The Limits of Sci-fi

[M. J. Young]

Jareth Dakk brought up sci-fi games in http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4949">Why not more Sci-fi?, and there were some good answers. But a passing comment there sparked a thought in my mind. But the idea is a bit fuzzy, so I'm going to clip a few things to try to get it clear in my own mind, and hopefully yours as well.

Star Frontiers was TSR's attempt at a basic SF game, but it was more of a mix of Star Wars and Star Trek elements than a generic game.

This was rattling in my head. I played StarFrontiers in the early 80's, and it was probably my favorite game to play at that time. I can't now recall anything about it that was reminiscent of Star Wars, and the resemblance to Star Trek was somewhat superficial--how different can two universes be whose basic premise involves the ability to use spaceships to travel between star systems which are predominantly at peace with each other? But I think that notion--how different can they be--had me in the frame of mind for this thought.

First, most sci-fi rpgs feature not-so-fantastical technology when compared to what we already have. Remember those wonderful yellow-spined DAW sci-fi novels? The wonderful stuff they came up with was weird and 'alien' and we could only imagine it with help from the author. Have we run out of ideas? I don't think so. Maybe a thread could address quality in sci-fi (or any other genre) as well.

This is where the thought started to click. It's a problem I've had to face as an author and game designer, as well as merely running game worlds. To put it simply, what can science fiction do that hasn't been done, from a setting and technology perspective?

That's not to say that there are no more good sci-fi stories to tell. I'm sure there are. I'm sure that there are people capable of devising new ideas in science fiction that will make for great stories. The problem that I see is that these great ideas are few and far between. Jules Verne gave us a trip to the moon and a journey under the ocean; H. G. Wells gave us an invisible man and a time machine; Gene Roddenbury (well, I don't know that he didn't have a better source) gave us teleporters, and Isaac Asimov gave us robots. We've got ideas for clones and androids, supercomputers and starships, nanotechnology and biocomputers and mind/machine interfaces. And most of the science fiction we encounter is retreads of familiar ideas in some new arrangement.

Yet Clarke's words about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic is very telling in this regard. That invisible man probably is still magic; it is doubtful that anyone will ever be able to become invisible and remain both corporeal and alive. I hear that quantum non-locality might make it possible to do an end-run around Heisenberg and eventually build a real teleporter, but at the moment that still looks a lot like magic. The problem, though, is when we do these magical things, we have to make them sound like science. I used quantum non-locality as the http://www.mjyoung.net/misc/quantum.htm">basis for a communications system (which I have only recently been told won't work, just after I included it in a book). Star drives and hyperspace theory have been accepted. I suppose the question is something of a dilemma I think faces science fiction writers generally: what is there that hasn't been done in science fiction, and how can I do that without having it seem like it's really magic with a pseudo-scientific rationalization for it?

Does this make sense?

I'm actually having problems with both sides of the equation. I can think of precious few things that might be done that science fiction hasn't already tackled in some way (and I'm usually pretty good at dreaming up things tht might be done), and then if I find any, they never seem like things you could do scientifically/technologically anyway.

Ah! An Example. Clockstoppers (some discussion and my thoughts on it http://www.mjyoung.net/time/other.html">here) revived the notion of a person being accelerated to the point that people around them appeared frozen in time. Star Trek did the same thing in the original series. In Star Trek, it was the result of a chemical; Clockstoppers used a machine that was supposed to shift the person into something called hypertime. These concepts don't withstand even the scientific scrutiny of a theologian (me); to enjoy the show one has to accept that some sort of magic is at work here that defies scientific explanation. That's the problem: doing something in science fiction that doesn't seem like it's really magic we're pretending is science. As Ruthra C. Kralc of Bah Ke'gehn has said, Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. If it seems too much like magic, it doesn't work in sci-fi; but almost anything I can think to do that isn't merely pasting together the pieces of other people's work in a new collage seems too much like magic.

Is this fatal to sci-fi games? Or am I overreacting?

--M. J. Young

[clehrich]

M.J.,

I don't know if this answers (or rather, addresses) your question, exactly, but a pal of mine who's a biochemist has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to develop a sci-fi world in which the science is plausible.  Not that this is by itself new, of course.  But his argument is that most scifi tends to think primarily in physics terms: can it go that fast, can we do that with particles, can nanotech do that, and so on.  As a biochemist, he's basically answering your question something like this:

Any technology which is plausible but so advanced we can barely imagine how it might be done has probably already been done biologically, in nature.

