I'm going to go through some concepts to kind of set things up for you and then
we're going to work our way through some video game history and take a look at
some examples of games. I understand some of you are gamers but not all of you are
gamers. That's okay. You can play games. They won't hurt you. They're not
addictive, no matter what people say, but they are a lot of fun and they do take
a lot of the concepts that you see in science fiction in other media and
extrapolate it, play around with it, and maybe in some ways have some inherent
ties to it just because of the technology that the games use. So we're
going to think about new media and you know that's one of those oddball terms
that gets thrown around in the academy because we had these other media that
were there before. This newer stuff came along and when the new media started to
come along, they said, well that's new. Well we're newer than new in some ways and it's
a kind of a catch-all phrase, but when we're thinking about new media and we
want to put in a lot of things, in particular from the 20th century,
although I know film was a 19th century technology initially, but we've got film,
we've got television, we've got video games certainly, we can include comic
books in there and really kind of expand what we want to think about when
it comes to new media. All of the developers of games, even though games
have a long history, there was already a significant history of what science
fiction looked like, what people thought it might be conceptually if we start
bringing in prose stories and novels and so we have a very rich history of
science fiction that people are already drawing on. In fact there were other
games, we don't even have to get to video games, we can look at some board games, a
lot of those which were based on popular science fiction novels. So we had these
kind of board games that were there, even role-playing games and so people
working on developing video games and just sort of had a very rich tapestry
from already established from the get-go to draw upon and this was really kind of
an important issue because with early video games the technology was kind of
doing all it could to make the game however simple it was and so they really
needed a lot of fill around the games. You couldn't give people very
complicated instructions, when we get to computer space that's sort of going to
be kind of the first example of a way that a game failed just because it was
too complicated. So if you could give people a simple premise that they
understood because they'd seen it elsewhere already, they had seen it in a
movie, they read about it in a book, all of a sudden they're filling in a lot of
the narrative that the games couldn't provide yet at that point. Also there was
just the kind of the fundamental nature of the technology itself, computers and
these other digital technologies, these things are fantastic machines right.
Science fiction authors have been writing about powerful computers,
computers that would run whole planets and take us to the stars and all these
things for a lot longer than these machines actually existed and of course
while computers are really neat and what they can do for us they still have
certain limitations. So in some ways the fantastic thought that surrounds the
computer got people thinking you sit down in a computer and you kind of want
it to do fantastic things and what's a good way for a computer to take you to
another planet right or to let you be a superhero or something like that it can
be done through the medium of games and that really captures a lot of people's
imagination in that regard. So there's a really good book, it came out in 2003
called digital play the interaction of technology culture and marketing and
that's something that I'm particularly interested in. When I was working on my
dissertation I looked at the interaction between the film industry and video
games and there's a whole lot of collusion going on there. There's a
technology that gets shared, there's resources that get shared like writers
or creators or designers and there's the economic part of it, the marketing part
is really kind of fascinating and so Klein he wrote this book with a few
other people but in particular as a section he wrote and he was talking about
how there's this what he called a circuitry of technological innovation
right. We have all of these cultural contexts and subcultural practices so if
you kind of like science fiction and you really get into it you're going to
understand the minutia of it but all of these sort of cultural things you may be
you may not be into science fiction but because it's so big you know something
about it. You may not be into sports but because sports are so culturally huge
you're going to know something about it it's kind of like background radiation
that just exists from the culture it kind of soaks into you. You can ignore it
you can say I don't want anything to do with it but it's still there and so in
discussing kind of the way that these three forces technology culture and
marketing are coming together Klein is really looking at video games and he's
looking at the way that a lot of the design that goes in behind them the
thought that goes into that is really influenced by science fiction. In
particular he talks a lot about Isaac Asimov and how influential Isaac Asimov
has been and George Orwell's 1984 as well because we sort of have two kind of
competing and I don't want to set up a you know an easy dichotomy but we sort
of have two sort of jostling ideas about what the future as science fiction gives
us might be. One way it's kind of shiny bright a lot of possibilities a lot of
neat things going on the other one is more dystopian we have some bad things
that can happen we have some struggles that are going on both visions allow for
commentary on the present and I think that's something that's very important
to consider is as you're reading a really good science fiction story or
watching a really good science fiction movie or playing a really good science
fiction video game you've always got to kind of be cognizant of how it's
commenting on culture right now and what might that mean. So some common
tropes that we see in science fiction video games are standard science fiction
