Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

[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?

[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)

Edit: Not saying that the three mentioned are bad games, just that they can't be taken seriously as space games.

[seccess]

Also, Kerbal Space Program.

[wavefunction]

Star Citizen perhaps, since they out of the games you've mentioned hew closest to established astronomy.

The rest just invent whatever through the magic of procedural generation, which is cool but not coherent with using actual astronomical data.

[foo123456]

ehrm, Elite: Dangerous actually use real data.

[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?

[quaz3l]

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

[rz2k]

Here's a short article about his involvement in the new Cosmos. [1]

[1] http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/tv/whatrsquos-seth...

[sp332]

Nope, same one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_MacFarlane#The_Seth_MacFa...

[lfowles]

Nope. He was also behind the remake of Cosmos if you haven't heard that one yet.

[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

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

To see what it looks like, you can check out this youtube video:

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.

[tgb]

While not exactly what you want, and more than a little imperfect, you should be aware of Velocity Raptor[1]

[1] http://www.testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html

[Mithaldu]

Some hints on controls would be nice. Also, in chrome the top two things aren't clickable. Otherwise, this looks adorable!

Edit: I wonder what kind of horrible people would downvote the parent post.

[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.

[yincrash]

galaga, bomberman, ultima, texas chainsaw massacre

[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.

[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?

[llanfair]

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

[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.

[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...

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.

[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?

[ctdonath]

He basically describes Star Raiders (Atari, 1979). 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.

[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

[chadk]

Reminds me sorta of The Three-Body Problem.

[mdpm]

tangential, but spaceengine is awesome.