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As you may recall, writing a Deux Ex episode
sort of sent James on a bit of a sci-fi kick .
So, this week we're gonna be doing some more of that.
I'll be up front with you, today's topic doesn't
have much to do with games, but it is something
that shows up in games a lot. Especially the sci-fi ones
Today's topic is Technobabble.
It's sort of the hallmark of mediocre science fiction in
any medium, and it's something we should be
able to avoid when making games, mostly because it's never necessary.
When we use scientific terms wrong, all it does is misinform
the portion of our audience that doesn't know what those terms mean,
and creates cringe-worthy moments for the people who do.
This violates the main principles of design, all of your decision should serve your audience.
So let's talk about sci-fi for a minute. There are two main camps for what we now call sci-fi.
Science fiction and future fantasy.
Science fiction is an attempt to deliver a view of a possible future.
One vauguely rooted in fact with an internally consistent logic.
It takes what we know of the universe today, and uses it to explore
concepts that fall out of that understanding.
Star trek, at least up through next generations,
was a great example of this. They didn't always use things perfectly,
but they tried to have a grounding in science, and used that to help them examine
societal structure in a humanity with faster-than-light capability.
Star Trek gives a rosy view. It's clearly born of a '70s ideology,
but they attempted to keep it grounded within the vaguely possible.
Going so far as to create subspace, to invent a realm where they could break
the physical laws, as they needed to.
Better examples would probably be some of Aurthur C Clarke's work,
or the work of Jeffery Landis,
but that's harder to put side-by-side with Star Wars, so yeah.
The other type of sci-fi is future fantasy.
In this type of science fiction, advanced technology stands in for magic,
and allows the characters to do whatever is necessary in order to move them through
an interesting plot, or explore the more nebulous, social,
and philosophical ideas the designer wants the player to explore
The original Star Wars films are great examples.
They rarely bother with the technological explanation for what's going on,
because it doesn't serve the core purpose of the piece.
Taking time to explain all that might kill the story's pacing,
and would do nothing to further our emersion in the world, so they
don't even bother. And when some explanation is necessary, they give a vague,
"umm... because technology! That's why!" and move on.
The explanation rarely has anything to do with science, but it doesn't need to.
That's not he point of the story or the world they are trying to present to us.
When creating sci-fi, both of these approaches are totally valid.
They can both lead to exciting stories and provide us a canvas to explore
things relevant to our real lives today. The danger only comes in when a creator can't commit,
and tries to layer vague, "sciencey" terms over their work, because they don't feel
their audience will be able to maintain the suspension of disbelief otherwise.
Here's an example, "midichlorian counts". For all it's importance to the series,
the Force was never fully explained in the original trilogy.
Now I ask you, "did you care?" Of course not.
Believing in the force is sort of the price of entry into the Star Wars universe.
If you're participating in something Star Wars, and you can't invest in the Force,
you're either pretty much saying that you don't want to be there,
or that the creator hasn't adequately framed the Force within their work.
They haven't given enough reason to buy it.
No amount of "sciencey" rationalizing is going to help that suspension of disbelief,
so tying it to something that the audience vaugely understands as science saying,
"Oh, it's in the blood". And linking it to our modern understanding of
genetics isn't going to solve the fundamental, underlying
suspension of disbelief problem.
What I'm saying is that you can't lend credibility to your story just by using science words.
Using real science, and allowing that to be the floor that helps you ground your universe in
an internal logical constancy. That's why science fiction works, not just because it sounds "sciency".
Once you've got that underpinning, you can explore all of the interesting things that shake out of it.
Which is what makes science fiction so great, and on the flip side,
the limitless freedom that technology provides future fantasy
is what allows it to deliver compelling stories and explore such a wealth of ideas.
Don't hamstring it by entangling it in a web of pseudo-jargon.
So yes, that is why technobabble sucks.
Now we got a few more minutes here, so lets do something a little,
*snicker*
Extra.
It seems to me that relativistic physics is the branch of science most often abused in sci-fi.