elements right space travel we've read about it we've seen it film television
we got it down if someone talks about FTL faster than the light we're like okay
well which way is it going to happen you know is it going to happen through
this type of engine or is it a wormhole or some sort of dimensional tell did
they find old alien technology I mean there's already plenty of ideas about it
and if you've not really been exposed to that so we're going to get around it
advanced technology aliens cute aliens mean aliens nasty aliens friendly aliens
aliens that want to exploit you commercially or physically or whatever
so all of those things that exist in science fiction sort of standard
elements that we're used to it's very easy for game designers just to adopt
those as they want kind of use them in familiar fashions or recombine them in
new ways to get people interested in a new game or an existing game that has a
new iteration coming out a sequel or something we know in science fiction
often the future is threatened either from without there's an alien invasion
we got space invaders that are going to come down and destroy us or within
there's something going on within our within a society or a culture there's a
power struggle there's an ideological struggle and this gets manifested
through you know controlling the population through drugs or controlling
the population through authoritarian measures something like that and finally
another thing to consider is that the virtual environment of the game itself
is a symbolic representation right so the technology that makes games really
kind of puts that right in front of you you're aware that there's a screen there
you've got a joystick you've got some sort of control device that you're
interfacing with and it really gives you the sense now if the game is really good
hopefully you get really immersed into the game and you forget that you're
playing or you get very invested in the your character or the story that's
going along but there's the idea that science fiction has always been
interested in creating virtualities virtual worlds virtual culture societies
either in the close future or in the far-flung future wherever now one of the
things that I kind of want to hinge the discussion around today is the
exploration of space there's probably a lot of different tropes I could have
picked we could talk about nothing but aliens in their representation in video
games or you know particular laser gun technologies I mean pick something that
you really like in science fiction and you can come up with a whole history of
representation of it in video games but for me kind of one of the the meta
situations that informs game design is the exploration of space space is a
concept right not only a reality yeah okay we're gonna go out to the moon we're
gonna send probes to other planets but let's explore space right we're kind of
a naturally explorative species right running around let's go see what's over
that other hill let's go see what's over that ocean whatever it takes to get
there if we have to construct a wheel we have to build a boat we have to build a
spaceship and so early video games really weren't invested in that idea
quite yet early video games were more treatments of very traditional games
like tic-tac-toe or table tennis something that people were thinking about
kind of recreationally or even simply because that's just what the technology
could do but once computers got disseminated into universities and it was
really university students guys and gals it was really university students
that helped stimulate the development of video games so the technology was
unleashed upon people like you and they just sat down and were just so full of
imagination and possibility that while they may have been limited by the
technology at the time they still try to do as much of as much with it as they
could and so really when it comes to it we've got very early computer games
like space war from 1962 and colossal cave adventure from 1976 space war was
a graphical game in that it actually had visual elements on the screen colossal
cave adventure at first was what's known as a text adventure right it was all
words on the screen and you typed in where you know go north go south pick
up stick that type of thing so games like this once students started messing
around with them really set up the whole idea of space it could be outer space it
could be caves that were exploring Miyamoto said one of his inspirations
when he was designing Super Mario Brothers was all the caves that he would
play in as a kid and kind of how that was sort of exciting so designers in
some ways are explorers right and we get to as gamers as players we get to
engage in that type of exploration and I think for some people that's a very
going out and exploring a world either the world we live on or virtual worlds
if they exist in print in television or film and video games wherever that can
be a very satisfying and rewarding experience so we've had space really the
representation of space has really been simulated for a long time in games I
mean just you know pick out a board game something like go or chess right there
is a space that is there there the space is being contested it's being fought for
we're maneuvering pieces we're trying to control that sort of space when it
comes to video games we have sort of a limitless potential and what we want to
do with space where we want it to expand and so we can think very literally about
where we're going to expand that space we're gonna create a new solar system
are we going to create a new alien race that inhabits that how are we going to
get there was a human even going to be the protagonist of the story right it
might be interesting to play as an alien but in encounters humans or whatever so
we have that going on and figuratively we have the exploration of space that
goes on from a design sort of perspective what does this what does all
the space exploration mean are we sort of limited to a map are we in a solar
system are we in one small area you know kind of what is the scope of that
and in some ways because of the history of science fiction that came before
video games video games can take those worlds that were suggested by game by
other media and really expand on them now for purposes today I haven't really
