The serious business of writing the backstory

Although most work on Imperial Realms is mundane coding and testing, that's not all that's required to build a game like this. It also takes significant effort to develop a backstory that spans some fifteen thousand years, even more so since my goal from day one has been to present a plausible universe with believable ties to reality.

Much of the best written science fiction makes serious attempts to picture what the future might look like, then explores the dramatic possibilities suggested. Unfortunately, science fiction in films and on TV rarely aspires to this level (even after forty years, Stanley Kubrick's 2001 remains the noteworthy exception). Games rarely even reach the mediocre levels of TV.

With Imperial Realms I wanted to develop a science fiction game that meets the higher standards of written SF. It wouldn't be science fiction if it didn't contain some invented reality, but we do try to make it plausible and avoid cliches and outright nonsense such as force fields, wormholes and time travel. As well as the satisfaction in doing things right, this approach has another benefit; after taking the time to map out believable paths through which society and technology can evolve, game play can then follow those same paths, something of considerable value.

To achieve that, we've looked at three specific areas in the backstory. We need to know what technology might exist, both to decide where and how people might live. We need to know how society might be structured, to map out alliances and divisions. And less obviously, it's worth spending a bit of time considering language issues, not so much for their direct use in the backstory but because these have to relate to the practical problems of accommodating real-life languages.

Future Technology

Technology is actually the easiest of those three areas to address, in many ways. When we look around in real life, it seems that we're advancing at an exponential rate, and in future will develop faster than we can imagine. However, this may not be so. For the last few hundred years, almost all technological progress has come from mapping out what we could call the "electric domain." That is, it stems directly and indirectly from the twin achievements of understanding electromagnetism and, from that, of mapping out atomic structure. Those let us harness electricity and study material structure, from which progress has built upon progress, but ultimately we're still reaping the benefits of a couple nineteenth-century discoveries. There are further and great gains to be had from this, for sure; in a hundred years we might be able to generate and transmit power efficiently, and our understanding of biology may grow enough to create man-made life. However, barring some new leap in scientific understanding, we still won't have anything but the simplest ideas how to harness nuclear forces or gravity for our own purposes.

So, it might well be that our current spurt of development is an anomaly, similar to the great leap in progress that humans doubtless took after learning to control fire. Even if we do make the scientific discoveries to keep on with the technology race, there are social factors which might also slow technological progress, just as in real life. What really dramatic changes do occur in the near future will probably not be the gross scientific leaps SF writers wrote about back in the fifties, such as Asimov's "nucleonics." Rather, they are more likely to be the result of steady incremental improvements in existing technology - making our gizmos better, faster and smaller. In Imperial Realms, we assume humanity remains at this state for a period of several thousand years (about as long as current history), with steady scientific discoveries related to gravity gradually leading us to a new technological era that in turn lasts for thousands of years more. Both periods present many game and dramatic possibilities, without speculating so far abroad as to turn Imperial Realms into fantasy.

Future Society

Along with technological progress comes social change, which is much harder to picture. While it's sometimes tempting to think that humanity can't keep going at all unless human nature changes, actually "humanity" already includes a very wide range of customs and attitudes, and our nature has probably already changed since early days.

So, for inspiration here I look mainly to history and to other real cultures around the world. This isn't much help at plotting details but does provide an overarching principle; given infinite space for people to spread, they are likely to do so and then adapt to their new environments in infinitely many ways. So there likely would be people in different places with every conceivable sort of social organization, and some likely would wipe themselves out just as some fear we might do in real life.

On the other hand, even though IR postulates that people would have practically infinite space to spread, and that they would change, we also have natural constraints to that change. If people continue to live together in societies at all, then they will be subject to the same biological and social pressures as always. Sudden, sharp and dramatic changes are unlikely to progress too far unless people unlearn the habit of xenophobia, which seems unlikely. Outside trade will provide opportunities to those who do it, and so is always likely to be pursued by some residents of a planet even if shunned by most. Family ties will likely remain the basis of society because family relationships will be the most sure of all human relationships. People may evolve with technology to become more individualistic, or even sociopathic, but the ultimate reasons why societies evolve the way they do are practical rather than idealistic and probably not likely to change much. Taken all together, we picture humans changing only slightly and gradually for a long way into the future, but also with constant small pockets of extreme radical change.

Future Languages

Of all the ways in which people adapt to their environments, language is probably the most obvious. Two groups of the same people separated from each other to any significant degree will develop different dialects, which may in turn develop into different languages - all because of practical needs. To think this would not happen on a galactic scale would be naive; obviously it would. However. once we grant the existence of an overall ruling class, ties between worlds, and such, we open the door to common languages. What would those look like?

Mostly we don't try to impose any rules about language at all, in the backstory or in real play; players can speak in whichever language they want. There is a need to communicate official information, though, which is best met using an official language. In a civilization spanning star systems that would need to be translated into an incredible diversity of local languages. For such a language to work, it would have to be quite mechanistic and unequivocal - more like a computer languge than a human language, in many ways. This presents the obvious temptation to create such a system in real-life for use within the game as a way to centralize bits which must really be shared and translated into different languages.

Future Knowledge

Pondering all these things together leads to a minor matter, which is rather fun to tackle; How would future knowledge be organized? Surely it would not use the same distinctions we maintain in libraries and universities, any more than we maintain the same schools of thought that the ancient Greeks did. This, too, has a practical application; these categories are immediately useful for organizing the Imperial Library.

Physics is taught now as a single field of study, but in fact it has long ago fractured into several quite different areas. Particle physicists carry on the most "fundamental" scientific research while many others work in fields such as "condensed matter" physics, which are really applications with such large scope they count as areas of study in their own right. Some, such as meteorology, are already taught and organized separately, but not all. How long will we persist in the artificial distinction between "condensed matter physics" and chemistry? Wouldn't it make more sense to group them together under "material science" (as indeed some already do?) What about other areas?

I naturally think of Physics first because it's my own area of expertise, but the same phenomenon surely exists in other fields. Would Geography be one subject or several, once we have millions of worlds to study? How would Anthropology change when it had to include not only millions of different human societies but also aliens and mixed alien-human societies? If biology progressed to the point where all human behaviour could be directly tied to physical phenomena, what would this mean for psychology and sociology?

We can't spend all our time studying these philosophical matters and will doubtless make mistakes and inconsistencies while writing the backstory. However, I am proud of what we've done so far and consider it already far above the level that most games reach. Look for even better in future!