Thank you that was super informative. Is there anything that can be done to mitigate an impending eruption? Ive always heard that if one of the big super volcanoes goes it could be quite catastrophic for the entire world. Surely theres been some research into like pressure relief holes or something…antacid tabs?
Surely theres been some research into like pressure relief holes or something…antacid tabs?
I am sure there are lots of geologists who have thought of it, it makes sense right?
The problem is that nobody gives a shit about listening to geologists unless they are talking about where to find oil. Even if a geoengineering project of this scale and magnitude (with such catastrophic consequences if it goes wrong) where possible with near current geological science and hardware this degree of interest and investment of society is only ever committed to visions techbros provide and I don’t think a single techbro has ever taken a geology class and actually remotely paid attention.
It was geologists in the 1970s who first pointed out the obvious connection between human released CO2 emissions and global warming.
Nobody gave a shit :)
(plenty of complicit geologists who made a veryyyyy good living too don’t get me wrong)
We are just weirdos going on about rocks except when those rocks are really valuable and provide the capacity to create empires but even in those cases we are never really part of that, we are always still the weirdos going on about rocks who everybody is like “ok but can you shut up now and point to the gold on the map?”.
I know it is a weird example but look at the landscapes of virtual environments, video game developers have been trying to craft evocative landscapes since the beginning of video games even before 3D engines, you would think that some of them might have been interested to find inspiration for world design from the dizzying variety of landforms and stories described in geology (that are perfect to engage a player with because geological landscapes are layered stories first and foremost).
From the perspective of a geologist, it is obvious for game developers to make world building tools that allow molding an entire mountain range for an open world rpg by first starting with two continents and smashing them together with your mouse over and over again until it made a compelling starting point (instead of just making every damn mountain by hand or just writing a dumb algorithm to randomly generate mountains) and then running a massive river through the mountains for 10 million years to create the main valley for the game.
Todd Howard released a screenshot of the next Elder Scrolls Game
the story here was there was a river and then a mountain range came in (some new kid named Appalachians) and was like “sorry dude” but then the Delaware River was like “I am literally going nowhere bro, put your silly mountains wherever you want and I will cut you down when you get in my way”. This friendly conversation has been going on for 400-500 million years, which is about 1/8 of the earth’s history (the earth was a hot mess for the 1st billion so that barely counts). A lot of rivers are pretty lazy, but not the Delaware River, you gotta give it credit.
A geological sandbox for large scale world design that allowed game developers to quickly and intuitively create landscapes with layered pasts and local variety that perennially inspired curiosity from players seems so obvious to me it is painful. (Also as a fun toy for its own sake).
Like damn… video games barely know how to make a rock outcrop look natural and it is 2024…
——
All that being said to point out that your vision of a cool geo-engineering project is mostly unrealistic because of humans not even bringing geology into the picture. Part of the globalized contagion of late-stage capitalism is VERY crucially a collective forgetting of the stories in the landscapes around us. We have been taught to see the landscape around us as a background for our genius, not the primary gift passed down by our ancestors, the foundation of all the beauty in our lives and a fascinating machine of anarchy that creates endless forms of order.
Everywhere all over the world people are extracting groundwater at a ridiculously unsustainable rate (the fucking AXIS EARTH IS TILTED ON has changed because so much groundwater has been extracted) even while geologists try to point out there is going to be no clean water left???, the dysfunction of our thinking with respect to land goes very deep unfortunately.
Instead we are left with this trash Elon Musk-esque obsession with spiritually disconnecting ourselves from Earth and leaving for Mars as if the idea of separating us from the landscape (and natural systems/biosphere) we evolved in makes any sense at a basic level of our body maintaining homeostasis effectively or is something we would even desire to do (thanks for that one, sci-fi shows and books!). It is like plucking an ant from an ant colony, carefully placing it into the ocean and whispering “now you can start a new life here”…… It makes no sense.
