YOU ARE travelling through a landscape of lush green trees and rolling hills.
Whenever you move, the image changes to match your new point of view, giving you
the feeling that you really are travelling through this computer-generated
world, rather than merely watching images change on a screen as you push and
click the mouse. Soon the wooded hills give way to a grassy plain and you see a
lake blocking your path and a dome glinting in the sunlight. Could this be the
weather research station that your rich Uncle Prospero told you about?
Thanks to the hints dropped by your uncle in his videotaped invitation, you
already know the kind of tasks that await you inside the dome. His message
implied that en route to his home you should visit his weather research station,
in which you would find clues to understanding the 鈥渃haos science鈥� that he has
been writing about. And if you play the game correctly, he hints, you might also
inherit some of his vast wealth. Could this be the real purpose of your
trip?
Welcome to Chaos: the Fantasy Adventure Game, a CD-ROM released in
the US in April. (There is no launch date yet for Europe.) But as the packaging
points out, this is more than just another fantasy adventure with wacky
graphics. The format may be reminiscent of Myst鈥攖he world鈥檚
bestselling CD-ROM鈥攂ut there is an extra depth here in the scientific
content. Could this be the model for teaching all manner of difficult scientific
concepts?
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Back to the game. Once inside the dome, you notice a young woman who seems
decidedly odd, wearing a thick winter parka, despite the beautiful summer day
outside. You may not know it yet, but this is a clue. You start to check out the
station鈥檚 three instruments and a large console. As you approach each
instrument, the woman explains its function. One measures wind velocity, one the
east-west temperature gradient, and one the vertical temperature gradient. Each
has its own digital readout. Intuition tells you that by altering the readings
on these instruments, something critical will happen.
Your intuition does not lie. Jeff Jones, from New York University and the
designer in charge of the game鈥檚 scientific content, explains that all the
鈥減uzzles鈥� that the player must solve are based around a concept from the lexicon
of chaos. The weather dome puzzle, for instance, is based on the work of
American meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who stumbled across a 鈥渟trange attractor鈥�
in the 1960s. This elegant mathematical form, which resembles a child鈥檚 drawing
of a butterfly鈥檚 wings (above), became a symbol of the new science, and is a
compact representation of the chaotic processes that underlie the unpredictable
behaviour of the weather.
Lorenz created a simple computer simulation of the convection that takes
place when a flame heats water in a pot or when the Sun heats air over a desert.
The fluid鈥攁ir or water鈥攐rganises itself spontaneously into a series
of long cylindrical rolls that rotate slowly. Lorenz created a simple
three-dimensional plot of how these rolls changed over time, expecting to find
that they would quickly settle into a steady, repetitive pattern. But much to
his surprise, the motion never quite repeated itself. The rolls followed nearly
but not quite the same paths, and at times even changed their direction of spin,
generating the double-looped form now called the Lorenz attractor.
Jones designed the weather station puzzle with its three instruments to
parallel the three variables in Lorenz鈥檚 convection experiment. When you solve
the puzzle, by mimicking the original conditions set by Lorenz, the console
displays an image of the attractor, as if you had discovered it for
yourself.
Now the console transforms into a machine for controlling the weather
outside. To move on in the game you must decide from a list of temperature
settings the best weather conditions for continuing your journey across the
lake. The answer, learnt by trial and error, is 鈥渋cy cold鈥�. But perhaps you
should have guessed this from your companion鈥檚 warm winter coat. Once you have
chosen correctly, the program transports you outside the dome, across the frozen
lake, and on to the next puzzle.
The game offers eight environments for you to explore, each with its own
chaos-inspired puzzle. For those who want to know more about chaos theory, there
are also several educational strands. The main one is Prospero鈥檚 journal in
which your uncle has recorded his discoveries about the chaotic nature of the
world. Here are comprehensive explanations of concepts such as
fractals鈥攕hapes such as the Lorenz attractor that always look similar no
matter how much you zoom in on them鈥攁nd the butterfly effect, which stems
from another of Lorenz鈥檚 findings. Even the tiniest alteration to the starting
conditions of a weather simulation created by Lorenz led to huge, unpredictable
changes in its future behaviour. Thus, a butterfly beating its wings in Tokyo
today could cause a tornado in Texas next month.