We're not talking about teleporters here, but he really starts to foam at the mouth when people talk about nanotechnology.  His argument (Ron, you'd be a HELL of a lot better qualified than I here) is that proteins and enzymes pretty much already do insanely complicated engineering work, and are ridiculously small, and use very little energy, and are pretty difficult to break.  So why bother trying to imagine "what if" we had such things?  We do.

The result of all this, plus a hankering after way-out sim space opera, is the game http://auroragames.com" target="blank">Aurora.  It's not free, although there's a free sample, but the CD-ROM has a really very large amount of stuff on it.  Soon we're going to have a POD version, no really, promise.  And I'm working on ridiculously large amounts of cultural material on the various species, including (I mention this for you in particular, though it's not available yet) a very lengthy (60 pages and climbing) discourse on the Pargin religion, a somewhat radical separatist faith among the metal lifeforms known as Uhrmina.

Check it out.

[John Kim]

This is where the thought started to click. It's a problem I've had to face as an author and game designer, as well as merely running game worlds. To put it simply, what can science fiction do that hasn't been done, from a setting and technology perspective?

That's the problem: doing something in science fiction that doesn't seem like it's really magic we're pretending is science. As Ruthra C. Kralc of Bah Ke'gehn has said, Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. If it seems too much like magic, it doesn't work in sci-fi; but almost anything I can think to do that isn't merely pasting together the pieces of other people's work in a new collage seems too much like magic.

First of all, I don't think that scientific implausibility is actually a barrier to science fiction.  Most SF -- even very good SF -- is fundamentally based on "What if?" premises.  Even if something had no scientific validity, I think it can make good science fiction -- if it logically explores the consequences of that premise.  IMO, SF is primarily about the conjecture and scientific exploration, not about science as we know it.  

That said, I think there is an awful lot of stuff that can be done with "hard" science fiction, because it is a relatively open field.  Very little of published SF that I have seen comes even close to being "hard" in terms of science.  Most SF -- especially SF RPGs -- stick to a horde of very standard tropes, like FTL spaceships of a particular kind and star-hopping adventures.  

The problem, as I see it, is not at all that there is not stuff to do -- but rather that it quickly verges on being unplayable unless you use the well-worn tropes to give players the familiarity they need.  It requires a careful arrangement to come up with a setting familiar enough to easily play while still having new stuff in it.  

I'd like to post a bunch of mini-ideas, but they will have to come in later posts, I think.

[Uncle Dark]

It seems to me that one of the limits of generic SF games is that they are too wide open.  You can do anything, but have no direction.  One of the limits of genre-specific SF is inflexibility? Playing in a different world than the one the authors wrote often requires a rules overhaul.

So consider Sorcerer and Sword as a model for how to do a SF game.  Not in terms of mechanics, but in how it handles the genre.  S&S doesn?t give a setting, it gives examples of how to build a setting in the genre.  It explains the genre in loving detail, how to do it, how not to do it.  S&S never says ?your game needs to have Elves,? it says, ?if you want a non-human race in your game, here?s how to do it.?

The reason this works so well is because Ron gives us a well-defined arena to play in.  He set up the basic conventions of a specific sub-genre of Fantasy, a skeleton for us to flesh out as we would.

So pick a sub-genre of SF.  Spend some time working out the conventions, and spell it out for your readers.  Show them how to play with it.

Lon

[Cadriel]

Hmm.  I find it interesting that science fiction, unless it is so outlandish as to be fantastical (e.g. Star Wars), generally lets its technology date horribly.  Computers, in particular, are more advanced now than most people before the 1980s projected them in 50 years; to create reliable projections of what computers will be like in another 50 years would require an even greater imagination.  And I think that any science fiction that focuses explicitly on technology is bound to date, and date quickly.

A lot of the science fiction that survives is stuff like Star Wars (really a fantasy story in some SF trappings) and Star Trek (varies, but it was originally a frontier exploration story with SF trappings).  That is, the kind of things that base themselves on familiar story elements, but place them in space with neat gizmos and technobabble.  These are quite navigable as game concepts, as has been demonstrated by a variety of SW and ST and derivative RPGs over the years.

What I think remains is not the science fiction that projects technology into the future and says, "What if?" but rather the SF that projects humanity into the future.  You see, there are fundamental differences; the former tends to have characters who are basically the people of the author's own era, and tend to date easily (read the Lensmen series to have it demonstrated firsthand).  The second group has technology which is not central; it is an extrapolation of our own overall technological advancement, in essence an often dark mirror on our own world.  It is the people who've changed, the people who've begun to be impacted by their own instruments.  So these are stories where the science fiction is more than just trappings; it is the background against which these people have altered.  Most literary cyberpunk (which has not been successfully captured in an RPG to date) is a good example of this thread of science fiction, along with a lot of its anime offshoots; also some of my personal favorite films, like Blade Runner and Gattaca, discuss humans pushed into a future that is a mirror of our own world, asking what becomes of them.

