StarTalk Radio - Advancing to the Next Level: The Science of Video Games (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 28, 2013

There’s more to games than meets the eye in Part 2 of The Science of Video Games, from evolution and economics to artificial intelligence and simulating entire galaxies. With Sims creator Will Wright and author Jeffrey Ryan. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York City. And there I also serve as director of the Hayden Planetarium, where I went to as a kid. It had a big impact on me, actually. Really? Yes. The peanut gallery here is Eugene Merman.

Eugene, welcome back to StarTalk Radio. And I've got with us our special guest, Jeffrey Ryan, author of Super Mario Brothers. How Nintendo Conquered America. How Nintendo Conquered... I keep letting you get away with this, but really, how popular is Nintendo now? They're one of the top three companies. Aha! Is that what you'd say about Germany during World War II as its country?

Ah, one of the top three European nations. You know, conquering, like the third one. They silver meddled World War II. Let me ask, which region of the world does most of Nintendo's revenue come from? It comes from here, from the U.S. We are the dog, we are not the tail. That doesn't prove anything, that just proves that most of it comes from here. That's like, you could find a restaurant where all its money came from New York.

No, what I'm saying... But you wouldn't say it conquered New York. Well... You would if it was a Japanese company of Japanese guys that came over here. If there's one Japanese restaurant that makes all its money in New York City, there's no way you would describe that as conquering New York. Just because they send it all back to Japan. Okay, let's ask another way.

Okay. Good. Okay. The only scientist here... You raise an important point. Just because most of the revenue comes from America doesn't mean that most Americans play Nintendo games. Right. Let us ask that question. Sure.

What is the number one video game manufacturer in America? The number one manufacturer in America because Nintendo... No, in the world. No, no, no. What do Americans spend most of our video game money on? Probably Xboxes. Xbox. That sounds different from the word Nintendo.

No, but they're very close to each other. They're both in Redmond, Washington. Two of the three video game giants both have headquarters across the street from each other. Is that where Bill Gates' house is? Probably, yeah. What a piece, both of those companies. They actually tried to buy Nintendo about ten years ago.

They did the right thing. I want to get back to a point about the computing power. I remember when Mighty Joe Young came out, the film, the remake, back in the 90s, I think. It was a big deal because they were able to show hair, you know, the texture of his fur. And so... And then Monsters, Inc. came out and you could do the same thing with the Sully character. That's right. Exactly. Harry and the Hendersons, which predates, but it's not a big deal. That was Bigfoot. That was Bigfoot. Harry and the Hendersons. I remember that. I remember

that. So it's just interesting how every next advance in computing there's something else that gets included in the representation of a reality. And I think in The Limit you might want to simulate everything. Simulate every phenomenon, every process on Earth. And guess what? I have a clip with Will Wright and in this particular clip he talked about the effort it took to simulate the entire planet. And we're reminded of the Gaia hypothesis, where the planet is itself an organism, whereas

one thing rises, others fall, but then they rise back again and there's this prevailing equilibrium. Let's find out what Will Wright has to say about simulating all the... Sounds a little hippie-ish, but I'll go along with it. Sim Earth, I did after SimCity. I pulled way back, and I get interested in the entire Earth as a system, basically looking at the biology, geology, and the interaction of these forces. All these different forces, yeah. People had done serious

climate models or evolution models, but really these things are all interrelated at some time scale. In researching that, I came across the work of James Lovelock, who in fact ended up being an advisor on the game. And I would send him copies and he would sit there and play with his grandson. And he's a wonderful man. Can I be an advisor? Sure. I want to test games. But James Lovelock was one of the few people that considered the Earth as an entire system. He was the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, along with Lynn Margulis. Really, the idea behind the Gaia hypothesis is perhaps the Earth as a system

is even more complicated than we think and, in fact, is self-regulating. And we have some theories... Most people think of Earth as just this planet, right? Not as some place that has an active interaction with forces that go beyond just the rocks. In some sense, the idea is that the Earth is a living thing and it's composed of millions of other species of living things.

