Science Made Cool

Mad Science Goes Mainstream

Mad Scientists are cool.  They get to say things like "Unleash the Robot Lobsters!" or "Release the Radio-Controlled Sharks!"  Who else gets neat lines like that?

Well, it appears that soon those classic Mad Scientist lines will become part of the standard United States Navy lexicon.  The Mad Scientists at DARPA have been hard at work developing two extremely cool Mad Science inventions:  robot lobsters and radio-controlled sharks.

The lobsters (more precisely, the Biomimetic Underwater Robots) are designed to scuttle around the seabottom and track chemical gradients using sensors in their antennae.  Presumably they could be used for things like locating and disabling underwater mines, or (more peacefully) finding toxic waste sources or pipeline leaks. 

Even cooler are the experiments on radio-controlled sharks.  Using electrical implants which stimulate the sharks' sense of smell, scientists at Woods Hole can pretty much steer the big toothy fish like they were toy trucks from Radio Shack.  While it would be exceedingly nifty to imagine, say, pirates being eaten by Navy radio-controlled sharks, the idea is apparently to use the sharks' keen senses to gather information -- turning them into living reconaissance drones, in effect.  The pirates (or whoever) would then presumably perish by more conventional means.

All this goes to show that if you want to be a Mad Scientist nowadays there's no need to get yourself an underground headquarters or some hunchbacked minions.  Just send in a grant proposal to DARPA.  In a world that looks more and more like a comic book every day, Mad Scientists are now a vital national resource.

The View From Afar

Here's an interesting story about Geology In Action.  It isn't exactly news that the Horn of Africa has ideas about leaving the band and starting a solo career as a large island or free-floating subcontinent.  That's been pretty obvious ever since the plate boundaries were mapped in the 1970s.  What is impressive is how large and sudden some of the changes have been in the Afar Triangle region of northeastern Ethiopia.  According to the news story, the land level in one spot has dropped 100 meters in just the past few months.  Geology usually works on a scale of millimeters or centimeters per year, not a meter a day.  It won't be long before the ocean breaks in and Ethiopia gets a seacoast again.  Here's what it looks like from space.

We live on a very dynamic planet; compared to most other worlds in the Solar System the surface of the Earth is a churning froth, constantly being erased and renewed.  Only the fact that our own lifespans are so short makes us think of the physical landscape as something permanent.  It's not.  The San Gabriel mountains outside Los Angeles are growing at a rate of several inches a year; the Atlantic Ocean is getting wider all the time; every river is constantly eroding its banks and shifting its course.  And now it appears Africa is breaking up.

Fortunately, there is something we can do to help.

The Big Gamble

Readers of this blog may wonder why we haven’t posted for a week.  That's because most of the Zygote Games staff was at the Game Manufacturers' Association trade show. 

This was the first chance we’ve had to really show off our products to a lot of people who know and love strategy games. So we found sitters for the kids, packe d up our 8-foot-tall inflatable tyrannosaur, and flew to the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas.

We arrived Monday the 13th, arriving too late to do anything at all besides collapse from exhaustion.  The Riviera Hotel is on the old part of the Strip, and combines labyrinthine immensity with desperate shabbiness.  Plus it smells like whatever my grandmother used to clean the grout in her bathrooms.

From Tuesday morning to Thursday afternoon, we demonstrated how to play Bone Wars and told people about our forthcoming game, Parasite! We also collected business cards for our fossil giveaway. This time we had a large herbivore coprolite from Utah, courtesy of Indiana9 Fossils. As at CHITAG last September, people were incredulous, made "eww" faces -- and inevitably put their cards in the bin anyway. (Our winner was Ken Gibson from Draper, Utah – congratulations! We’ll be mailing your dung out this week.)

When we weren’t working, we had the chance to see neat stuff from other companies, including Edge Games, who have a card game about the Periodic Table;Human Head Studios, publishers of the forthcoming card game Villainy; Slugfest Games, publishers of the excellent swordfighting game En Garde!; Atlas Games's twisted new board game Recess!, and Edhellen Armoury, who have a really nice line of foam swords.

Overall, GTS felt like a success for us. A lot of new people saw Bone Wars for the first time, and most of them really liked it. We got quite a strong response from game shops in the western US and Canada that are near good fossil beds. And more folks are looking forward to seeing our really gross parasite game. On top of it all, game industry journalist Paul Tevis recorded a podcast interview for Have Games, Will Travel with our President and Science Guru, Diane Kelly. Tune in and find out why a game company needs a Science Guru, anyway.

Off to GTS!