And that's why I hold that SF RPGs that won't date along with their technological assumptions (as Blue Planet and Transhuman Space slowly move away from reality, just as the Cyberpunk RPG did) are either games where the SF is a trapping, or are centered around humanity as forced into the future.  I think this is the perfect ground for a very Narrativist-focused RPG; I'm even thinking of concepts for how to design one.

-Wayne

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

My take on science fiction differs greatly from most people's. As I've presented before, I think the term best applies to taking some recognizable element of the writer's immediate political and social landscape and "tweaking" it - exaggerating or eliminating it to a degree than cannot be possible in reality at this moment, but remaining with an explanation or context that concerns material reality. The story provides commentary on the phenomenon being addressed, whether in very basic or very complex terms.

As far as I'm concerned, science fiction is never about "the future," but about the Now when it was written. I consider most of it to be explicit political cartooning. "The future" only represents one way in which the "not possible at this moment" criterion can be achieved.

In other words, I am completely unimpressed by these interpretations of the term:
- Trappings (terms like "warp," tentacles, space ships, "the future")
- Extrapolation (which includes the issue of plausibility)
- Alternative-history per se

None of them denote science-fiction to me at all. Asimov's The Caves of Steel (arguably the only good novel the man wrote) is about androids and contains a good deal of extrapolation, thus it has two of the things above ... but it is science fiction because it concerns morality in the 1950s context, and its relationship to scientific Positivism, which was a big friggin' deal at the time (anyone out there know who C.P. Snow was? How about Vandevere Bush?).

(Correct: Star Wars is not science fiction by my interpretation. It's fantasy with space-y trappings. I classify fantasy mainly by the centrality of one or more of elegy, vitalist forces, symbols of internal conflict/wishes, or pornography [for which I do have a definition].)*

Now, so what? Ron goes off on some damn thing again. If I wanted that, I'd read old Harlan Ellison or recent Warren Ellis. Well, Wayne's point is so far the most coherent to my way of thinking, and it prompted me to present it - so that one can ask, where is 'science fiction' by the Edwards Definition in today's commercial landscape at all?

Star Wars: Episode II is not science fiction. Neither, in my view, are Iain Banks' books.

The Truman Show and Gattica are science fiction - no real surprise there, I trust.

And in role-playing? ... big pause. Uh-oh.

Best,
Ron

* I will discuss this paragraph by email or private-message only.

[Marco]

... Tentacles?

-Marco (who can't define Sci-Fi but knows it when he sees it)

[Walt Freitag]

And in role-playing? ... big pause. Uh-oh.

Paranoia fits your SF definition to a tee, I believe.

- Walt

[Sylus Thane]

For me, Science Fiction deals with space in some way. Both as it deals with technology and people. But, for some it is all about the technology, or all about the people, rarely (in my opinion) do you see them both being dealt with evenly. For me, probably the two most ideal authors of science fiction are Robert A. Heinlein and C.J. Cherryh. Both are supreme authors in their own right and from differing eras and points of view. The main other point I would make that shows how they excell is they do not focus on the technology or people singly but in a reasonable equality showing how one effects the other. The other reason is that they do not fill pages upon pages with technobabble. Now I am not opposed to explanation of technology in how it applies to the universe in question but when it becomes extreme that is where I lose interest. I don't read science fiction novels for lessons in physics, I read them for a mental adventure. Good quick definitions that are good and plausible for the universe in question are good enough for me.

And here is where I get to the crux of my problem with sci-fi RPG's. Others lack of imagination or suspension of disbelief.

Over the last year I have been helping playtest a sci-fi RPG with one of my good friends. When playing we generally have no problems unless we get on a subject of technology. I prefer quick and to the point explanations that fit with the universe. My friend simply cannot allow any form of technology to be used unless it conforms to all known forms of accepted science and theory. His ability to go "What if" just isn't there. He claims the sci-fi I run or design is space opera, not science.

I think this is problem with many people who play or design sci-fi, be it novels or games, they are unable to suspend their disbelief and use their imagination to say "What if".

Has anyone else run into a similar problem?

Sylus

[Le Joueur]

...The idea is a bit fuzzy, so I'm going to clip a few things to try to get it clear in my own mind, and hopefully yours as well.

Star Frontiers was TSR's attempt at a basic SF game, but it was more of a mix of Star Wars and Star Trek elements than a generic game.