But at the Earth level, there are interactions and feedback cycles occurring almost like within a cell and this is still a somewhat controversial idea but it was a natural extension of sim ant there's an emergent order to the little bits that don't necessarily know the whole picture yeah there's a general term that scientists use for these systems called complex adaptive systems. These are systems that have internal feedback structures and are able to regulate themselves in some way or another. The idea that the Earth as a whole, the entire biosphere, could be a single complex adaptive system is still not widely accepted in science, but an intriguing idea. Certainly enough of an idea to base a game on it. Oh yeah, yeah, and in fact he was building little models himself that he called Daisy World, showing how the Earth might regulate its temperature.

And there's some interesting data out there. You know, the sun is something like 30% hotter now than when the Earth was formed. Yet the temperature on Earth has remained fairly constant over that entire period. So something seems to be potentially regulating at least the temperature of the Earth. Just to put some science on the table,

here's my issue with the Gaia hypothesis. Because those who are proponents of it assert that if something goes slightly out of equilibrium, forces will bring it back in. Right. So it's self-regulating. That's what this phrase means. Meaning if the global warming is a thing, that eventually there'll be a bunch of mice that happen to eat, you know, heat.

That's a bad example, but... A really bad example. But say there's 2,000 mice. That's enough to eat up all the heat of the world. Now it's scientifically accurate. Some heat-consuming phenomenon. Something on Earth will correct the mistakes that are happening on Earth. Exactly. That's the premise.

However, I look at planet Mars, which once had running liquid water over its surface. But then they ran out of the heat-eating mice. That's what it is. Yeah. So whoever the Gaia hypothesis people were on Mars, they're all dead now, right? Because Mars could not regulate itself. Mars is far out of today whatever equilibrium it might have been in the past.

And take a look at Venus. It has a runaway greenhouse effect, 900 degrees Fahrenheit. And I almost calculated you can cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza on the windowsill in nine seconds. Sounds like you think you could build a windowsill on Venus. Why would you open the window in the first place when it's so hot outside? I would vaporize. Bad idea. And so the Gaia hypothesis, while intriguing, surely it's intriguing enough to base a video game on and to watch the forces compete.

But in terms of actuality, it's flawed. It'll work over some period. I don't think it's a fundamental truth of the cosmos. Right, right. That's all. I know what happened to Mars, though. What happened? What happened to Mars was chronicled in the video game Doom, where demons from hell invaded Mars.

Uh-huh. That's it? That's what happened? That's all it takes. Does Doom take place before right now? It takes place in the future. In the future. Wait, you said I know what happened, not what will happen. Are you saying that doom isn't true?

No, I'm saying that it hasn't happened yet? Yes. Okay. Just testing you. So. That was all worth it. Where am I going here? What's interesting, he didn't stop with the Gaia hypothesis. Will Wright went on to write the video game Spore. And after the break, we're going to throw in another clip from my interview with Will Wright and just hear what he says about Spore. We'll be back in a moment with StarTalk Radio. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio.

I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm here with my co-host, Eugene Merman. Eugene. Hello. Tweeting at Eugene Merman. Yes. M-I-R-M-A-N. Yes.

You got it. You got it. And Jeffrey Ryan, thanks for coming on to StarTalk Radio. No problem. Author of Super Mario and how Nintendo took over. Conquered America. Conquered. Conquered.

Conquered. Those are battle words there. Well, we left off before the break. We had a clip from my interview with Will Wright, the creator of Sim and other creative video games. And we're just going to get him to talk about Spore. Spore. I mean, nothing is out of his reach, apparently. Now, first he tries to create all of Earth, and replicating the Gaia hypothesis, that you have this sort of

system of self-regulating, interconnected forces. And Spore, this is based on the science of astrobiology. What life might look like someplace other than Earth. Right. This is cool. I mean, is he one of your heroes? Oh, yeah, he's fantastic. I mean, Spore starts off at the Angstrom level and then goes into... Angstrom.

Not bad. That's probably a thing. I'm going to bet that means a thing. What does it mean? I learned that from MTV. Is it because it's very small? An Angstrom is one ten billionth of a meter. Oh, really?

Very small. So the size of viruses and things. Yes. And it ends, Spore, the game ends with you conquering entire galaxies. Nice. With larger forms of life that evolve from these. And these are alien life that take on features that are unfamiliar to Earth. Let's see what he says in my clip from his office in San Francisco.

