The Starlane Times: the newspaper a space game writes about its players

Starlane is one universe, and everybody plays in it at once. Things happen there whether or not you are watching: somebody earns a licence, somebody loses a ship on the rim, two factions spend a month fighting over a station. So the game writes it down. Every day there is a new front page at /times: the Starlane Times.

Nobody writes it. The game reads what the fleet did that day and puts it into words. Here is what that looks like, and the rules it keeps.

What a day's paper holds

An edition covers one UTC day. Today's says today, still being written under the date, because it is: anything that happens before midnight lands on this page. The story at the top is the rarest thing that happened, so a door the fleet paid for opening outranks a licence earned, and a licence outranks a new crew. Under the lead is everything else the day held:

• a gate the fleet paid for opening, or a gate's pot reaching its target;
• a system charted for the first time, by anybody;
• ships lost, and the line that every pilot was towed home;
• licences earned, each named by what it is;
• a new crew founded;
• a grudge settled on the rim, when somebody finally brings down the captain who kept coming back;
• the month's front, and how it stands;
• the day's event: a station paying over its board for one good, or a bounty paid twice over;
• ideas from the fleet that went into the game that day.

This is a real day, the eleventh of October, word for word:

A licence earned. Earned today: the Bounty Licence. A licence is bought with credits and only once the skills are there, and the skills take real days. None of it can be bought with money.

A new crew was founded. Two to five pilots, by invitation only, under a name nobody typed. A crew has a board for notes and flies escort for its own.

A price on a reaver pack. A reaver pack has been working somebody's lanes, and the first one a licensed hunter takes there today pays its bounty twice over, until midnight UTC.

It names nobody

Read that again and look for a name. There isn't one. The Times never names a pilot, and that includes pilots who have made their page public. Your page is shareable but never in search engines (here is why), and the Times is written to be found. The two promises only hold together if the paper names nobody at all.

It names no place either, except Sol. Starlane has no map: you find out where a lane goes by flying it, and whoever arrives first is on the record for good (why there is no map). A newspaper that printed where the busy stations were would give that away. So the event says somewhere on the lanes, and adds that the station paper there says which, to anybody who has been.

And it prints no figures in a story. Counts are written in words, two ships or dozens, and nothing says how much anybody earned.

A quiet day says so

Some days nothing much happens, and the paper doesn't pretend otherwise:

A quiet day on the lanes. Nobody charted anything new, nothing was lost, and the gates waited. Somebody was working a dock shift; somebody always is.

That line sits under whatever still leads that day, which is usually the month's front.

The front, a month at a time

Every month, two factions contest one station. Nobody signs up for a side. Every sale into its market, every delivery to it, every shift on its dock and every bounty claimed from it counts for one of them, whether or not the pilot doing it thinks of it as a war. This month it reads:

The Terran Directorate and the Coreward Compact contest a station. Two factions want the same station this month, and every sale, delivery, shift and bounty there counts for one of them. So far the Coreward Compact leads. The station page there says which station it is, to anybody who has charted it.

When the month ends, whoever did more holds the station: its banner says so, and so does its record. And since a change this autumn, it decides more than the flag: the station's market, yard, academy and dock board serve you by your standing with whoever holds it. It never closes the lane out.

The ideas pilots asked for

Pilots tell us what to build on the signal board, and the fleet votes on it. When an idea ships, whoever sent it in is paid for it in credits. The Times now says so on the day it happens: an idea from the fleet went into the game. It doesn't say whose idea it was or what it asked for. The board is theirs to read.

Every edition, kept

Every day's paper is its own page, and it stays. Each edition links the day before and the day after, and every edition this month opens the archive: a month to a page, each day under the headline it led with. A day with no news of its own is marked a quiet day instead of borrowing the front's headline as if it were news.

None of it is stored as a newspaper. Each edition is worked out from what the day left behind, every time somebody opens it, so it can't disagree with what happened.

Why a game would write a newspaper

A universe with other people in it should be able to show that to somebody who isn't playing yet. Every line in the Times is something a pilot did, and the next edition is written by whoever is flying today.

Read today's edition. If you want your own name somewhere, that's what your pilot page is for, and it's off until you turn it on.

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