: What was it… a million in seven weeks?

G: Yeah, something like that. It’s still on the BBC Science & Nature website, and from… gosh, I think I last asked them in… April? They said it was still the most popular part of the Science & Nature website so it’s still getting a lot of new players every month and that’s, what, three years later, three years after launch? So that’s been satisfying. It also got a lot of attention, and it seemed to do… all the things we wanted it to do.

First and foremost people enjoyed playing it, they could play it multiple times, and that’s always our aim. I got into this space for a couple of reasons, one of which was I wanted there to be good games about real-world subjects, not just kind of… some of the serious games are… they’re incredibly excellent ideas and they’re about really worthy things but they’re not great games.

B: Yes. I would have said there’s always been a divide perceived between educational ware, if you like, and ‘proper’ games.

G: Absolutely. I never wanted to make edutainment. I kind of – my background, I’ve been making board games, roleplaying games and the odd computer game since I was ten, so… what’s that, twenty-five years now? So, for me it’s got to be led by the gameplay, if it’s not a good game, then the rest of it can – you may as well not worry too much about it because… you know.

So the reason we made Climate Challenge was because my wife was working on a climate science project, and I was just finishing up the game we were working on at the time, and her boss took us out for dinner, and got me quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a game about anything. And he was like ‘Why don’t you make a game about climate change?’ And I was like ‘All right then!’, being quite drunk. And the next morning he phoned up and said ‘Right! So we’re doing this now?’ It really was good timing for us, so we went ‘Yeah… all right then.’

‘You can’t say to people ‘You can’t do that”

B: So how did the BBC come into it?

G: They did a small version of climateprediction.net, it’s like SETI at home. Like a distributed model thing. The BBC did a small part of that as part of their Climate Chaos season with Sir David Attenborough. [My wife's boss] had a couple of contacts there, he put us in touch, and we went to see them and we got them at just the perfect time. They were incredibly receptive. We knew it was quite a big deal when we got the opportunity with them.

We came at the right time of the year, they were willing to take a risk on something that – they had no idea whether it would work, but they liked the idea, they thought it had potential. They gave us a lot of support, and as a small company that really helped. After that… the response we got, both good and bad – one of the things I’ve learned about making games on the subjects we make is it’s fun making games; it’s nice to make them about real-world stuff… but you do get more death threats. (laughs) We got a lot of coverage for Climate Challenge, both postive and negative. We had some climate skeptic blogs lay into us, but -

B: I did wonder about that.

G: Every time they did we had like another fifty thousand people play the game, so they were really good advertising for us. But with Fate of the World, I’d say ninety-five percent of the coverage we get is very positive? The other five percent tends to call for our execution, or our arrest –

B: Calling you tools of the liberal panic?

G: Well, last week we got accused of being far-left conspirators and far-right fascists in the same week, which I thought was quite impressive. I’m still waiting for my secret decoder badge.

B: Fate of the World is basically dealing with very similar themes to Climate Challenge, but there’s far more depth, and on a much broader canvas.

G: Yeah, with Fate of the World, we realised we wanted to deal with the whole world. In some ways we kind of approached it as if we were making… like a football management game, in that you want the most accurate data and the most accurate stats you can have in the game, so the player gets a good sense of the world behaving in a consistent and accurate way. But things like climate change, population growth, land use, resource exploitation, energy – all these things stop the player achieving the goal they want to achieve.

For me it might be having a space program and colonising Mars, having a base on the Moon, but you can’t do that if you’ve got no fuel, you’ve got no people, your ships are being blown out of the air by huge tornadoes, those kinds of things – whereas for others it might be creating a stable, Utopian society, but you can’t do that if everyone’s dead. And for other people it might be… you know, killing everyone and finding out about that. I don’t mean that flippantly. One of the things we really believe is that when you’re making a game about a subject like this, you can’t say to people ‘You can’t do that’. As a gamer I demand to be able to do these things.

B: You were never tempted to take away player agency at all?

