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Setting aside the ideas for the plot, could games like Eve, No Man's Sky, or Elite: Dangerous accomplish the same thing if they used actual astronomical data?
by Zikes 11y ago
Setting aside the ideas for the plot, could games like Eve, No Man's Sky, or Elite: Dangerous accomplish the same thing if they used actual astronomical data?
- foo123456 11y agoehrm, Elite: Dangerous actually use real data.
- 6502nerdface 11y agoYeah, the entire Elite series has always used real star coordinates and names, at least for those close to Earth.
- LeoPanthera 11y agoExcept for the original game, which used procedurally generated galaxies, and didn't feature Earth. This was the only way to get the game to fit into the 32K RAM of the original BBC Micro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
- 6502nerdface 11y agoYou're right! It wasn't until the second game, Frontier: Elite, that they started using real stars around Sol.
- seccess 11y agoAlso, Kerbal Space Program.
- wavefunction 11y agoStar Citizen perhaps, since they out of the games you've mentioned hew closest to established astronomy. The rest just invent whatever through the magic of procedural generation, which is cool but not coherent with using actual astronomical data.
- Zikes 11y agoBut that's my point exactly. If those games did use actual astronomical data (and I'm told by foo123456 that Elite: Dangerous actually does) then could those games accomplish Carl Sagan's goal of teaching astronomy in a compelling video game setting? Those games' established plots are apparently compelling enough, but would they drive learning if their current environments were swapped with something based on reality?
- scrollaway 11y agoStar Citizen's intent seems to be to ship personal servers (quake style). Maybe this will be possible, I'm sure some people would be interested.
- Mithaldu 11y agoThey can't. In order: Eve is a murder/capitalism simulator and has almost no physics in the first place. (There's 3-dimensional positioning, but you can fly through planets and shoot through other ships as much as you like; also the entire world is static.) No Man's Sky is 90% an art piece with some added murder simulation. Elite: Dangerous, also a murder/capitalism simulator, only unlike Eve it's more about the immediate visceral. Notably all three of those pretend space ships are, like WW2 planes, subject to air drag, have a terminal velocity and have no automation on-board whatsoever, and astronomic physics aren't even considered in the first place. These games are literally WW2 fan fics in "space". (Or really, ether, as old-timey people thought of what's between planets.) If you're looking to teach physics and astronomics, Kerbal Space Project does that quite well, even though it also ignores relativity and speed of light considerations. More importantly, none of these games are even remotely able to tackle the topic of civiliations and saving them, which won't be done with a gun, but with the word. The closest thing i can think of to that are the Mercenary games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary_(video_game) Edit: Not saying that the three mentioned are bad games, just that they can't be taken seriously as space games.
- Zikes 11y agoYou're assuming the goal is to teach astrophysics, rather than astronomy. If we're just trying to teach the space equivalent of geography, the physics and plot don't matter so much as the physical locations and nomenclature.
- Mithaldu 11y agoAstronomy is the study of the laws of stars, not of their names, regardless of how close "nomy" sounds to "name". https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy Additionally Sagan was most certainly conflating it with astrophysics, as is commonly done, and evidenced by his mention of "stellar evolutionary events".
- nether 11y agoThat's barely even astronomy. At the university level, astronomy coursework is basically math.