This was rattling in my head. I played Star Frontiers in the early 80's, and it was probably my favorite game to play at that time. I can't now recall anything about it that was reminiscent of Star Wars, and the resemblance to Star Trek was somewhat superficial--how different can two universes be whose basic premise involves the ability to use spaceships to travel between star systems which are predominantly at peace with each other? But I think that notion--how different can they be--had me in the frame of mind for this thought.

First of all, I was one of those hardy souls who bought Star Frontiers right away (I loved the cover).  To us, it was right out of the Star Wars universe, with the rubber masks and names changed to protect the innocent (or from copyright/trademark law).  You're right, I never saw any Star Trek to it, perhaps it was influenced by Traveller, and thus similar in explorative scope, but I can't really see the connection.

And that's where I think the heart of the problem lie.  Wayne takes us down this road somewhat, with his comment that Star Wars and Star Trek were Fantasy and frontier exploration with Science Fiction trappings.  Well, that's just plain wrong.  Star Wars is the classic 'coming of age' metaphor done as the also classic 'heroic quest' and Star Trek is mostly about cultural issues done as first contact exploration and both are presented in Science Fiction.  That's why you can't really mix 'em.  Thematically, they're from the opposite ends of the universe.

See, when I read, see, or absorb anything science fiction, I notice one thing (well two if it's done really badly); these are stories about people.  Not about people 'in the future,' just people.  Furthermore, I note that all the tech, all the gizmos, and all the crushing pressure of science fiction society are just metaphors.  This makes the problem even worse.

First, most sci-fi rpgs feature not-so-fantastical technology when compared to what we already have. Remember those wonderful yellow-spined DAW sci-fi novels? The wonderful stuff they came up with was weird and 'alien' and we could only imagine it with help from the author. Have we run out of ideas? I don't think so. Maybe a thread could address quality in sci-fi (or any other genre) as well.

This is where the thought started to click. It's a problem I've had to face as an author and game designer, as well as merely running game worlds. To put it simply, what can science fiction do that hasn't been done, from a setting and technology perspective?

That's just it, as I've pointed out science fiction isn't about "setting and technology," it's about the problems people face.  Where does the "setting and techmology" come in?  I can't speak for other fans, but to me they exist to heighten the problems addressed.  Furthermore, for every single example from past science fiction, people will call them dated.  And you what?  They are.  Why?  I think it is because of what I am saying here; the 'science' part of the fiction exists to heighten the tension (even, at times, to raise it to an epic level).  How?  By using what bugs the people of the time the story is created.

I think the classic example for me was when I realized (as badly later handled as they became due to a writer's strike¹) that Star Trek's Borg are a manifestation not of artificial implant technology in the future, but our cultural fear of being reduced to meaningless automatons by technology.  (How different are they from the workers in the silent film classic Metropolis?

Let me put 'speculative' of 'hard science fiction' aside for a moment and let me strip down your examples of technology by time period and relative 'tech.'

That's not to say that there are no more good sci-fi stories to tell. I'm sure there are. I'm sure that there are people capable of devising new ideas in science fiction that will make for great stories. The problem that I see is that these great ideas are few and far between. Jules Verne gave us a trip to the moon and a journey under the ocean [This came at the height of the Industrial Revolution; gears and wheels and gunpowder could do anything!]; H. G. Wells gave us an invisible man and a time machine [Also from the Industrial Revolution, Wells was more aware of the soon coming saviour, electricity - Shelley was ahead of her time in many ways.]; Gene Roddenbury (well, I don't know that he didn't have a better source) gave us teleporters [Roddenbury wasn't at the forefront of teleportation - see Vincent Price in The Fly - but he was at the beginning of the computer age and remote sensing.], and Isaac Asimov gave us robots [Asimov did the definitive work - in the burgeoning era of computers and artificial intelligence - but robots have been around since the Industrial Revolution where they anthropomorphized men losing their jobs to machines.]. We've got ideas for clones and androids, supercomputers and starships [The last century offered astounding advances in biotechnology, information technology, and unified field physics.], nanotechnology and biocomputers and mind/machine interfaces [Our modern era has once again focused on the promise of existing technology taken to the extreme.]. And most of the science fiction we encounter is retreads of familiar ideas in some new arrangement.

The very first science fiction story has to go to Edmond Rostand in Cyrano de Bergerac; Cyrano spins a yarn for a pair of easily distracted guards, featuring a trip to the moon resulting from lunar tidal effects on his head!  Again, a journey to the moon, this time not using military technology, but the earlier understanding of how the moon affected the waters of the Earth.