Most people, they can imagine the Earth and our solar system surrounded by stars, and that's about where it ends. They have a very dim idea of what a galaxy is, how big a galaxy is, and the fact that our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies blows people's mind at that point. There was actually a thing done back in the 60s by some designers named Charles and Ray Eames called the Powers of Ten, and it was a way of looking at our universe at all these different scales a lot of people might have seen films or a book of this where basically they start with a guy sitting in a park and they zoom into his hand they zoom into cells they zoom all the way down to atoms and subatomic particles

and then it zooms all the way back out right because the powers of 10 can go both directions right in and out right and so it actually goes through about 40 powers of 10, all the way down to subatomic level quarks, and all the way up to the extragalactic level, where you're seeing galactic filaments and voids. But at every level, there are interesting structures. And Charles and Ray Eames were designers. They were designers. They're your peeps.

Yeah, they're giving credit for the concept, but in fact, there was a Dutch school teacher, Kees Bolken, that actually came up with the idea. In the 1950s. Yeah, exactly. I have that book, yes. Yeah, Cos're giving credit for the concept, but in fact there was a Dutch school teacher, Kees Bolken, that actually came up with the idea. In the 1950s, I have that book, yes. Yeah, Cosmic View. But anyway, I was intrigued with the idea, could I build a game that allowed you to traverse through a lot of these levels centered on the idea of life? Because life is this amazing thing in that it started out microscopically, at this very small scale.

Slowly it's becoming more and more organized, building more elaborate structures, including shells, brains, cities, spaceships. And now, it has the potential to have a huge impact on the universe. We potentially could go out and colonize the galaxy, start building self-replicating robots. And I thought life was a great tour guide through these scales. So the goal of the person interacting with spore, what is their objective? Well, you start spore as a single-celled organism. Oh, you are the single-celled organism. Yeah, you are a little tiny microbe living in the ocean, and you have to evolve. And you go through many generations, you get more elaborate. Eventually, the creature can become intelligent. They can start forming tribal structures, social structures, using tools,

eventually advancing up to cities, and then eventually going into space. And at that point, you're actually flying around a simulated galaxy with millions of stars interacting with other alien races. It's a crazy idea. I mean, it's great. Brilliant. How did it do commercially? It started very well. I mean, it wasn't as big as The Sims. I think it was a little more esoteric than The Sims for a lot of people. The Sims is very personal. I think it was a little more esoteric than The Sims for a lot of people. The Sims is very personal.

Spore had some amazing creativity tools, though, because the player is not only designing the creatures, but they're designing buildings, spaceships, all sorts of stuff, and eventually planets. You can start terraforming your own planet. And these things, whenever you design them in the game, they're automatically shared with all the other players, and that's how we populate the galaxy.

Now, suppose I run across your creature, and I say, oh, you're good food for me, and I eat you. Yeah. Then what? Well, first of all, you can find out who I am. You know, maybe you like the creature I made. Like because you taste good or like because I want to be your friend? Well, maybe like aesthetically. You think I'm designing really nice creatures. On the other hand, if you like the way they taste, you can abduct them in your spaceship, bring them back to your home world, use them to populate a new planet. You can, in fact, build a farm planet. To serve man. Exactly.

So at the bottom of this is an ascent in scale. And I like that concept because, as we said, Angstrom is named after Bengt Angstrom, who studied very small phenomenon. So he started small, and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Many, many powers of ten. When I think of that from a video game programming perspective, many, many powers of 10. When I think of that from a video game programming perspective, these are scales that have to be in there somehow, built into the fabric of the software.

They found a way to actually make separate games. So when you're actually as a cell, they don't need to make 800 million cells to make one person, and then 800 million people to make a planet. That would be stupid programming. Yes, right. Yes, yes. They found a way to make it invisible when they switch

from one scale to another. But you can't tell when you pull out. Okay, so that's just the clever graphics to make that happen. Because you go on all these scales. On Earth, there's life, a virus scale, and the biggest life there ever was, you know? Uh, yeah, it's, uh, turtles. Space turtles.

Uh, I don't know. It was that clump of trees, right? It was the whale. Yeah, it was the whale. Yeah, Star Trek 4. Duh. Right, right, right. It was Save the Whale. That was the name of that one, right? Yeah. But you can imagine, in principle, scales greater than that. And so nothing stops the video game designers. Like a double whale? The biggest imaginable animal? So nothing would stop that imagination. And now when you look at how that has influenced other forms of imagination, when I think of some great adventure films, how about Lara Croft? Yeah.

