Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

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96 pointsdanso72 comments

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?

They 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)

Edit: Not saying that the three mentioned are bad games, just that they can't be taken seriously as space games.

> 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.

KSP "only" has a sphere of influence model. That's why there aren't any Lagrange points anywhere in the solar system.

Also relativity and speed of light are pretty unnecessary in a chemical-rocketry simulator.

Slight correction but Elite: Dangerous has the capability to do better flight mechanics.[1]

The game is often quite boring, but I joke with people that it makes an amazing space station docking simulator. I actually can't wait to try that with an Oculus.

[1]http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/224726/does-elite-...

Only in the barest sense, sadly: "Each ship has a top speed, this can be increased with better thrusters and power distribution, but they still cap out whether you have flight assist on or off."

I was pretty disappointed about this. The predecessor games to Elite Dangerous, Frontier and Frontier First Encounters, had a Newtonian flight model (and an optional "time acceleration" feature to artificially shorten intra-system flight time).

Rogue System looks promising as a semi-realistic combat space sim: http://imagespaceinc.com/rogsys/

Pioneer also exists as an open source Frontier remake, with the same sort of flight model and universe: http://pioneerspacesim.net/

Same, it's why i retracted my original backing. I do understand the issue they faced, since they wanted to make a multiplayer game. But they sacrificed their original fanbase on the throne of that.

realistic physics is mega boring in space games. The first elite was much more fun with arcade physics. Frontier combat was rubbish, you just yoyo'ed past each other with 5 seconds of shooting between oscillations. That's with a human pilot driving.

Realistically a space battle would be, does the evader want to evade and has more thrust? => they evade, else, the attacker approaches and both get to shoot until one is dead. There would be no real combat other than weapon size and armour plating. I don't think there would be space dogfights as the onboard computers would just be able to track each other too accurately / apply optimal game theoretic evasions given the constraints. Boring ... might as well play spreadsheets.

They are boring when the player's tools and gameplay are not adapted to a situation involving relativistic distances. In space warfare sensors, delay of signal reception, interpretation of sensor input, projection of positioning both human-based and automatic, as well as weaponry built and programmable to relate to all of these things become much more important than:

See, point, shoot.

You'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.

Astronomy 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

Additionally Sagan was most certainly conflating it with astrophysics, as is commonly done, and evidenced by his mention of "stellar evolutionary events".

That's barely even astronomy. At the university level, astronomy coursework is basically math.

Category of "murder/capitalism" is an interesting one. Do you think that the people who wrote Elite, for example, were so steeped in the values of colonialism or piracy that they were oblivious to the murder/capitalism subtext? If not, it must be human nature, I suppose.

Not so much that he (he's made several games like that) is oblivious to it, but more that it's the most easy thing to simulate in games, and also what people expect. You can do better, as games like Untertale or KSP demonstrate. But it takes a special kind of person.

There was an old 8-bit game called The Halley Project that aimed to teach you constellations by having you navigate through the solar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Halley_Project

I think it wouldn't hurt to use actual stars and such in these games, if only to give people a sense of our astral "neighborhood".

I don't know if it would make for good gameplay though.

In my game (https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard) I consulted star maps of nearby regions of the galaxy (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/starmaps/mapindex.php) and placed systems accurately.

However, I felt that using their astronomical names/numbers would be unrealistic--if these stars ever ended up being colonized, they would be given colloquial names, so I made up my own names for most of them.

Independence War 2 - the best space simulator I have ever played

Also, Kerbal Space Program.

Star 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.

But 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?

Star 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.

ehrm, Elite: Dangerous actually use real data.

Yeah, the entire Elite series has always used real star coordinates and names, at least for those close to Earth.

Except 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)

You're right! It wasn't until the second game, Frontier: Elite, that they started using real stars around Sol.

The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive... This has to be different Seth MacFarlane than the one I am thinking of right?

Nope! He actually had a major role in producing Cosmos <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395695/> with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and also has a major interest in space.