The point I'm trying to make is that the 'science fiction' part is always a product of the time and, as far as I'm concerned, exists solely to sharpen the problems had by the people in the stories.  That's why you run into the marvelous 'plot device' uses of Roddenbury's 'beaming down' teleportation machines.

Yet Clarke's words about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic is very telling in this regard. That invisible man probably is still magic; it is doubtful that anyone will ever be able to become invisible and remain both corporeal and alive. I hear that quantum non-locality might make it possible to do an end-run around Heisenberg and eventually build a real teleporter, but at the moment that still looks a lot like magic. The problem, though, is when we do these magical things, we have to make them sound like science. I used quantum non-locality as the basis for a communications system (which I have only recently been told won't work, just after I included it in a book). Star drives and hyperspace theory have been accepted. I suppose the question is something of a dilemma I think faces science fiction writers generally: what is there that hasn't been done in science fiction, and how can I do that without having it seem like it's really magic with a pseudo-scientific rationalization for it?

Does this make sense?

Not really.  I've read some of the books suggesting that 'Star Trek technology' may someday be realized.  So what, by the time any of them reach the 'Star Trek level' (which can't possibly be simultaneously), culture will have changed so unpredictably that a society like Star Trek's will be impossible.

You've presented a pretty good argument that the literal character of the technology is irrelevant (being indistinguishable with magic); I think that bolsters my observation.  Carrying forward the principle I have proposed, there are a huge number of things that 'haven't been done.'  Look first at current technology then ask yourself where in it lies 'the fear;' how could this 'run amok?'  Cyberpunk is less about man-machine interfaces run amok than about the economy doing so; both are used as metaphors for a loss of humanness of compassion for strangers.

From the authors I've spoken to (I actually prefer 'writers conventions' to 'game conventions' and 'fan conventions'), this is the major 'point of entry' to writing science fiction.

I'm actually having problems with both sides of the equation. I can think of precious few things that might be done that science fiction hasn't already tackled in some way (and I'm usually pretty good at dreaming up things tht might be done), and then if I find any, they never seem like things you could do scientifically/technologically anyway.

Ah! An Example. Clockstoppers (some discussion and my thoughts on it here) revived the notion of a person being accelerated to the point that people around them appeared frozen in time. Star Trek did the same thing in the original series. In Star Trek, it was the result of a chemical; Clockstoppers used a machine that was supposed to shift the person into something called hypertime.

My favorite goes back to 1962 with The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything by John D. MacDonald.  Kirby inherits a watch that stops time, no questions asked.  They don't wonder about why no one else has figured outsomething so simple a watch could carry it, nor do they wonder about the relativistic effects (other than to suggest that everything 'looks redder').  It's still science fiction.  (Even Minority Report treats time as a topic of science fiction.)

This brings me back to 'speculative' or 'hard science fiction.'

These concepts don't withstand even the scientific scrutiny of a theologian (me); to enjoy the show one has to accept that some sort of magic is at work here that defies scientific explanation. That's the problem: doing something in science fiction that doesn't seem like it's really magic we're pretending is science. As Ruthra C. Kralc of Bah Ke'gehn has said, Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. If it seems too much like magic, it doesn't work in sci-fi; but almost anything I can think to do that isn't merely pasting together the pieces of other people's work in a new collage seems too much like magic.

"Don't withstand?"  You have yourself eliminated all your examples via Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote.  (Except "star drives and hyperspace theory," but that seems more like tacit acceptance rather than "scientific scrutiny."  By the way, for the same reasons your quantum non-locality communicator doesn't work pretty much does in the teleporters for anything larger than a particle.)  I think you get really close to an ancillary point when you said, "...When we do these magical things, we have to make them sound like science."

Only in the rarest of 'hard science fiction,' does the author even make a good case for their 'pet technology' and even then they never take the social ramifications (think about what the fax machine did to business), subsidiary technology (ebay anyone?), or how the rest of the ambient level of technology would reflect the advancement.  Why?  Because it's not about technology!

People, people, people, but I suspect you know this already.

Is this fatal to sci-fi games? Or am I overreacting?

Nah, you're just facing the wrong direction.  Looking to the past only reinforces stereotypes; in order to create 'new' science fiction paradigms, ya gotta shuck off not only the past of science fiction, but the society around you.  Think about what you want characters to do (in the most abstract sense) in the game.  Pick your favorite nifty bits of current tech (or tech that society has recently 'fallen in love with') and play around with 'what might happen' if it 'runs amok.'  Make these the 'forces at work' in the background and voila! instant science fiction.

Let's take an example.  How about cellular technology?  You got cell phones, pagers, wireless laptops, now even bluetooth technology to connect them without wires.  What do they do?  Keep us connected,

that's mLife!™  (Which provokes a response against advertising controlling our choices.)

