Sebastian Alvarado is a Ph.D candidate at McGill University in Montreal. He's also part of a collective of scientists called Thwacke, which is helping game developers bring more rigorous reality to their games, most particularly in the realm of science-fiction where fans expect a firm hook into reality.
The group has already been hired to work on Brian Fargo's crowdfunded role-playing game Wasteland 2, helping sort out what a post-apocalyptic world might look like in real-life. However, Alvarado is keen to stress that he and his colleagues are not here to take the fun and imagination out of video games.
"I play video games. We all do," said Alvarado. "That's the whole point of our firm. But we also believe that people find science in video games interesting."
After posting a number of blogs about topics like species design in Mass Effect 3 and the Animus in Assassin's Creed, Thwacke received "some extremely positive feedback" from players who want to understand the worlds they inhabit. And then they were picked up by Brian Fargo's InXile Entertainment to work on Kickstarted adventure Wasteland 2.
"When our involvement was first announced, there was a bit of fear along the lines of 'Oh, no, the white coats are going to come and say 'this is unrealistic, throw it out of the game'.' But that's not our job. We are here to help the writers, not get in their way," says Alvarado.
"Wasteland has this very tongue-in-cheek humor and off-the-wall crazy sensibility in creating their world," he says. "The writers ask us questions and we answer to the best of our ability."
As a whole, Thwacke stays up to speed on scientific trends, and they can get game designers in touch with new discoveries in a timely fashion.
Alvarado says, "We always keep in mind that anything we include should be relatively new, [something] that's trending in exciting science, and then incorporate it into the game. With any luck, the release of the game will coincide with that information becoming more generally available and widely understood."
Alvarado argues that game designers are often scrupulous about creating visual realism, but less careful when playing with scientific ideas. "I'm someone who's finishing a Ph.D, a molecular biologist. It irks me, for example, when I see storytellers vaguely using, say, DNA to wrap up their loose ends."
"Take a game like Assassin's Creed. They paid for a lot of their team just to go to Italy so they could draw Venice. They're willing to invest in getting things just right. So it's good to see that same attention to detail going into the science. Deus Ex did a great job of understanding what the future might look like, for example, because they took the time and trouble to study the facts and the published ideas on the subject."
So what kind of ideas have they generated for Wasteland 2? He explains, "The writers have been putting together some fantastic ideas. We are sprinkling ideas on the fiction they've already created.
"They told us that parts of the map were going to be waterlogged. Since it's close to the ocean, we looked at how intertidal species that live along the coast might survive in vastly changed conditions, how they might adapt.
"We thought about the hermit crab, something that lives in both aquatic and terrestrial environments. They've done a pretty good job of surviving on land. We assumed radiation is a gating mechanism, so why not just let them grow significantly in size?"
He adds, "One of the key characteristics of a hermit crab is that they find new housing as they get larger and larger. We decided to suggest some of the debris in the wasteland as housing for these hermit crabs. We pitched the idea, along with several others, of hermit crabs that move into a bus, they could walk around with a bus on them. We went into the biology of some of these crabs that can regenerate limbs and how they could apply that to game design when setting up a boss.
"We don't ever want to compromise our academic integrity. We're doing real research. But we know we have to have fun with the fantasy, but rather than just inventing a giant crab, which has been done before, we're thinking about how it might react, adapt and behave based on a greater understanding of the subject."
Thwacke isn't so much an agency as a collective of scientists with a broad understanding of different fields who share a keen interest in video games. And given the detail with which games are studied by players, they believe that a sprinkling of scientific authenticity can go a long way.
Colin Campbell writes for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @colincampbellx.
There's a longer quote from him on the hermit crabs describes it even better: "We used radiation as a very simple gaming mechanism to argue that it makes animals super large, because everyone knows radiation makes things super-large... we'll just take that one as a granted *laugh*". But then they came up with the idea that the crabs can sequester some of the radioactive compounds in their shells then just discard them occasionally, adding some further protection.
So know when to use the science and when to ignore it.
Waking Mars did this pretty well too. Without too many spoilers, you assume Mars used to have a molten core that kept its atmosphere from being blasted away for a few million years, so it was warm and had water. This may not turn out to have been the case, but once you've made that assumption the rest is broadly plausible, and there are some explicit parallels made to Earth geography that show you someone certainly researched it. It's the sort of thing I loved about classic hard sci-books, and the plot here certainly qualifies.
There's also lots of cool/insane stuff in nature you'd never think up on your own because it's just too crazy. Might as well steal it!
Some of the stuff that comes from real science is way too weird or imaginative for anyone to come up with normally. Nature has a crazy imagination!
