You probably manage a lot of your life through Facebook: you plan events with particular friendship groups, keep an eye on the activities of your younger siblings, or announce big news to all who might want to know. In Redshirt, that reliance on one social network site is examined through magnification to extremes. It is 2363, and whatever your species or wherever you sit on the gender spectrum you are a nobody brought onboard a space station to clean up after others, and you manage your entire life through a social network called Spacebook.
Like its real-world parallel, Spacebook allows you to like statuses, send messages, and plan events. Here, however, your motivation is more than just procrastination. You'll want to maintain those relationships to get yourself noticed, and attend those events to build the skills necessary to lose the mop and bucket. Only through Spacebook can you advance in your career, and only through career advancement can you stand a chance of survival when calamity hits.
You see, when you arrive on the space station you wear a red shirt, and as Star Trek fans will know, redshirts always die.
Your likely doom is conveyed through a combination of vague suggestions that you might want to make some effort to become indispensable. First, you're sent on an away mission during which all of your colleagues die. Second, you start to see messages that contain a countdown and a hint of disaster once it reaches zero. Third, well, the game is a metaphor for our own ticking clocks, the inevitability of our own deaths, and the desire for meaning in our meaningless lives.
Redshirt portrays that feeling of meaninglessness well. While you plan events that take place in the real world (of the game, at least), all you see when you attend is lists: of who came, who spurned you because they don't share your interests, who gets a 10-point boost to their relationship with you, and who feels neglected because they didn't receive an invitation. Maybe you gain some skills, but that's all data too. Rather than try to hide the numbers behind the game's inner workings, Redshirt reduces relationships, skills, health, and even happiness to statistics.
Your entire social life is a regime of Spacebook actions, carefully planned to maximise positive output while still falling within your limit of four-to-six actions per day. If someone is writing negative statuses about you, just invite them to an event carefully designed around the interests that are displayed on their Spacebook page. If you want the 10-point daily boost to happiness that comes from being in a romantic relationship, just send a few flirty messages and then keep your partner close with a daily generic message.
In Redshirt, other people are a resource to be managed. If you want to be even more cynical, other people are there to be used for your own progress, so that you might live when they will not.
It turns out that you can be too skilled at social manipulation. Once I figured out that I could get a promotion without having to bother with building my skills if I just sucked up to the hiring manager instead, I leaped up the career ladder and was as high as I could climb with 100 days still to go until disaster struck. Left without much of a hint as to what to do next, I spent those remaining days smoothing things over with those who'd been left with a negative impression of me. As the vague warnings hinted at my impending demise, I patiently liked the statuses of those with whom my relationship was in the red, avoiding events because I'd inevitably leave loads of people feeling neglected, until nobody had a mean word to say about me. I was as important as it's possible to be in the game, and moderately popular with everybody on the station.
I still died. Maybe I missed a crucial hint, buried beneath the onslaught of song lyrics and cheesy chat-up lines, or maybe despite my best efforts to avoid it there is always still a chance that I'll die a meaningless death.
I'll play through again, though maybe I'll wait until a new update arrives to fix bugs like the one that makes dead colleagues continue to send me messages. For once, however, I don't really care that I lost. Redshirt is less here for your completion before you move onto the next thing than it is for provoking thought and discussion, and that's why you should totally play it when it launches later this year.