Now let's take that 'too far.'  Let's note the games people are playing with their cell phones in Japan and Sweden and let's add video.  Heck, let's go the route of virtual reality up to, and including, cybersex.  Bring in persona representatives rather than actual images, a little chat and we've got the social side of the equation.  (And that's an important point, not only for reasons I've gone into, but because of the 'keep us connected' advertising side of it.)

How about the technological/advertising side?  Okay, you've got these full-sensory chat areas as well as connecting with friends and family as though you were there; I don't know about you, but that pretty much sells it for me.  Let's imagine everyone gets into that; furthermore that the technology makes it possible to do that almost constantly for indefinite periods.

Now we run into a 'people issue,' people getting out of shape, not being clean, disease, and the whole nine yards.  How about this?  Let's make the man-machine interface two-way?  Not only would you be able to 'jack out' and 'run the net,' but someone else could 'jack in' and, I dunno, do your exercises?  Hey, that'd be a great technology!  In case of medical emergency, you only as far away as the next person to get expert EMT service (the EMT 'jacks in' to the nearest person and helps you).  Even better, why have a person do your exercises, surely a program or a recording could just as well; eventually all drudgery could be 'farmed out' to 'organic automatons,' living people who've leased their bodies to a company that uses algorithms to 'do the dirty work.'

In fact, if the society is so bent on 'virtual experiences' that has implantable versions of this technology, you might as well fit each with some kind of 'omni-tool' and use all the bodies to create the socialist government ideal.  Instant drone workers.

"We are mLife, you will be assimilated."[/list:u]Okay, I'm having a little fun here, but you get the point; you take a little existing stuff and run it out to the illogical conclusion.  You use that to heighten the conflicts inherent in the game to an epic level.  And you call it technology; instant science fiction.

Let me add one bit:

The problem, as I see it, is not at all that there is not stuff to do -- but rather that it quickly verges on being unplayable unless you use the well-worn tropes to give players the familiarity they need. It requires a careful arrangement to come up with a setting familiar enough to easily play while still having new stuff in it.

John's got a point and I wonder if that isn't part of the problem.  The reason some science fiction games seem like 'modern day with gizmos' is for exactly this reason.  (I think I've heard people criticize 'D&D medieval' as just the modern world with magic and no cars.)  If you don't have a set of tropes (like a Genre Expectation), you have to depend on existing ones or invent something 'familiar enough.'  Might that be a hidden problem with creating a science fiction game?  Make it satisfy "scientific scrutiny" and you lose consumer interest, right?

I don't really what I'm talking about anyway.  This could all be beside your point.  It's just how I think.

Fang Langford

¹ This 'thematic basis' I have constructed for them is quite in line with what their original author had planned (and I found out more than a year after I created my 'construct').  Unfortunately, he was on strike so the 'thematic basis' was circumvented that season and lost.  Funny I should take note of it and complain for over a year about 'the mistreatment of the Borg' before finding the interview about just what happened.

[Harlequin]

I'll jump in here, sort of at right angles to Fang's post, because the one idea which jumped out at me in the original thread sort of got skimmed over.  Warning - long - feel free to skip over it, but there's a LOT of meat here.

The thing that got skipped could be seen as another 'category' of SF, but it's less a category - it meshes with the other ones fairly cross-board - than a motivation.  One of the *reasons* people write SF... and I think that discussing it (and others) in that light may shed substance on the discussion here.

I'm thinking, in this case, of the Big Idea.  The concept, usually a place, which is so mindblowing that it takes a novel - often several - just to dip a big toe in the ocean of its ramifications.  This often shares some identifying markers with Tech Extrapolation, but IMO it is quite clear and distinct.  Rama.  Riverworld.  Most of Niven's work, esp. Ringworld and the Mote, but also including smaller pieces like Destiny's Road.  All of these introduce core ideas which are so pervasive that they absolutely soak into the setting, the story, and the action; depending on the skill of the author, the narrative will nearly always be exploratory in outline, but the character exploration is strictly secondary to the basic plotline of exploring the *ramifications* of the Big Idea, as they gradually become unveiled.

Not all SF fits this trope.  Red Mars, for example, I would say is not; it may be (IMO) one of the greatest exemplars of people-in-tech SF, talking about how we interact with our own capabilities and with each other within the framework of those capabilities... but it does not have one big idea which nobody else has ever thought of, to blow up and explore.  It does not express the raw ambition of thought that Philip Jose Farmer does, when he first said, "Hey... what if everybody, from every time of human existence, got resurrected and thrown into a pot?"... Red Mars expresses a subtler, many-small-ideas trope, brilliantly.  (Riverworld is also my example of where people-in-tech-SF is orthogonal to Big Idea... because Riverworld, too, is primarily about how we interact with one another within the framework of, well, *somebody's* technological capabilities.)

