93gamesstudio (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} 93gamesstudio) wrote,@ 2007-09-20 09:06:00 |
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| Current mood: |  tired |
Design Note
The Arithmetic of Extinction
On first glance, a 90% estimated casualty rate over the course of one year seems unimaginable. Short of a pandemic, which we ruled out as not in keeping with the post-nuclear feel of previous editions, nothing should be able to kill six billion people so quickly.
From a setting perspective, a more survivable Last Year wouldn't have generated an optimal atmosphere. We wanted a setting in which familiar urban landscapes had become hostile frontiers and small communities of survivors huddled together in the darkness. The world of Twilight: 2013 is a hollow and empty one for characters who remember what life was like only a year or two before.
Once we decided how bad we wanted things to be, mechanisms for killing nine in ten people were easier than we expected. As we examined recent history, it became clear that most large-scale disasters don't have higher casualty rates because they're local or regional. An earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami can devastate thousands of square kilometers, but the rest of the country – or, if need be, the rest of the world – can send help, receive refugees, and fund relief and reconstruction efforts. In Twilight: 2013, the infrastructure and C3I disruption from nuclear attacks and EMP meant that virtually every corner of the globe was thrust into crisis at once. Quite simply, there was no place from which sufficient help could come. Subsequent problems, which would have been manageable under normal circumstances, spiraled out of control into a proverbial "perfect storm" of humanitarian crises. Given time and leadership, even an isolated community might be able to recover from a nuclear strike. The same community isn't likely to withstand subsequent food shortages, cholera, and descent into mass panic and paranoid fratricide.
Hurricane Katrina was still fresh in our minds when we began writing Twilight: 2013, and its lessons deserve careful study. First and foremost, it told us that human nature is to deny impending danger until the last moment. The vast majority of people will not make sufficient preparations for any sort of crisis. Most citizens of developed countries will choose conformity and polite silence over making any sort of public spectacle, and will rely on their governments to provide for them rather than taking responsibility for their own safety. For their part, governments tend to discourage a large degree of self-sufficiency for a myriad of reasons. These mindsets are not conducive to crisis survival, be it on an individual or a societal level.
In addition, the last two generations have seen a movement away from rural life in virtually every industrialized nation. Thanks to the development of refrigeration, food production has become a centralized industry in which the vast majority of people no longer participate. Personal hygiene without indoor plumbing, trauma medicine, off-road navigation, and most primary production crafts are likewise skills that are as foreign as hunting and farming to most city-dwellers. Without public utilities and readily-available food, most of us simply don't know what to do to keep ourselves alive for a year.
So, by the numbers, what killed the world? Here are our estimates, assuming a global population of 7 billion at the beginning of 2012. GMs should feel free to adjust these numbers based on their own views of Armageddon.
Starvation, dehydration, and exposure: 2.4 billion (34% of prewar population). The single greatest killer during the Last Year was not bullet, blade, fire, or atom, but the breakdown of the world's ability to provide sustenance and shelter for its inhabitants. Over a third of humanity died from shortages of the most basic survival necessities.
Public health failure: 2.1 billion (30%). The widespread destruction of public utilities by both conventional warfare and EMP effects led to a global breakdown in public health and sanitation systems. Cholera, typhoid, and other diseases ran rampant in both surviving communities and refugee settlements.
Civil disorder: 310 million (4.4%). Panicked desperation resulted in temporary but intense civil unrest in most heavily-populated areas. Across the globe, citizens cast off the mantle of civilization in favor of whatever actions they felt they needed to take to preserve their own lives. Repressed population groups also seized the opportunity to settle old scores, and violent crime flourished to levels unseen in centuries.
Secondary nuclear strike effects: 250 million (3.8%). Secondary casualties from the nuclear exchanges broke down into two groups. The first includes victims of radiation poisoning or related complications such as compromised immune systems. The second is comprised of individuals who received physical injuries that were immediately survivable but ultimately (after weeks or months) fatal. This total does not include the vastly-increased cancer rate that current survivors will experience over the coming decades.
Self-inflicted: 240 million (3.4%). An astonishing number of people died by their own hands, either to avoid a worse fate or because they weren't psychologically capable of accepting continued existence after the Last Year. Precise causes of death were split evenly among action (deliberate suicide or requests for euthanasia) and inaction (simply lying down and waiting to die). Self-inflicted deaths with religious motivations comprise a significant minority of these totals.
Existing medical conditions: 230 million (3.3%). Modern medicine extended the life spans of millions of people around the globe. In the absence of functioning hospitals and pharmaceutical production, conditions that were otherwise minor annoyances with regular maintenance became terminal in a matter of months. Specific ailments responsible for these deaths ranged from AIDS and kidney failure to diabetes and asthma. This total also includes age-related deaths at both ends of the spectrum (infant and elderly).
Misadventure and accidents: 210 million (3%). Failures of overstressed technology, errors in judgement, and simple human stupidity contributed to a significant number of fatalities. Many of these would have been survivable had a prewar level of trauma care been available. An even greater number were the direct result of individuals lacking the basic crisis management skills to get themselves and others through life-threatening situations.
Influenza: 180 million (2.8%). The H5N1 ("bird flu") pandemic that caused such concern in the early 2000s never materialized on a global scale, though it was responsible for an undetermined number of deaths in
Conventional warfare: 170 million (2.4%). The Last War erupted with such speed that the world's militaries had little opportunity to build their forces up to Cold War levels. At the beginning of 2012, 0.4% of the world's population – some 28 million people – was engaged in some form of military service, including millions of irregular insurgents. As always, the vast majority of war-related casualties were civilians rather than soldiers.
Nuclear strikes: 75 million (1.1%). This figure includes primary casualties: people who were critically injured or instantly killed by the direct blast, thermal, or radiation effects of nuclear detonations. A small amount of this total includes victims who were not exposed to blast effects but were killed by the EMP-induced failure of technology; most such casualties died in mass transportation accidents or were reliant on medical life support equipment.
Natural disasters: 2 million (0.3%). Earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis didn't stop for the Last Year. However, even without relief efforts that mitigated the death tolls of previous natural disasters, the tolls exacted by these events paled in comparison to the damage humanity did to itself.
