Name: 額外學分。技術口述 (Extra Credits: Technobabble)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T04:57:39.000Z
Duration: 7 min 58 s
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情態助動詞 B1

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

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 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

Better examples would probably be some of Aurthur C Clarke's work,

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

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.

Now we got a few more minutes here, so lets do something a little,

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

Look up the photoelectric effect if you wanna dig more into that "quanta" of light idea.

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