mentioned any properties that existed in another media before and said okay
well you know here's Star Wars and here's a Star Wars game I think those
are very interesting examples of games and quite fascinating of themselves but
I kind of wanted to give you some more original games that nevertheless point
back at what came before and have a little inspiration from the game
designers in that regard so space war 1962 one of the earliest digital
computer games was created by a man named Steve Russell and several other
students at MIT he had sort of the major idea for the game he wrote most of the
code for the game and like all good designers other designers improved upon
what he had done there was one programmer who wanted a star field in
the background of the game and Russell kind of programmed one it was sort of
random and the programmer said I don't like this I want it based on real star
coordinates so the guy sat down and coded it in one day gamers are always
taking other games and modifying them using them as sources of inspiration so
we're going to have a lot as we get later in the history of the games we're
going to have some references going on that aren't just from books or film
television but from other games themselves so this one we've got space
war pretty simple title what are we doing there's a war in space right we've got a
contested field it's a star field we've got two players engaged in combat with
each other the one ship looks kind of like a needle the other one looks like a
little wedge pretty simple and there's a star in the middle that they put in
these were a lot of high-tech folks so they were like well let's see if we can
simulate gravity right if we've got a star we know stars have gravity so
there's a Sun in the middle of the screen the ships can get sucked into the
Sun so while the players are shooting at each other they also have to keep away
from that hazard that's kind of in the middle of the field they also put in a
hyperspace key so we have the idea of instantaneously transporting across
distances here in this game it's just within the star field but the idea of
hey if we're traveling in space we need a technology that's going to enable us
to cross distances very quickly Russell who did the game cited the lensmen
series which E.E. Smith wrote from 48 to 60 he actually wrote most of it in the
50s and many years later there was one last one in 1960 but that was a major
influence on the development of this so here's Russell a guy who's got a head
full of science fiction novels and sits down a computer says whoa I really like
the idea of traveling in space and what can we do and kind of have some sort of
combat some other programmers that worked on it also were fans of Smith
particularly his Skylark series so that was an influence and they also love
these Japanese tokusatsu films which are sort of like the Godzilla type of
movies you know special films that used trick photography and they were
definitely in the science fiction mold with either giant rampaging monsters or
giant rampaging aliens or those sorts of things so they were very keenly aware of
their own interests in science fiction and use that to fuel what they were
working on as programmers so we have the industry kind of starting to develop we
had to wait for the computer technology to disseminate to other universities or
only a handful I think there were four in the United States at the time when
space war was written that had the PDP one that was able to run the program so
we had to wait for computers to kind of become more disseminated in the culture
and as they did they were still these fantastic machines right even as they
became a little bit more commonplace for a certain segment of the population they
still had a certain draw to them and so Nolan Bush now who would later go on
with another fellow called Ted Dabney to found Atari and hopefully that's that's
a name that you know even if you don't play games they had seen space war they
liked the idea and they said as the technology developed enough at this
point that we can take a giant computer those mini computers were pretty large
the size of several bookcases at that point can we get the technology shrunk
and down and into something a little bit more manageable and sellable and sure
enough they did and they released computer space in 1971 40 was at 41
years ago Wow hard to believe it was the first commercially sold arcade game it
came in four different colors all of which were molded from this sort of
fiberglass material that was sprayed with a flaky metallic paint and without
even looking at the gameplay just looking at the game the physical game
itself you're supposed to look at this and think ooh this is the future right
this is science this is what we think the future might look at but you're
playing the future is now and you're gonna play this game now and you're
gonna have an awesome experience it was the same basic space war type where two
players could fight against each other they did make a single-player version
which was an interesting innovation you know so you didn't need or far enough in
you didn't need another person to play a game with right this is sort of the one
of the promises of the technology is once that game is there the machine
handles itself the machine can go on and play against you or the programmers who
created the machine behind you so we have a an interesting sense of
competition going on there unfortunately the game was kind of
complicated to play it had a lot of buttons you had to push there wasn't a
joystick yet they hadn't really thought of that or other inputs like paddles or
paddle controls and things like that and so there were some rather detailed
instructions that went with the game well when you walk up to a game right
you want to be able to play it fairly easily you don't necessarily want to sit
there and have to read a manual and this is what contemporary game designers are
dealing with right someone gets a really complicated game for their Xbox 360
or their PlayStation 3 there's no manual they're gonna just chuck it over
their shoulder so why even bother to print it right we're gonna build the
tutorial into the game but I get ahead of myself because the controls are
really complicated and the instructions were kind of detailed didn't didn't do
