There is a bathing suit there. No really.

I must have been 8 or 9, spending genuinely unhealthy amounts of time playing Metroid, Metroid II and Super Metroid, when I heard through the elementary school grapevine that SAMUS WAS A GIRL. What? Did I miss something? Samus has monster shoulders! Samus kills things constantly! Samus has NOTHING in common with the women I know!

In retrospect, Samus had nothing in common with the males I knew, either. There is something behind the fact that I naturally associated her behaviours with fundamentally male activity. While most would point to a source for this belief in the broader gender stereotypes of the world I grew up in, I suspect a simpler source. I spent enough time playing videogames that I built much of my preconceptions about gender from the characters I played on my Nintendo. Women wore pink. Women were kidnapped. The grace of the female form made sense when abstracted into Peach’s uncanny 4-metre floating jump. 8-bit Techo linebackers, Gaiden ninjas, Cobra Command Assassins, and all their contemporaries defined my male. Men fought, built, bombed, dodged, and destroyed.

Samus, therefore, was explicitly male. Something about that fact made her real identity, as a Kim Bassinger-inspired bombshell, all the more alluring. But wait! My friends exclaimed. If you beat the game fast enough, you get to see her NAKED! This was a blatant, earth-shattering lie. I played Metroid II obsessively, as only an 8-year-old can while motivated by the possibility of an 8-bit boob. The result of my labours was a four-second shot of Samus’ suit flashing and disappearing, to reveal red (yes RED) hair blowing in the wind, and a beach-girl figure bound in a matching red bikini! YES! I didn’t give a shit that my peer’s convictions fell short of reality; that was GREAT.

Let’s be clear here. Meeting the speed limit was HARD. You didn’t have time to collect power-ups, and had to blast through regions killing as little as possible while bunny-hopping constantly. In the equivalent challenges of later games, the requirements were intense. Later incarnations only revealed “Zero-Suit Samus” if you managed to scan EVERY FREAKING THING IN THE ENTIRE GAME. Believe me, that is a very seriously gruelling pursuit.

Something was gradually lost as the series progressed and evolved. Samus’ bikini became a less exciting bikini, and then a tank top and briefs in Metroid Fusion. Eventually it evolved into a blue body-suit, form fitting as it is. As cosplay girls have a habit of proving, even the least adventurous versions were fantastic. At the other end of the spectrum, rumour has it that in the original end scene in Super Metroid, Samus was revealed completely nude. Designer Tomomi Yamane allegedly reconsidered, concerned about American sensitivities, and had the bathing suit painted in. Another member of the team, Yoshio Sakamoto, later claimed in an interview that he had kept a prized ROM of the game that included the original scene, and that he was the only person that knew where Samus’ beauty mark is. Sakamoto, you dog!

To my incredible disappointment, the beauty mark showed up later in Metroid: Other M tucked under Samus’ lip. The 8-year old part of me still mourns the former ambiguity of that unknown beauty mark. Anyway, very predictably, gamers stepped up to the plate. In a truly awesome flurry of amateur programming from a jejeune pornographer, a ROM appeared online in which Samus was FULLY UNCLOTHED for the ENTIRE GAME. 8-bit boobs! YES! Imagine my surprise when, as some part of my brain complained that Samus could never have survived THAT without her suit, I began to loose interest in the ROM. I admit, I was older, I had experienced the glory of boobs first-hand, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was smut.

Part of it was the challenge. It was so easy to see Samus’ body that I just didn’t care anymore. It was as if the mind-numbing challenges of the original games had actually been the reason crude images of sexied-up Samus were so appealing. It’s fairly well established in neuropsychology that the anticipation of a reward affects the size of the eventual dopamine release far more than the reward itself. No surprise there.

And of course there was the dark side of the internet (and of Japan) that had done the world the favour of just going ahead and mass-producing Samus smut. It was easy to find, and something about the niche subculture associated with it made it just feel dirty. It was ubiquitous, easy to access, and totally unappealing. While I was spending pretty much every available moment either playing video games or chasing girls, my original 8-bit obsession had become completely meaningless. I mean, honestly. Imagine the below uncensored. Could you really watch that without feeling just a little awkward?