I would later learn that that was a video game. Right. Because I went just to see, you know, Angelina Jolie, and then I say, wait, wait, wait a minute, this is a video game. This is just like a video game. This story is a video game story. It was Pitfall and Indiana Jones, except they realized when they were making...

It was what in Indiana Jones? Pitfall, which was an Indiana Jones knockoff for the Atari. But they decided since this is going to be 3D and there's going to be a shoulder camera hovering over someone's head invisibly the whole time, you're just going to be looking at their butt the entire time. They figured, why not make it a nice-looking butt? And that

was the origin of Lara Croft. That was the origin of Lara Croft. Does the game, which I've maybe played, follows a butt? I don't remember that. The butt is attached to... In the movie, I remember having a person in it. It's attached to a person, but the way your view is, you're always seeing her back. Oh, I see. Right. You never see her front.

Well, when she turns around, but then the camera reorients itself behind her. So they had to invent what she looked like from the front in the movie. Yeah, so they figured, why not go with Angelina Jolie? They have a series of women that they hire. Or it's going to be a lady, her back, and then Brad Pitt's front. Sort of androgynous. How about other films? Adventurer.

Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat. Terrible movies. Interplay, but they have video game origins sure because who doesn't love money Mortal Kombat was a fighting game Resident Evil was called a survival horror game where you have very limited control over your character

there's a zombie coming you can't just pick up a gun and shoot them a hundred times you very slowly reach out and pick up the gun very slowly come up and then you have like a 50-50 chance of missing. And that makes you really scared, because the game isn't letting you play that well. And that duplicates the fear that you would make a mistake. I'm not saying the games are very fun.

You know, I love our language that we have a word for the undead. That's just... We have like a million words for the undead. We have revenant, wraith, undead, zombie. Zombie? I mean, I'm going with zombie. Okay, okay. Walkers? Elephants have no word for the undead.

Those dummies. Tron was a recent film that came out. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it came out. And that crossed many generations. The original Tron is from 1982, and then the sequel took place like 30 years later, but they found a way to make Jeff Bridges, when he's like 31,

they had a digital Jeff Bridges that looked 31 next to his 60-year-old self. How did they do that? Computers. Computers. Yeah, yeah. They used the technology from Avatar. They actually had one of those things

plug in to a horse and then program. And the horse walked backwards for 30 years. The creatures in Avatar are real and they do a lot

of the animation for our failed movies. Closing out this segment, how about War Games? Matthew Broderick. Oh, War Games is excellent. Isn't that an interesting film? You know, I saw it recently

and it held up, you know? I mean, yes, it was dated, but... Unlike Citizen Kane, War Games does actually stand the test of time. So black and white, come on! I get it, it's a sled. Next! So, but that

got into that we could be victim of our own creativity. Yes, the idea of thinking that you could win a nuclear war, that you could outthink the other side. And... And the video game Missile Command speaks to that really well also, because there's five

cities on the California coast, you're trying to defend them against an incoming rain of missiles. Your job is to shoot down the missiles. But now that it's not the Cold War, have those games evaporated? Yes, but that was one of the reasons, I think, that the Cold War went away. People played Missile Command, and they realized, I can't ever win. The only way to win is not to play.

Oh. Ooh. Tied it back. Tied it back. The Gandhi of video games. The Gandhi. I would like to see his video game of Pass the Pacific. When we come back out of this break, we're going to bring up other subjects that have been fertile ideas for video games, like, for example, artificial intelligence.

Join us here on StarTalk. We're back with StarTalk Radio. I'm here with my host, Eugene Berman, and author of Video Game Analysis. Jeff Ryan. Jeff, thanks for being on StarTalk. Thanks for having me. You know, we're folding into this conversation, an interview I had with Will Wright, the creator of Sim, and my latest clip. We talked about artificial intelligence, which has kind of been with us in the programming and video industry for so long.

Let's find out what his take is on this, because he comes at it from an interesting direction as a designer, as an architect, as a computer programmer. And let's see what his take is. People tend to think of AI as this giant pile of technology that we've slowly been building up and building up, but really AI is more of a bag of tricks. We can combine those tricks in interesting ways.

