User:Murgh/A fourth school

The following text was written at least 20 years too late. I would have loved to have cooked it up in my Elite years around 1985-87, probably even more if I had thought of it during the genesis days of Oolite 2004-06, but I didn't. When it eventually popped up, so much later, it was still from a frame of mind of a "blank slate" player, reluctant, maybe even afraid, to take on much of all the modernity that was now available. Maybe these thoughts come from that, and it couldn't have been written earlier? This is set is far from the world of 20+ years since the birth of Oolite, now rich in progress with more than a thousand of game-advancing OXPs, teeming with spacecraft shaped in the smooth and luscious (PROHIP) style. It is back to the basic beginning, when the skeleton was still visible. The raw math was exposed, the ships were crude geometric shapes, the text was generated by a wacky formula.. It is hard to imagine someone now, booting up Oolite with no or few OXPs, and deciding to take in the full 8-bit game experience that it was, confronting the game in that nearly "analog" state of mind. But you never know, sometimes revolutions come full circle.

"Where are the people saying that they should stick to the original lore? And which original lore, anyway, since it's not like anyone agrees on what that is..."

Cim, ^{May 05, 2022}

Overview

Some narrative ideas are difficult to reconcile with the established "schools" of Elite (and Oolite) lore. If the Syncretist concepts repel, and the Pragmatist approach only provide dissatisfaction, the type of stories that spring from the root narrative of Elite are left to fall into the Purist realm.

But at what point does a sub-branch of Purism germinate to a schism, and defect to an offshoot of its own, or even merit the suffixes of an -ist and -ism? These are the presumptuous seeds of the Brutalist paradigm caught in a wind blowing an opposite direction.

Divergence

To make sense of the Elite universe, we are given the peculiar boot-up game data, alongside Holdstock's The Dark Wheel and The Space Traders Flight Training Manual to make of it what we want. We decide what to take at face value, and some certainly have objections to the information supplied by Holdstock.

The Purist makes sense of the Elite game data by absorbing all of it: lobsters, edible poets, unusual mating traditions and all, the yield of the clever maths of Bell&Braben that pushed the available technology of its times to its limits. Even more so years on and veiled in nostalgia, a uniquely eccentric curio to be digested.

But if the willingness to digest the curio balks at the game's outset, the mind maybe no longer adhering to Purism. If your instinct says that the data itself feels corrupted, censored or artificially engineered, and feels in complete conflict with its intent, it could be said that it is anti-purism, or Iron Ass Brutalism.

To the Brutalist, the whimsical elements of the presented universe are unnatural; they are glitches in a deficient simulation. The tapestry of disinformation, distortions, and deliberate omissions should themselves be interpreted as literally as any flight manual.

Red flags

The pattern of 8s are a trail of clues.

The unnatural symmetries are the primary "evidence":

• 8 galactic charts/sectors
• 256 (2⁸) systems per chart
• 8 government types
• 8 economic models
• 8 non-human races..

These "limits" are typically dismissed as low constraints of early 1980s computer code, but the numbers are in fact abridged in the extreme^[a] from their potential immenseness. Thus, to the Brutalist they are deliberate clues. Why wouldn't the artifice be a clue or a crucial key to the story.

If you are abruptly dropped into the middle of a maze, and given a limited set of very strange instructions, you have to suspect the possibility that the information is wrong, and that someone is lying to you. The scepticism places the entire universe under a dark, harsh light. If you cannot trust the manual, you are on your own to solve the challenge of who is in authority, what sinister intentions lie behind, and why are we fed false information.

From a traditional "starting mindset" of the open world-no-story-"choose your own path"-sandbox-Elite, this is the opposite.

Philosophy

Where the rational Purist thinks,

• "The universe is weird, so I must find a scientific explanation for the weirdness to make it feel real"

The Iron Ass Brutalist thinks,

• "The universe is weird because the machine controlling it is broken or evil. The weirdness is the story."

The rational Purist might say,

• "There's no right way to play this game, you have the freedom to roam forth and discover any way you like.."

The Iron Ass Brutalist says,

• "That's what they want you to think!"

Kernel

The Brutalist breaks it down like this:

GalCop was an ineffective governing body until it built a machine to help them be better at it. The machine analyzed the chaotic, inadequate human endeavours of the galaxy and went to work. It shaped its dominion into mathematical symmetry and utilitarian geometric structure by law to achieve its objectives. Its success was certain, by moving with great speed to stun its subjects, and appeal to its subjects' greed to seal the transformation.

This creates a story universe constricted into mathematical order.

But tyranny breeds insurgence. A deft strike by the resistance to the machine's brain lobotomized it. But the effete leadership still couldn't bear to shut it down, so it remains in operational control of the galaxy, in a state of insanity.

This creates a story universe full of absurd concepts.

Attempting to navigate such a story universe from a perspective of "gritty realism" is a dark, dystopic proposition. This is the Iron Ass Brutalist mindset.

The story

Main article: The Brutalist Axiom

The Brutalist Axiom details the broad-strokes timeline from humanity's largely inefficient pre-Reform era "The Sprawl", through The Era of Standardization triggered by the activation of the GalCop Central Mainframe. Then follows the various uncompromising excisions and reforms that it implemented onto the galactic population, succeeded by the initial Thargoid skirmishes, and eventually the insurgent Goat Soup Syntax Rupture attack on the Mainframe. Finally the Post-Rupture Aftermath arrives that marked the beginning of the Age of Inanity, along with the coinciding escalation of Thargoid attacks.

Which brings us to the moment a player begins a new game.

This is the body of lore that falls under the Iron Ass Canon.

Footnotes

• a. ^∧ Described by Stranger, the original BBC Micro assembly code (and preserved in Oolite’s Universe.m / Universe.js), the state of the universe is determined by a seed, a structure composed of three 16-bit integers (words).

1. w0 (16 bits)
2. w1 (16 bits)
3. w2 (16 bits)

3 x 16 bits = 48 bits, 2⁴⁸ = 281,474,976,710,656, a formula capable of generating over 281.4 trillion possible different galactic charts.