In an age where hypersexualized fantasy women are a fair target for love and marriage in some parts of the world, we are increasingly ignoring the roles that these images have in defining gender roles. There are a handful of gender-ambiguous characters out there (which deserve a post of their own), but by and large the fictional personae of video games continue to reflect a twisted set of gender stereotypes. I often suspect that they reflect the whims and fantasies of a small group of international character designers and artists that are obsessed with cleavage, aggressive but emotionally fractured women, unrealistic mother figures, and one-dimensional schoolgirls.

I’ll get more into this later. But for now, enjoy all the Samus smut.

I have been eagerly watching pre-release material for your game, and am excited to play it! Unfortunately, I feel that it is my responsibility to inform you that you seem to be confused about some of the basics of astronomy and, indeed, the very nature of space itself.

Let me sum up a few basics of the game. Mario is the captain of a truly awesome space vessel, capable of travelling between galaxies! In seconds! It needs no glass bubble, no walls, just a garden. I was going to complain about the fact that the ship has no visible means of maintaining an atmosphere, engines, life support, and it appears to be steered exclusively by a pirate-ship-style 18th century wheel. A two- dimensional steering mechanism seems hardly practical in three dimensional space. That aside, I can suspend my disbelief long enough to entertain the possibility that Starship Mario is a PLANET SIZED SPACESHIP! It is kind of spherical, after all.

The idea of a planet-sized ship has been around for a while (J.D. Bernal wrote about it first in 1929, and the idea has been pretty-much omnipresent in recent years). If it is big enough, it can hold its own atmosphere, produce theoretically unlimited resources to support life (if you can find a way to mimic sunlight or replace natural processes), and plus it’s a synch to ward off most radiation if you have a massive core of conducting liquid metal and a big-ass magnetic field. Most radiation. And then there is the problem of propulsion, which get more difficult the greater the mass is that’s being moved.

I’m willing to assume the following:

1: Spaceship Mario has sufficient mass to hold down an atmosphere.
2: StarMen provide the solar energy that warm the ship and provide light for the nicely arranged tulips (aka, oxygen gardens).
3: A liquid core of conducting metal (or artificial equivalent) creates a tremendous magnetic field that protects Mario from massive cellular and genetic damage from the cosmic radiation of deep space.
4: The ship relies on a futuristic propulsion system that a) somehow moves a planet-sized ship, and b) has managed to get around the problem that if you expel a reaction mass from a large enough body, the exhaust will eventually reverse course and fall back down, gently tugging the ship, and annulling any acceleration. So rockets are pretty much out of the question. Maybe it rides gravitational waves or something.
5: Said propulsion system can travel between neighbouring galaxies in roughly 1.5 seconds. You’d pretty much have to find a way around light speed and inertia for this one to work.

Exhibit A: not a galaxy

And about that galaxies thing. Did you really call that a galaxy? It looks like a level to me. Maybe at best a planetoid. Carefully aligned without a hint of orbital motion. For the record, galaxies are quite large. Trillions of Goombas could fit in a single galaxy. And ALL of them rotate. Stuff orbits! It is the way of the universe. Just wanted to point that out.

Finally. The goombas. They are everywhere. There are bumblebees everywhere. Bob-ombs, bullet bills… exactly how is it that Bowser managed to get the upper hand and populate the entire known universe with his cronies? Assuming that wicked fast spaceships are available, it’s not inconceivable. Even then, you wouldn’t expect every planet to harbour life. Remember the Drake Equation? Life is fragile! Unless of course you terraformed every planetoid (“galaxy”) in the universe beforehand. This is getting ridiculous. So add the following:

6: Bowser has terraformed the universe, and populated it with his cronies within Mario’s lifespan. Impressive work!
7: Somehow this massive empire is administered and coordinated by a single dude. I’m not even going to go into this one.
8: The whole time Bowser was playing Universe Napoleon and raging from conquest to conquest, Mario was slacking off completely. I mean, you would have to notice entire galaxies falling under Bowser’s armies, right?