G: No, because… there’s a lot of reasons. I mean, games should allow you to do stuff you can’t do in normal life. I think where a lot of the ‘serious games’ have made a mistake is that they only include one side of the argument. The positive, or whatever their angle is. For me that’s always been a mistake. I have been asked, a lot, ‘If you’re worried about climate change, why don’t you just get rid of three billion people?’ and they’ll put it in various forms, from the minor ‘Why don’t we encourage people not to have kids?’ to the major… ‘Why don’t we kill three billion people?’

B: It’s always been a staple of a particular kind of blockbuster entertainment. Like the Tom Clancy novel Rainbow Six, where the villain is killing off large swathes of the Earth’s population so it’ll return to a purer, unspoilt state -

G: Yeah! And I genuinely believe that if players are curious about that, want to experience it, they should be able to do it in the game and see how bad stuff can get. The one thing about the game which I think is important is you shouldn’t be hidden from the consequences of your actions. You should be able to experience it, you should be able to try things out – for instance if you want to play like a Logan’s Run approach and kill off everyone over a certain age, the knock-on effects are going to be huge, but that’s part of the fun of being a game. No-one’s really being hurt. And it’s interesting to see how bad things can get.

B: You would see it as learning by making mistakes in a safe environment?

G: Well that’s how we learn, isn’t it? One of the games that opened my eyes to what you could do with games was Deus Ex. The things going on behind the scenes in Deux Ex, you get the occasional discussion about the nature of democracy, and whether you should have corporate rule, or rule by an artificial intelligence, while you’re playing this… you know, cool first-person shooter spy game.

I thought that was awesome. It was an interesting subject, and it made for great narrative. It should make for interesting gameplay, for an interesting environment for the player to explore and have fun – and by fun I mean often be terrified, or disturbed, or challenged… it’s always been key to me. Though I should say that those negative things are just part of the whole picture.

‘We’re certainly not trying to lecture people’

B: You talk about an over-arching narrative. Are you thinking of that in terms of narrative coming from the actions the player takes within the game, or is there…? I know there are different scenarios you select, and goals you’re working towards -

G: Because it’s a card-based game – card-based and turn-based – the game is built around the narrative the player decides to tell. So they focus on the areas they’re most interested in. So if you’re really interested in fusion power, and you’re thinking that’s where you want to go, that’s how your narrative is formed. It’s not dramatised in the sense of an FPS.

The narrative is based on the actions the player takes, and the reactions to that, so every decision has those consequences and I think the narrative is kind of exciting to see how… you make a decision, and stuff happens, but maybe not always the stuff you expected to happen. Just seeing how these various options plays out. This is the real world you’re playing with and, well, it’s much better to mess it up in a computer game than in reality.

B: At the same time you’ve had two major coups in terms of people you’ve recruited to the project, with Richard Jacques and [author] David Bishop. David in particular, is he just writing a lot of flavour text, then?

G: One of the reasons we brought David on board is that the game needs black humour. (laughs) We do not make po-faced games, if we can help it. They should always have that element of black homour, yet at the same time if you’re dealing with something that kills millions of people and it’s based on something in the real world you need to reflect the humanity of what you’re doing, and we felt David was really capable of both getting that humour but also giving it a human feel.

He was my top choice – we interviewed a *lot* of writers, but he can make some quite dull-sounding subjects really funny, and other subjects that were very serious kind of touching, and I was impressed. I think his background in writing the Doctor Who novels and the period where he was editor for 2000AD and Judge Dredd magazine, he got across some quite poignant, interesting, good science fiction stories and I wanted that in the game. We were really pleased to get him on board. We’re moving his text in as quick as possible, he’s an incredibly fast writer and sometimes we have to make sure we’ve got all the cards sorted before we get him to write on them.

On Friday I got the first music in from Richard Jacques, and that was pretty exciting for me. I love his work, and one of the things we love about this game is that it’s enabled us to search out the people we really admired in the industry or around, and say ‘Hey, do you want to work on this with us?’ With Richard we didn’t just randomly interview different composers, we just went straight to him, because we all loved what he did.

