Eco Defenders

Eco Defenders will always be one of my favorites among the games we've made. Science is often represented as a set of crystalline lenses you can hold up to the world and discern its essential underpinnings. It's a myth-breaker, an illusion-stripper, and the ultimate tool for discerning Reality As It Is. Many of our games give a nod to science as the ultimate arbiter of truth. For instance, that chart at the end of Coaster Creator literally describes the complete and total results of what just happened in that world. Those physical rules are implied to be equivalent to how the world actually works.

But that's a lie.
 
Coaster Creator ignores the type of material the track is made out of. It ignores wind resistance and climate conditions. It ignores the weight and movement of the passengers. It ignores the literal shape of each coaster cart. Coaster Creator omits many, many things in the name of simplicity. Coaster creator is an approximation of how a coaster might work, and nothing more.
 
Ultimately, all models are approximations. That's a bit of a tautology, I suppose, but only because a completely perfect model of a thing is then clearly the thing itself. But the point still stands. They're all a bundle of spinning gears, approximations, benign omissions and occasional falsehoods. Models - even scientific models - don't actually care about the Truth of things; they care about building models that are good enough to accomplish a task...and usually that task is prediction.
 
That's what I love about Eco Defenders. Like actual wildlife ecology, even the best-made plans are laid to waste by the sheer complexity and scope of a real, living ecosystem. We try to wipe out some creatures, desperately flail to keep others around, and bring in creatures to get rid of others...and sometimes creatures to get rid of those. Sometimes these plans work. Sometimes they fail horribly and we only find out after the fact, because the sprawling experiment that is our ecosystem is too big and beautiful to fathom.
 
Eco Defenders follows that theme. You can research the creatures in the little world, study their habits, diet, defenses and so on. You can design a creature that may very well be perfect for annihilating the target creature...only to find out that it sleeps at the wrong time and the two never meet. Compare this with Australia's Cane Toad Debacle and you can see why I'm proud to have designed a game that admonished scientific hubris. That's also why I love that the Eco Defenders gameplay cycle ends with a phase of "What the heck just happened?" The game emphasizes comprehension of how a complex system works rather than your power as puppet master. The complexity of the ecosystem, even in our silly little game, is large enough to overwhelm and confound the most reasonable of plans.
 
I consider that a unique aspect of Eco Defenders, and something I'll be proud of as a designer for the rest of my life.