All in all, the premise for this game requires such a monumental effort to cast aside disbelief that it is impossible to play. I humbly request a rewrite of the game that explains all of the technological assumptions, or at the very least includes an appendix.

Seriously and sincerely,

Paul

It’s not hard to see why people make the connection between Bioshock and Rand. While the world of Atlas Shrugged revolves around the struggles of elite industrialists who eventually prove they hold the fabric of the world together, Rapture’s elite do just the opposite. Their selfish pursuits tear the city apart and plunge it into civil war. While Rand is a fierce proponent of personal freedoms, Rapture is a playground for those freedoms that has descended into hell. In case that’s not enough, Bioshock 1’s hero/villain is actually named Atlas. There are more similarities. Andrew Ryan, pseudo-protagonist, is a play on Ayn Rand’s name. There are many, many more.

Rand’s story focuses on the struggles of intelligent, attractive, and successful inventors and entrepreneurs. Despite their talents, they find their efforts consistently blocked by forces of government and society – which clearly don’t appreciate the contribution they make and underestimate what they could do with a little more freedom. They become so frustrated that they go on Strike – mysteriously disappearing without a word. The original title of Atlas Shrugged was actually The Strike, so named for this precise event.

Without the superproductive superintelligent superattractive, the world falls to pieces and thrashes about in directionless, apocalyptic agony. Finally convinced that the world is now ready for their return, Rand’s supercapitalists come back to recreate and govern the world – heralding their arrival by scrawling a massive totemic dollar sign in the sky (literally). The superficial argument is simple. The selfish actions of the economic elite benefit the world – and so should be left unrestrained.

Bioshock is an unabashed counterpoint. A world created by a single superawesome Randian – Andrew Ryan – brings new promise and new discovery beyond any expectation. But the selfish actions of other talented, intelligent entrepreneurs tear the world apart. The message is that the economic elite are not always as inadvertently benevolent as Rand suggests – indeed every Randian ubermench you encounter in the game (other than Ryan) is a villain of fantastic proportions. The final moments of Bioshock 1, when the player is handed the key to the city, underline the fact that the powerful elite (whose ranks the protagonist has now joined) cannot be trusted to choose a path that is for the good of those around them. They could just as easily prove to be genocidal terrorists. Simple, right? (Also, how much does it suck that you don’t get to take over the world in BS2?).

Just like Rand’s narrative, Rapture’s stories are of the extreme type. Its villains are evil as they get, lives of the citizens of rapture are as bad as you can imagine, and it’s impossible to find a middle ground.

Bioshock is a relatively direct critique of the central theme of Atlas Shrugged, not to mention some strong links to The Fountainhead that really get going in Bioshock 2. But it misses major problems in Rand’s work. For starters, Atlas Shrugged paints the world in terrifically monochrome black and white. It is difficult to see real connections between Rand’s work and the real world for exactly this reason. I believe it was a mistake on her part, a mistake that Bioshock emulates. Just like Rand’s narrative, Rapture’s stories are of the extreme type. Its villains are evil as they get, lives of the citizens of rapture are as bad as you can imagine, and it’s impossible to find a middle ground.

Second, Rand drew a class of protagonists without weakness. By making her heroes inaccessible, their good deeds become distant. It’s hard to image anyone being inspired and strengthened by her heroes – in my experience fans of Atlas Shrugged usually end up with twin senses of entitlement and indignity, and an excuse to act annoyed at having to pay taxes and put up with liberals. Finally, one of the most disturbing elements of Atlas Shrugged is its complete absence of children. Despite the many attempts of its protagonists (looking at Rand’s haircut you would guess she can’t write bodice-ripping fluidfests, but hey, there they are), no child is born, no mother cares for her children, and only the abstracted and romanticised childhoods of superhumans is offered. Even at ten years old, they act with atypical distance and maturity. It’s impossible to shake the feeling that Rand denies real childhood to all of her characters. They are, essentially, sterile. They are more intelligent and more beautiful than any of ‘us.’ They are powerful and wield the power to destroy and remake the world. They are perfect — more like gods than men.