Now, I can see some serious reasons why Big Idea would tend to fail, as an RPG modus.  But I can also see some good reasons why, especially among people like those here, it should not be permitted to do so quietly.

Forget "all the ideas are used up."  That's what distinguishes a brilliant Big Idea SF author from, well, at least me. :)  "The ideas are hard to come by" does matter, though... coming up with the Big Idea and actually running with it is, IMO, one stumbling-block increment more difficult than running with something less mindblowing.

But more importantly, the literary model here is fundamentally a one-shot.  Oftentimes, the ramifications run far enough that the author carries it to a second or third book, because they realized they weren't done yet.  Invariably, that second or third book is less mindblowing than the first one; the Big Idea can shatter your preconceptions, but More About Big Idea can at best be a fun read. (Games "based on" a Big Idea novel fall in this same category - they're sequelized, and typically vanilla.)

RPGs are sometimes run as one-shots; it's a model of gameplay which deserves, and gets, good credit in environments like the Forge, with comparison to the endless campaign model.  But that's *campaigns* as one-shots.  Big Idea SF usually results in a SETTING which is, itself, a one-shot.  Which would mean, in the RPG environment, one product, one game run, end of story, book sits on shelf.  The publishing industry has words for this, all unkind.

That being said, the publishing industry can go hang.  Because Big Idea SF is also mindblowing, the sort of thing which can totally alter your worldview and leave you numb for days.  So I ask, is that or is that not the sort of sensation that Forge-inspired games would typically give their left indices for? :)  That's gold, it is.

So perhaps, and the more I write the more I suspect this is core to the initial question of "why not more SF?", the question of increasing the SF presence in the RPG world runs hand-in-hand with advances in how we see the use of a setting, or a published game.  If we do not ask it to be "infinitely reusable", then a game book could indeed present, for the first time, the likes of Ringworld, and succeed in doing so.  All of our Explorer types (and the Explorer in all of us) would be thrilled - so why not?

The key, I think, would be in making such a product so that not all the cards were on the table.  "Secret" heavy games try this and fail, because expectations are not in-line with the usage; your players can and often will go read the Player's Handbook to the Sabbat, and even if you ask them not to and they comply, they know it's there, they know the shape of the thing.  Game masters who ask their players not to read the Sabbat book, read it themselves, and then throw out everything within it (without telling their players) and make that organization entirely a conspiracy theory crafted by the players' manipulative elders - they're touching a gameplay model which the Big Idea SF game would require to live.

I can cite a specific example, because I realize upon writing this that I have run a Big Idea game, just once, to the specs I'm seeing.  It could never have sold - the "publishing model" involved only works when being pitched to friends by friends, it requires *trust*.  But it also garnered arguably the most praise I've ever received for a game, and a decade later I still get pestered to continue it.  Jared?  You listening?  You played in the last half of that first session.  Remember Budapest Zoo?

The pitch: You live in war-shattered Budapest, sometime in the near future of now.  You eke out a living as best you can, but there are more bullets than beans in this city, more bombs than children.  Now make a character.

The Big Idea, and the Truth: Humanity - as a whole - has achieved peace, matured to the point where strife is not necessary.  Except in Budapest.  The inhabitants here - civil rights? whassat? - are kept in this state by grey-garbed agents of the outside world, who provide both the subsistence food and the plentiful ammunition which allows it to remain as it is.  Homeostasis of death.  Your home.  What do you do about it?

The ramifications and interpretations here are what make me really class this as a Big Idea story.  What *is* Budapest?  A zoo, kept for the edification of enlightened humanity?  A prison, a life sentence for those who still have genetic predisposition toward violence?  The ultimate, cruel, reality-TV program?  Or simply the most visible expression of a never-truly-suppressed violence of the racial soul?
(This is stolen outright from a short story I would like to find again sometime but cannot recall the details of, out of a collection entitled When The Music's Over - but since nobody else had read it, it worked as stolen.  The SF short story may just be the perfect source for this sort of thing.)

It hit hard, because they were totally not expecting it; the shape of the thing was very different from the pitch.  (I still think the game should have ended at the conclusion of the one-shot, when the outside-world reporter in their midst betrayed them all to prevent the inhabitants of the Zoo from learning the truth.  They badgered me into a second session.)  And I suspect this is necessary, for Big Idea works in gaming... you cannot alert the players ahead of time to what's coming up, or the Big Idea itself loses savour.  But if you can't put the cool part of the game on cover or back-cover text, how do you sell it?  And if you can sell it, how do you ever make money selling an RPG which is best savored only once?

