Hello! If you are coming over from the Interstellar
Warfare episode on SFIA, welcome, we’ll be picking up on some of the topics we discussed
there in the context of creating a plausible scifi setting. If not, greetings, I’m Isaac Arthur, the
host of Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur, and also one of the game designers and writers
for Hades 9. The former is what got me involved in the
latter, we talk about the realism of scifi a lot on SFIA and I often get contacted by
creators wanting to add more realism to their stories, that was the case with Hades 9 and
I got sucked in quickly, moving from occasional sounding board to the writing up the game’s
backstory and technology, and we aimed for maximum realism, sticking to known science
where could and trying to craft our fictional technologies with a heavy feel of realism. One of our regular approaches for discussing
the future is to look at commons themes in science fiction and ask why that might or
might not work based on known science. The intent there is never to diminish a particular
work of science fiction, but to use it as starting point to getting a clearer look at
the future and explain the science that will make it possible. Indeed I almost always focus on works that
aren’t just popular, and thus well-known to my audience, but personal favorites too. However, while a good story can buy you an
awful lot of suspension of disbelief with an audience, it’s usually best to minimize
that. You can do that by maximum realism of course,
and you can do that by sticking to very well known breaks with reality, thing which have
become tropes, and you can do that by keeping fictional technology, or magic if writing
fantasy, very limited. Just a few of them and with very clear explanations
of what you can do with them and what you can’t. That first one, maximum realism, is always
the best ground state. You do your research or grab a technical consultant
to advise. It’s a lot harder for science fiction than
fantasy though, as we have tons of examples from history to allow realism while we don’t
have a scrying ball to the future for scifi. That’s a good example too, you make up a
technology that lets folks look into the future for a story and you have to consider the implications
of that because much of your audience will and they’ll ask not just why people aren’t
using this to win the lottery, but why they aren’t using it to peak ahead at schematics
of future technologies to be developed, thus leading them to end all science and R&D. You’ve got a camera that can look at any
point in space and time, so you tell someone to leave science journals open on a specific
desk and turn the page every minute, in a century, and you’ve got all that tech, and
the next day you repeat the process, looking at the new tech developed a century from now
by a society that now had the original R&D today. It’s also a writing opportunity too, folks
can glimpse the future so there are no lotteries anymore, and no gambling, what do they do
instead and how does this alter their outlook on life? It’s not just about making up a fictional
technology and trying to see some of its applications, it about seizing on those problems as story
opportunities too. You make up a technology for a single episode
and never use it again and the audience wonders why it doesn’t get used again, why it isn’t
used for some very obvious applications, and view it as a deus ex machina, so it burns
into suspension of disbelief and can ruin a good story. Alternatively you can do entire stories just
exploring all the applications and cultural changes of just a single technology and do
your worldbuilding around that and add to the feeling of realism instead of subtracting
from it. Well explained and explored ideas, even fictional
ones, boost engagement rather than subtract from it. That’s why you can get away with certain
very common clichés and tropes in fiction. There’s a very simple reason why so many
fantasy stories begin with a young farmer or shepherd in the hinterlands who finds a
magic sword and is in reality a prince, his youth and naivette let us introduce a mentor
character who can explain the big strange world to him, as he needs to know, and in
doing so explain it to us, makes for natural exposition, as opposed to two characters talking
about stuff they’d both already know, like you and me discussing how elevators or drip
coffee machines work. A reader from the 14th century needs to know
about those but it would be very weird for me to talk about the importance of coffee
on society. Okay, it obviously wouldn’t be weird for
me, specifically, to talk about the importance of coffee, I’m pretty sure every subscriber
to SFIA knows I’m a raging caffeine addict, but that would be an example of plausible
exposition. You have a spaceship with an astrophysicist
on board and he can explain a phenomena and if he talks about stuff everyone in that setting
should know, it can be blamed on him defaulting to lecture mode. So he just rattles off the basics of how hyperspace
travel works and gets interrupted by his target making a sarcastic remark that they’re not
a total idiot and don’t need the basics. The goal is achieved, the audience has been
giving important expositional information for the story in an organic way. Other tropes you can use, even when fantastic,
just because they’ve become so common nobody cares, that realism has been achieved by sheer
usage of it in other stories. Lots of older stories tried to explain how
vampires or zombies work under science, most don’t even bother now because there’s
no need. People think they’re cool, have heard a
jillion different quasi-scientific explanations for them, and frankly don’t want to hear
another, so you only have to give one if your vampire, zombies, or orcs are different, varying