Now this may be because relativity was the first time physics radically departed
from our perceptual reality, and thus is, sort of, semi-mystic to a lot of people anyway.
Or, it may be because Einstein was really the last guy to capture the public imagination with physics,
and so, much of the terminology from relativity has trickled down and is sort of recognizable
to a sci-fi audience. Even if many of us don't actually understand it.
So, to wrap things up today, we're going to give a brief run-down of
relativistic terms that come up a lot. Now, I should start by saying,
none of us are physicists. We got help from some in writing this, but it's still
likely that some of you know this stuff better than we do.
The explanations I'm about to give barely skim the surface, and are extremely over-simplified in a lot
of places. Still, for anyone watching who is not a physicist, Hopefully this will begin
to clear up what some of these terms actually mean. So when a game or movie tries to throw
one of these at you, you can call them on it.
First up, "quantum". "Quantum" just means "a discreet amount".
You can think of it as "an indivisible quantity."
The reason why we call it "quantum mechanics" is because it's a branch of physics that treats light both
as continuous wave and as coming in discreet definable packets, or
'quanta' of energy.
Look up the photoelectric effect if you wanna dig more into that "quanta" of light idea.
Next, "Brownian motion".
In the 19th century, a fellow by the name of Brown
noticed that pollen particles floating in water would move erratically.
Later it was discovered that this macroscopic movement was the result of the
microscopic forces from the collision of atoms and molecules within the pollen.
Brownian motion is simply the seemingly random movement of particles in liquid.
But it's often used to describe any random-seeming event that's actually
controlled by a large number of rational micro-events.
"Spacetime". This one's tough to sum up,
but it really just boils down to linking space and time mathematically.
Once you accept that relative velocity can affect relative expereiecne of time
that an atomic clock running on a fast-moving spaceship
will run slower than an atomic clock here on Earth.
Then that means how you travel through time is effected by how you travel through space.
So they need to be mathematically, directly connected somehow.
You have to have some way to equate the two, at least interrelate them.
Which is where we get, "spacetime".
Next, inertial mass.
Once you get to relativity, you need to stop thinking of mass being a quantity of stuff, and
start thinking about it as, simply meaning, resistance to being accelerated, or, inertia.
Thus, inertial mass.
And finally, "curvature of spacetime".
For most of human history, we thought of a plane as a flat surface.
If you go back to Euclid, who set out the cornerstone logic that would define all
of our mathematics up through calculus, you'll find that's essentially how he defined
a plane with postulate 5, so that how we've always seen it.
And that makes sense. After all, that's how we experience the world.
But much in the same way that thinking about the world being flat is wrong,
even though for the majority of our daily lives, it might as well be.
Thinking of reality existing in flat planes is also wrong.
The spacetime plane of reality is often curved by the gravitational force of massive bodies
In fact, the curvature of spacetime is really a way to just stop
conceiving of gravity as its own, unique force.
And rather,think of massive bodies distorting the plane of reality.
If we think in terms of our flat geometry, we percieve the sun to be exerting a
gravitational force that makes the Earth orbit in a curve
but in curved spacetime, the Earth actually traves in a straight line
Which is defined by the distorted spacetime, created by the massive sun.
This is useful, as it helps us understand why even massless things like
light are still affected by this distortion.
All this really means in a sci-fi sense is that we can't rely
on our traditional geometry to understand how things work
in these sections. We have to use a more advanced,
non-euclidean geometry to calculate the stuff accurately
So, for example, traveling in a straight line, through
such a distortion might still result in a curved trajectory.
Even though you never altered your course.
I'm probably starting to lose some of you now,
so I'll go ahead and stop here. Thanks again to all of
the physicists who helped us fact-check this.
You made it abundantly clear how much deeper the rabbit hole goes.
If nothing else, I hope this is at least shown how much
digging and research can be done before you can start
throwing these terms around.
Either way, I hope you all enjoyed the science.
We'll be back to our regular thing next week.
See you then.
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