B: If you wanted mainstream credibility amongst your hypothetical gamers, he’s certainly a good name to have. Did you think of it in those terms?

G: Well, yes. You can hand him the project and say ‘Go make some cool music for this’, and he knows better than we do in many ways what ‘cool music’ will be for the game. I’ve got an awful lot of games with music from him. I’d say I was a pretty typical gamer, my Steam account has I think 220 games on it, so that’s where I come from – I should point out that I say a lot about me, but I’m really the spokesperson for the game. We’ve got a team of fourteen and they’re all hard at work. The creative vision is led by Ian Roberts, our director – but we’re all very much gamers first and foremost.

B: He’s the other co-founder, isn’t he?

G: Yeah. He’s been with the company an awful long time. And Claude – one of the reasons we wanted Claude to join us is he had far more experience running triple-A projects, like Battlestations Midway, his last one. It’s important to us that what we make is a game first and foremost. The educational stuff is… I think as long as you get the data accurate, or where you do make stuff up you’re open about it… the education side of things kind of takes care of itself.

We’re certainly not trying to lecture people. If anything I want them to get critical thinking skills, so they can watch what a politician says on TV and go ‘Uh huh? Riiight…’ and get more understanding of why it’s true, or more often than not untrue.

B: Just by putting the information out there you’ve done something valuable?

G: Yeah. We’re not making an educational title here. It has to be based around play, and the game experience first and foremost otherwise it just doesn’t work. I mean that’s certainly what we found with the original Climate Challenge. The reason it worked, for us, was because people enjoyed the cards. They enjoyed playing through to different narrative ends, chasing down particular combinations of things they wanted to do. They enjoyed being essentially in a god game in Europe, so now we wanted to make it a god game on the Earth.

Just being in control – for me a computer game is great because it’s an amazing personal experience, one-on-one. I’ve been playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and that terrified me in a way most horror films don’t, because it was a personal experience, and I think that’s what computer games are best at. We do try and make sure the information is as accurate as possible, and give people further things to find out about, but we’re not here to lecture them, we’re here to give them a good, entertaining experience.

‘We’re not trying to make Fate of the World for schoolkids’

B: Obviously you’re talking to me in these terms because you know I’m working for a gaming website, therefore I’ll understand, but you’ve secured financial backing or distribution deals from a lot of people who aren’t related to the games industry. Did you explain these things to them in videogame jargon?

G: It’s interesting, actually. There’s three different sets of language that I’ve had to learn, almost like three dialects. There’s gamer language, where I talk about an FPS or an RTS, all these terms, and you know what I’m talking about. There’s the language of climate science, and science in general – a scientific paper talks about an error, for instance, and a non-scientist hears error and they hear ‘mistake’, where in a scientific paper that doesn’t mean a mistake at all, it just means results, how fine is the accuracy.

And then there’s investor talk, which is very different – one term which caused a bit of merriment was PvE. In gamespeak that’s Player versus Environment. In investor-speak, that’s Price versus Earnings ratio. (laughs) So we had to be very careful. When you’re talking to investors you do have to stop and think ‘Wait – how am I writing this? How am I explaining it to them?’ and part of our job with investors is getting them to understand the dynamics of the games industry.

Most of them are not gamers. They love the idea of what we’re doing, and they love the social impact side of what we do, but they don’t necessarily understand how games fit together. For instance, when I’m talking about Steam as a distribution channel, I often have to talk about it as – it’s probably fair to say – as the iTunes of PC or Mac gaming? They get that, because most of them have iPods. It’s been a case of… increasing that education for them. The one thing that unites everyone is if they understand the narrative, if they get a good story from it, the rest falls into place.

B: Did you have to explain things like your philosophy of player agency to them? When I was talking about your company and your game to a friend of mine, he seemed almost shocked that a game Oxfam were involved with allowed you to destroy the world.

