Chapter 25. Balance of the Planet

In early 1989, I was approached by Joe Miller of Epyx, asking if I was interested in working on a license they had just secured. The project was a movie entitled Voice of the Planet, which was about environmentalism and was intended for release in conjunction with Earth Day 1990. Would I be interested in doing an environmental game?

The proposal struck my fancy. Although I was wary of licensed games, the topic here seemed worthy. I had always felt that Energy Czar simply didn't capture the richness and complexity of problems balancing environmental problems with economic issues. It was time to go back and get it right. Besides, my wariness of licensed games was outweighed by the trust I had in Joe; whatever happened, I knew that he would make things right in the end. So I told him that I would put some time into working out a preliminary design.

I already had my vision for the game: the complexity of environmental issues and their entwinement with each other and with economic issues. I wanted to demonstrate that everything is connected, that simplistic approaches always fail. This required a huge system of factors all connected by equations. My central design problem would be coming up with a clean way to pile all the factors into the game and keep the equations organized. Any large system of equations is intrinsically unstable it takes just one out-of-range value to send the system crashing into psychotic behavior: trillions of fatalities from air pollution, say, or hydroelectric dams generating more energy than the sun, or some other such nonsense. How could I possibly design a system that was likely to remain stable with so much complexity?

Apple had recently released HyperCard, its beautiful hypertext-programming-drawing system that offered all sorts of wonderful possibilities. It was quite the rage in the Macintosh community, and although it was quite inadequate for my needs, the concept of hyperlinks seemed an appropriate model for use with environmental problems. After all, environmental topics are all intricately linked in myriad ways what better model than hyperlinks could I use?

So I resolved to build something rather like a hypertext system, but first I wanted to list the elements that would go into this system. What would each page in my hypertext system contain? The first few dozen came easily, but as the list grew longer, problems emerged. There were problems of overlap: Should sulfur dioxide emissions be subsumed under air pollution or should they stand alone?