Game in the Brain

As an adult the impact of appliances is the time and cost of many of the responsibilities we gain.

In a scifi setting, fabricators, workshops/machine shops, printers, refiners, extractors, food processors, recyclers, etc..

The harder the scifi the more important details and constraints become. System and life cycle  thinking – becomes necessary but does it add value to the game?

Do players like to have a problem complicated by or solved by mastery of these topics.

As the plant director who is IT, a nerd who reads the books and into open repair  I observed – many problems in Philippine manufacturing are accepted as something they can’t fix – but to me they are fixable.

One problem we recently had was spending tens of thousand of dollars in New equipment per year: which we didn’t need too. Not to someone who knows how to fix Things.

There is this paradigm of people who don’t know and it’s OK. A manufacturing plant or company without my skills is completely happy and content with what ever skillset they have and just want more capital and higher costs to create outputs – 

Of course IT, Lean manufacturing, and etc affect how we run the plant. The players can completely play traveller or cepheus engine without optional rules on the details and make money based on the efficiencies in the book… How much cost they spend to create income modified by how efficient they are. 

Then of course there are players who want to be able to fabricate repairs in ship, manufacture small batches of tech in their current port that doesn’t have the tech, solve a technical problem in their current star system etc…  There is that technical problem and People – the largest influential irrational variable to any system issue. 

The game adapts to its players – as younger players emerge in Scifi – someone will challenge the way the game is played. They will not grow up with the golden age of scifi books – they would probably grow up on Scott Manley, Anton Petrov, curious Droid, Kurzgesagt etc… 

My kids will not understand many of tropes I grew up with, as it’s more common for kids to be different from their parents than be their copies frozen in time (kids in 2020 enjoying 1980-1990 materials). 

I’m not the only parent who is using minecraft and roblox concepts to understand their kids. Understanding this is their world now more than ours as abilities decline with age, and they are learning their potential. 

Still that layer of thought applies – one can work with what ever level of complexity they can handle in a TRPG. If they want to go deeper there is always a community who supports them the way I got into my work education came from games before I studied the real life applications. I had the freedom to choose the complexity.