The Turing test, which Alan Turing came up with, is really still one of the best definitions that if you can fool a human into thinking it's intelligent, then for all practical purposes, it is. It doesn't matter what's under the hood. But AI is slowly advancing, not nearly as fast as we thought. Back in the 60s, people thought that machine translation would be something that we'd have working perfectly in 10 years. Even now, if you go and do something with an online translator, you realize... They really don't get it. No, they give you a rough sense of it, but they are nothing like the perfect translator that we thought would be totally simple.

I think fundamental AI, getting a computer to recreate human intelligence, is turning out to be a little bit almost of a non-issue. What we're finding that computers are great at is harvesting human intelligence, distilling it down into a usable form and redistributing it. In fact, that's really what makes Google useful. There's no supercomputer at Google really analyzing the web and deciding how to post the search results. All it's doing is it's looking at millions and millions of human decisions about what pages to link to, harvesting and distilling those human intelligent decisions and reflecting it back to us. What do you think of Watson? Watson was very impressive. This is the IBM system that played Jeopardy. It was very brute force. It was terabytes of data, but the inferences it made were quite

remarkable. So you say brute force almost pejoratively, as though the human mind doesn't use brute force. I guess you're trying to distinguish law calculation power from intuition or insight. The human brain is actually slow but highly parallel compared to modern computers, which are typically more serial, one stream, but incredibly fast. They're very different forms of process. It's actually kind of remarkable that a computer and human brain seem even similar at all, given how different their processes are internally. So give me an example of a parallel processing that goes on in the human mind and contrast that with a serial processing that would go on in a computer. I mean, the human mind is composed of 100 billion or so neurons

that are operating at electrochemical speeds. The time it takes a signal to move across your brain is many orders of magnitude slower than the time it takes a signal to move across a computer chip. You're dissing our brain, you know. Well, not really. You take that time, which is kind of slow, but at the same time, you have 100 billion of these cells. Each one of these neurons is an amazingly complex little computer unto itself. The human brain is probably the most complex thing we know of in the entire universe. And it's not clear that we're going to find anything more complex. The human brain is able to make interesting associations,

creative insights, connections, that we don't even know how it does it. That's important. Wait, wait, if we don't know how it does it, we'll never be able to program a computer to duplicate that. Right. It looks like one of the more promising fields of computer intelligence is not one in which we engineer the intelligence, but one in which we allow it to naturally evolve. I thought that's what the chess programs did. They would learn from every game they played. Some of them do, yeah, but even then

they're learning a subset of rules and patterns that are pre-programmed. They don't have the insight to say, oh, here's a whole new thing I need to learn. The programmer can basically tell them, okay, these are the five things I'm going to allow you to learn. But even then, the computer programmer has to understand the concepts, or at least the conceptual framework, that it's going to allow the computer to learn. It could be the conceptual framework you need for a certain problem solving is something that you don't even know. There's a subset of computer science which is focused on systems that evolve to become more intelligent without human design. And in some sense, I think that's probably the most hopeful path to more intelligent computers.

probably the most hopeful path to more intelligent computers. Among the computer games that you know, which one best invokes artificial intelligence, or at least adaptive intelligence based on learning what had just happened? There was something about 10 years ago called Starship Titanic. Now, this was not the world's greatest AI program, but it was designed to have a free-flowing conversation with you. So you type in anything you wanted, and it would come back. And Douglas Adams, the guy from Hitchhiker's Guide, made this game. So basically... The guy who wrote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

You were able to sit down and talk with two or three Douglas Adams characters. No matter what you threw against the wall, they could throw something back against you. But it would connect or make sense, because I could make a thing that just goes like, bleh, but then it becomes boring. Right, right.

So it's got to be convincing. Yes, it passed the Turing test for a little bit, then you realize that it was a fake game. Did it have enough of Douglas Adams' personality so that you can say, yeah, this is like Douglas Adams, if I didn't know better? In fact, they had Monty Python guys come in to work on it to make sure that the humor was like, wow, that was left field.