well in fact it was pretty much a commercial failure it was however
culturally enough of a big deal but it wound up appearing in two movies so
Soylent Green important important dystopian film and Jaws right so you can
see these computer space actually being played in this Jaws said
contemporarily of course for the time but Soylent Green a futuristic film the
idea was this person playing this game in the film like oh that was just such a
mark of the future and this is what science fiction was already about so we
had at that point the film industry becoming cognizant of games and starting
to say how are these in turn going to influence us back as much as we've
influenced them already so let's get to Space Invaders space invaders one of
the earliest shooting games right pretty simple you've got a laser cannon at the
bottom you have to just shoot these invaders they're relentless no matter
how many you shoot they will just repopulate the screen they will fire
back at you if they destroy your bases that's the end of the game if they
managed to march all the way down to the bottom of the screen they have invaded
your space and they have conquered and you lose the designer Nishikado was
looking at a lot of popular media he was he was a Japanese guy really was
interested in a lot of things he had played the Atari arcade game breakout
which you just have to you have your little paddle and you bounce the ball up
and just break bricks break bricks break bricks the sort of backstory of that is
you're a a convict trying to escape from jail and that's not really discussed
anywhere it's in some of the graphics that are drawn on the arcade game that
kind of give you that suggestion so there's a little bit of subversion to
break out and Nishikado also really liked War of the Worlds the 1953 George
Powell version very influential he saw it when he was a child and if you've
ever seen it you know the aliens the the Martians have a very particular look in
that film that's that's kind of neat and Star Wars which was really big right
the whole planet Earth seemed to be consumed with Star Wars fever fever and
Nishikado wasn't alone in that regard so initially when he was working on Space
Invaders he was taking the breakout model said bricks what can I do with it
and it really was seeing Star Wars that said wait a second why why am I messing
around with bricks why am I messing around with common sort of things let me
unlock my imagination let me draw upon what's really influential for me and it
was science fiction and now the invaders have become so iconic but they actually
are a shorthand for the entire video game industry I've got my unlicensed
Space Invaders shirt on right now you can also see there on the screen you can
get a Space Invaders couch if you like the Space Invaders have even really
invaded us and created crop circles so we know that they walk among us or are
waiting to invade us whatever you want but Space Invaders galvanized the
attention of an entire generation of gamers right very simple premise we're
getting invaded from space hadn't seen that in the video game before but we had
seen it many times in television and film read about it in books all the time
so we started to get a space race in gaming kind of like we had a space race
back in the days of the lunar missions we had one going on here but it was an
exciting thing there really wasn't that much competition although communist
mutants from space I threw that in just because we've got this stuff going on at
kind of the height of the Cold War and video games really absorb the culture in
which they're created but all of these games and really from this period from
about 78 to the late 80s there were hundreds of space titles being produced
I just picked some of the more obvious ones space panic was a kind of a fun
game where there are aliens that are invading and you have to dig little pits
and then the aliens fall in and then you bury them and they crash down the whole
time you're playing that your astronaut needs oxygen so the game is actually you
can't just sit there and kind of bide your time you have to get things done
before you run out of oxygen each level space zap a reflex sort of game
you've got a base in the middle aliens are invading north south east west what
are you going to do kind of prefigured the sort of twitch type of games where
we have to touch something pretty quickly a space duel again kind of
taking the idea of space war and updating it for a new generation so much
like science fiction takes older ideas and repackages them in novels in
television shows and movies we get the same thing happening in games space ace
was a animated game it was done using laser disc technology that was popular
eyes first in dragons lair and so the fantasy sort of games came out first and
then we had space ace doing that in space Harrier so you can you could spend
weeks months in the 1980s probably even years going through all the space games
that are represented there an important one that came out kind of in the middle
of all that was Metroid for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Metroid was
interesting for a couple of reasons the first was that the narrative that was
set up in the game so we've got Samus Aaron and we've got these Metroid
creatures that are stolen by space pirates and they're going to be turned
into these sort of nefarious creatures biological weapons they're going to
become weaponized and and used by the space pirates so she has to kind of take
on the whole crew one of the important things about this game was it was the
first video game one of the first to feature a female protagonist now it
wasn't revealed till the end of the game and I'm sorry if I ruined it for you
haven't played it but play it it's fun when Samus stepped out of her armor all
the sudden gamers who at that point were mostly males and mostly young males were
confronted with oh whoa there's a gender issue here it was actually a very
interesting way to bring that concept into discussion and by all accounts
pretty much everybody who found this out thought it was really cool almost no boy
said ooh it's icky I was a girl I've got cooties or you know something crazy like
young boys do now where Metroid fell in in terms of development was as a
Nintendo title Nintendo was having a lot of success with platforming titles
