Miazma: physics edutainment through a computer game

MIAZMA: PHYSICS EDUTAINMENT THROUGH A COMPUTER GAME The beginning of the 21st century is characterised by several contradictions and challenges. One of them is that scientific and technological development has never been as important for the well-being of humankind as today. Nevertheless, these fields seem to lose the attention of talented and interested youngsters. - Igeneration. The classical methods do not seem to be of the targeted audience, so finding the right language t is thus in the interest of all of us in science to demon- long time ago, around the dawn of the personal computstrate the beauties of scientific research to the young er era, when the present authors were in the age group sufficient to complete this task, so new, innovative with the latter was a real challenge. In order to facilitate techniques have to be developed to capture the attention the inter-generation communication, young colleagues, of the teenage generation. practicing high school teachers, as well as junior family The Miazma project was inspired by these ideas. Fur- members were asked to contribute to the efforts. The thermore, the course of events outlined above is espe- key partner, however, was a professional company, Pricially regrettable in Hungary, a country where physics vate Moon Studios, that had extensive experience in and natural sciences in general, have always been highly developing computer-based adventure games, as well valued. This is the reason why a group of physicists at as tabletop and conventional strategic board games [ 2 ]. the Institute for Nuclear Research, Hungarian Academy The director of this company was also a popular singof Sciences (MTA Atomki), Debrecen [ 1 ] decided to er-songwriter performing under the name Pierrot, and address high school age students directly, through their this fact in itself helped to abolish the generation barrier preferred medium, a computer adventure game. It was a to the target audience. Needless to say, scientists and artists contemplated each other with some reservation during the early stage of the project. The two groups couldn't have differed more in their socialization, cultural background and in general, in the way they looked at the world. We, scientists, tried to resolve this shock jokingly, recalling stories from the time of the Manhattan Project, when two utterly different communities had to work jointly to reach a common aim. Nevertheless, it soon turned out that there are many common features in the thinking of scientists and artists, and that the differences also served as the source of mutual inspiration for the two groups in overcoming difficulties. In the end we all agreed that both science and developing adventure games can be considered as special forms of problem solving. The story of Miazma [ 3 ] takes place in the present, but refers back to several historical moments from the past few hundred years. It contains both fictitious and realistic elements. Fictitious are all the characters appearing in the game in the present. However, the key characters of the past, István Hatvani, the professor of the Reformed College of Debrecen from the 18th century, and Sándor Szalay, the founding director of Atomki are real. The meteorite that landed at Kaba, near Debrecen in 1857 is also real, while the other meteorites playing role in the story are fictitious. From the technical point of view, Miazma is an interactive film in the style of the “third person point-and-click” adventure PC Windows games. In other words, it is built of short film scenes embedded in an interactive computer game environment. Real locations are covered by live-action cinematic approach, while the narrative depends on the actions of the players themselves. Their decisions open many possible alternative routes, all from a single starting point towards one fixed ending. Besides the b P. 42: The fictitious film and the story, puzzles provide the main moti- emxehtieboitriioten oinnthe vation for players. In Miazma there are more than AGORA Science 30 puzzles, at varying levels of difficulty. Most of the centre, Debrecen c FIG. 1: jonathan and the head of the Radiocarbon Laboratory, with her beloved plants and animals. This laboratory is marked by green colour in the game to help the orientation. puzzles incorporate scientific problems (fictitiously) created by Prof. Szalay several decades ago. According to the story, these problems were designed to be solvable only in a later age (the present), when the necessary technology would become available. With this, Prof. Szalay wanted to hide potentially dangerous objects in his time, and guarantee that they would be handled by trustable individuals scientists of the 21st century. In working out the de- • Surface Science Laboratory tails we tried to keep scientific rigour at a sufficiently • Ion beam Analysis Laboratory high level. However, compromise was made at several • Computer Centre instances in order to make the story (...truncated)