Since embarking on building Astronaut: Mars, Moon and Beyond for NASA, Daniel Laughlin has had many people ask him if videogames were just about blasting anything that moved. After all, how can something so banal and violent possibly teach us about the inner workings of the universe? The fact that he’s partnered up with Virtual Heroes, the maker of America’s Army, to build this ambitious MMOG does not necessarily help matters either, but Laughlin, project manager for NASA's Learning Technologies programme, actually embraces the connection.

“We are calling this game the America’s Army of STEM education,” he says. Not the catchiest of slogans, perhaps (and in case you’re wondering, STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics), but it is also easy to see why Virtual Heroes’ experience appealed to NASA. The FPS has been a powerful tool for evangelising and recruiting for the US armed forces. “We do have different goals to the US Army, but their success encourages me that we can accomplish even more complex goals with an MMOG,” says Laughlin.



With the average age for the NASA workforce at around 50, and fewer young scientists, engineers and mathematicians coming in to replace the ones that retire every year, there is a sense of urgency to a type of initiative that can potentially bridge the communication gap between an aging institution and young talent. Laughlin believes that many children and adolescents are capable of pursuing a storied career at NASA but would never even consider it as a possibility because they haven’t had any personal experiences of NASA’s brand of space science to spark their interest.

And that’s where videogames come in. Laughlin and his team see game mechanics as versatile enough to accommodate enormously complex ideas while remaining approachable, playful and appealing. And it’s all to inspire, using part of NASA’s enormous repository of scientific and technical data, a nascent new generation of scientists and engineers.


_{^{Daniel Laughlin, project manager for NASA Learning Technologies}}

If all these noble educational ideals are starting to turn you off, consider the fact that the blueprint for the project promises a fully interactive universe, with NASA providing the assets and expertise to make that universe extremely realistic, and the game designers coming in to make it interesting. “Our designers and writers are currently exploring NASA resources and working with some of the most creative scientific minds available to arrive at compelling, fun missions based on real science,” says Jerry Heneghan, founder and CEO of Virtual Heroes. The scenarios they are currently working on include constructing and using robotics, mass accelerators, spacecrafts and surface vehicles. To those versed in the science of StarCraft and Dead Space, they might sound rather dry and mundane, but the team knows that the game has to be the driver.