Analyse This! - Or the Science of RPGs
For the last couple of years I've been a subscriber to Pyramid, the on-line magazine of Steve Jackson Games. It's very much aimed at GMs (Game Masters, aka Keepers or Referees - the person who runs a role-playing game) with articles on scenario and character ideas, or discussions of the problems and opportunities that crop up when running RPGs. It's arguably worth the subscription for princeofcairo's 'Suppressed Transmission' articles, but there's usually plenty of other stuff that captures my interest, often for reasons beyond just RPG-running.
The Jan 5th issue in particular had a very good article by Gregory Stauf exploring the reality behind the stereotype, familiar from any number of gaming genres or sf/crime TV shows, of a character rushing into a lab with the Unexplained Object of the day, saying "I need this analysed, right away!" - and more often than not, being told (in a remarkably short time) "It's utterly unknown to science!". As Stauf points out, not only is real-world scientific analysis a lot more complicated than that, but the whole issue is much more subtle.
A particularly good example that Stauf gives is that of the (relatively) high-temperature superconductors discovered in the mid-1980s. A few years before then, he notes, if you had taken a lump of ceramic material to a lab, dipped it in liquid nitrogen, and then shown that it floated above a magnet, you would have had a pretty big head start on convincing the staff that it was alien technology. After all, everyone would have known that superconductivity (and its manifestations, such as the Meissner effect) only happen in metals, and only at the sort of near-absolute zero temperatures you need liquid helium for. He also makes the converse, and equally telling, point that if you had just left the sample for analysis, in all likelihood all that even a lengthy assessment would have told you was that it was a ceramic of odd but not exceptional elemental composition. Superconducting behaviour would not have been something that anyone would have looked for in that sort of material.
Programmes such as CSI and its spin-offs are often accused of giving the public a misleading idea of the speed and accuracy of forensic and analytical science. Indeed, lawyers now have a term, the 'CSI Effect', for the over-reliance placed by juries and journalists on forensic evidence. But the example above nicely illustrates a wider point: scientific analysis can often only provide you with the answer to a specific question. Asking what an object is made of is only part of the answer (and after all, you could answer "Protons, neutrons and electrons" and be 100% correct without even picking up a test tube). Asking what its properties are - particularly ones that might make it useful or valuable for an unknown purpose - is a much harder question. Asking what it is actually used for is a question almost beyond the realms of scientific analysis. I'm sure I'm not the only gamer to have had the experience of either being a player trying to work out what a strange object is meant to be, or even a GM trying to nudge the players into deducing what it is that they have just found. (I recall one gaming session where we found lots of oddly-shaped artefacts of no apparent purpose; one player noted dryly that they were "probably of ritual significance", which is apparently a standing joke amongst archaeologists regarding items of this sort.) A good RPG writer or GM, or indeed a good sf writer, will do well to remember this point.
One who usually did, by the way, was Colin Kapp. Not well known these days (although perhaps fondly remembered by British sf readers of the 1970s), Kapp wrote a series of short stories featuring his 'Unorthodox Engineers', a military squad of scientific and engineering misfit geniuses who were sent in to tackle problems and environments that baffled or defeated more conventional approaches. 'The Subways of Tazoo' is a superb example of trying to understand the technology of a long-dead civilisation that indeed features vast numbers of odd artefacts - and a good explanation for them, which the UE team finally hit on after a lot of lateral thinking. Although Kapp's writing was rather old-fashioned even in his day (did he ever feature a female character?) his UE stories are still well worth seeking out by anyone who enjoys Scrapheap Challenge or Mythbusters. Another good novel in the same vein is Greg Benford's Artefact, which if you discount the rather date geopolitics is an excellent depiction of efforts to make sense of a very strange archaeological find.
Solving mysteries is for many gamers the heart of their enjoyment of playing RPGs; ditto for readers of crime or mystery novels, or the 'problem-solving' sub-genre of hard sf. What takes real skill and imagination is coming up with scenarios that capture and reward their interest, but if done well it can offer some very interesting insights into how science really works.