G: (laughs) Our partners are really good with it. I have come across people who… do not like that approach at all, and I’m understating here how much they do not like it. I… worry about that? I think everyone we’ve been dealing with, like Oxfam, like… we’ve been talking to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, in the States which is like NASA. People like NOAA, they get it, they understand you have to encompass both sides. Same with Oxfam. I think what’s helped us with partners like that – and this is more and more the case – is that the people we’re dealing with are gamers.

As games as an industry and an experience have matured, there’s a lot of people in these organisations who are used to playing games, so they had no problem accepting that. In fact, they would have been very suspicious had we *not* done that. The difference really comes down to ‘Does the organisation have gamers in it?’; yes, in which case they totally understand it, and they can see the point, and they’re very good at explaining that internally… if the organisation *doesn’t* have gamers, I mean… some organisations don’t understand what a game is.

They’ll say ‘We’ll make a game’, but for them a game means essentially a linear lecture, and that’s not a game. A game should be replayable, it should be challenging, it should have lots of different options, it should be built around the player and it shouldn’t just lecture at you. Those people have a real problem with this. I think one of the things that we do do, though, is that especially as we have these darker options, we do emphasise to organisations that we’re making games for adults. We’re not trying to make Fate of the World for schoolkids. If we did a version for schoolkids it might be different – it might not be, but I think you need to understand your audience, and they seem to get that very well.

‘Games shouldn’t be afraid of dealing with weighty issues’

B: You say ‘adult’ in terms of the subject matter, but at the same time it’s in the whole ‘grand strategy’ arena, and it seems to be aiming for a hugely different audience to the Modern Warfare 2 kiddies on Xbox Live. Would that be a fair assessment?

G: Absolutely. We’re not the same kind of game as Modern Warfare. They’re very interesting games, but… we do definitely have a different audience. I think it is fair to say that some of what we do is niche, but I think it’s a mass-market niche that overlaps both gamers and non-gamers, which is kind of where it’s exciting for us.

B: I got the impression you were looking towards an undiscovered market, that there weren’t many people doing this sort of thing.

G: Yeah. I mean, we do love what we do. We’re all gamers, we love making games, but we’re getting to make them about real-world subjects and trying out new gameplay situations that we otherwise may not have had a chance to explore, and that’s really satisfying when you’re working in the ‘games’ space. We’re not just making another sequel, another version of the same game, we’re trying out – some of the gameplay decisions that have gone into the game, we had no idea whether they would work or not.

Because you’re working with real-world data, you can’t just fudge it, in the way you might do sometimes with other games. I mean, a lot of games pride themselves on their accuracy. If you’re making a Formula 1 game, you want the car to behave like a Formula 1 car, but we had to go ‘Well, we hope there’s a solution in here that’s going to make for good gameplay, but we don’t know’. We mostly have been successful with that, but there’s certainly been elements which… haven’t really worked out, and we’ve had to go ‘Oh, all right, okay’. We’ve learnt from that, we’ve started again.

B: A lot of your members do have a background in… ‘making simulations of things’, don’t they? I can see in one sense the game is another iteration of that. Pump the numbers in and see what comes out.

G: But it’s interesting because you do get days when the science is coming from one direction, and the gameplay is coming from another direction then basically the two collide, and you have some quite strident meetings about… which takes precedence? How do you play this out? Which is a decision you don’t have when you’re just doing a simulation, because all you care about with a simulation is the usability and the user interface. Obviously that’s still a key to what we’re doing, but you have to make sure there’s a satisfying payback for players. And that’s quite different to a simulation.

B: You’ve already mentioned Deus Ex in terms of replayability and different scenarios, but obviously that’s a very different kind of game. What would you think of as closer mechanical or aesthetic influences?

