A game I have loved and what it taught me: SMAC

In Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999), we are put in charge of ensuring the survival of the last remnants of humanity, a few thousand people sent urgently in a starship to colonize the star system Alpha Centauri in the final days of Earth. Through the game, we not only get to decide how humanity may (or may not) survive, but also decide how humanity evolves into different future societies, and find its place among the stars. This unique science fiction setting drew me to Alpha Centauri as a teenager. At first, I expected to be simply entertained by the game. Yet years later as an adult, I still remember Alpha Centauri as a wellspring of ideas from which I drank and became transformed. 

Through Alpha Centauri, I discovered ideas about how future societies may organize themselves to ensure human survival and progress. I discovered ideas about what future speculative technologies might be and how they will affect future societies. I remember that playing the game made me felt less lonely in the world, because I discovered that loneliness is a universal human condition and that it is timeless. I discovered hope and optimism in an uplifting possible future in which humanity finds its place among the stars. I found and grappled with ideas that are bigger than me. I made decisions that made me reflect on my capacity for empathy. I discovered that history is not a guiding moral force. I found these ideas so unexpected and erudite in a computer game that playing the game became a way for me to meditate about my place in the world...

Lying awake in bed

Lying awake in bed last night, I heard what sounded like Chinese opera music playing from my neighbor's apartment. No it can't be, I thought and closed my eyes. And for a few seconds, I was back in my childhood bed in my grandparents' house. Then, as now, light from the the evening streets leaked through my bedroom windows. And I could hear my neighbor's TV playing audibly. When lay still, I could make out the words of the TV shows being played. Sometimes, I would lie with my eyes open, tracing out the room in semi darkness. Other times I would lie with my eyes closed. Time slowed, and nothing else seem to mattered.

gravity is desire

There will still be something beautiful

"One of those messages tells of a love which failed, and a fall. It tells, too, of what came after."

Mortal. Machine. The heart is destiny's engine.

...hurtling forever towards the earth

"What have you done? What has changed? Impossible to tell."

Brazil

"There are parts of my life that you don't know," you said. "Before I met you, there was someone else, and things happened when I went back to Brazil."