You are right sadly :( but dont discredit yourself so much! A ton of people do listen and a ton of people think yall are cool! I think you’re cool. Its just that those people and I dont tend to be the people that have the resource to make decisions
On the game side of things, while i agree more realistic landscapes would be awesome, making games is really hard work and you need to be careful where you’ll invest your time in if you want to actually get anything finished. The truth is most people who are not geologists can’t tell the difference between a realistic landscape and an unrealistic one.
We have some tools for world generation, though i’m not sure how realistic they are. Mostly a mix of noise functions (Simplex, Perlin, etc) and erosion simulation. But i barely understand how that works, so your “geological sandbox” seems a lot less obvious to me.
Another thing to consider is that in game design, realism will always take a backseat for good gameplay. A map that naturally guides the players where they need to go is usually much more desirable than one that is realistic but unintuitive. Plus when you add magic, gods, or even enough sci-fi, the bar for what counts as a realistic landscape really goes out the window anyway.
Another thing to consider is that in game design, realism will always take a backseat for good gameplay. A map that naturally guides the players where they need to go is usually much more desirable than one that is realistic but unintuitive. Plus when you add magic, gods, or even enough sci-fi, the bar for what counts as a realistic landscape really goes out the window anyway.
Why would a map that reflected natural landscapes be more unintuitive than an awkwardly fabricated one that doesn’t reflect any landscape a person has seen looks like?
sigh and I am really trying not to come off like I am claiming everything has to be realistic to the stupid little details only a geologist would know.
…but also if natural landscapes ARE unintuitive to most people now, doesn’t that feel like an existential crisis to you? Shouldn’t game developers seek us to reconnect our intuition with natural landscapes to try to heal that awful severance of our soul?
My point was that building landscapes to tell stories in without building the landscape as a story too is a silly thing to do, both for immersion of the player and for overall work.
There is no reason a sort of clay like modeling simulator couldn’t give you an artistically conveyed sense of two continental plates colliding, and if the tools were playful and immediate to use (like I pointed out, just being able to smash continents together by clicking and dragging them in different directions at each other like Besieged but for geology) it would be easier for world designers overwhelmed by a blank canvas to start because their canvas already has a story rather than suffocating blank space.
Why would a map that reflected natural landscapes be more unintuitive than an awkwardly fabricated one that doesn’t reflect any landscape a person has seen looks like?
Mountain ranges blocking off high level areas, terrain elevation being changed to make sure certain landmarks are more visible/look better on camera, resources such as water/ores, etc needing to be close together for balancing reasons (For survival/crafting games), etc. Reality doesn’t always conform with one’s artistic vision.
There is no reason a sort of clay like modeling simulator couldn’t give you an artistically conveyed sense of two continental plates colliding, and if the tools were playful and immediate to use (like I pointed out, just being able to smash continents together by clicking and dragging them in different directions at each other like Besieged but for geology) it would be easier for world designers overwhelmed by a blank canvas to start because their canvas already has a story rather than suffocating blank space.
And my point is that shit is hard to make, doesn’t scale well with large maps (simulating the plates colliding like you said costs memory and processing power), and wouldn’t find an audience because most people can’t tell/don’t care about the difference.
Look, i’m sorry if i came out as rude, i know you don’t mean that every single little detail must be correct just to please you, i get it. My main gripe with your comment is just the “This is so obvious! Why hasn’t anyone made this?” attitude. Because it ignores the work that needs to go into each of these tools, often for almost no recognition/compensation.
My main gripe with your comment is just the “This is so obvious! Why hasn’t anyone made this?” attitude. Because it ignores the work that needs to go into each of these tools, often for almost no recognition/compensation.
It is obvious, and you still aren’t seeing it. You keep misidentifying the main thing I point out as the beginning of the creative process and a catalyst to seeding inspiration for level and world design as an arbitrary complicated ask that has nothing to do with the experience of level designers engaging in the creative process nor how organic and engaging a landscape feels in the end product.
It’s like, an axiom to this conversation is that the knowledge I have of geology must mean MORE work for game designers and that gives you a right to portray me as having a snarky, unappreciative attitude towards the incredible amount of work that goes into video game development.
It honestly portrays that lack of interest in geology well, you almost seem annoyed that I would suggest geology contains anything that might be of use to video game development because it involves learning about something other than computers and computers are already hard enough.
