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A Game For Aspiring Martians

Erica Holcomb

Periareion. It’s an astronomical term meaning “the closest approach to Mars.” It’s also a computer game where users try to establish a realistic virtual colony on the red planet.

Producer and designer Erica Holcomb grew up in Kalamazoo, though she now lives in Orlando, Florida. She’s one of several hundred finalists for Mars One, a nonprofit that hopes to start a real Mars colony in the not-so-distant future. Holcomb told WMUK’s Sehvilla Mann that the game reflects her deep interest in exploring areas never before seen by people.

SM: Once the colonists are on Mars, what are the challenges that they face and what’s their objective?

EH: Well, first of all, one of the main points of our game is that there’s no aliens. We got asked that a lot when we were building the game: are there going to be aliens? And no, we want to make it as realistic as possible so it’s mainly a survival game. Lots of micromanagement, lots of survival. The biggest enemy you’ll face is Mars’ environment. It’s not a very pleasant environment to live in and you have a lot of hazards, from dust storms, you have radiation, you have landslides and we also have, like, frost in one of our maps in the southern hemisphere. So there’s a lot of hazards that your colonists face when they’re out and about, outside the base and exploring, and also hazards that they face in terms of running out of food, running out of water.

Credit Erica Holcomb
PeriAreion players create realistic virtual colonies on Mars.

SM: And so I gather that the worst thing that can happen that your colony can fail and the best thing that can happen is that can become sustainable.

EH: Exactly. That’s how you win the game. We have three different winning conditions, actually. You can create a research colony, you can create a commercial colony or you can have a commercial colony so if you choose one of those three there will be different options for creating a sustainable colony. But the end goal of every single game is to make your colony sustainable, make it not dependent on any help from Earth. Though along the way you can have lots of help from Earth.

SM: How hard is it to make a sustainable colony in this game?

EH: We’ve had lots of reports of its being really difficult. That depends – we have three difficulty settings. For anybody just sitting down to play the game I would highly recommend the casual difficulty setting, because even we have trouble sometimes on normal and hard. A lot of it is based on random events and – like people can be caught out in dust storms or just accidents can happen around the base so that all makes it a lot harder. But um also we have difficulty settings on each map. So each area that you can choose to land is slightly different than the others and has slightly different hazards.

SM: How much did you have to sort of imagine and fictionalize and how much were you able to stick to things that are fairly certain?

EH: We did a lot of research and we were lucky enough to actually get a meeting with some of the people at NASA out here in Florida, and we actually found out that a lot of the stuff that we thought we were imagining or thought that like, was just a bit of a reach was actually stuff that they’re working on right now. So a lot of the technology and things like that – the different things that you can research, and there’s an entire research tree that you can spend experience points on and different tasks your colonists can do can give you points to spend in research.

SM: Is that just kind of research on the conditions on Mars or what kind of water might be there or things like that?

EH: A lot of it was actually some of the technology we put into the game. We tried to find articles about what research was being done. Certain things we weren’t quite sure about. Recycling technologies, things like that.

Erica-Holcomb-web.mp3
WMUK's full interview with PeriAreion producer and designer Erica Holcomb

SM: So you applied for Mars One and you said you were accepted and are you still in the running or is that done now?

EH: Yeah, currently I am.

SM: Wow. Would you actually do it, if you got selected?

EH: Yeah, absolutely.

SM: Even though you might not ever come back?

EH: Yeah.

SM: Wow, okay.

EH: At the same time too I realize that there’s also a chance that when I go out driving in Florida – especially in Florida – that I won’t come back.

SM: Erica Holcomb, thanks so much for your time.

EH: Thank you.
 

Sehvilla Mann joined WMUK’s news team in 2014 as a reporter on the local government and education beats. She covered those topics and more in eight years of reporting for the Station, before becoming news director in 2022.
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