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[Chianese]

Hi,
longtime lurker, first time poster here. What follows is a pretty damn nerdy post. I'm no game designer myself (not yet atleast), I've only dabbled a bit in 3d and done some pixel art, but I've long been into gaming and atleast as long into literary science fiction. I apologize for my rambling post, but this is an subject that interests me and I suspect someone else might've thought about it too.

I recently started re-reading M John Harrison's masterful science fiction novel Light a couple of days ago. It's just an amazing book, exhilarating and fresh, with sparse, lucid prose. Definitely one of my favorite books ever (both SF and non-SF). First read it about ten years ago or so, but re-reading it now got me thinking about how games, films and literature approach science fiction. To me, it'd seem that most science fiction games are science fiction only on the outside, with the actual mechanics of them being kind of traditional. I'm focusing more on just depictions of space combat here, but I think the same applies to other fields too.

The aforementioned novel Light has many great qualities, but I think one of the standouts is the story of Seria. In the novel, Seria Mau is this girl who inhabits a "K-ship" called The White Cat, meaning she basically is the ship. I don't remember if the book tells exactly what the K-ships are, but here's a quote I borrowed from a Guardian review of the novel:

"K-ships crouched in the service bays with arc lights slicking down their dark grey flanks. They were restless. They flickered in and out of visibility as their navigation systems trawled through 10 spatial dimensions. They never disconnected their defences or target-acquisition systems, so the air around them was constantly cooking with everything from gamma to microwaves. Work near them, you wore a lead suit."

And the book has these fantastically evocative battle scenes, that actually might be plausible, considering the book takes place in 2400AD. Maybe plausible is the wrong word, but the technologies imagined are far fetched enough so that they sound like something that might actually exist in future, given enough time. The ships in the book have armament that evolves in every encounter, mines and ordnance that's sentient, onboard mathematics that calculate all possible trajectories in tenths of nanoseconds and so on, with fights being over in those same fractions of nanoseconds. I'm using Light here as an example, but science fiction in books in general tend to lean on the heavier side, with more thought given on how the future might be, or what kind of things are possible. A space battle that's over in less than a nanosecond might be exciting on the page, but it'd hardly look like much on the screen, as your eye wouldn't even catch it.

It'd seem that games on the other tend to take their inspiration more from films, which is understandable, due to the visual nature of both mediums and also due to the fact that it'd be pretty damn difficult to make enjoyable gameplay if you push the concepts of how combat might look in the future far enough. I mean it's only a matter of time before plain human reaction time becomes a limiting factor in engagements. Might take awhile, but considering how most scifi seems to take place in like 2200-2500. I don't think spaceships will ever have dogfights, with two ships circling each other, shooting laser bolts. Same kinda applies to ground warfare, with for example all the Covenant weapons in the Halo series being pretty horrible and weak, if you compare them to guns actually in use in contemporary armies.

Again, from a visual and gameplay perspective I fully understand the reasoning for having most sci-fi actually pretty lo-fi, but at the same time I am curious if it'd be possible to make a game dealing with "truly futuristic" combat. How would one approach it?

So what I'm rambling on about here, could one make interesting gameplay about what lets say space or planetary fighting might actually look like in 200 years or so? Thoughts?

[valrus]

Speaking as a fan of written SF (and only a lukewarm fan of tv/movie SF), I agree about SF in games.  (I mean, while of course it's just wallpaper, it's more glaring than, say, fantasy wallpaper when you compare the source genre to the game.) 

And as you say, there's probably reasons for hewing to the more human-scale conflicts we see in movies and on TV.  A lot of more modern literary SF, at least, would be too big, too fast, too strange.  (I'm especially thinking of the New British Space Opera.)  Battles that are over in seconds, ships lobbing probabilistic weapons at dots hundreds of kilometers away, ships with godlike intelligences planning a million moves in advance... at least so far as combat is concerned, there's not a lot of obvious place for human agency and the emotional resonance of conflict.

The other thing is that the emotional effect of lit SF combat might be lost in a game anyway.  The point of lit SF combat is often awe (and shock), and most books use it sparingly for that reason.  If we take that  and repeat it a thousand times, because game, it'll just become game: red dots are bad, avoid their stuff, hit them repeatedly with my stuff until they are removed from play.

Anyway, I'm rambling too.  To the question!  Here's how I would approach future combat:

• Combat in games tends to use the somewhat "bare" information state associated with historical combat, rather than what's inevitable: upcoming combat events simulated extensively in advance, and the decision-maker trying to choose the best state from the probabilities and then playing little direct role in the unfolding of the event.
• "Decision-maker" isn't just commander; this would probably apply to anyone who has to make a decision, however small.  Grunts' HUDs will probably have similar capabilities at a smaller scale.  (For example, a grunt storming a building might see a simulated "X-ray" view, showing the most likely structure and usage of unseen rooms, that's updated with more sophisticated simulations as more of the building is seen.)
  
• Because of the above, the role of information and misinformation will become increasingly important, with an even greater reliance on technologies to frustrate enemy decision makers' ability to reliably predict events.  These effects, however, would likewise be taken into account in simulations.

That is, that's how I'd approach realistic future combat if I wanted to.  (But actually, if I were making a game in that theme, I'd rather use a different mechanic as the core mechanic, that resonates rather than conflicts with the sensawunda.)