By sculpting extreme personas and arming them with the immortalising and all-empowering ADAM and EVE, Bioshock’s villains are equally inaccessible. As before – instead of critiquing this flaw, Bioshock adopts it for use in its own story.

Problems aside, Bioshock has a lot to say, commenting on everything from free will to abstract art to gender based power relationships. Between Lamb’s antics and Fontaine’s megalomania, the series covers the gamut and reflects on everything from transhumanism to sacrificing morality for political goals. Many of these tidbits were concealed in audio diary recordings – brief notes that were so interesting that I sent Delta and Jack to many grisly deaths attempting to retrieve them.

The point is that neither narrative sends a believable message, and both of them belong miles underwater.

It’s true that Bioshock critiques the main motif of Atlas shrugged. But in doing so it makes all the same mistakes. It paints a world in sunbleached black and white, where little sisters are saved or killed, where Ayn’s elite industrialists are good or corrupt, and consequently, where there is no hope of making a social or political argument that is meaningful outside of the world of Ayn Rand. So yes – Bioshock presents a counterargument to Atlas Shrugged. But in doing so it restricts itself as a political medium, and falls victim to the same crippling errors that mar Ayn Rand’s philosophy. The point is that neither narrative sends a believable message, and both of them belong miles underwater.

So let’s stop talking about Bishock as a critique of Rand and see it for what it is: A dystopian tale that participates in a discussion with Rand’s philosophy. It should also be noted for its references to George Orwell’s 1984, cultural references to the fourties and fifties, the Book of Genesis, and of course to its self-proclaimed spiritual predecessor, System Shock 2.

Karl’s most recent book, Ventus, is a fantastic exploration of a high-technology future where an errant terraforming experiment turns Ventus into a proving ground for the semantics of artificial intelligence. Check out a review of the book.

It was only a matter of time.

In a convulsion-inducing metascapade of blue boobies and G.I. Georgeous, Everyone has completely lost it over avatar. And I mean lost it in the picket-fence-frontal-lobotomy sense, the rule-34 sense (oh yes it’s out there, no I will not link it), and the every-meme-has-already-adopted-it sense. Oh yes.

Last week it progressed to the point that the only person left who didn’t like the movie was the Pope. Or, more accurately, the Pope’s press office, which thought the film lacked substance and was a boiled down plot-substrate that just didn’t have backbone, much less depth of character or a Meryl Streep cameo. Everybody agreed, but nobody cared. Evo Morales countered with a witty retort! Huzuuh! Some other guys thought the film was racist towards Texans, I’m guessing because it made resource-hunting colonists out to be the bad guys. There is actually something to be said for more nuanced opinions claiming that the film reinforced the so-called white messiah narrative.

Let there be no question!

Yes. And it gets worse.

Avatar induced depression is now a reality. Quite literally, several different local news stations have reported individuals becoming depressed when real life fails to live up to the Technicolor ultrabeauty of Avatar. Soon euphoric, dream-like metaworlds will be the only real treatment for depression. As long as James Cameron gets to direct it and everything is in 3-D. But facing reality will get harder until the only way to break the cycle will be for force feed depresees 3-D Polanski until, by contrast, the real world is the best freaking place ever.

But, since that’s going to be a while coming, I have provided you with great gif images to fill the time!

Did you know that all sharks are ALREADY blue?

a

Vive L'Avafrance!

The majestic gorilla, from primate to pixel

I find deep satisfaction in the recent (ish) trend away from realism in video games. Specifically, high-quality, realistic depictions of fundamentally surreal elements – where 8-bit pixellation and posterization are enshrined in gleaming high-color environments. Let me explain. Start with a gorilla. A real, five-thousand-pound senator dripping chunks of banana and trying to pick lice out of your hair.