That was pretty good, though. Oh, okay. So it's not only just what you say, but how you say it and what kind of clever twists of phrase you might bring to it. And it would talk. You're saying it's audio, not typing. It was mostly typing, but it felt English. Felt very English. Nice. Finally a British video game that talks like a comic. English as in English humor.

Yes. I see. Monty Python, Hitchhiker's Guide, Doctor Who. Yeah, it's a whole world that some Americans just can't even relate to. English as in English humor. Yes. I see. Monty Python, Hitchcock, this guy, Doctor Who. Yeah, yeah, it's a whole world that some Americans just can't even relate to. I think most can. I mean, other than Churchill. Yeah, so what I wonder is people always imagined a future where computers just replaced humans in decision making, in intuition.

We've got computers replacing raw computing power. Calculate pi. I'll go home, come back, there it is, right? So how far away do you think we are from a true artificial intelligence world? And how will we know if it's really intelligent or just mimicking, like the, what is it? The Turing test. Or is that like the Chinese room or something, the Chinese box you know what I'm talking about? No. Never mind. Maybe it's the same, but a different phrasing. But maybe Will Wright was pulling something on you. Maybe that was actually Will Wright robot with artificial intelligence. And if I don't know, it wouldn't matter to me.

Yes, yes. And he's somewhere on an island in the South Pacific going, ha ha. Yeah, he's in the Bahamas just laughing. Well, we're finishing up this segment, but there's much more about the science of video games to come. You're listening to StarTalk Radio. Find us on the web at startalkradio.net. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio.

I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History. Eugene. Hello. Professional stand-up comic. And Jeff Ryan, thanks for coming in to do this. Author of How Nintendo Will Conquer America and has already taken over the world, apparently. You know, for me, one of the most intriguing things about modern Internet game playing is the fact that you can play with people who you've never met in another country.

Yeah, and be cursed out at them. Yeah, in a foreign language and not understand. But get the tone and spirit like Sims. What is this called? Massively multiplayer online role-playing games or just MMOs or online games or just WoW because WoW is World of Warcraft, the most popular one.

World of Warcraft. So are these people fighting people, or countries fighting countries? It started off people fighting other, like, monsters. You'd have to team up to fight a big monster, because... So it's cooperation. Yes. No matter how big you are, no matter how high up you are, you need to band up with a bunch of people at your level to fight the monsters. Because the monster is badder-ass than you are.

Yes. Okay, so that's how it began. So what is it now? Now, it's a way of life. Now they're playing forever. They may not even fight anyone because they're just talking with people about upcoming events. There's different ways that you can trade. There's a whole Internet currency.

Trade what? Goods. Yeah, goods and services. Good services and gold. We'll trade what? Food, prostitutes, and weapons. There's an economist, Edward Castronovo, who realized that there is an entire economy going on in these games.

There are people called gold farmers that are working in places like China and India where they're making about a dollar an hour just fighting, getting gold, and then selling it to people who are buying it because they don't want to play the game. They just want the consequence. In this virtual space? Yes. They're making a dollar in real life for virtual gold. Yes. They're paying real money and they're getting fake gold back.

Yeah. Let's see what Will Wright says about just this kind of video game. Nowadays, with the military deploying drones that are controlled essentially by joystick at the military base. Do you see video games as enhancing the ability of those soldiers to perform in that way? Or is that a completely different kind of function and operation? Oh, no. I think the generation of soldiers that are going to the army flying these drones grew up with video games. And it's a very natural interface. In some sense, you have to kind of step back and say that it's hard to remove humans from our

technology. We have the shelf technology around us all the way down to the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the buildings we live in. And in some sense, that's the ecosystem that we learn in and adapt to. And so these soldiers have grown up in an environment where they have screens, they have input devices, they are controlling complex things. They're doing symbolic reasoning. Sometimes we forget that soldiers just in, they're 18 years old, 19, 20. I mean, that's the age. Oh, yeah. Even in Iraq, after they've gone and done their patrol, they come back to their tent and play Counter-Strike on their Xbox.

So it's not like they played these games as a kid and then went into the Army. They're still playing these games. I know a lot of them are using them for teamwork exercises. One of the things about these games, especially some of the shooters, that is kind of underappreciated, is that a lot of them are team-based. And they require amazing levels of coordination, teamwork, et cetera. What is the biggest team video game out there? Well, it's really hard to say.

