[Sotff] Harder sf fate

[Alan Barclay]

You might want to question whether you want the game to be hard SF. Hard SF
tries to be scientifically accurate and explore questions essentially of
engineering or empiricism.

On the other hand, Traveller was heavily influenced by Asimov's Foundation
and Empire and stories like it. While these have some element of scientific
accuracy, they are really vehicles for exploring human questions -- how do
people respond to living in weird environments, how do different ideologies
clash -- planets as fictional glimpses of other ways people might live,
other ways of thinking, and/or the consequences of applying technology in a
certain way. 

This is what I found fun about Traveller, not the attempt at sceintific
accuracy.



-----Original Message-----
From: sotff-bounces at phreeow.net [mailto:sotff-bounces at phreeow.net] On Behalf
Of Brad Murray
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2008 9:54 PM
To: Spirit of the Far Future
Subject: Re: [Sotff] Harder sf fate

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 5:14 PM, Alan Barclay <nitrosyncretic at gmail.com>
wrote:
> As for trying to anticipate exoplanetary science (Where's this sim
thinking
> coming from?) -- fah! Who cares! Just generate interesting worlds.

That's a good question actually, and one that already has some heads
butting at our design table: "hard" sf seems to imply a certain amount
of "sim" design or, as we're heading I think, more abstraction.

That said i completely agree about making sense of strange numbers. I
think we have that right now, though at a multi-system scale as well
as a system scale. It might need just a little more though -- maybe
another parameter.

-- 
Brad Murray (halfjack)

All the money's gone -- nowhere to go.
But oh that magic feeling -- nowhere to go.

_______________________________________________
Sotff mailing list
Sotff at phreeow.net
http://phreeow.net/mailman/listinfo/sotff_phreeow.net