Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4994158" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think Sci-Fi's problem is actually pretty much the opposite of 'shared past, variable future'.  As some have stated, I think that explains nothing.The real problem with Sci-Fi is complexity.  Regressing into the past allows us to strip off various modern conventions to produce a quite simple world which is nonetheless believable.  It doesn't matter if the real world was never as simple as our game world, or if it is missing some feature that the past di have because most of us aren't familiar enough with the past to notice (or if noticing care).  However, we do know the present.  And unless we go post-apocalyptic, then we expect the future to have at least all the attributes of the present plus whatever additional features we wish to add to the setting.  The further into the future we go, the more layers we add to the onion as one tech level is made to sit on top of another. This presents a hideous problem to anyone wanting to create a believable sci-fi world.  It's just simply too huge and sprawling to document.  In a fantasy game world, the 'local neighbor' can amount to a few hundred square miles.  In a sci-fi game world, we should count ourselves fortunate if the 'local neighborhood' amounts only to an entire solar system.  Every 'local neighbor' of a sci-fi universe is potentially as complex and as varied as an entire fantasy multiverse.  You just can't sandbox in that sort of situation very easily, and yet at the same time, once they have a spaceship the players have much more freedom to sandbox if they want to.Space is just incredibly vast, and a space faring civilization is just mindbogglingly complex.  No sci-fi novel even begins to try to cope with the vast number of potentially complex factors that could interplay together.  Usually, a sci-fi novel introduces just one theme - biological engineering, cybernetics, AI, nanotechnology, cloning, VR, aliens or whatever - and explores just that one thing as its major theme.  My experience with sci-fi games (well, just Star Wars) is that they tend to use the trope of representing the entire planet with a single tiny location, and entire races with a single individual.  The scope is just too big.  The culture is just too complex.  Sci-fi games die because they are overwhelming.  We expect to much of them and when we get it, we don't know what to do with it.</blockquote>

Verification