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Why NASA's New Video Game Misses the Point
longacre writes "Erik Sofge trudges through NASA's latest free video game, which he finds tedious, uninspiring and misguided. Quoting: 'Moonbase Alpha is a demo, of sorts, for NASA's more ambitious upcoming game, Astronaut: Moon, Mars & Beyond, which will feature more destinations, and hopefully less welding. The European Space Agency is developing a similar game, set on the Jovian Moon, Europa. But Moonbase Alpha proves that as a recruiting campaign, or even as an educational tool, the astronaut simulation game is a lost cause. Unless NASA plans to veer into science fiction and populate its virtual moons, asteroids and planets with hostile species, it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to suffer through another minute of pretending to weld power cables back into place, while thousands of miles away, the most advanced explorers ever built are hurtling toward asteroids and dwarf planets and into the heart of the sun. Even if it was possible to build an astronaut game that's both exciting and realistic, why bother? It will be more than a decade before humans even attempt another trip outside of Earth's orbit. If NASA wants to inspire the next generation of astronauts and engineers, its games should focus on the real winners of the space race — the robots.'"
Us nerds think the rovers on Mars are awesome.. your kids don't care. The simple fact is: robots don't explore space, people do, and when they do it through a robot they're doing it from boring desk. Ever taken your kids to work? That was exciting for about 15 minutes wasn't it?
There's one thing robots in space can never do that humans can: be humans in space.
And hopefully one day everything we do in space won't have to fly under the banner "exploration".
How we know is more important than what we know.
The problem with making a realistic or educational game about anything is that real life generally isn't fun. Space, like everything else, is boring. It's mostly empty with a few rocks here or there, all moving in a very predictable patterns. Even the life of an astronaut is pretty boring, they mostly carefully follow checklists that other people have written.
Humans are programmed to enjoy a few kinds of very specific things. People are different, but in order to be fun games have to exploit some subset of the quirky things we enjoy. There have to be stories, characters we can relate to, frequently-changing visuals, interesting soundscapes, or worlds we feel like we have more influence over than the drudgery of our daily lives.
Welding? Not so much.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
You mean - fucking never.
.... uh .... hmm - nothing flying yet. Gee.
Space Shuttle - designed 40 years ago - flew 30 years ago.
Replacement, designed 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago
Hey NASA - go fuck yourselves. You're done and you put the ass in Astronauts but here's a video game to pretend you're in a space program that won't admit it's dead yet. Or you can play an equally probable game involving aliens and space marines. I'll take the space marines.
Let's be clear: I'm a Space Nerd, and proud of it. I grew up on Astounding/Analog - still have a loft full of back issues from the '30s. My son and I read space books every other night - I can't get Footprints on the Moon without weeping like a baby, just as I do every time I watch Kennedy's Rice speech. Just got me again.
But, NASA, NASA, what were you thinking here? I 'played' this mess for all of 10 minutes, then it was "delete local content" time. It's neither fun, nor educational, it's just a tedious frustrating mess. The only thing it inspired me to do was to bust out my copy of Space Colony and play through it again with Son #1.
Hopefully next time NASA will make up their minds whether they're making a game or a simulation, and stick to it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
And we wonder why the US is falling behind in science. We have people complaining that a simulation isn't exciting or entertaining enough, when that isn't even the fucking point of it. Maybe if it hadn't been distributed via Steam, we wouldn't have the types of people going through it who are wondering where the guns and aliens are...
Maybe Erik Sofge misses the point. This was a tech demo to show they are progressing and drum up some initial interest. It did that. Yes, it's a bit boring... But that's part of the purpose of releasing it... Making the real game less boring.
I only played it once through, but if that's an accurate depiction of how an astronaut would handle that situation, it's AWESOME. When they make the whole game and have a lot more stuff to do and fix, I'm going to enjoy playing it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The game doesn't let you skip through the budget hearings. And, when they're finally over, your mission gets cancelled.
it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to suffer through another minute of pretending to weld power cables back into place
Yeah, no one will go for that idea. It's as silly as creating a game where people pay money so they can water virtual flowers in their virtual garden.
Have you tried renaming the shuttle to something other than Challenger?
I think that solves the crash problem.
The mundane tasks combined with teamwork with random individuals, and a text-to-speech synthesizer? You end up with brilliant videos like this, exploring what life would be like on the moon if modern gamers were sent into space: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv6RbEOlqRo
"Joy is contagious," he said, peering into the microscope.
...they'll play anything. I look forward to incomprehensible complaints about welding supplies popping up in my Facebook feed.
No. Make a web game where you get to send commands to a rover or space probe once per day (to simulate latency) and receive funds to build another, cooler rover or probe later. They could put programming into the game by using a simple scripting language to give the rover/probe more autonomy so it can get more done per day. It could be excellent. I'd play that.