right so think about Donkey Kong we've got little Mario running he's got a
jump barrels and he's got to go up the levels till he rescues his girlfriend
and you know from Donkey Kong and the sort of platforming games became very
popular as a genre and so Nintendo kept doing that at Donkey Kong we had Ice
Climber Super Mario Brothers Legend of Zelda in 86 and a lot of Nintendo's
titles tended to be very whimsical their design tended to be a little cartoony
right they were going for a little bit of a younger market in some ways they
wanted things to be fun and having Metroid get introduced kind of added a
little bit of maturity to their titles they were going for something maybe a
little more challenging in terms of play maybe a little bit more thoughtful in
terms of overall story and they had a lot of success with fantasy and this was
kind of one of their first major successes with using science fiction in
a story in a game we had Mega Man come out in 1987 he is a hero he's a humanoid
robot he was created at the same time that these six other robots were created
by dr. light and his helper dr. Wiley dr. Wiley kind of decides that he wants to
run the world right classic story world domination we see it in science
fiction all the time I'm gonna use robots to do it and so Mega Man has to
go and stop his electronic brethren from carrying out these sort of evil plans
again we've got a standard action platformer like Metroid like Donkey Kong
everything else but the interesting thing about this one was that it
disrupted the linearity of what was going on we've had games at this point
getting more sophisticated in their narrative but they've really been a
beginning a middle and an end often like we see in other media what Mega Man did
was allow people to decide which of the stages of these six stages which of
these six robots they were going to take on first and second and third and all
the way through six and from that sort of construct their own narrative of the
action well what what's going on if you go encounter cut man first and then
fireman second that might influence how you come to understand the story and
we're really starting to see the potential for under unlocking different
ways of getting narrative across to people we still like to be able to
understand a story there's still something very comforting about a
beginning a middle and an end to things but giving the player the option kind of
like in those choose your own adventure novels where you read them and it's like
okay if you choose to fight the dragon turn to page 97 if you run away from the
dragon turn to page 112 right so you're flipping around in those sorts of things
a kind of a prose experiment games actually give the players if they're
programmed that way the ability to have different narrative experiences to the
point where a lot of games that are released contemporarily will give you
alternate endings or different endings to pay based on certain decisions that
you may have done in the game a mega man has produced 11 titles in the series
they all kind of have unique stories and settings and characters but they're all
very consistent in terms of sharing common science fiction elements so you
don't have to go back and play if you're interested in mega man 8 you don't have
to go back and play mega man 1 from 1987 because one you may not have the
technology right you may not have a Nintendo sitting around or it hasn't
been ported or something like that you don't necessarily have to understand the
history that's come before it in order to understand what the games about
because it has those common science fiction elements that it can draw upon
now we're getting into the 90s okay so we have wing commander long-running
series started 1990 the last title actually came out this year and it's a
fan-produced title which is interesting they love the series so much they didn't
want it to go away the interesting thing about wing commander is it is a classic
space opera right action writ large across the galaxy right what's happening
here is happening on a galactic scale and as we get to the end and we kind of
get the mass effect we'll see that replicated again with wing commander the
story was all told in cutscenes that happened between most of the gameplay
you could talk to the characters with sort of a primitive dialogue tree but
most of the game was really about getting in a ship and flying it around
and blowing up the invading aliens right it's classic space invaders just done in
kind of a different format right when we got to wing commander 3 in 1994 they
decided rather than digitally creating the characters to use famous actors and
so they hired Mark Hamill Luke Skywalker Malcolm McDowell John rise Davies a
bunch of people and had them act in front of green screens there were no
backgrounds there were no sets created for this production there were some
props that was about it and so it was an extremely pioneering game in terms
of the technology what it was trying to do and had a pretty big budget for its
time it was four million dollars and that was unheard of in 1994 for someone
for a company for the game company to spend that kind of money on a title it
was very successful it was frequently billed as the world's first interactive
movie we might ask ourselves what does that mean how do we how do we what is
the nature of interaction how much of it happens here cognitively how much of it
happens physically with what we do how much of it happens afterwards with maybe
what we do with ancillary products right do we see a great movie and then go read
the book it's based on do we go watch a good movie and then go buy a game and
play the game that the movie is based on something like that so wing commander
is space opera we also had in the 90s descent three games in that series it
was a 3d first-person shooter and it had six degrees of freedom and it was
simulating zero gravity so you were in this ship and you could literally fly
and go anywhere that you wanted to wing commander didn't quite have that so much
you know things were still sort of on an XY axis in some ways you had some kind
of mobility things but descent was really trying to push the idea of we're
in space what does that feel like right if you really are in this environment