Here's a short article about his involvement in the new Cosmos. [1]

[1] http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/tv/whatrsquos-seth...

Nope, same one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_MacFarlane#The_Seth_MacFa...

Nope. He was also behind the remake of Cosmos if you haven't heard that one yet.

Carl Sagan was a very interesting man. I'm sure he would have loved this simple space game I made - http://brainplex.net/space

It uses random points for stars, but tracking "the nearest few thousand stars" from Earth would be pretty simple.

I actually want to make a scientifically educational game. I want to make a game that demonstrates the concepts of relativity with accurate space travel at near light speed.

I recently spent some time working on exactly this, in 2D:

https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids

To see what it looks like, you can check out this youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCz7tRl1s

I wrote an engine that modeled object positions as "timelines", where position varies with time, and demonstrated the basic relativistic effects (length contraction, time dilation, and frequency shifting). Unfortunately, I never really figured out how to turn these into actual game mechanics.

Read the Star Carrier series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Keith,_Jr.#Bibliogr...

It has a number of situations and warfare considerations regarding that.

I too did something like this for a school project. My version was just asteroids with a speed of light delay. I included instantaneous "wormholes" which created some nice apparent causality violations. Eg Asteroids could exit wormholes before entering them.

That is really cool! Thanks for sharing that with me. :)

While not exactly what you want, and more than a little imperfect, you should be aware of Velocity Raptor[1]

[1] http://www.testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html

Cool, thanks.

Some hints on controls would be nice. Also, in chrome the top two things aren't clickable. Otherwise, this looks adorable!

Edit: I wonder what kind of horrible people would downvote the parent post.

> I'm sure he would have loved this simple space game I made

I'm sure the top poster didn't mean to sound that way but it just sounds arrogant.

Right sorry.

Arrow keys to steer and Q/W to roll. Spacebar applies thrust.

"The question is how to design a home video game which would teach a great deal of astronomy in a context as exciting as most violent video games."

I'm curious as to what "most violent video games" he might be referring to? Asteroids?

I got lectured a bit by dad when I showed him a cool "violent" video game in 1987 or so. I think it was a C64 game, maybe Commando. He told me it was neat but he'd much rather see my brother and me creating things and learning. We would later leverage that little fact into our its-an-education-system arguments when we asked for an upgrade to a Commodore Amiga.

galaga, bomberman, ultima, texas chainsaw massacre

More like a rough idea than full-blown design, but such a game could implicitly teach astronomy the way Balance of Power implicitly taught geography.

FWIW, just recently read Sagan's Contact book, and found it really disappointing in terms of fiction-writing technique. The game idea sounds more like a screen-saver ... alas. In his home nonfiction niche, like Cosmos, he was great.

Really? I love it, because it's science fiction written by an actual scientist, one who knows how scientists talk to each other and who knows what the Fourier integral theorem is. The Soviet-American politics of the time in fiction form are also pretty interesting. My only complaint was that God in the digits of pi was a stoner cop-out, but other than that, I love it. I think his depiction of what would happen to humanity if we made contact was very believable.

Why are you so disappointed?

I liked that it was written by a scientist. But the text was bogged down by so much science exposition that the story - characters & drama - could barely breathe. There was a paragraph of [tech] on every page.

Really? I thought the ending was pretty great in that regard. It was a novel twist of grand revelation which I don't think I've seen used anywhere else.

Well, pi is almost certainly normal. That means that it stores all possible information (for example, the entire contents of the internet). We haven't proved normality of pi, but if we do, then seeing the face of God in the digits of pi is just the infinite monkey theorem. But this is mundane. You can also see them in the square root of two or in e.

I get that Sagan was trying to get the "numinous", but the tiniest bit of mathematical knowledge makes pi mundane, not mystical. If you want to make me mystical with mathematics, oh boy, talk to me about the Gauss Bonnet theorem, the classification of finite simple groups, or the moonshine conjecture. But pi is pedestrian.

