One of my favorite options throughout the Terran campaign was the interaction with the UNN news reports, and the obvious government control and bias against the heroes. What I thought was a fun gimmick took center stage in the plot when the protagonist rebels discovered incriminating recordings of the corrupt Emperor. The heroes chose to hack into the broadcast network and disseminate the incriminating statements, thus turning the “hearts and minds” of the people against the corrupt government. Advancing the revolution was a matter of controlling the infrastructure (in this case, the media infrastructure). For Raynor’s Raiders, power was about controlling information through existing systems, and was worth “a hundred battles.”
In more broad terms, power came from controlling the resources of information and the means of distributing that information. Jim Raynor’s observations that the government had used the media against his cause for years, and his fear that the government would only spin the incident and regain control, show the power of the media. While this is a largely a statement about media as a special kind of access to the power of controlling a very large population, it is also a commentary on the strategic value of controlling any element of infrastructure. For the Rebellion against Mengk’s Confederacy, control over UNN was as important as any military base or research facility or arms manufacturing plant.
It is easy to see the strategic value in controlling existing infrastructures and making them work for your own cause—indeed, there may seem to be no reasonable alternative. However, the Zerg’s interaction with existing differs a little from the Terran method.
philogames 