Storytelling & Space Settlement: Terraforming Mars
A race between cooperation and competition
For this second installment of my series exploring space settlement through storytelling, we’re going to step away from screens and explore a tabletop board game, Terraforming Mars. I’ll cover plenty of film, television, and books in this series, but I wanted to be sure to include games, too— and not just because it’s my day job. Games, of course, can also be a medium for storytelling, and a lot of tabletop and video games are not only set in space, but specifically tell stories about space settlement. And the interactive nature of games can help players experience the challenges of space settlement in a particularly immersive way.
Terraforming Mars: Exactly what it says on the tin
Terraforming Mars was created by Jacob Fryxelius, who has a doctorate in chemistry and was a science teacher until he co-founded a board game company. You can see this background in the impressive scientific detail and accuracy in the game. Fryxelius has also said that the game was inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson’s hard sci-fi Mars trilogy, which I will very likely be discussing later in this series. Both stories dive into the numerous physical challenges of converting Mars into a human-friendly planet, complicated by competing character (or player) motivations.
As described in the instruction book, the game is set in a future with a peaceful world government and numerous corporations. These future Earthlings are suffering from overpopulation, a pretty standard motivation for fictional space settlement: “Earth is overpopulated and resources are dwindling. We now face the choice to either recede, or to expand into space to find new homes for humanity.” The world government has therefore decided to incentivize the terraforming of Mars for human habitation by providing funding to technology corporations.
Players each act as one of these corporations, drawing and playing cards to build infrastructure and claim territory on the game board (a map of Mars) and interact with their own pool of resources (including steel, titanium, plants, energy, and money). Together, the player-corporations are terraforming the planet, raising its surface temperature, oxygen content, and liquid water. But they’re also individually trying to accumulate resources and other achievements, which count towards identifying the winner at the end of the game. (There’s also a solo mode, which involves trying to finish the terraforming process with as high a score as possible.)
Cooperation vs. Competition
When this game was first described to me several years ago, just before I played it for the first time, I assumed Terraforming Mars must be a cooperative game, in which the players were all working towards the same win condition. But while there is a collaborative goal, players are also working to gain private “victory points,” and once the shared goal is achieved, a winner is chosed based on those points. In fact, some of the actions that can be taken in the game will damage other players, encouraging a zero-sum mindset. For example, some victory points are based on how much of the (finite) territory you’ve managed to claim, and certain cards allow you to gain resources by decreasing another player’s pool. Taking an action to make progress on the terraforming itself also benefits the individual player: it can increase their income or other resource production, or directly increase their score.
This mix of cooperation and competition makes for a complex and engaging game, but it’s also an interesting parallel with space development under capitalism (the approach we’re taking to space right now, and what many people imagine as the future of space settlement). Space settlement requires large, collaborative, multigenerational goals: developing new technology, conducting scientific research, building infrastructure, and potentially someday terraforming other planets and moons. But in this economic mode, there will also be a significant element of competition: for private ownership of extracted resources or intellectual property, or control of territory.
The tricky part (in the game and in real life) is that these two types of goals can conflict with each other. In Terraforming Mars, the game is over when the terraforming goals have been met. If you satisfy these conditions and end the game before you gather more victory points than everyone else, then you lose (even though the group goal has been achieved). Sabotaging other players can improve your own chances of victory, but it will also slow the other players’ ability to help move the terraforming along.
In the game, being the person to progress the terraforming benefits the individual player (by granting points or resources), but this usually works differently in real life: being the one to contribute to the group goal can carry short-term costs for the individual, even if the goal is beneficial for everyone in the long term. This can lead to scenarios like the “tragedy of the commons”, in which a common resource (like a pasture, or the surface of Mars) is overexploited because every individual user is incentivized to take as much as they can, rather than taking less in order to preserve the resource.
Fortunately, humanity’s experiences with terrestrial commons suggest a number of approaches for avoiding or overcoming the challenge of short-term individual goals overriding long-term communal goals in space. For example, external regulation or internal cultural norms can restrain and guide individual behavior. And incentives like prestige, public goodwill, or technology development awards (like the “generous funding” from the world government in the fiction of the game) can help tip the scales by rewarding progress towards shared goals— like environmental protection, human safety, and scientific progress.
Engine-Building and Resources
Another difference between the fictional world of Terraforming Mars and our real-world challenges in space is the cost of resource extraction. One of the most addicting parts of the game is its “engine-building” mechanic: You’re not just collecting and spending resources, you’re also tracking your own resource production. Each player gets to add a certain number of resources to their pool every round, based on their production levels, and the cards you play can increase or decrease these production levels. With judicious early moves and a few lucky card draws, your resource production can grow rapidly, generating a satisfying pile of little resource tokens, which you can then spend to increase production even more.
This is a fun (and addictive!) mechanic in games, but in real life, resources that we extract from a planet like Earth or Mars are not infinite, so constantly increasing production isn’t a viable long-term plan. Also, there are usually costs inherent in production: most of our current energy generation methods here on Earth are altering the planet’s environment in ways that are harmful to human civilization, and resource extraction through techniques like mining also cause environmental damage. To be fair, the cards that allow a player to increase their production in Terraforming Mars usually include some cost that must be paid when the card is played. But in real life, there isn’t just a one-time cost: the damage continues to accumulate as resource production continues to increase.
Unfortunately, the addiction of engine-building also exists in the real world, and many governments and space companies are scrambling right now to play their cards early and ensure that they dominate the board in space in future generations. Not only is this setting us up for another tragedy of the commons in space (in the absence of effective regulation or other incentives), but this space resource engine-building can also lead to increased inequality, as the groups that can already afford to invest in space technology and resource extraction now have a head start in building their engines, which will let them hold on to the winner’s seat for the forseeable future.
Other News
My interview with the Outside Context podcast came out this month. Our very enjoyable conversation included a discussion of science fiction inspirations at the end!
I recently received this delightful message from Ryan DuBois (aka Bodhi Dubz):
“Hi Erika! I loved your book Off Earth. I'm an activist rapper and the book inspired me to make an album at the thematic intersection of politics and space travel (and science more broadly).”
You can check out the album, titled Treatise on the Nature of Existence, on Ryan’s Bandcamp page. I especially enjoyed the opening and closing tracks, and the incorporation of Star Trek theme music and audio throughout.