I really love this episode.
It has dramatic tension, intellectual depth, and as much production value as I could possibly squeeze out of my credits.
In this episode, we experience a small part of Raph’s story together—and we also catch a glimpse of his future.
I saw someone comment that they didn’t understand it, that they couldn’t tell what the story was trying to say. But this was never meant to be a simple story about fighting monsters and defeating villains. It isn’t black and white. It requires a certain amount of knowledge and life experience to fully understand.
This is a story made for hardcore science-fiction fans.
And once it clicks, I think it becomes very hard to stop watching.
With both the game and the AI series of The Computational Universe: Arrival, I feel like I’ve poured everything I’ve learned over the course of my life into the story.
Raph, in particular, represents the way I instinctively begin writing a heroic character. When I start writing a hero, this is usually the kind of person who appears on the page. There is a great deal of my own personal expression embedded in him.
In Episode 2, Raph comes to believe that both the Zhiluians and the Apdocians are barbarians.
Justice has not been carried out.
Everything is wrong.
The experience traumatizes him profoundly, and he decides that from now on, he will personally step in and solve the problems that arise during a Reformation.
But the more he intervenes, the deeper he sinks.
I love Raph as a character. There are parts of myself in him.
He begins as a gentle lawyer from a remote frontier world, someone who despises violence. But he gradually discovers that reality refuses to accommodate his ideals.
Over the course of the story, we will see exactly how he becomes Raph the Protector, one step at a time.
Whether he can ultimately remain faithful to what he once believed—that is something you will be able to decide in the game.
When I write, I usually don’t place that much emphasis on conventional character arcs, even though Raph certainly does have one.
What interests me more is whether a hero can endure suffering and still remain a hero.
There’s a line from Soldier: 76 in Overwatch after he saves someone:
“Old habits die hard.”
That kind of character matters more to me—the kind of person who, despite everything, remains themselves and continues believing in what they have always believed.
Change is easy compared with remaining unchanged.
The world offers far too many temptations, far too many directions a person can take. But your deepest convictions should be something that follows you for an entire lifetime.
That is something I personally believe.
Someone once told me that my stories didn’t feel like “stories” because they didn’t follow classical narrative structures.
The thing is, I have studied classical story structure.
But I also know that for a story to truly have a soul, the thing you ultimately have to pour into it is your own soul.
Maybe that is why writers become more exhausted the longer they write.
Because every work contains fragments of their personality left behind inside it.
One viewer commented:
“The entire series feels very Asimov.”
My favorite science-fiction writer is indeed Isaac Asimov, especially the Foundation series.
Foundation has an extraordinary sense of scale. To me, it is one of the clearest examples of how to do a grand narrative well.
Trying to reduce an inevitable dark age to only one thousand years is an undertaking that demands both courage and intelligence.
I think my own science-fiction writing has undoubtedly been influenced by Asimov.
A friend told me:
“This has more depth than most science-fiction shows on the market.”
And that is genuinely something I am trying to achieve.
I like stories with weight.
Stories you can immerse yourself in, but which also leave you with things to think about afterward.
Some people believe that kind of storytelling goes against what the market wants.
I don’t think so.
If anything, it is exactly what can make The Computational Universe: Arrival distinctive—something that stays with you and rewards reflection.
The market rarely rewards people for flattering it.
What it notices is uniqueness.
I still intend to remain on the hardcore path.
And by “hardcore,” I don’t necessarily mean hard science fiction in the conventional sense.
I mean taking the story seriously.
I want to tell a serious story well instead of chasing short, fast, instantly gratifying content or inserting jokes simply because someone thinks there should be one there.
In a way, this is also a choice about who I am as an author.
We all know that once a character is forced to confront a genuine dilemma, that character suddenly becomes real.
Some viewers have also said that the story reminds them of Mass Effect.
Mass Effect and Stellaris are both science-fiction games I love, so it would hardly be surprising if they have found their way into my thinking.
But of course, what I want most is for this story to develop a feeling that belongs uniquely to The Computational Universe.
So what does “The Computational Universe” feel like?
First, it is grand.
It carries the remnants of a lost golden age.
Second, it is philosophical.
It refuses to compromise itself into mediocrity.
It is not the kind of story that exists only to deliver some predetermined uplifting moral.
It is not a fable.
It is not a morality play.
Its structure is more complicated than that.
It is an act of construction.
And beyond philosophy, there is something deeply engineer-like about it.
I didn’t graduate from an engineering or science program, but I have been writing code for more than ten years. Engineering culture has seeped deeply into the way I think.
And I believe there is a unique kind of beauty in that.
Part of that beauty comes from a sense of authenticity.
Part of it comes from imagination suddenly breaking free.
Ultimately, The Computational Universe is meant to give you a science-fiction experience unlike any other.
And I think you’re going to fall in love with it.