Next, sometime in 1981 a Nintendo exec decides that it would be AWESOME to have a gorilla protagonist in an arcade game. While he was musing, everybody over at Disney had been busy drawing cartoon depictions of gorillas, which, coincidentally, are much easier to depict in 8-bit render and probably more appealing to six year olds than the original Fay Wray-crushing silverback.

The game, and many others like it, is a huge success. Everybody plays it. Tiny three-tone pixellated gorillas work their way up ladders and into the collective psyche of a generation, fuelling a flaming digital ejecta of spin-offs and merchandise. Over time, as technology improves, so does the gorilla. He develops hundreds, then thousands, then millions of colors. A half-dozen side kicks show up. Faster frame-rates. Hair. He plops into 3-D and begins appearing as a mascot at game conferences.

Meanwhile the background hardware developed to the point where depicting the original gorilla was feasible. Even easy. Perhaps easier than rendering the abstracted and cartooned version parading across billboards and t-shirts. But instead of returning to the original inspiration, improvements to the abstraction continue unhindered. It’s as though the 8-bit gorilla had replaced the Kong, not only as an artistic precursor but as the object being abstracted: the original gorilla is no longer part of the equation. In it’s place, a beautifully rendered neon orange cartoon gorilla.

Now comes the best part. Over the last five years, some games have stopped trying to imitate semi-realistic environments altogether, even in deeply abstracted forms. Instead, they strive to place the player in the best-rendered cartoon environment possible. You get to feel like you are a robot-piloting adolescent in a cartoon (See Robotech Battlecry). Take the recent Zelda remake Windwaker. A surreal, fully illustrated environment was embraced for being just that, leaving detailed lightblooms and textures to rot. BoomBlox took it a step further, depicting everything as an abstracted pixel, whittling the depiction down to its simplest element. In the marvelous Little Big Planet, the entire game is an abstracted representation of pre-electronic puppetry, gloriously rebuilding a simple technology in a complex digital environment.

The cartoon-o-real smashy-smash
of Deathspank

These games strive to imitate a meta-reality, and call back to artificial worlds of their creator’s youth. They are cartoons, and much more, because they depict elements that were originally crutches (i.e., pixels) as complex elements of beautiful environments, proudly displaying their presence where earlier games might have tried to hide them. Games that pursue realism, on the other hand, are more often than not simulations: of war (past, present or future), sports, and otherwise inaccessible or undesirable experiences – like flight simulators and horror-action trips such as Dead Space. By attempting to recreate reality, they are bound by an implicit need to create a world with minimal suspension of disbelief. A simulation has to be believable. In a cartoon world, however, anything is possible. Meta-realism, therefore, is a trend that will keep the doors of creative and experimental gameplay models wide open, forever immune to technologies that make realism all too easy.

In a glorious pinnacle of exactly what I’m talking about, check out this calculator (ok, actually it’s a subtraction engine) made entirely from the strings and cogs of Little Big Planet. Just think about that. Somebody took tens of hours to build a string and cardboard calculator that is run on a processor that could perform the same calculation in a fraction of a second. Just think about that.

Blindsight by Peter Watts: brilliant!

On the advice of a good friend I spent last night reading Peter Watt’s recent novel Blindsight. It was GREAT. Whiplash-and-flash scifi that is a prime example of the best that the genre can be: brilliantly speculative. Extrapolation, prediction, and what if: Peter Watts proves himself brilliantly fluent in building worlds of possible outcomes that dont seem that far away at all. Since this article contains a few mild spoilers, take a couple of hours and read the story online here. Watts wins two internets for making the whole thing available free online! Or, support the guy and buy a paper version.

Blindsight is (at least at first) a classically structured tale of an encounter of the third kind; beginning with unexplained phenomenon of intelligent origin, followed by exploration-and-discovery typical of classic hard scifi, and finally with the cataclysmic encounter itself.