in some specific way from the common clichés. Same reason you don’t need to explain why
a guy and gal who just met at the start of story end up having a happily ever after even
when they just met the day before. We can handwave that the trials and stresses
brought them together and showed each other their true selves and strengths, but nobody
actually cares, they just want a happily ever after for two characters who they’ve grown
fond of and watched go through seven kinds of hell together. I’m stressing that because it’s very easy
for folks trying their hand at writing to overlook why these formulas work and assume
they can work for other things. Mostly they won’t, and each break from reality,
each mind-blowing new tech or magical ability introduced but never used again or for any
other obvious beneficial application, sucks away at that suspension of disbelief. We didn’t want that with Hades 9 which is
supposed to be both fantastic and more than a bit horrifying but have a constant flavor
of gritty, dark realism to it. Why in an empire with easy space travel that’s
had it for thousands of years would they not have millions of worlds and even more artificial
habitats? That problem we deem the Dyson Dilemma over
on SFIA. The answer for game, they did. That Dyson Dilemma, a pretty key concept to
a lot of what we talk about on SFIA from the get go, is the bane of Space Opera because
you always need to either explain why there aren’t ancient and vast empires rolling
around who’ve colonized a billion worlds and gone further to Dyson Swarm them up, or
just ignore it. Dealing with that issue was both a major problem
and creative opportunity, because I decided early on I was only going to let myself have
one new tech for the whole setting requiring one fictional new type of science and everything
would have to build off that. Why they mostly settled planets instead of
artificial habitats, why those are now gone, why there aren’t any ancient alien empires
kicking around, all revolving around the one necessary handwave, the specific type of method
they use for star travel at faster than light speeds. Ditto we introduce their reliance on traditional
manpower rather than robots for everything into a clear historical cause, as we said
over in the Interstellar Warfare episode, there are realistic scenarios for why you’d
have classically manned ships, at least for big capital ships, but even those are thin
with cyborgs or AI being far better, yet for a story you want human focuses so you want
manned ships. You have to come up with a plausible reason
for that, one that satisfies the audience. Rather than going with a simple handwave or
ignoring it, what you do instead is use it to your advantage on worldbuilding, and weave
that into every aspect of their culture and history and let that offer you writing prompts
to continue adding more and more details to that backstory. Sometimes of course you’ll have scenario
you were writing, realize it is flawed and going to cause problems or paradoxes, and
you can either scrap it or ignore and hope the audience will too, but a lot of time with
a little creativity you can turn it from a flaw into a keystone, to add more realism
and more depth to a story that the audience can sink into ever deeper, and you have to
do a lot less scrapping and re-writing, or finger-crossing hoping the audience won’t
notice, if you start your worldbuilding with lots of research, as much realism as you can,
and introduce only a few fictional elements and use them as the foundations of why this
civilization is different than the one we all live in. Games are especially tricky in this regard
as you have to work with set game mechanics, but that can be strength too. A major focus of Hades 9 is big fleet combats
with giant ships and huge crews, ships that can take a hit they call minor damage even
though hundreds of crew were killed by it, not because they are prone to understatement
but because it is a giant ship with a crew compliment on par with a city, even a major
metropolis. One constantly short on resources and hanging
on the edge of survival. And we can work with that, to paint a portrait
of civilization living in the ashes of a once great empire, that has had to grow callous
to huge casualties, and look at the human condition both from the perspective of that
fleet commander, who can only deal with those casualties as a statistic, down to the lone
grunt or regular citizen destined to be one of those statistics. In doing that we created a home port central
to everything going on, the eponymous Hades 9, to be a bit of dark cyberpunk abode with
its own communities, adventures, secrets, and mysteries. We use that as the backbones for motivations,
why society is the way it is, why the villains or antagonists act the way they do, how this
affects the player’s own motivations and goals, the RPG elements of the game, and I
think we did a good job. The setting already yanked me into it, I’d
initially just been a soundboarding for some scifi realism as I am with a lot of projects
these days, and it didn’t take me long to go from hearing about the basics to wanting
to explore and paint them in more detail, and that’s something we decided to use too. In creating a massive multiplayer setting,
to try to not to just maximize customization for players but to let fans get a real hand
in helping to build the setting, the stories in it, and more. So that’s my introduction to Hades 9 and
the worldbuilding that helped forge it, we have some other behind the scenes look at
its creation, that backstory, gameplay, and some introductory stories for you to watch
today, and we’ll be adding to them as we continue the march to first release for Hades
9. And I hope you’ll find the story, and the
game, as captivating as I have.