Another note, I like when art and design draw off of real world practicalities to create a believable and powerful world. Half-Life 2, for example, had believability work into the artistic design of the soldiers and characters; giant shoulders of doom and other absurdities were cut and the look of soldiers were based a lot around "would this make sense in real life?"
That's a good one - City 17 feels completely plausible, being based on real locations, so then you can add in the Combine weirdness and it feels more plausible too. Also suspiciously linear paths, but you gotta do what you gotta do to get a game out.
Anything goes in science fiction as long as it's properly explained and doesn't serve as a deus ex machina or other similar excuses for sloppy writing. If these guys are just a reference for the writers then that's fine. If they have anything to say about enemy design or the plot then that's probably the worse thing that could've happened to this game.
In other words:
"The writers ask us questions and we answer to the best of our ability."
Awesome.
"We went into the biology of some of these crabs that can regenerate limbs and how they could apply that to game design when setting up a boss."
I disgree, because I believe the best science fiction and by extension, the best games, incorporate elements from the bleeding-edge of basic science research. (From whichever fields)
As a scientist, I cringe every time I see absurdities, because I know better. A perfect example, is the terminator-like boss from ME2, that required harvesting of gobs of human DNA and tissue, to be built. To any kid with just entry-level college biology courses, that should sound ridiculous. Yeah.. advanced civilization needs our DNA to build some monster. Nevermind that NOW, in the real world, we can synthesize a basic micro-organisms, grow pounds of different kinds of tissue, and do things with DNA that suggest advanced beings would be able to do magic, in comparison.
I digress, but you get the idea. Incorporation of such knowledge is often the difference between a crap plot with a B-movie feel, and a superb plot that immerses an individual by using real-world (or at least believable) theory.
That's dope. Radioactive mutation seems like a less plausible pathway to crazy monsters than biotech (knocking out base pairs, synthetic chimeras and etc), but the gating mechanism is an awesome reboot of the classic meme. Props!
WOW! I really wanted to just make a comment about the giant-hermit-crab-finding-alternate-shells idea already being in use for several years in a mmorpg called Fallen Earth (they use trash cans and computer monitor shells from what I remember) but the sign up process let me see what you guys are up to here.
I am an actor in Toronto with a natural low baritone that I can lower down (or up) even further. That intro to "Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast" where the guy reads from Revelations is easy.
Anyways, I'm non-union and my agent is reasonable if anyone needs a voice actor
So know when to use the science and when to ignore it.
Waking Mars did this pretty well too. Without too many spoilers, you assume Mars used to have a molten core that kept its atmosphere from being blasted away for a few million years, so it was warm and had water. This may not turn out to have been the case, but once you've made that assumption the rest is broadly plausible, and there are some explicit parallels made to Earth geography that show you someone certainly researched it. It's the sort of thing I loved about classic hard sci-books, and the plot here certainly qualifies.
There's also lots of cool/insane stuff in nature you'd never think up on your own because it's just too crazy. Might as well steal it!
Another note, I like when art and design draw off of real world practicalities to create a believable and powerful world. Half-Life 2, for example, had believability work into the artistic design of the soldiers and characters; giant shoulders of doom and other absurdities were cut and the look of soldiers were based a lot around "would this make sense in real life?"
In other words:
"The writers ask us questions and we answer to the best of our ability."
Awesome.
"We went into the biology of some of these crabs that can regenerate limbs and how they could apply that to game design when setting up a boss."
Please, no.
As a scientist, I cringe every time I see absurdities, because I know better. A perfect example, is the terminator-like boss from ME2, that required harvesting of gobs of human DNA and tissue, to be built. To any kid with just entry-level college biology courses, that should sound ridiculous. Yeah.. advanced civilization needs our DNA to build some monster. Nevermind that NOW, in the real world, we can synthesize a basic micro-organisms, grow pounds of different kinds of tissue, and do things with DNA that suggest advanced beings would be able to do magic, in comparison.
I digress, but you get the idea. Incorporation of such knowledge is often the difference between a crap plot with a B-movie feel, and a superb plot that immerses an individual by using real-world (or at least believable) theory.
WOW! I really wanted to just make a comment about the giant-hermit-crab-finding-alternate-shells idea already being in use for several years in a mmorpg called Fallen Earth (they use trash cans and computer monitor shells from what I remember) but the sign up process let me see what you guys are up to here.
I am an actor in Toronto with a natural low baritone that I can lower down (or up) even further. That intro to "Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast" where the guy reads from Revelations is easy.
Anyways, I'm non-union and my agent is reasonable if anyone needs a voice actor