Conversely he did try to cover this with the statistics - the message was found much sooner in the sequence then the statistics would dictate were it random.

But we know this is false. We have computed way more pi than he knew about when he wrote that.

Conversely, we also know that even with the amount of pi we have, we can already come up with any kind of pattern you could want to, by changing the base, by arranging the numbers in a different order, or by picking particular colours or whatever. In a sense, this is an application of Ramsey's theorem. We can find patterns in pi for the same reason that we can see patterns in clouds, or the Bible, or in constellations.

I still think it's cheap potheaded thinking that dilutes the whole "mystery" and "numinous" edge he was going for.

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Interesting that even the author of the original work seems to put aside the point of the original work for a game adaptation. Contact is about the search for god(s) and higher powers and the human religious experience, and contacting extra terrestrials was the mechanism to talk about that.

That is open to interpretation. I adore Contact and i got nothing even close to religious out of it.

The movie focuses pretty heavily on a Christian or at least monotheistic God, and the book has some different depictions of gods and how humanity relates to them. Hadden is the most obvious: a maybe immortal man, living in the sky, who saves the plot with a deus ex machina.

I remember Hadden having built a theme park/commune in a jungle somewhere which had polytheistic and maybe sacrificial elements.

The protagonist discovers that existence is neatly ordered, down to the digits of pi.

It's not proselytizing, but it looks at how humans react to higher powers, whether they're called aliens or faith or gods. It's a skeptic's inspection of the humanness of belief and faith.

I didn't read the book, only watched the movie.

And i am saying quite seriously: Until i read the post above i did not see anything religious in the movie. Whatsoever.

I do realize that this is highly likely to be due to being not an american and coming instead from a culture where religion is looked upon as at most a hobby, something a vanishingly small percentage of people spend time on and even less take seriously.

Thus: Interpreter matters. Whether Contact manages to touch on religion at all is highly dependant on the subjectivitiy of whoever watches the movie.

The religious aspect of the movie wasn't some deeply masked symbolism. It was right on the surface. The two main characters of the film were a scientists and a reverend who had multiple debates about faith and the existence of god. Then the climax of the movie is when their roles are reversed and the scientist is the one asking for people's faith to believe her without any physical evidence.

There's the evidence of her having recorded many hours of static after the pod fell for a few seconds.

Yes, the movie on the surface seemed to end on a note of ambiguity, but it in fact resolved in favor of science.

The movie has far more religious overtones, or more generally overtones of valuing "faith" as directly characterized by believing in things without evidence.

However, personally I still appreciate it for a different reason: it suggests that the human drive to seek a higher purpose or a deeper meaning can meaningfully apply to reaching for the stars, too. Put together with the rest of the story, I still enjoyed it despite the overtones.

I will always use the themes of first-contact, intergalactic civilizations, and video games to plug the excellent scifi novel Constellation Games, by Leonard Richardson:

http://boingboing.net/2013/02/20/constellation-games-debut-s...

You may also know Richardson's other writing, such as the O'Reilly books RESTful Web APIs and RESTful Web Services, or the Python HTML-processing library Beautiful Soup.

Comparatively, Constellation Games has more action and satire.

Was I the only disappointed that the game play description didn't include having to use an "Ok to go!!!" audio command to start each mission?

He basically describes Star Raiders (Atari, 1979). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders

Star Raiders is one game in a long series of games that pretend space travel works like airplanes of the WW2 era. It's a very impressive game for the technology it was on, but doesn't convey any of the concepts Sagan was talking about or is known for.

I get the feeling that the original poster never actually played Star Raiders, a game in which all one does is blow up the enemy, occasionally pausing to chase the robot that delivers recharges from the starbases...

That said, 36 years later, it's still playable...

I did play it. That's why Sagan's description reminded me of it.

would the Carl Sagan's estate allow his name to be used in a video game made with that idea?

"Carl Sagan's Contact" sounds cool

Reminds me sorta of The Three-Body Problem.

tangential, but spaceengine is awesome.

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