What are the best core themes?
I've always had fun creating worlds. I built up complex worlds in my mind for my lego men to adventure in, I drew out elaborate maps of cities and countries when I was little and daydreamed funny stories or adventures that could have taken places in these places. Later I built MUDs, made complex dungeons for other people to run around in. In recent years I would craft complex stories and histories in my mind to match with events in games like GalCiv 1, or Master of Orion 3 since they lacked stories of their own.
I've written before on the importance of a good story/background for a computer game, how the proper narrative can give context to ordinarily meaningless actions. I singled out the WarCraft series as an example of how story is done right, and games like Master of Orion or Galactic Civilizations where a story could have either made the game playable (in the case of the former), or made it simply outstanding (in the case of the latter). To me, a story in the thread that ties a game together.
So, add my habit of doodling stories in my mind with my appreciation/desire to see well-crafted narratives in video games and you'd almost see the quivering beginnings of a game writer.
Well, except for the fact that I'm not all that great at writing...
And I don't have a game to write for...
Lucky for me, a friend of mine has gotten into game development with the Torque Game Engine in the past year or so and is trying to build his own Space RPG/Sim. Well, for a good space game, you need a story. He and I talked and he thought it would be great if I wanted to write for the game. Since this is a hobby game, and will probably never reach a released or even largely playable state, it's a great platform for me to experiment, for me to get a feel for how to write in this medium. With some work, some feedback from others and maybe eventually some writing lessons I may reach a point where I'm good enough to write stuff that I would ever let anyone else outside a very close circle of friends read... Maybe someday I'd even get to write the story for a cheap 2d sidescroller freeware game! The sky's the limit!
So now, I have a universe to create. It's history, geography, politics, factions, races and technology are all left to me to think up and describe. It's a daunting, but very cool, task.
My problem is I need a starting point, I need to come up with a larger theme to fit everything else into. This is probably the hardest part since a compelling theme drives so much in a story, it dictates how so much else is written.
This is why I'm here, writing to you, my fellow JUziens. Many of you here are sci-fi geeks, you love video games, you may be a writer yourself, or you may just love reading a good story. What sorts of sci-fi core themes and concepts have you really enjoyed in other games/books/movies?