what might that do for you and if you think about a television show like
Babylon five which was very invested in a hard science fiction in certain ways
and yeah we had jump gates and aliens and that sort of stuff but where physics
was real or applicable trying to keep up with that well what might that be and it
was a really nauseating game to play in some ways because you could be all
flipped around and you didn't know which way was up this is your exploring
space which way is up the plot pretty simple you're hired by a corporation of
course turns out to be evil as most major corporations are to eliminate the
threat of an alien computer virus wait a second this computer that I'm playing
this game on is the distant forerunner to this evil computer that exists in the
future that's creating these bad things that are going on and of course we've
got robots you gotta love robots just throw them in the game people know what
they are they're going to take off and run with them so this game the first
title actually set in our solar system and progressing through that and so they
really tried not only with using the real physics but also using our real
solar system to try to imbue the science fiction premise with a little
dose of reality and kind of blend that together really nicely it was kind of
one of the first games to use full 3d polygon meshes which gives you kind of a
more accurate representation of what you're seeing over the sprites that had
been used for more than a decade to create games and the interesting thing
about this is they had seen the shareware approach that had been
popularized by doom right so you give people the first part of the game for
free and you say hey if you like that come by the rest of it right so how many
times have you been given a sample of something here's the first chapter of a
book right or here's a free preview weekend for a movie channel like HBO or
something like that and now that they've got you kind of hooked on their
program and you're going to buy it right so the idea is we're going to do this
and it was a it was an interesting economic model for the computer gaming
industry to try out for a while at the end of the 90s we had a very influential
title even though it didn't sell well System Shock 2 and if you're a fan of
BioShock you owe it to yourself to go back and play this game it still holds
up fine even though it's from 1999 it's a first-person action role-playing game
so you have a character as you accumulate experience you can modify your
ability to take more damage or to sneak around or to repair computers or that
sort of thing you're an amnesic soldier in the future right so you don't have
any idea of what the past is this is great we skip forward in time you have
no idea of what the last couple hundred years have been like common trope in
science fiction right okay we're going to go back in as you explore as you go
through the narrative you come to kind of understand what's happening we've got
an awakening from suspended animation we're on board a spaceship that's going to be testing
a new faster than light drive and things have gone horribly wrong why because there's a
malevolent artificial intelligence an AI known as shodan that is really
trying to take over things right so again we have this common theme in science fiction
we've created our official intelligence now it's gotten out of control and now we're
going to have to deal with the sort of consequences of that action as game
historians have gone back they've really looked at this game and many other game designers like
oh yeah we played that we got all of these ideas from it in terms of game design and so it's
regarded now as being very very influential and of course ken levine who designed it would go on
to do bio shock a lot of the ideas that he explored in more detail in bio shock are first
seen in system shock too and then also thief the dart project which is a fantasy game that he did
fantasy and technology kind of an interesting combination i wouldn't call it steampunk but
it was right around there so game designers often get exposed to interesting ideas
in science fiction that they keep reworking over and over again through different game titles
that they work on so we get to halo now hopefully if everything before had sounded vaguely familiar
not at all familiar hopefully here in the 21st century the future is now and we're going to see
what that's like so halo combat evolved coming out for the xbox and it was sort of their killer
application people ran out to buy the hardware just to play the game like they had done years
before with the atari 2600 and the home version of space invaders we're again set in the far future
right 26th century we are assuming the role of master chief he's cybernetically enhanced
we have some ai and humans living well together he's being helped by cortana
who kind of lives within his neural interface in his
armor and they have to uncover the secrets of this ring-shaped world they've crashed on halo
of course if you've read any larry niven right the ring world engineers
there you go i mean completely lock stock and barrel uh from that in a certain way
interestingly and i kind of put system shock too right before halo combat evolved
to get you to start thinking about why wait is that gonna show dan that was a female ai cortana's
a female ai why before creating artificial intelligences are we imbuing them with gender
what does that mean so we've got this we've got sort of samus from metroid we've got gender
showing up in these science fiction inspired influenced video games in some very interesting
ways and there's a whole subcategory of games science fiction games that have male protagonists
with female ais guiding them through the course of the game right so they take on a very strange
mother slash girlfriend role for the characters it's a it's a just a just a delightful topic
i think to go and explore so bungee studios as before they even started programming the game
they came up with an entire science fiction universe they wanted this thing fully fleshed
out they wouldn't fully realized they had hundreds of years of history before the game
history through the game history after the game they wanted it to be very well developed
and very convincing right so if you read something like the foundation series
