
Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video] - danso
https://cdn.loc.gov/service/mss/mss85590/099/099.pdf
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Zikes
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?

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Mithaldu
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)](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
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.

~~~
Mithaldu
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](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".

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JimLaheyMD
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?

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quaz3l
Nope! He actually had a major role in producing Cosmos
<[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395695/>](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395695/>)
with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and also has a major interest in space.

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

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

[https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids](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](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.

~~~
Mithaldu
Read the Star Carrier series:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Keith,_Jr.#Bibliogr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Keith,_Jr.#Bibliography)

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

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commanderkeen08
"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?

~~~
themodelplumber
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.

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varelse
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.

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fche
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.

~~~
jordigh
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?

~~~
XorNot
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.

~~~
jordigh
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.

~~~
XorNot
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.

~~~
jordigh
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.

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kevinmchugh
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.

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

~~~
kevinmchugh
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.

~~~
Mithaldu
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.

~~~
slg
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.

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

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

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gojomo
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...](http://boingboing.net/2013/02/20/constellation-games-debut-
sf.html)

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.

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cantastoria
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?

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

~~~
Mithaldu
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.

~~~
varelse
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...

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

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jlebrech
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

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chadk
Reminds me sorta of The Three-Body Problem.

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mdpm
tangential, but spaceengine is awesome.