The environment is fiercely dedicated to the cutting edge. Every ship, character, and conversation is saturated with everything that we think might be possible. From neurobiology to quantum physics, Watts packs a phenomenal quantity of recent research into a very short book, topping it off with an author’s commentary that credits the scientists and authors that he borrowed from (well over 100 footnotes) and that presents the logic behind his own creations. It reads like a tour of cutting edge research into space and into our own minds, with sources to boot.

But only superficially. Below all of this, there is a second level of fiction that asks very astute questions about the way we think. By creating a foreign world that is alien both in aesthetics and in epistemology, Watts boils plot into a single, viscous question: what is sentience good for? The answers that he provides are unvarnished and insightful, and while they are not always completely original (what is these days), they offer one of the most accessable in unique perspectives on humanity that I have read. His conclusions are unforgettably powerful, and have had me second guessing my own actions ever since.

I can’t help but think that this type of thought is infinitely valuable. It updates classic philosophies with modern neurology and biology, and points out human weaknesses that may one day be the cornerstone of our place in the Universe. It is a dialogue that we desperately need because it challenges the assumptions that may cripple us (or, in my opinion, has and will continue to), all the while leaving crumb-trails that lead the candy shack in the woods where rational thought is holed up and waiting to be rescued.

The only flaw in the book, at least at this level, emerges when Blindsight confronts the obvious retort/question: “Why then has evolution resulted in high levels of sentience – in all people and for many thousands of years? Why is it anything but vestigial?” Personally I think that Watts cheats his way out of providing an aswer by arguing that many evolved traits convey no real advantage – only fitness (a good chance of having kids). Of course this is true, but the reality is very complex, and in our case tightly linked to social and political environment we create. We don’t just evolve to compete as a species, we also evolve to succeed within the social microcosms that blossom whenever people start living in proximity to one another. At least in part, this is because species level adaptation, which Watt’s perspective relies upon, is a myth. The mechanics of mitosis select at the level of individual genes. The question is not “will a new mutation make a species more competitive,” but rather “will a new mutation make this individual gene more likely to be passed on.”

But honestly people, I’m nitpicking here. Like I said, the book is GREAT. So stop ruining it for yourself and just go read it before someone gives the whole story away, or worse, you doom the entire human race by forgetting how freaking bizarre our own neurology can be.

I am NOT going to bed.

In real live news today, an Australian mother called the police after her son refused to stop playing grand Theft Auto 4. Apparently the cops arrived around 4 am and told both the child and parent to chill out and go to bed. If my mother had her way, more than thirty minutes of screens would be a felony. But have courage little man! One day you will have your own apartment, television, and disposable income, and NOT EVEN THE POLICE will be able to stop you from playing GTA4 at 2:30 AM.

 
***
AN OPEN LETTER FROM THERESA OF VAULT 13 TO SANTA,

OR THOSE REPRESENTING HIM AT THIS TIME
***

Dear Santa,

Let me start by telling you that the dwellers of Vault 13 are dissapointed. We don’t have many chances to celebrate down here, and pretty much our only two holidays are Christmas and Halloween. The latter has been getting progressively worse since we ran out of booze, and the only thing people can think to dress up as is mutants. Headless mutants, giant mutants, major chest wound mutants … except of course for Lyle, who still thinks it’s funny to dress in drag and hit on me. So you can understand why Christmas means alot to us. It is the one chance I have to sit around in the control room, read the lore databanks, and drink eggnog. Perhaps most importantly, it’s the only time of year that anyone around here gets presents.

So, just to remind you, I asked for three things this year:
- A new water chip.
- Water rations.
- Less time isolated with Lyle.

As you already know, I didn’t recieve any of those things. I didnt even get a lump of glowing rock. Nothing. AND some bastard is stealing my water rations. Thanks alot, Santa. I’ve been good this year. EVERYONE (except the water theif) has been good this year. Frankly I think that you are a bloated charlatan.

You have no excuse. Everyone knows that the North Pole workshop is underground. The Arctic is the lowest rad region on the freaking map. So next year, when December rolls around, we’re eating Reindeer steaks and burning christmas trees for warmth.