I didn’t make the computers too hard to fit anything else in your brain, I also constantly give mad props to my favorite video game designers especially indie ones and ESPECIALLY open source projects with loving communities or developers who have maintained wonderful games for years and years.
…but yes… this whole landscape thing? It is obvious as fuck to a geologist, I’m sorry but it is. Treating open world design like it is this thing you have to build entirely by hand or with awkward algorithms that attempt to procedurally generate some unsettling landscape that has to be fixed by hand JUST as much one like this
Mountain ranges blocking off high level areas, terrain elevation being changed to make sure certain landmarks are more visible/look better on camera, resources such as water/ores, etc needing to be close together for balancing reasons (For survival/crafting games), etc. Reality doesn’t always conform with one’s artistic vision.
Procedural generation has to be hemmed in by guard rails, Minecraft doesn’t just generate ores willy bully with no thought or check for game balance? No procedurally generated game worth its salt does and there are innumerable successful examples of those. Why would it be any different for building worlds with geologically inspired tools in a fashion I describe?
I don’t understand why you see a difference there.
These processes also don’t have to be extremely advanced geophysical simulations, you can abstract shit into elegant systems that reflect deep complexity, it is called good game design.
I really don’t understand what i said that ticked you off this much. I’ve started this whole discussion by agreeing with you to begin with, geology IS important, and it SHOULD be more prominent in game development. All i wanted to do was give you
my input on why it isn’t more prevalent, and how things are done currently. In any case, here we go again:
you almost seem annoyed that I would suggest geology contains anything that might be of use to video game development
On the contraire, i like geology, i like your idea,and i agree with you. But when making a game you have 1000 of ideas that are just as good that you need to implement in a short amount of time, with a limited amount of money. Reinventing world generation, as interesting as it is, is simply not usually a priority. I do agree it could improve the game, but i don’t think it’s fair to act this appalled that it doesn’t exist yet the way you imagine.
…but yes… this whole landscape thing? It is obvious as fuck to a geologist, I’m sorry but it is. Treating open world design like it is this thing you have to build entirely by hand or with awkward algorithms that attempt to procedurally generate some unsettling landscape that has to be fixed by hand JUST as much one like this
In your other comment you asked for a tool that lets you model landscapes by hand, and automatically calculates how that affects tectonic plates. l’m not sure what you think i’m misinterpreting here, this is a complex program that would take several months to make. So either you’re asking a big company to make this, in which case, my comment of “most people wouldn’t notice/care” applies, as they’d only do that if there’s immediate profits, or you’re asking open source/independent devs, in which case, don’t.
Procedural generation has to be hemmed in by guard rails, Minecraft doesn’t just generate ores willy bully with no thought or check for game balance? No procedurally generated game worth its salt does and there are innumerable successful examples of those. Why would it be any different for building worlds with geologically inspired tools in a fashion I describe?
Okay, so do you think minecraft’s world generation is realistic? Because my point was that game balancing often interferes with realism.
Thank you that was super informative. Is there anything that can be done to mitigate an impending eruption? Ive always heard that if one of the big super volcanoes goes it could be quite catastrophic for the entire world. Surely theres been some research into like pressure relief holes or something…antacid tabs?
I am sure there are lots of geologists who have thought of it, it makes sense right?
The problem is that nobody gives a shit about listening to geologists unless they are talking about where to find oil. Even if a geoengineering project of this scale and magnitude (with such catastrophic consequences if it goes wrong) where possible with near current geological science and hardware this degree of interest and investment of society is only ever committed to visions techbros provide and I don’t think a single techbro has ever taken a geology class and actually remotely paid attention.
It was geologists in the 1970s who first pointed out the obvious connection between human released CO2 emissions and global warming.
Nobody gave a shit :)
(plenty of complicit geologists who made a veryyyyy good living too don’t get me wrong)
We are just weirdos going on about rocks except when those rocks are really valuable and provide the capacity to create empires but even in those cases we are never really part of that, we are always still the weirdos going on about rocks who everybody is like “ok but can you shut up now and point to the gold on the map?”.
