Technobabble - Bad Writing Makes Bad Sci-Fi - Extra Credits

As you may recall, writing a Deus Ex episode sort of sent James on a bit of a sci-fi kick. So, this week we're going to 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. Today's topic is technobabble. It's sort of the hallmark of mediocre science fiction in any medium, and it's something we should be able to avoid like 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 cringeworthy moments for the people who do. This violates one of the main principles of design. All of your decisions 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 and future fantasy. Science fiction is an attempt to deliver a view of a possible future, one vaguely 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 and humanity with faster-than-light capability. Star Trek gives a rosy view. It's clearly born from 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 the physical laws they needed to. Better examples would probably be some of Arthur C. Clarke's work or the work of Jeffrey Landis, 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's necessary in order to move them through an interesting plot or explore the more nebulous social and philosophical ideas the designer wants to let the player 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 immersion in the world, so they don't even bother. And when some explanation is necessary,

they give a vague um because technology, that's why. And they move on. The explanation rarely has anything to do with science, but it doesn't need to. That's not the point of the story or the world they're 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 so tries to layer vague sciency 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 its 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 for 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 you don't want to be there or the creator has not adequately framed the Force within their work. They haven't given you enough reason to buy it. No amount of sciency rationalizing is going to help that suspension of disbelief. So, tying it to something that the audience vaguely 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 suspension of disbelief problem. 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 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 such compelling stories and explore such a wealth of ideas. Don't hamstring it by entangling it in a web of pseudo jargon. So, yes, that is why technobabble sucks. Now, I got a few more minutes here, so let's do something a little extra. 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 are going to give a brief rundown of relativistic terms that come up a lot. Now, I should probably start by saying none of us are physicists. We got help from some in writing this, but it's still likely that many of you know this stuff better than we do. The explanations I'm about to give barely skim the surface and are extremely oversimplified 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 some game or movie tries to throw one of these at you, you can call them on it. First up, quantum. Quantum just means a discrete amount. You can think of it as an indivisible quantity. The reason we call it quantum mechanics is because it's a branch of physics that treats light both as a continuous wave and as coming in discrete definable packet, or quanta, of energy. Look up the photoelectric effect if you want to dig more into that quantum of light idea. Next, Brownian motion. 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 microscopic forces from the collision of atoms and molecules within the pollen. Brownian motion is simply the seemingly random movement of particles in liquid, but it's often used to describe any random-seeming event that's actually controlled by a large number of rational micro events. Spacetime. This one's tough to sum up, but it really just boils down to linking space and time mathematically. Once you accept that relative velocity can affect relative experience of time that an atomic clock on a fast-moving spaceship will run slower than an atomic clock here on Earth, then that means that how you travel through time is affected by how you travel through space. So, they need to be mathematically directly connected somehow. You have to have some way to equate the two, or at least interrelate them, which is where we get spacetime. Next, inertial mass. Once you get to relativity, you have to stop thinking of mass being a quantity of stuff and start thinking about it as simply meaning resistance to being accelerated or inertia, thus inertial mass. And finally, curvature of space-time. For most of human history, we thought of a plane as a flat surface. If you go back to Euclid, who set out the cornerstone logic that would define all of our mathematics up through calculus,

you'll find that's essentially how he defined a plane with postulate five. So, that's how we've always seen it. And it makes sense. After all, that's how we experience the world. But much in the same way that thinking about the world being flat is wrong, even though for the majority of our daily lives it might as well be, thinking about reality existing in flat planes is also wrong. The space-time plane of reality is often curved by the gravitational force of massive bodies. In fact, the curvature of space-time is really a way to just stop conceiving of gravity as its own unique force, and rather think of massive bodies distorting the plane of reality. If we think in terms of our flat geometry, we perceive the sun to be exerting a gravitational force that makes the Earth orbit in a curve. But in curved space-time, the Earth actually travels in a straight line, which is defined by the distorted space-time created by the massive sun. This is useful as it helps us understand why even massless things like light are still affected by this distortion. All this really means in a sci-fi sense is that we can't rely on our traditional geometry to understand how things work in these sections. We have to use a more advanced non-Euclidean geometry to calculate the stuff accurately. So, for example, traveling in a straight line

through such a distortion might still result in a curved trajectory, even though you never altered your course. I'm probably starting to lose some of you now, so I think I'll go ahead and stop here. Thanks again to all of the physicists who helped us to fact-check this. You made it abundantly clear how much deeper the rabbit hole goes. If nothing else, I hope this has at least shown how much digging and research can be done before you start throwing these terms around. Either way, hope you've all enjoyed the science. We'll be back to our regular thing next week. See you then. The last control. Hey.