Screw you,

Theresa
Vault 13

More often than not, the ocean depths and voids of space are filled with life, pirates, battles, and immediacy — imitations that do not depict the true nature of these depths: cold, lonely, enormous and terribly hostile. It’s hard to communicate the experience of deep sea diving, or to imagine space flight. A few haunting releases — like Wholfin’s video of an underwater squid birth — offer us clues.

The problem originates in the conflict between realistic representations of these deep places, and the desire to create an interactive fictional landscape that is entertaining. Case in point, I can’t think of a single space sim where weaponry was silent — or where spacecraft are as deliberate and slow as their real-life counterparts. J.J. Abram’s recent blockbuster Star Trek filled its outer realms with laserblasts, rifts to the future, planets teeming with life — and only gave credence to the radical emptiness and hostility in a single line from Simon Pegg in his marvellous role as Scotty: “space is disease and danger, wrapped in darkness and silence.”

“Space is disease and danger, wrapped in darkness and silence.”

A few films have come much closer. The original Alien film was fantastic in its communication of the isolation and inescapability of an interstellar transport freighter — beautifully exploiting the depth and silence. The golden-age classic 2001: A Space Odyssey hardly needs mention here, but underscores how silence, isolation, and darkness can be used to create a film with an atmosphere that focuses on exploration and mystery rather than horror. Similarly the recent and underappreciated film Moon made a lunar mining station feel like nothing other than a prison full of secrets. A few have taken it a step further — pointing to the darkness and isolation as a catalyst for mental instability — as is the case in the upcoming Pandorum, Danny Boyle’s 2007 masterpiece Sunshine, and dozens of others.

Space battles will NEVER be like this.

In the video game world, space simulations are often very far from the mark. EVE Online, for example, paints space as a resource rich lanscape where even the most distant corners are easily reached. There is no concern for the difficulties of navigation, the inhospitability of a dark vacuum, the constant threats of micrometeors and radiation. At their worst, space sims can become three-dimensional dollhouses (such as Spore), combat based Tie-Fighter descendents like Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, or fleet-centered simulations like Homeworld and Sins of a Solar Empire, all hilariously parodied by the upcoming Positech Games release Gratuitous Space Battles (GSB). These games offer strategy and complexity — but from a skeptical viewpoint they are often no more than Tower-Defense style strategy setups grafted into an unrealistically depicted foreign environment.

It’s no coincidence that space environments are simulated by Nasa using diving tanks and complex ballast systems. The fundamentals of careful weightless movement are similar, with the obvious exception of water friction. In the gaming world the ocean depths face the same set of challenges as deep space simulation. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has come slightly closer, painting the undersea as a dark and forbidding place — but with much less effect than some of this year’s earlier games. Crysis managed an underwater environment that was dark, painfully plagued by low visibility, and home to realistic swarms of underwater life — although once again sacrificing deliberate slowness and isolation for the sake of relatively rapid and enjoyable gameplay. Dont get me wrong — the fantastic graphic environments do create a brilliant ambiance. See for example Crysis’ depictions of swarming fish.

Perhaps I’m asking too much of an industry whose role is to entertain. It’s hard to imagine a game that blends decade-long uneventful journeys with enjoyable action. I insist, however, that it has been done in other environments and that it can be done in space and underwater. Half-Life (1, 2, etc.) did it for underground industrial complexes. This year’s atmospheric survival horror Dead Space did it for interstellar mining complexes. A select few from the indie crowd, such as The Majesty of Colors, have done it for surreal, unconventional underwater environments.

I hate to be a pessimist, but it may still be some time before piloting a vessel or floating through the ultra deep reaches a level of atmospheric engagement that comes close to what I imagine — and hope — these environments are really like. Unless we learn to overcome our inexperience with these worlds, our inability to imagine them will keep them forever out of reach in the simulated environments of mainstream gaming. But (listen closely, Santa), maybe not.

Until then, get a better sense of space with this great little video from Tony Darnell.