I know it is a weird example but look at the landscapes of virtual environments, video game developers have been trying to craft evocative landscapes since the beginning of video games even before 3D engines, you would think that some of them might have been interested to find inspiration for world design from the dizzying variety of landforms and stories described in geology (that are perfect to engage a player with because geological landscapes are layered stories first and foremost).
From the perspective of a geologist, it is obvious for game developers to make world building tools that allow molding an entire mountain range for an open world rpg by first starting with two continents and smashing them together with your mouse over and over again until it made a compelling starting point (instead of just making every damn mountain by hand or just writing a dumb algorithm to randomly generate mountains) and then running a massive river through the mountains for 10 million years to create the main valley for the game.
Todd Howard released a screenshot of the next Elder Scrolls Game
the story here was there was a river and then a mountain range came in (some new kid named Appalachians) and was like “sorry dude” but then the Delaware River was like “I am literally going nowhere bro, put your silly mountains wherever you want and I will cut you down when you get in my way”. This friendly conversation has been going on for 400-500 million years, which is about 1/8 of the earth’s history (the earth was a hot mess for the 1st billion so that barely counts). A lot of rivers are pretty lazy, but not the Delaware River, you gotta give it credit.
A geological sandbox for large scale world design that allowed game developers to quickly and intuitively create landscapes with layered pasts and local variety that perennially inspired curiosity from players seems so obvious to me it is painful. (Also as a fun toy for its own sake).
Like damn… video games barely know how to make a rock outcrop look natural and it is 2024… ——
All that being said to point out that your vision of a cool geo-engineering project is mostly unrealistic because of humans not even bringing geology into the picture. Part of the globalized contagion of late-stage capitalism is VERY crucially a collective forgetting of the stories in the landscapes around us. We have been taught to see the landscape around us as a background for our genius, not the primary gift passed down by our ancestors, the foundation of all the beauty in our lives and a fascinating machine of anarchy that creates endless forms of order.
Everywhere all over the world people are extracting groundwater at a ridiculously unsustainable rate (the fucking AXIS EARTH IS TILTED ON has changed because so much groundwater has been extracted) even while geologists try to point out there is going to be no clean water left???, the dysfunction of our thinking with respect to land goes very deep unfortunately.
Instead we are left with this trash Elon Musk-esque obsession with spiritually disconnecting ourselves from Earth and leaving for Mars as if the idea of separating us from the landscape (and natural systems/biosphere) we evolved in makes any sense at a basic level of our body maintaining homeostasis effectively or is something we would even desire to do (thanks for that one, sci-fi shows and books!). It is like plucking an ant from an ant colony, carefully placing it into the ocean and whispering “now you can start a new life here”…… It makes no sense.
You are right sadly :( but dont discredit yourself so much! A ton of people do listen and a ton of people think yall are cool! I think you’re cool. Its just that those people and I dont tend to be the people that have the resource to make decisions
On the game side of things, while i agree more realistic landscapes would be awesome, making games is really hard work and you need to be careful where you’ll invest your time in if you want to actually get anything finished. The truth is most people who are not geologists can’t tell the difference between a realistic landscape and an unrealistic one.
We have some tools for world generation, though i’m not sure how realistic they are. Mostly a mix of noise functions (Simplex, Perlin, etc) and erosion simulation. But i barely understand how that works, so your “geological sandbox” seems a lot less obvious to me.
Another thing to consider is that in game design, realism will always take a backseat for good gameplay. A map that naturally guides the players where they need to go is usually much more desirable than one that is realistic but unintuitive. Plus when you add magic, gods, or even enough sci-fi, the bar for what counts as a realistic landscape really goes out the window anyway.
Why would a map that reflected natural landscapes be more unintuitive than an awkwardly fabricated one that doesn’t reflect any landscape a person has seen looks like?
sigh and I am really trying not to come off like I am claiming everything has to be realistic to the stupid little details only a geologist would know.
…but also if natural landscapes ARE unintuitive to most people now, doesn’t that feel like an existential crisis to you? Shouldn’t game developers seek us to reconnect our intuition with natural landscapes to try to heal that awful severance of our soul?