G: Well… the guys at Steam described Fate of the World as ‘sitting in between Civilisation, Moonbase Alpha and Magic the Gathering’. (laughs) And I’d say that was about right. I mean, the big difference is Civilisation deals with the past. It’s the formation of nations, moving around of countries, exploring new things… whereas our game is very much about the next 200 years. It’s all about the future, and you know, 200 years from now -

B: I assume you’ve played Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri?

G: Oh, absolutely. Loved Alpha Centauri. That was my fave of the Civ games, actually. I played it – gosh, it’s a game I tend to dust off about once a year, and play again, just because it – yeah, it was great fun. And one of the things I always found… unsatisfying about Civilisation – and don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Civilisation’s a bad game, I love the Civ games – but unsatisfying was that you’d get sort of ‘Future Tech 1′ and ‘Future Tech 2′.

Whereas one of the things I love about what we’re doing is that we go and talk to physicists working on fusion power, scientists working on big geo-engineering projects, you know, we talk to NASA, we talk to all these people about what’s going to happen in the next 200 years and that’s really exciting for me. I mean, for me – everyone in the company has their own interests, where they’re going, what they’re focusing on, but me, I’m definitely a tech head.

Whereas other people in the team are very focused on the social policies, about how society is going to evolve, what’s the nature of society? Are we going to be living in a kind of Big Brother future, those kinds of issues. And we’ve got a whole swathe of things. But for me I love the fact we can say ‘Oh, wow, so this is coming up’. Some of the research in nanotech, for instance, is kind of amazing. Or I’m interested in exploring subjects like transhumanism – preferably in a computer game, before experimenting on someone for real -

B: Is that one of the policy choices in Fate of the World?

G: Oh, yeah, we have transhumanist options. If all your cities start to flood? Maybe you should just give everyone gills. I’m not saying that’s a sensible idea! I mean, that’s for the player to discover, but I think it’s certainly one of the thoughts that crops up.

B: Again, that’s certainly been explored before in science fiction. I think there’s an element of that in Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, where the climax is very much about ‘We must learn to live with the world the way it’s become’.

G: Yeah, the traditional human approach has been to adapt the world to us, and the thing about transhumanism as a concept is that it’s about adapting us to the world. And that has its good and bad points, and for some people it’s a very heavy line to cross, and I can understand that. But I think that games shouldn’t be afraid of dealing with weighty issues. We’re perfectly positioned to do so. I would much rather deal with a weighty issue where I’m in control and I’m playing as the agent, in the game, than passively accepting it in a TV show, or a movie – I’m a child of computer games.

‘I think games can do so much more’

B: At the same time I’ve read people saying they don’t think it’s a game’s place to put forward anything – like the people who say ‘Music shouldn’t be about politics’. There does seem to be a school of thought like that about games as well, that they shouldn’t -

G: Yeah, I’ve run into that thought. I utterly disagree with that. I don’t see any reason why games can’t tackle… any subject, really.

B: Like the people who seem to think games have a responsibility to always be ‘fun’. As if ‘fun’ is only Sega’s blue skies and classic arcade gameplay? If you start talking about anything that involves pain, or suffering in any sense then it can’t possibly be… gratifying, in that kind of childlike way.

G: Yeah, fun is an often over-used term. It’s quite nebulous. I think people who say that are mostly not gamers, that they’ve not played that many games. They’re not really embracing the breadth of what games have to offer. I mean games can be scary, compulsive, intriguing, silly, stupid… they can be a whole range of things. Films are the same. We have serious films, we have light films… same with TV. I think games can do so much more.

You have games for different moods – I’ll play Amnesia when I want to be terrified, or I’ll play ArmA II when I want a realistic military simulation, or I’ll play Left4Dead when I want to go and bash some zombies, and those are all acceptable things. I think that’s a viewpoint that’s changing. Games are still very young, we haven’t been around that long. Cinema’s been around over a hundred years? That’s a long time to have evolved. The games industry isn’t that much older than me. It’s difficult to say ‘You can’t do that’; I think, ‘Why not try it? Why not see what games can do?’. I think that’s where it’s really exciting, frankly.

Part 2 here…