The Nerfing of the Starship Enterprise: Conclusion

Ok, I've sent some time reviewing the past and how today's Enterprise is but a pale shadow of the original.

The question now is why did it turn out the way it did?

Not the easiest of questions, and I believe it would be difficult to answer even if I did in-depth interviews with every decision maker behind every product. Frankly, I've talked with enough designers and writers to know that often they don't understand why they do things. I doubt this area is any different. But trends can be spotted and those can telling. Given that I'm not a mind reader, I may wrong- but that's not going to prevent me from trying.

There are two areas here, the first is Game and the other TV/Movies. I feel that the nature of each drove the nerfing of the Enterprise with only a little overlap.


Gaming:

• Ablative game design is frankly the market driver. It's the core (with HP) behind D&D and similar games as well as all the most successful MMORPGs.

It's easy for the designer, and easy to grasp for the player. Being easy, it has the deceptive appearance of being easy to balance. They are very popular indeed.

I don't like Ablative systems, and I've written about that before. The simple truth is that few things in life or even in TV/movies are really ablative. Once selected, simulation suffers. Further, once selected it very difficult to keep anything exceptional- it's now just a number of hit points (or boxes in Star Fleet Battles) to be reduced.

Lastly, once a type of game starts down the ablative path- it almost always dooms any following games. WotC hasn't tried to replace HP in D&D, it's an expected element of that genre. Who would risk something different when it has been prove ablative works?

• The Hobby's need for expansions in order to maintain sales drives expansion of setting and technology.

There is a strong pressure to keep a game line selling, and that's difficult to do if your first book out the door defines 'the best of the best'. What sexy reason does the buyer have to get the lastest expansion? It has to have new stuff, and sooner or later that new stuff is going to break the old.

• The desires of designers to 'fix' the original.

Designers often think they have wonderful ideas. They may not be part of the original, but dang it they are so wonderful they have to be in there anyway. The designers of Star Fleet Battles loved historical navy simulations- and names and concepts from historical navy simulations found their way into a Star Trek game.

TV/Movies:

• First and debatably the most important influence- Star Wars.

The impact of Star Wars was huge and has altered the public's view of what sci-fi should look like ever since. Star Trek avoided the fighters for a while, but in the end gave in (at least in part) during the run of DS9.

However Star Wars' version of hyperlight is now the default image for FTL travel. It's blasters now the default of 'ray guns'. The makers of TV and movies love default images, and have a difficult time breaking away from them. In short, the original Enterprise was too... original.

I feel that this influence drove a lot of the changes we've seen. From how warp drive and phasers now work to the numbers of shuttles carried.

• Cultural Change.

The original was a product of the 60s, when American Exceptionalism (while under attack) was still the norm. The Enterprise and crew was the United States written into the future: bold, individual, powerful. When on a equal footing- it would crush its Klingon (Elaan of Troyius, Errand of Mercy) or Romulan (Balance of Terror) foe.

Dramatic tension was added to its battles by other means like sabotage (Elaan of Troyius), unknown foes (Balance of Terror), or outside influences (The Tholian Web).


TNG and later were created when Hollywood (and sadly much of America itself) had decided that traditional America was flawed and without value. Socialism replaced the original's Capitalism. Force wasn't the heroic defense of virtue any more- but the resort of those who have failed to understand what they were doing. Kirk claimed to be a soldier, in TNG Star Fleet was no longer a military arm.

The Captain of the Enterprise was French, and the model of the Federation became the EU.

With such a mind shift, there was no place for a powerful 'best of the best' Enterprise. It could no longer be exceptional. Thus any one-one-one battle with the Klingons or Romulans was now at best a toss up.

In a way it made for easy writing, just about everything was a threat. And the only path to victory was either technobabble, or by talking out the differences.


So IMO that's the current state of affairs.

We won't see anything like the original Enterprise with the current mindset in Hollywood, or the current state of the art in game design. And so, we left with memories of the good old days.

I did love those old days*.


Part: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII

*Like all memories, these are somewhat selective. To be honest, many TOS episodes were less than stellar. Really, Spock's Brian anyone?