or the berserker series or any of these kind of the doom series any of these massive
science fiction magnum opuses by their authors that just seem completely rich completely alive
and have their own sort of history and fantasy we would probably you know have a comparable analog
to lord of the rings or the game of thrones the song of ice and fire that's being popularly
adapted right now so even for characters or for players who might not be into science fiction
right they play other sorts of games they're going to enter this and there is a complete
universe that's been crafted around them wildly successful title spawned a million-dollar
franchise there's additional games in the series spin-off games halo 4 is coming out people are
very excited for it there's novels there's comic books you can go out and buy yourself
action figures based on it and have them they're reminding you of the game even when you're not
playing the game right we want to think about that what does that mean for a really good property
to kind of inhabit your inner space and get you thinking about it or daydream about it getting it
to live within your own imagination bungee studios was very interested in getting getting
that to happen so bio shock a survival horror uh first person shooter set in an alternate 1960 so
we're not in a far-flung setting we've actually retreated to the past and tell an alternate sort
of history alternate timeline we've got the underwater city of rapture uh art deco
uh sort of gone wrong um this is an exploration of space too it's under the ocean right it's in
a city under the ocean and um is full of terror right because you can't escape it like we're in
space where are you going to go you can't you're going to run away to another planet what are you
going to do how are you going to get there we're under the ocean how are you going to get i mean
how are you going to breathe right if you choose to leave you can't leave the city you've got no
gills you've got no respirator you can't do something like that so the company 2k boss and
the developers working with Ken Levine from system shock 2 and he's feeling this is kind of a
spiritual successor the ideas that he had explored in that series we've got a morality-based storyline
right what is the nature of good and evil how do ethics function if you can create life
can you also destroy it right i mean there's a lot of great big questions that science fiction likes
to raise and play around with as ways of commentary on our lives in society right now
and so uh you have the big daddies who protect the little sisters and little sisters go around
and harvest adam from people and it gives you powers and you have to decide are you going to
free the little sisters you're going to leave them imprisoned if you free them are you going
to set them completely free or are you going to harvest them for your own sort of nefarious
purposes and deciding what to do for yourself Levine said he was really influenced by
objectivism developed by the writer Ann Rand and used that as an influence on the story as well as
1984 and the book logans run which made you seen the film version or the television show based on
that but Levine is a is a game designer who reads a lot of science fiction he really loves science
fiction literature and there's actually a very crucial scene in the game i'm not going to spoil
it for you if you haven't played it play this game i think you'll very much enjoy it if you've played
it don't spoil it for other people in the class there's a crucial scene where there's an issue
of what is going on with control and this blew people's minds right usually you're playing a game
and you're not thinking well why why is the game designer not letting me go into that room
or why do i have to drive my car to that city over there why can't i just drive my car of
the cliff and that the story's over no we want the story to continue and it's that issue of
interactivity and control right and it's so fascinating that science fiction is often
about questions of control and power and this title very consciously raised that for players
and a lot of them hadn't really considered that before so it was it was very very radical
for the time dead space and i threw this in there just because space may not be a happy
place to go exploring right we may find things that are there that are nasty that aren't necessarily
aliens but they might be zombies or you know some sort of undead so it's a little bit of a mashup
genre mashup we've got engineer isaac clark named after science fiction writers isaac asimov and
arthur c clark there are these necromorphs monsters created from corpses and alien virus
maybe there's an alien religion associated with this maybe not there's some very interesting
things going on there one of the things this game is trying to do is get you very immersed
in what's going on and so the normal stuff that's at the bottom and sides of the screens
that might tell you give you information none of that appears everything is within the game itself
and so you're not distracted from these uh head heads up displays or hud's right hud's
it's everything is there it's kind of happening there are cut scenes
that kind of pull you back out of the story and give you some exposition
but dead space was really trying to do something a little bit different and bringing in
much more of a horrific element something that might have been suggested in metroid
and some of these other games really putting it first and foremost and using the advances in
technology just to scare people scare them very badly again like bungee had done with
halo they wanted to set up a very believable self-contained universe so they worked on a
comic book series they also created an animated film and both of these were prequels so as the
anticipation was building for the game people could read the comic books people could watch
the movie and have an idea of what was going on so if you didn't read the comic books or watch
the movie you could still get in the game and play it and understand it why because of the
science fiction elements that it was drawing on uh last but not least mass effect we could probably
fill an entire semester with this another title very heavily invested in its own self-contained
