In March of 2023, I signed up to chess.com and decided I was going to get good at chess. Somehow I'd heard about people getting really into chess.com and there was a big online chess community and it was cool now, and I thought "yeah, let's give that a go."
After two weeks on chess.com I had the disappointing realisation that I do not like chess. Not really at all. I understand the rules, but I can't see through them to the enjoyment, and do not care to spend a bunch of time learning to do so. Chess is sort of interesting to learn about, but not at all fun for me to play. So far the best thing I got out of trying to engage with chess is that I found the very pleasant youtube channel ASMR Chess, in which a man who really loves chess very gently explains various strategies and moves to you.
Despite my dislike for Chess, it takes place on a board and I'll admit that there are loads of interesting variants of it, and there are lots of interesting ways to think about playing it. This makes it fine territory for me to make a new version myself, and save a whole bunch of time on designing half the game. I came up for this one while I was still part way through Fire Season, so it was actually super handy to kind of have something in the bag that was going to be way less work than usual.
Gold Goo Scenario is a chess variant where only one side is playing something even remotely resembling chess. The other side is playing some sort of mutant checkers variant. Conceptually, this is basically inspired by the theoretical "Gray Goo Scenario" in which a self replicating material (typically a swarm of nanomachines) turns everything it encounters into itself, eventually transforming all available matter this way. The mechanics of the Goo player are intended to replicate this.
You have a few rules you have to abide by as the Goo, in order to make this a game and not just somebody pouring loads of plastic counters onto a chessboard. You can't leave any part of yourself separate from the rest, lest it denature and be destroyed by the elements. Any part of the goo can move directly from one side of the goo form to the other. And, to make taking pieces possible, there's a brief grace period where the first rule doesn't apply, allowing you to absorb a piece and then replace the space left behind with another goo.
As the chess side, you are bound by the rules of the chess pieces you are given, representing an elite tactical unit tasked with wiping out the goo through application of overwhelming firepower. You have no such advantages in terms of regeneration, but have the full power of the pieces you're granted. Every loss will be massive. But risks must be taken.
Also to make it work as a more interesting strategy game than simply taking it in turns to do weird shit or chess shit, each side takes 3 consecutive turns at a time, so there's more of a need to plan ahead, and the options to apply hit and run tactics in handling the goo.
The theming for this one came relatively late, after I'd already done all the mechanics and during the production stage where I make all the notes and mechanics into an actual game document. The theme for the project overall is of course "Surviving the Future", so how does the Gray Goo Scenario factor into that? Aside from it being a strange theoretical apocalypse, what motivations could someone have for creating something self-replicating? Perhaps a shortage of something else.
With this basic starting point, I thought about what things people might try and create unlimited sources of in the future, from which I could contrive some scenario for the game. After Oil, perhaps the most obvious thing that people might wish to make self-replicating, I moved onto food. Why would we need to make any form of self replicating food, in a world that currently produces vastly more than it can consume, leading to massive waste?
Well, we aren't likely to be able to keep doing that for much longer if current climate trends continue. Within the next 10 years we are likely to lose 10-25% of our global food production capacity. Areas with favourable conditions for the production of food crops are expected to shift, with our current systems needing to heavily adapt in order to keep step with demand. Deforestation and high intensity weather events will put further pressure on existing agricultural practices, and more extreme weather events such as storms, hurricanes, and floods will become more frequent and destructive.
This isn't even to mention the threats posed by soil degradation, in which the land itself becomes useless for farming due to mismanagement and overuse. Or Pollinator Decline, in which the insect life we depend on to make many of our crops actually grow to produce food is no longer present in the numbers we require, which is itself largely driven by changing climate conditions and abuse of pesticides.
Well, with all that in mind, (and in a desperate attempt to lighten the mood) wouldn't it be oh so useful to have a source of food that just generates more of itself? Your very own magic porridge pot! Here comes the titular Gold Goo. It's self-replicating butter. A high calorie foodstuff usable in so many situations. Who wouldn't want infinite butter?
Well, uhhh, it doesn't work. I mean the butter does exist and it's self-replicating, but it's hopelessly out of control, having escaped containment and consumed an entire town's worth of people, at minimum, before the events of the scenario. You can't eat a food that turns you into more of the food. It's King Midas' Gold Goo. Or perhaps more like The Skittles Touch.
It's also hard to deny that at least some of the mechanical conception of how this particular Goo functions is inspired by the novel Jam, a decent book. While the Jam is largely unexplained, it's fairly well signalled that the Gold Goo is some sort of experimental foodstuff. A deliberate reference is made to the conceptually similar but probably much more horrifying real life Boston Molasses Disaster, and for a little while I was working off the idea that the food would be a refined sugar in the same vein. However, I thought butter would be a more interesting thing to have slowly covering the land, as though the earth was just a big slice of toast, and making it Golden Syrup or something similar would probably be a bit too close to the actual events of the aforementioned disaster, which felt in poor taste.
Well, at this point I'm kind of accepting that this entire project was a way of me trying to come to terms with the scale of the climate crisis, by envisioning various tangentially related scenarios and creating art through my most familiar forms of media (writing and game design). This is probably why there's so much more direct discussion of this within these explainer articles.
There's a big running theme alongside "Surviving The Future" as the thing tying all the games together, but I'm going to explain more of that once the project is done. I've only got a few more left to produce (I'm behind schedule, but still working through them).
Anyway, Chess annoys me and deserves to be broken. We need to push for massive action to make our agricultural practices more sustainable asap. Don't eat the self replicating foods.
We'll be back next time with something far more experimental, as we look at game 8, Haunted House.
(ORIGINALLY POSTED 04/07/2024)