It depends on what you mean by biggest. I mean, there are games like World of Warcraft where it's a very long-term game. People play for months or years, and you develop characters, and you typically have guilds or groups that you go out with. And these are other actual people

in the actual world out there. Oh, yes, yeah. Very deep friendships develop in these games. a lot of people end up meeting getting married wait in the game or getting married after both i mean i mean you know real marriages they meet in the game they get to know each other for months or years at some point instead to meet up for the first time they get along in real life it turns out i've heard a countless number of people have gotten married after meeting in these online worlds has the opposite happened there's someone who you've been hunting your whole life and then you meet them they want to to shoot them. Well, I mean, yeah, there have been some bad

results of this. This is true of any human interaction where people can get together and you get good and bad. You get all the reflection of humanity. People have been killed because of things that happen in games and killed in real life. How? Well, there was a case in Korea several years ago where some guy in an online game stole some of the guy's sword. It was like some special sword and he got really pissed off and so pissed off that he even ended up tracking the guy down and killing him in real life. And he didn't get the sword back. It wasn't even a real sword. It was a virtual sword. It was bits in a computer memory. That's my point.

This is crazy. And I've got a list here. February 2002, Louisiana woman sued Nintendo because her son died after having seizures, which she accused Nintendo of it being caused by him playing Nintendo 64 for eight hours a day, six days a week. Nintendo denied any responsibility. Well, first of all,

that's an unreasonable amount of playing. Like, if he had eaten that many grapes, he might be dead. If he had eaten grapes for that period of time, he'd be dead. August, 2000, a 28-year-old South Korean, Lee Seung-soop, died after playing Starcraft for 50 hours straight. September, a 28-year-old South Korean Lee Seung-soop died after playing Starcraft for 50 hours straight. September, 2007, a Chinese man died after playing internet video games for three consecutive days in an internet cafe. I've got a better one. In 2009, Kim Sa-rung, a three-month-old Korean child, died from malnutrition after both her parents spent hours each day in an internet cafe raising a virtual child in an online game. Okay, that's crazy, but a lot of these...

Thank you for agreeing. I'm just saying a lot of these, like, if you don't eat for 20 days you'll die. When StarTalk Radio continues, we'll talk about some of the more positive aspects of video games. No, we'll talk about how people in Asia are dying because they don't know when to come inside and make breakfast for their child. We'll catch you after the break. Welcome back to our final segment of StarTalk Radio, where we're talking about the science of video games.

I've got with me, helping out this conversation, is Eugene Merman. Eugene, there you go. And Jeff, Jeff Ryan. Yeah. All right. I've got a couple of questions for you. Shoot. Because professionally, you critique video games.

You judge them for their value. We spent so much of the show talking about what could be harmful about video games or weird about them, but surely there's some redeeming features. They can get you pregnant. So I've got a question here. This came in on our Facebook page. Should video games be included on a long-term mission to Mars? That would take about a year to get there.

If NASA asked them to design it, what might that game be? Oh, a video game specially designed? Wait, a video game designed for the trip? Yeah. It should be a video game designed for the trip? Yeah. It should be a video game where you go out to restaurants on Earth. No, no, you're exactly right. The video game should give you what you're missing. The last thing you want in a video game is if you're cooped up in Mars in the game.

Fighting aliens on Mars. What you want is to be like, oh, I feel so nervous about this date. You want a field. You just want to run through a field, and that's your video game. So you want the opposite of what you're doing there. Yes. You want a field. You just want to run through a field and that's your video game. So you want the opposite of what you're doing there. Yes. You want an escape. In Tetris, for instance, you get to finally put blocks in the right order, which you never

get to do in real life. So I'm on my way to Mars. That's not my video game. My video game is back on Earth. Your video game is going to an Applebee's and sitting down and getting bad service. Until you get better service, buy the restaurant and rebuild it. Alright, so now tell me, so Nintendo has the Big Brain Academy. I confess, I own this.

