The question of beneficial video games was raised in a forum to which I belong. The electronic hobby is now to American culture what film was half a century ago, having doubled and doubled and doubled again in reach and influence: from lab-constructed dedicated curiosities and pizza parlor arcades video games moved to the home, first to the cartridge- or tape-fed television attachments and then to the ever-affordable family computer, to high-powered consoles and the internet. Video gaming produces and invites excess, seen most clearly in the unwisely distributed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and a collection of news reports on addiction, theft, avarice or — bizarrely but rarely — foul play. My generation is the first to have been in part defined by video gaming, so what have I to show for the diversion of my formative years? Lost time?
Not from Electronic Arts' and Binary System's Starflight. Starflight was one of four programs wrapped alongside the Tandy 1000 EX that sat under my family's 1986 Christmas tree. Eight years old at the time, I played the game as soon as my father copied a pair of "play disks" for me and, despite the learning curve, became acquainted with the game, enjoying it for years.
Never before or after have designers attempted to simulate the open-ended exploration of space. Through inventive use of fractal generation, players could travel to and explore over 800 planets revolving around 250 star systems — a swath of the galaxy that spanned 62,500 sectors on an X/Y-coordinate map, each corner claimed by one of seven space-faring races. Players assumed the role of captains for Interstel, a commercial exploration organization in the far-flung future. Success was dependent upon efficacy, practicality and enterprise: a starship was outfitted and crewmembers were hired and trained with available funds.
Every ship's maiden voyage was made by an inexperienced crew piloting a defenseless, underpowered craft. In the spirit of Adam Smith, players could advance only by generating capital: planetside mining, lifeform and artifact collection; and colony recommendation. One could resort to piracy — at the expense of winning the game, of course, but the marvel of Starflight was its breadth.
Each planet was unique. Rock, molten, frozen, gas surfaces; different atmospheres, hydrospheres, lithospheres. Most planets were inorganic; others teeming with life. Players could land on one of 32,400 points of latitude and longitude, then explore each topographically varying surface in a radius determined by planetside weather and the fuel efficiency of their terrain vehicle. If a site yielded nothing or surveys gathered everything of worth, players could launch into orbit and land again. If the vehicle ran out of fuel, crews made the trek on foot and Interstel would bill players for a replacement.
Graphically, Starflight might have struck one as mediocre in the mid-Eighties and antediluvian today but for the strength of iconography. Representation made the game's universe possible; like chess pieces, every unit was defined by a categorical symbol. Hidden behind a generality was specificity. A "bilateral bipedal" or "medium producer" lifeform; a mineral deposit; a ruin; an alien starship; when examined, could carry one of dozens of particular descriptions. Like memetics, a series of icons instantly and efficiently communicated what were a bewildering number of distinct entities. Starflight was not so much simplistic as it was masterfully ordered.
The game was underpinned by an objective: Preventing a mortal, apparently natural intergalactic threat that was revealed early in the game. Only through successful ship-to-ship diplomacy could a player determine the force's nature, cause and weakness. As each alien race possessed differents cultures and expectations — idiosyncrasies and enmities — skill and patience were required to befriend or otherwise engage a species. Communication had great depth, and one — at least one eight years of age — began to believe in an intelligence transcendent of the game's artificial one.
Binary Systems created, by design or else by the sheer impression of so rich an experience, a powerfully educational computer program for a youngster. I learned basic finance, checks and balances, and the cause and effect of stimulus-response. I learned about star spectra and mineralogy. I learned dozens of words: lithosphere, hydrosphere, monetary, flux, flare, obsequious, curio, molybdenum, cobalt, ataraxia.
I have only beaten the game once. Not because I could not — technically speaking, for I soon bought a clue book, too young to quite grasp the finer points — but because I so enjoyed the adventure, the process of growth and advancement. At times I am more satisfied with accomplishment than completion, and Starflight, in its non-linearity, was a fitting medium. There is no game I remember more fondly, nor one that more greatly contributed to my childhood.