universe all of these grand worlds these grand narratives that are set up in science fiction
for people to explore right in books in film television the games just multiply that i mean
part of the challenge i think for designers in creating games like this is how how do you
put boundaries on the narrative if we can keep telling stories and we can keep expanding the
universe it almost becomes too much right it almost becomes too much to take in particularly
if we have a space opera like this one we've got a galactic backdrop going on it's an action
role-playing game set in the future again we are elite human soldier commander shephard we're
going to go out and explore our galaxy on the normandy we're exploring we're explorers that's
what we do this game is absolutely sprawling uh for those of you who played it you know what i'm
talking about if you haven't played it this is a game and i maybe i'm using that term loosely
maybe we need to invent a new word in language for this for games of this nature but it's so
big so massive if you want to do everything the game gives you the opportunity to do
you would be spending hundreds upon hundreds of hours going through all the permutations and
all the combinations and trying to just every little nook and cranny imagine reading a novel
that every page you had to if you wanted to you could unfold that page more and more and more to
expand that narrative um so we've got full customization of the character a lot of people
got into we have a multi-threaded progression through the main storyline and a lot of subplots
we've got a plot of eplots ced i mean you all of these things if you don't want to go do that
you don't have to you can just go through the main narrative of the game in about maybe 10 12 hours
you're missing all the fun right you're missing that a lot of that exploration uh that's out there
the nuances making those discoveries right that the game designers put in there to give you a
little a little reward for your curiosity and there's a really extensive conversation system
things that we have seen in other games really Bioware heavily invested a lot of time
in making nuances to this and dialogue became central to the morality system so again we have
an idea in science fiction science fiction is about power in some ways it might be about
systems of power control how do we address that on a personal level right for the gamer
you want to make positive decisions you want to make negative decisions you want to be
a a teflon sort of hero you kind of want to be a jerk sort of hero you can you have these types
of options that you want there are a tremendous amount of science fiction influence on mass effect
we have fred saber hagan's berserker novels frederick paul's gateway novels
the television show bow star galactica we have this really intense human machine element
present in the game babylon five which i've mentioned before seems to influence the citadel
in the game in the way its governance structure is set up casey hudson who was a project director
of bioware cited a whole slew of films and i just picked some of the more notable science fiction
ones alien blade runner star war star trek 2 starship troopers all those influences on the
game not just ideas in terms of themes or narrative but visual design right the way that
the levels look the way that worlds look the way that a chair might look on the deck of a ship i
mean all of these if everything has to be designed for the game it should be designed consciously
and purposefully so here nearing the end the future is now i've said that several times
over the course of the talk today as of today there are five at least 5800 video game titles
that we could categorize as science fiction in some way that is a staggering amount of
game titles that have are influenced by science fiction yet there's a lot of other genres
represented in video games but by and by and large far and away video games science fiction
works so well together we want to think about some economic possibilities and these are a few
ideas i'm giving you here at the end to kind of consider in 2011 the total amount the consumer
spent on gaming content and this is new gaming content and just gaming content across all the
platforms worldwide somewhere 16 and a half billion dollars if we start throwing in other
ancillary markets like novels movie tie-ins
glasses beach towels t-shirts toys whatever you want you got to make sure you go out and get your
bio shock toys we're looking at getting that number up closer to 50 billion dollars it is huge and so
many companies are paying attention to it in a way they hadn't before and so we're seeing a
dissemination of science fiction ideas science fiction culture through gaming we've got a lot
of themes going on in these games freedom of thought what does that mean what are issues
of space colonization should we go out into space to begin with right that's actually a very
interesting point to consider what might it mean if we get to space and we meet aliens and we kind
of don't like them you know maybe well maybe there's some bigotry maybe they don't like us
we're hey we're great humans you know come eat some of our food and listen to our awesome music
right nope don't like it our issues with artificial intelligence all these types of things
and then whose future is being represented really whose future is being represented
and i want to think about this and kind of from a national issue so much of science fiction
is influenced by certain nationalities and cultures particularly when it comes to the
video game industry we have particular areas of dominance so when we think about the future
whose future are we entertaining for ourselves where does our own vision of the future come from
how do we distill that what does it mean when we take our angry birds into space
and do those sorts of things and just finally if you want some more great science fiction inspired
video games to play i've just got a brief list here for you of ones that i think were particularly
notable from the last couple of decades we have ones that will question raise questions of identity
ones that will actually let you play as alien characters and deal with that ones that ask you
um try to build new societies and civilizations ones that challenge our notions of
virtuality and all sorts of things like that