My point was that building landscapes to tell stories in without building the landscape as a story too is a silly thing to do, both for immersion of the player and for overall work.
There is no reason a sort of clay like modeling simulator couldn’t give you an artistically conveyed sense of two continental plates colliding, and if the tools were playful and immediate to use (like I pointed out, just being able to smash continents together by clicking and dragging them in different directions at each other like Besieged but for geology) it would be easier for world designers overwhelmed by a blank canvas to start because their canvas already has a story rather than suffocating blank space.
Mountain ranges blocking off high level areas, terrain elevation being changed to make sure certain landmarks are more visible/look better on camera, resources such as water/ores, etc needing to be close together for balancing reasons (For survival/crafting games), etc. Reality doesn’t always conform with one’s artistic vision.
And my point is that shit is hard to make, doesn’t scale well with large maps (simulating the plates colliding like you said costs memory and processing power), and wouldn’t find an audience because most people can’t tell/don’t care about the difference.
Look, i’m sorry if i came out as rude, i know you don’t mean that every single little detail must be correct just to please you, i get it. My main gripe with your comment is just the “This is so obvious! Why hasn’t anyone made this?” attitude. Because it ignores the work that needs to go into each of these tools, often for almost no recognition/compensation.
It is obvious, and you still aren’t seeing it. You keep misidentifying the main thing I point out as the beginning of the creative process and a catalyst to seeding inspiration for level and world design as an arbitrary complicated ask that has nothing to do with the experience of level designers engaging in the creative process nor how organic and engaging a landscape feels in the end product.
It’s like, an axiom to this conversation is that the knowledge I have of geology must mean MORE work for game designers and that gives you a right to portray me as having a snarky, unappreciative attitude towards the incredible amount of work that goes into video game development.
It honestly portrays that lack of interest in geology well, you almost seem annoyed that I would suggest geology contains anything that might be of use to video game development because it involves learning about something other than computers and computers are already hard enough.
I didn’t make the computers too hard to fit anything else in your brain, I also constantly give mad props to my favorite video game designers especially indie ones and ESPECIALLY open source projects with loving communities or developers who have maintained wonderful games for years and years.
…but yes… this whole landscape thing? It is obvious as fuck to a geologist, I’m sorry but it is. Treating open world design like it is this thing you have to build entirely by hand or with awkward algorithms that attempt to procedurally generate some unsettling landscape that has to be fixed by hand JUST as much one like this
Procedural generation has to be hemmed in by guard rails, Minecraft doesn’t just generate ores willy bully with no thought or check for game balance? No procedurally generated game worth its salt does and there are innumerable successful examples of those. Why would it be any different for building worlds with geologically inspired tools in a fashion I describe?
I don’t understand why you see a difference there.
These processes also don’t have to be extremely advanced geophysical simulations, you can abstract shit into elegant systems that reflect deep complexity, it is called good game design.
I really don’t understand what i said that ticked you off this much. I’ve started this whole discussion by agreeing with you to begin with, geology IS important, and it SHOULD be more prominent in game development. All i wanted to do was give you my input on why it isn’t more prevalent, and how things are done currently. In any case, here we go again:
On the contraire, i like geology, i like your idea,and i agree with you. But when making a game you have 1000 of ideas that are just as good that you need to implement in a short amount of time, with a limited amount of money. Reinventing world generation, as interesting as it is, is simply not usually a priority. I do agree it could improve the game, but i don’t think it’s fair to act this appalled that it doesn’t exist yet the way you imagine.
In your other comment you asked for a tool that lets you model landscapes by hand, and automatically calculates how that affects tectonic plates. l’m not sure what you think i’m misinterpreting here, this is a complex program that would take several months to make. So either you’re asking a big company to make this, in which case, my comment of “most people wouldn’t notice/care” applies, as they’d only do that if there’s immediate profits, or you’re asking open source/independent devs, in which case, don’t.
Okay, so do you think minecraft’s world generation is realistic? Because my point was that game balancing often interferes with realism.