It tests you on various cognitive, intuitive operations of your brain. And what do you think of it? The idea is that it keeps your brain well lubricated because it's making you do math and different calculations that you normally don't do in your regular everyday life, but you can do. Unless you're an astrophysicist. Yes, yes. His life is big brain academy all the time. It really doesn't help. I did well. I don't want to brag or anything. I imagine you did pretty well on the astrophysics test. Is that their way to make up for the fact

that maybe parents were complaining that their kids were spending too much time in Super Mario Brothers? That was actually Nintendo's attempt to find an audience outside of 12-year-old boys. That was an attempt to find adults, seniors, people that normally don't play video games. Astrophysicists are buying games.

Yes. They don't care what parents think. They want parents to hate it so the kids want more and eat them when the parents aren't looking. So, all right, so but what else does it do that's positive? Do video games improve hand-eye coordination or do they make you more alert? I've seen my kids play this and there's kind of like an

addiction, you know? You pull, it's time for dinner. No, I can't. I'm not ready. Wait a minute. I have to slowly... Have you ever tried pulling someone away from Go? It's the same thing. No, I can't. I'm not ready. Wait a minute. I have to slowly. Have you ever tried pulling someone away from Go?

It's the same thing. It is so not the same thing. It is. You've never pulled them away. Super Mario will teach kids about astrobiology. You see this thing here? This is not just a regular pipe. This is a wormhole.

Think about it. You go in here, you pop out anywhere else in the world, this is some sort of intergalactic transit system, which explains why the Mushroom Kingdom has sentient fungus and sentient plants as well as sentient animals. You're in a whole other part of the galaxy. And there's no way to just read that in a paragraph? You need to explore it yourself. Experience to understand a wormhole and how much fun it would be. So there's some learning there is what you're saying. But that's not the tactic

of operating the game. That's information in the game that you carry away, leaving you a little more enlightened than when you started. What would you say was the most educational video game there ever was? The most educational video game that ever was might have been something like The Sims. Not Duck Hunt? No, no, because think about how often you talk to other people in live and actually have the same sort of interactions that you do in The Sims. Okay, so in those Sims then, it's training you to be more socially aware.

Yes. What do you call it? The emotional quotient as opposed to your... Your EQ. Your EQ. Yeah, if you're in Duck Hunt, you may be getting your skills bettering at duck hunting, but it doesn't transform to everything else. But this game, you're talking to a portal.

I get it. The whole civilization is better than... He's making an important point. You have a skill that's not just that skill, that has applicability elsewhere. Yes. And would you say that an entire generation of kids who are now playing video games,

as adults who will be running the country, will they run the country better than it's being run now? I think they're going to run it very differently. They're going to see things as a team-based approach. Differently. Differently. People will get together for a mission. They're going to work as a team to destroy the world.

So it's not just any one side. It's like, let's all work together to end the human race. It's going to be like the teams in Warcraft, like the guilds. Instead of you have your job, I have mine, and maybe we'll have some meetings, everyone will work together for an accomplished goal and then disband and go do something else. So the world started as warring tribes that sort of remained, calmed down a little, and then through Warcraft, we will return to Warring Tribes.

Good. I'm glad. And how about puzzle solving? The ability to solve a problem you've never seen before. Who gives us that? All of the different puzzle games, starting with Tetris. Tetris, okay.

So they're pure puzzle games, and they're obviously puzzle games. Yes. And what's the future of 3D? You brought to this set... The past of 3. And what's the future of 3D? You brought to this set... The past of 3D. This is the past of 3D. This is 3D from, like, cavemen use this 3D device.

Yes. It's this huge visor that you put on your head, and it's got a joystick with a wire connected to it. You don't put this on your head. The best part of this is it doesn't strap onto your head. And when I say best part, I mean the worst part. I will not pursue that further. You need four hands to play. We are running short on time.

We are coming to the end of this episode of StarTalk. This has been great, a great conversation. Eugene, thanks for coming. Sure, thanks for having me. Yeah, and Jonathan, good luck with the book published by Penguin. It's been out for about a year. And the future of video games, in one word, holograms. Holograms. That's very exciting. word, holograms. Holograms.

That's very exciting. 3D holograms like the holodeck. Well, guys, that's our show. StarTalk Radio is brought to you in part by the National Science Foundation. You can find us on the web at startalkradio.net. Like us on Facebook. And where else but StarTalk Radio. And actually, you can find us in our new location on the web on the Nerdist channel in YouTube.

All owned by Google. One day they'll own us all. As always, this is Neil deGrasse Tyson telling you to keep looking up.