Galilean Relativity

Most people know about Einstein's theory of relativity; few people know that Galileo came up with a kind of slow-motion analogue of it. He reasoned that, until you know about something happening, it might as well not be real for you. In other words, events happening in the New World right now would not be known in Europe until several months later, so it was better to think in terms of the lag being a kind of reality. Galileo showed that this view of reality had some practical benefits. But the idea never took off.

This could provide the basis for a nice game. I actually started building just such a game, calling it The Last of the Incas. It was based on the final struggles of the rebel Inca leaders against the Spanish. There were several such flare-ups, and it is conceivable that a truly determined and well-led effort might have succeeded in ejecting the Spanish from Peru. What made these struggles interesting was the slow speed of news travel in the rugged terrain of the Andes. Often, a military force would set out for a destination without realizing that it had already been captured by the enemy. My game factored this into the display: The dispositions you saw on the map were based on your latest information about them; they could be wildly out of date. Traveling closer to one area gave you more up-to-date information about it, but also made your information about distant areas even less reliable. The game played rather like a modern information war by controlling road junctions, you could blind your enemy and concentrate your forces on his weak points, capturing them before he even knew they were in trouble.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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