And, if you're the GM, it can avoid an hour of increasingly tiresome 'can you guess what it is yet…?" for the players.
The Jan 5th issue in particular had a very good article by Gregory Stauf exploring the reality behind the stereotype, familiar from any number of gaming genres or sf/crime TV shows, of a character rushing into a lab with the Unexplained Object of the day, saying "I need this analysed, right away!" - and more often than not, being told (in a remarkably short time) "It's utterly unknown to science!". As Stauf points out, not only is real-world scientific analysis a lot more complicated than that, but the whole issue is much more subtle.
A particularly good example that Stauf gives is that of the (relatively) high-temperature superconductors discovered in the mid-1980s. A few years before then, he notes, if you had taken a lump of ceramic material to a lab, dipped it in liquid nitrogen, and then shown that it floated above a magnet, you would have had a pretty big head start on convincing the staff that it was alien technology. After all, everyone would have known that superconductivity (and its manifestations, such as the Meissner effect) only happen in metals, and only at the sort of near-absolute zero temperatures you need liquid helium for. He also makes the converse, and equally telling, point that if you had just left the sample for analysis, in all likelihood all that even a lengthy assessment would have told you was that it was a ceramic of odd but not exceptional elemental composition. Superconducting behaviour would not have been something that anyone would have looked for in that sort of material.
Programmes such as CSI and its spin-offs are often accused of giving the public a misleading idea of the speed and accuracy of forensic and analytical science. Indeed, lawyers now have a term, the 'CSI Effect', for the over-reliance placed by juries and journalists on forensic evidence. But the example above nicely illustrates a wider point: scientific analysis can often only provide you with the answer to a specific question. Asking what an object is made of is only part of the answer (and after all, you could answer "Protons, neutrons and electrons" and be 100% correct without even picking up a test tube). Asking what its properties are - particularly ones that might make it useful or valuable for an unknown purpose - is a much harder question. Asking what it is actually used for is a question almost beyond the realms of scientific analysis. I'm sure I'm not the only gamer to have had the experience of either being a player trying to work out what a strange object is meant to be, or even a GM trying to nudge the players into deducing what it is that they have just found. (I recall one gaming session where we found lots of oddly-shaped artefacts of no apparent purpose; one player noted dryly that they were "probably of ritual significance", which is apparently a standing joke amongst archaeologists regarding items of this sort.) A good RPG writer or GM, or indeed a good sf writer, will do well to remember this point.
One who usually did, by the way, was Colin Kapp. Not well known these days (although perhaps fondly remembered by British sf readers of the 1970s), Kapp wrote a series of short stories featuring his 'Unorthodox Engineers', a military squad of scientific and engineering misfit geniuses who were sent in to tackle problems and environments that baffled or defeated more conventional approaches. 'The Subways of Tazoo' is a superb example of trying to understand the technology of a long-dead civilisation that indeed features vast numbers of odd artefacts - and a good explanation for them, which the UE team finally hit on after a lot of lateral thinking. Although Kapp's writing was rather old-fashioned even in his day (did he ever feature a female character?) his UE stories are still well worth seeking out by anyone who enjoys Scrapheap Challenge or Mythbusters. Another good novel in the same vein is Greg Benford's Artefact, which if you discount the rather date geopolitics is an excellent depiction of efforts to make sense of a very strange archaeological find.
Solving mysteries is for many gamers the heart of their enjoyment of playing RPGs; ditto for readers of crime or mystery novels, or the 'problem-solving' sub-genre of hard sf. What takes real skill and imagination is coming up with scenarios that capture and reward their interest, but if done well it can offer some very interesting insights into how science really works.
And, if you're the GM, it can avoid an hour of increasingly tiresome 'can you guess what it is yet…?" for the players.