7) Grand Theft Auto III-IV (2001-2008): This may be a little unconventional for a GTA game, but my favorite moments have always been listening to the radio while watching the sunset. Would it make it better if I said I also had a hooker in the car with me?? Anyway, particularly nice spots have been on the Algonquin bridge in Liberty City, Washington beach in Vice City, and on top of Mount Chiliad in San Andreas.

So if I were to boil all of those moments down and try to come up with some sort of video game soup of my favorite bits, what would I call it? I’d call it “Environment Exploration Soup”. The best parts of games, for me, are the environments and exploring everything they have to offer. I want to feel like I’m really there, I want to understand them, I want to experience the world that the game designers have created. And make no mistake, I don’t care if this world is “realistic” or not, I just want it to be interesting and evoke some kind of emotional, philosophical or intellectual response. There are plenty of moments that exhibit emotion like this available in the real world, for example, if you visit the Grand Canyon, check out geysers and hot springs at Yellowstone National Park, take a look at El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, or pictures of the Earth taken by astronauts walking on the Moon, a picture of sunset taken by a rover on Mars, or real images taken from the surface of one of Saturn’s moons… put these moments to a soundtrack, put them in the context of a game world and give them a story, and what you have is a platform more powerful than any big budget movie can provide. Why? Because the player is in control, the player moves the story along at his/her pace, the player owns the environment and the story in a video game. And what makes a video game even better are those latter examples… right now people can’t go to the Moon, Mars, or a moon of Saturn, but you can in a video game. Just like Star Trek presented audiences with compelling moral and ethical issues that are rooted in science fiction environments or cultures, video games can utilize these environments to do the same… and I think they can do it better.

Video games are fundamentally just another medium, like books and movies, for telling stories… which, by the way, is one of human kind’s oldest traditions. Sure, games can do other things, but just like all the great books and movies that people talk about and remember… and I mean the really great works… they all have something to say. When you sit down to be entertained by a book or movie, whether or not it is fiction or non-fiction, the writer sets the stage, they set the rules, they present to you a variety of scenes and images, and if they’ve done their job well, they will have presented a compelling story that either convinces you of something, demonstrates a world view, demonstrates a vision, or shows you a new way of looking at something. Games can do this too, and many of the same variables are at play. Game designers set the stage for their story, they set the rules as well, however, the order in which scenes and images present themselves are sometimes up to the player. The way in which the environment is experienced may also be different from player to player. So game designers have an even more difficult job of making sure everything in their world is part of their vision and tells the story they want to tell.

Video games offer us an exciting new medium by which we can be entertained and enlightened. It’s sad that some people only view them as children’s toys. They have so much to offer and the industry is really only in its infancy. Throughout this blog, we will explore these kinds of ideas. Drawing on our personal experiences as members of the scientific community, we will also explore how scientific discovery and scientific data can be used to create even more compelling game environments and stories.