I suppose not all Big Ideas require surprise, so you can paint the concept without spoiling it.  Continuum, for example... the game's universe is definitely Big Idea SF, it even has an obvious "What if..?" thought of the nobody-ever-actually-ran-with-this type.  And it's not spoiled by letting the players know in advance that this is a time-travel game, rather the reverse.  What distinguishes the type is not the shock value of leaning the Big Idea for the first time, it's the intellectual rush of figuring out what that means to people living in that world.

However, despite the lack of dependence on surprise, Continuum (alas) is still largely a one-throw game.  The dependence on Exploration of -what the Big Idea means- still means that once the Exploration phase wears off (which will vary per player - I suspect that Budapest Zoo could have kept up the social contradictions and exploration of the ramifications nigh-forever), it may grow stale.  I suspect it depends on whether the game garners sufficient momentum-of-character and passion, before the Exploration phase ends, or not, like achieving escape velocity to make orbit.

So, to wrap up, I think my contribution to the analysis here is that there is a broad class of SF which is poorly represented in gaming literature because the form itself has a mismatch with several traditional gaming tropes: book publishing, indefinite replayability, having to show off its essential coolness to prospective players before they begin.  But that none of these aspects are *necessary* to gaming, and that this class of SF might therefore be beautifully handled using Indie gaming styles.  Go for it!

[Harlequin]

Oh, and as an appendix to the above...

I challenge someone to take the Big Idea concept and come up with an RPG which meta-handles this, and does it well.  Because Big Idea games must be one-off (one story arc or extended story arc), to build a game which (a) encourages the modes of thought necessary to allow prospective GMs to come up with Big Idea settings - why *not* have everyone who ever lived resurrected all at once? - and (b) provides a system specifically tailored to the Exploration-heavy (both IC and OOC) needs of this style.

Then the game would be replayable... as a different SF/hard-SF novel each time.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

(This is stolen outright from a short story I would like to find again sometime but cannot recall the details of, out of a collection entitled When The Music's Over - but since nobody else had read it, it worked as stolen.  The SF short story may just be the perfect source for this sort of thing.)

The short story is called "War Fever" by JG Ballard and it appears in the titular collection.

[Harlequin]

Thanks.  And I stand corrected, I think... the *obscure* SF short story may be the perfect source for this sort of game.  You hope your players haven't read it. :)

[Le Joueur]

I'll jump in here, sort of at right angles to Fang's post,

I'm not so sure.  Wasn't the mLife™ --> Borg thing a surprise?  Not even a little?  I pretty much laid out 'how to have a "Big Idea"' or at least tried to.

I'm thinking, in this case, of the Big Idea....

…Coming up with the Big Idea and actually running with it is, IMO, one stumbling-block increment more difficult than running with something less mindblowing.

The key, I think, would be in making such a product so that not all the cards were on the table.  "Secret" heavy games try this and fail, because expectations are not in-line with the usage; your players can and often will go read the Player's Handbook to the Sabbat, and even if you ask them not to and they comply, they know it's there, they know the shape of the thing.  Game masters who ask their players not to read the Sabbat book, read it themselves, and then throw out everything within it (without telling their players) and make that organization entirely a conspiracy theory crafted by the players' manipulative elders - they're touching a gameplay model which the Big Idea SF game would require to live.

...For [the] Big Idea [to work] in gaming...you cannot alert the players ahead of time to what's coming up, or the Big Idea itself loses savour.  But if you can't put the cool part of the game on cover or back-cover text, how do you sell it?  And if you can sell it, how do you ever make money selling an RPG which is best savored only once?

...So, to wrap up, I think my contribution to the analysis here is that there is a broad class of SF which is poorly represented in gaming literature because the form itself has a mismatch with several traditional gaming tropes: book publishing, indefinite replayability, having to show off its essential coolness to prospective players before they begin.  But that none of these aspects are *necessary* to gaming, and that this class of SF might therefore be beautifully handled using Indie gaming styles.  Go for it!

How about a Generic or Universal or General science fiction game where the preparer of each game (possibly more than one session each) is prompted to create a new "Big Idea?"  I wouldn't probably call it that, more of an Intrigue or a Mystique.  That way the players will be primed, but in the dark, the gamemaster will be pumped and full of mystery, yet the game could be played again and again.  Not an easy thing to write, but an interesting challenge.  Thanks for sharing the idea.

Fang Langford