User:Murgh/A fourth school

"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 IronAss 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 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 extreme¹ 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 IronAss 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 IronAss 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 IronAss Brutalist mindset.

Footnotes

• 1. As 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, therefore over 281.4 trillion more possible systems than the intentional 2048 we're given.