According to Bruce West, Director of the Center for Nonlinear Science at the
University of North Texas, the science in the Chaos game is 鈥渘ot only
accurate, it is presented in an interesting and often dramatic way鈥�. West sees
it as an 鈥渋nnovative approach鈥� to teaching complex phenomena.
Mysterious world
The integration of serious science into a fantasy adventure reflects the
unusual genesis of this game, which was conceived by staff in the Interactive
Telecommunications Program at New York University. Originally, says Jones, who
is a part-time lecturer at the ITP, the project was going to be an interactive
documentary. It was to contain interviews with chaos scientists interspersed
with puzzles that would allow the user to explore the new science on their own.
But the publishers HarperCollins suggested it would be more appealing to embed
the educational material in a game format.
Like Myst, the game takes place in a mysterious world that players
must discover for themselves. Red Burns, the game鈥檚 producer and director of the
ITP, compares Chaos to a jigsaw puzzle. 鈥淭he idea is that you would
work on a bit of it and solve that, then come back later and work on some more,鈥�
she says. And Chaos demands a major time commitment鈥擩ones
estimates 50 to 60 hours.
Along with the science, the fantasy game is peppered with humour, injected by
Jones鈥檚 co-writers Pippin Parker and Andy Yerkes. For example, before you enter
the dome, the obvious way to proceed on the journey seems to be to sail across
the lake in a boat tied up near the dome. Yet this proves to be a diversion,
because the only way to cross the lake is to make it freeze over. If you look
carefully at the boat you see its name is Red Herring.
Other environments show different aspects of chaos. After the dome, you move
on to a radio station called KAOS. Inside is an old-fashioned jukebox, half a
dozen weird musical instruments, and a booth occupied by a sarcastic disc
jockey. Your mission here is to 鈥渢une鈥� the instruments and record a musical hit
of your own. These, however, are not normal instruments. Each is a
chaos-inspired variant of a real one. The double bass, for example, is shaped
like a Mandelbrot Set, the beautiful and infinitely complex fractal form
discovered by IBM researcher Benoit Mandelbrot. The chimes are made from Koch
snowflakes, another set of fractal forms (above). The mathematical principles
used in tuning the instruments are not chaotic but, as Jones notes, 鈥渢here鈥檚 a
great deal of chaos maths鈥� lurking beneath the surface.
Having recorded your own hit, you can use the royalties to pay for the next
part of your journey. This environment鈥攁 drive along a fractal
coastline鈥攃ontains a puzzle inspired by West. You find yourself in a red
car which you must navigate at several different levels of magnification on the
car鈥檚 map. As you travel, you view the fractal coastline from the inside.
Measuring the distance between two points on the coastline depends on the scale
of magnification you use: the more you zoom in, the more intricate the pattern
becomes and the longer the distance grows. You have enough money to buy petrol
and each time you fill up the tank you can go five grid squares on the map. The
idea is to travel at the level of magnification that will allow you to hit the
next petrol station in exactly five squares.
Fractal Forest
Among the other environments you must conquer is the Fractal Forest, a puzzle
based on an 鈥渋terative function system鈥� that allows a computer to build up
images of natural-looking forms, such as trees, by repeatedly manipulating a
single shape. You must also play a virtual stock market, using 鈥渞escaled range
analysis鈥�, which requires you to learn about identifying correlations between
patterns that appear on different scales.
As with Myst, Chaos is likely to appeal mostly to
teenagers. But how valuable it will be as an educational tool is a matter of
conjecture. In the past, the CD-ROM industry seems to have believed that
learning could be achieved through technological prowess alone, and so
educational programmes were created without input from teachers. Critics have
argued that no matter how brilliant the technology, youngsters cannot learn
unless material is presented in an appropriate way. Jones acknowledges that
there were no education consultants called upon in the making of Chaos.
West is upbeat, however. He thinks the game will attract not only teenagers
but also anyone interested in chaos theory, including social scientists and
biologists. 鈥淭he player must synthesise the scientific information presented to
solve a given puzzle,鈥� he says. 鈥淎nd in doing so he or she also grasps a new
physical or mathematical concept.鈥