Tomorrow most of Zygote Games heads off to Las Vegas for the Game Manufacturers' Association annual trade show, accompanied by a 10-foot inflatable dinosaur.  (You were expecting maybe a Samoan attorney?)  We'll be giving away an authentic coprolite to the winner of our drawing, and with any luck we'll come home with a bunch of orders.  If you're planning to attend, stop by our booth!  It's the one with the dinosaur.

Cute Little Guy

The Life Sciences building at UC Berkeley gets a new exhibit this week:  a baby Triceratops skull.  The head's about a foot long (as opposed to more than six feet long for adults), with big eyes and adorable little horns.  It was found in 1997 at Hell Creek in Montana, and is the best preserved example of a juvenile Triceratops known.

Dr. Mark Goodwin, director of the university's Museum of Paleontology, is publishing a paper on the skull in this month's issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.  Apparently the little skull is a real treasure-trove of information.

For example, since the little guy had horns and a neck frill, that suggests that those features didn't serve primarily for sexual display in adults, as has been suggested.  (Juvenile humans don't have breasts or beards, juvenile birds don't have colorful plumage.)

Also, the little guy's skull bones hadn't fused yet, indicating that it took several years for Triceratops to reach adult size.  The growth rate is consistent with the more active model of dinosaur metabolism which has become the mainstream view since the 1980s.

What's amazing is that even though this creature is a different species which lived more than 65 million years ago, it still looks cute to human eyes.  Dr. Michael LaBarbera explains why (scroll down, or better yet read the whole thing).

A New Old Crater

A group of Remote Sensing scientists using satellite imaging have discovered an ancient meteor crater in the Sahara.  The lead investigator is the semi-legendary Dr. Farouk El-Baz, who has provisionally named the crater "Kebira," which is Arabic for "Large" or "Great."

No doomsday scenarios or miracle cures here, just a cool discovery.  And the guy who discovered it also chose the landing sites for the Apollo missions.  So he knows from craters.

Box Full of Disappointment

This is something of a departure from our usual course of cool science and bragging about our products.  Today I'm airing some thoughts on game design and the interaction between the design of a game and how it is packaged and marketed.

Did you ever have this experience when you were a kid?  There's a cool game you've seen advertised, so you pester and pester and pester and pester and pester your parents about it, and finally one birthday there it is inside the gift wrapping.  You tear it open . . .

. . . and what's inside isn't nearly as cool as what was on the box, or the TV ad.  You play it once or twice but it isn't much fun, then it gets shoved under the bed, and maybe some of the pieces live on in a kind of toy-zombie state as independent playthings.  From time to time your parents make pointed comments about it when you ask for something else.

I have a Theory that this disappointment comes about when the experience of playing a game is too different from its ostensible subject matter.  If the name of the game is something like "Carrier Attack!" but the rules and board are really just modified Monopoly with places like Coral Sea and Leyte Gulf instead of Boardwalk and Marvin Gardens, then that game will wind up under the bed. 

For a real-world example, consider the game Mastermind, which is a pretty interesting logical-deduction game.  The box, however, used to display a kind of James Bond villain complete with deadly-looking female sidekick.  The box says "espionage and intrigue" but inside it are nothing but little plastic mushrooms and a pegboard.  I expect there are a lot of Mastermind sets gathering dust under the beds of kids who were hoping for something which would satisfy their desire for Bondian action.  (Meanwhile, Mastermind now thrives as a solo computer game.)

In roleplaying games, a similar problem comes up when the game rules don't support the conventions of its genre.  When Greg Costikyan designed the Star Wars roleplaying game for West End, he was careful to create a set of rules which allowed player characters to perform the same kind of stunts as the heroes of the films. 

Game engines which aspire to universality, like GURPS or the HERO system, sometimes turn out to be incompatible with particular genres because the design assumptions just don't support the conventions of those genres.  The heavy emphasis on realism in the GURPS rules makes it difficult to replicate something like Star Wars, where two dozen crack stormtroopers can blast away at Han Solo without hitting him.  In contrast, the HERO rules, originally created for the superhero RPG Champions, don't really support "gritty realism" at the low-powered end.  (I suspect a great deal of the endless "GURPS vs. HERO" arguments can be boiled down to "this system supports genres I like.")

Getting the gameplay to match the subject matter is one of our unstated (until now) goals at Zygote Games.  For BONE WARS, for example, we could have used a Monopoly-style board with different bone beds instead of properties.  But that wouldn't have replicated the feel of being a 19th-century bone hunter.  When I describe other science and nature games as "lame," part of what I mean is that the game doesn't really match its subject. 

I'm very interested in seeing if this idea resonates with readers -- who are, after all, the people most likely to wind up playing Zygote games.  How much does this matter?  Can a really good game engine be fun to play even if it doesn't have anything to do with its subject?