Lab Coats and Lunatics

Videogames have always been children of science. The earliest games were written on punch cards in university laboratories and played on enormous computer mainframes only available to researchers. Now the entire videogame industry is dependent on technological breakthroughs brought about by unfaltering scientific progress. But what have videogames given science in return?

Take the world’s most famous videogame scientist, Dr. Gordon Freeman. Despite holding a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he’s no more a scientist than Mario is a plumber; as the silent protagonist of a first-person shooter, Freeman is essentially just a gun on a stick. His Half-Life colleagues don’t win any Nobel Prizes for personality, either. The game’s late-’90s graphical limitations meant its scientists are based on only four different character models, all wearing an identical uniform of a lab coat and tie.

That conventional garment is a handy visual shortcut to fall back on when you need a character to scream “scientist,” especially when graphical fidelity is limited. Drs. Light and Wily from Mega Man, Professor E. Gadd of the Mario universe and Pokemon‘s Professor Oak are all basically old white guys in lab coats. This stereotyped image isn’t limited to videogames, of course; it’s found in film, television and pretty much every other medium. Research shows if you ask a child as young as 8 to draw a scientist, you’ll most likely get some combination of beard, crazy hairdo and glasses … all adorning an old white guy in a lab coat.

So what? Does it really matter if the media is filled with clichéd scientists conducting crazy experiments? Yes – because fictional scientists influence the way people view real scientists. If children don’t have scientific role models they can relate to, they might reject future careers in science. Likewise, if adults are bombarded with caricatures like Doc Brown or Dr. Frankenstein, they might begin to dismiss all scientists as weird and dangerous. With important scientific issues like climate change and stem cells dominating the headlines, we can’t afford people to think scientists are all madmen trying to take over the world.

That’s not to say every fictional scientist should be a flawless savior of humanity. Scientists are people, with good and bad qualities like everyone else. But only occasionally does a videogame actually reflect that.

Half-Life 2 improves on its predecessor in many ways, but one of the game’s less talked-about features is its deeper portrayal of scientists. Valve focused heavily on facial-modeling and narrative to create a world populated with well-rounded characters, and barring Gordon Freeman (who remains an empty shell for players to occupy), the main cast of Half-Life 2 are all believable people with unique personalities.

Dr. Isaac Kleiner, with his bald head, large glasses and yes, lab coat, is a typical eccentric. His lab is messy, his equipment always breaks and he keeps a defanged headcrab as a pet. He’s a stereotype, but one with strong feelings beneath his geeky exterior. His laboratory bulletin board proudly displays a childhood drawing by Alyx for “Uncle Kleiner,” while a defaced photo from his Black Mesa days attempts to erase Dr. Wallace Breen, the oppressive ruler of City 17. Dr. Kleiner may be absent-minded, but that doesn’t mean he lacks a heart.

In comparison, Dr. Eli Vance wears his emotions on his sleeve. With nary a lab coat in his wardrobe, only a faded Harvard T-shirt hints Eli is a scientist, and his organized lab at Black Mesa East seems much less likely to self-destruct than Kleiner’s. More importantly, “scientist” is not his sole character trait; as Alyx’s father, he encourages your relationship with her while remaining fiercely protective of her in the battle against the Combine. By avoiding obvious stereotypes, Valve created a character who actually matters.

Half-Life 2‘s other scientists, Dr. Judith Mossman and Dr. Wallace Breen, are more morally ambiguous than Gordon’s heroic companions. Scientific achievement is far from Dr. Mossman’s only motivation; romantic feelings for Eli lead her to cooperate with Breen in the hope that Resistance lives will be spared. Similarly, Breen genuinely believes he’s helping mankind by cooperating with the Combine. His speeches warn against humanity’s twin enemies, instinct and superstition, suggesting that adopting Combine technology and embracing rationalism and science is the only way to survive.

With its cast of conflicting personalities and ideologies, the game offers a broad and ambiguous portrayal of what it means to be a scientist that few other games match. But while Half-Life 2 says much about scientists, it has little to say about science. That’s a shame, because games have so much more to offer.

If Albert Einstein were alive today he’d almost certainly play videogames, because their interactivity allows players to explore imaginary spaces that couldn’t possibly exist in reality. Einstein’s famous “thought experiments” were excursions into a theoretical realm where trains race against light beams and the universe stretches like a rubber sheet, concepts crucial to developing his Theory of Relativity. It may be difficult to visualize – which is why Einstein was such a brilliant thinker – but it’s easy to program into a videogame.

Some developers have already done so. The science implied within the story of Braid has been widely discussed and interpreted, but less attention has been paid to the science behind the game’s mechanics. Whether you see Braid as an allegory for the creation of the atomic bomb, a general warning against the dangers of pursuing forbidden knowledge or just the story of a guy named Tim searching for his Princess, it’s also a crash-course in theoretical physics.

“One of the core gameplay ideas behind Braid, before I even knew what the specific gameplay was going to be, was that it would involve a macro-level exploration of unintuitive phenomena, like the laws of quantum mechanics,” says Jonathan Blow, the game’s creator. “The idea was to focus on the incompatibilities between laws of nature and ‘common sense’: What would the world be like if we lived according to these rules from day to day?”

Scientists have yet to figure out why we can move through space in any direction, but only ever go forward in time. Braid‘s basic mechanics break this fundamental rule by letting players explore the consequences of moving backward through time. In World 4 of Braid, space and time become entwined so that moving to the left of the screen rewinds time, while traveling to the right restores its normal flow. It leads to some clever puzzles, but also makes you think about the nature of time. If our world worked like this, a walk down the street might lead you to last week. Could life even exist in such a universe?

Things get even weirder in World 5, where rewinding leaves behind a shadowy doppelganger to carry out your previous actions while you take an alternate path. It’s an illustration of the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, which suggests there is a “multiverse” of parallel universes where every possibility exists. If the theory is correct, then there are universes where the Nazis won World War II, the Dreamcast never died and Duke Nukem Forever actually got released. Braid lets us imagine breaking through the boundaries of the multiverse and interacting with our alternate selves.

Finally, in World 6, players gain a gold ring that distorts the time-space continuum: As objects approach it, time begins to move more slowly for them. This slowing effect is exactly how gravity works. According to the Theory of General Relativity, massive objects like planets or black holes warp the fabric of space, causing time to slow down. On Earth, the effects are almost imperceptible, but they do exist – GPS satellites have to be corrected by about 40 microseconds per day to compensate for the effects of relativity. We struggle to comprehend such a short period of time – even blinking takes 10,000 times longer – but exaggerating the effect in a videogame makes it easier to understand.

These concepts may be borrowed from high-level science, but they work in a videogame because they’re interesting to play with. With Braid both a critical and commercial success, perhaps more developers will include scientific ideas in their games. What about a Wipeout-style racer at near light-speed, in which space appears to warp as you hurtle round the track? Or a puzzle game where you manipulate strange magnetic ferrofluids? There are plenty of edutainment titles that explain scientific theories, but the real strength of videogames lies in letting us explore these strange concepts ourselves in a way no other medium can. It’s time to leave the mad professors of science fiction behind and embrace the weird and wonderful world of science fact.

Jacob Aron is a science and technology writer based in London. He runs justatheory.co.uk and regularly contributes to NegativeGamer.com.