Star Trek, Spacebook and social networking with Redshirt's Mitu Khandaker
Redshirt is a game which offers a science fiction take on social networking. Starting as the lowliest person aboard a space station you must use Spacebook -- the game's social network -- to work your way up the social and career ladder. But to what end? Wired.co.uk took this and other questions to the game's developer, Mitu Khandaker.
Wired.co.uk: What's Redshirt about?Mitu Khandaker: It's a comedy sci-fi social networking sim, which is quite a weird way to describe a game but it really is just about being the most insignificant person on this future space station. You're trying to climb up the career ladder using the onboard social network, Spacebook. It's up to you as the player to try and navigate the social relationships on board the station. They're different each time you play because it's all AI-driven and the non-player characters (NPCs) are generated each time you play a new game.
The title Redshirt is a Star Trek reference -- you're trying to stop being the most insignificant person. You're trying to stop being the redshirt by the time something terrible happens.
Does something terrible always happen? Originally I'd intended it to be a very sandboxy experience where you were trying to navigate social relationships and do whatever you want, but it seemed like it needed a story structure behind it. So there is a big intergalactic story which unfolds as you're busy liking statuses. Eventually it will end up affecting you -- there's no way out of it so there's a time frame by which you have to stop being a redshirt.
Where did your interest in social networks come from? I was in my second year of university when everyone got on Facebook. At that time in your life you've got this interpersonal drama anyway and the ways social media can exacerbate that -- it's always been really interesting to me. At some point it coincided with my love of thinking about modelling social behaviour and relationships in games. Those things coalesced into wanting to simulate a social network in this game environment. Even before I started working on Redshirt I'd had that idea and when I originally spoke to Cliff Harris of Positech Games (who's publishing Redshirt) I'd pitched it as a social networking sim without all the sci-fi skin over it.
In talking to him -- he's hugely into sci-fi -- it seemed like adding the sci-fi skin would only enhance the idea because then it becomes a reflection of what our possible future in space would be like. If we do become this space-faring species we're still going to be the same -- we're still going to be self-obsessed and post pictures of cats.
What led you to Facebook and did you consider other social networks? Right now Twitter seems like a bigger deal to people for a lot of reasons and when I started working on the game it was more of an even split. But when you think of social networking people tend to think of Facebook first because it's in the public consciousness the most. Ultimately the mechanics of the game to do with trying to share statuses and liking other people's things are all very similar [across social networks]. It's about putting yourself out there to gain approval of others. You can abstract Spacebook down to any social network really.
What was the research process like for the game? Most was extrapolating from my own experience but I did definitely do research. Articles like "What are the most popular Facebook statuses?" and what people post about the most. Also just speaking to people. There's very much an awareness of the different tropes you see on social media. The person who wants to share every mundane detail of what they have eaten, the people who post really vague things just to attention seek -- there are definitely archetypes of behaviour on social media which anyone who uses social media is aware of. It was about identifying those things and making sure they're covered in the game.
Was there anything interesting that came out of the testing phase? One of the challenges of trying to model characters with different behaviours is that you get the character to behave a certain way but a lot of the interpretation of the game and the way the characters behave comes from the players.
The ways NPCs can express their behaviour in the game are by liking statuses, sending you messages, updating their own status or responding to friend requests. There is a very limited range of things through which to assert an NPC's personality. Even though I might want a particular NPC to be a really selfish character who doesn't care about the others and is a bit mean, if for whatever reason the player doesn't interpret a certain status that way [...] the player's own experience will dictate how they interpret an NPC's behaviour. I suppose that applies to life. People behave a certain way but how someone else perceives them is down to their own personality as well.
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Star Trek, Spacebook and social networking with Redshirt's Mitu Khandaker