In the modern game industry, the term "realism" gets thrown around in a lot. A critic might praise the realistic physics in a game where faster-than-light spaceships carry players to fight building-sized bug-aliens, for instance. Or a developer might talk up the accuracy and realism of the weapon selection in a military shooter where a character can get shot in the face five times and be just fine 10 seconds later. There are obviously some limits to exactly how much realism we want in our escapist fantasy.

Still, it might be nice if the fantastical worlds we play in were at least plausible, if not exactly "realistic." That's where Thwacke Consulting comes in. The recently formed firm has set up a wide-ranging team of academic experts in fields ranging from geology and biology to nanotechnlogy and particle physics. Their goal: to provide scientific reference material to help flesh out even the most implausible fictional game worlds, a goal they'll try to realize for the first time with the post-apocalyptic nuclear hellscape of InXile Entertainment's Wasteland 2 Kickstarter project.

After a year and a half of mulling over the idea, Thwacke's Sebastian Alvarado officially set up shop in April. He was pushed by a frustration with games that tend to use science and technology as a kind of unexplained magic to make things work in a fictional world. Take the "genetic memories" that power the time-spanning animus in the Assassin's Creed games. Alvarado, an expert in evolutionary genetics himself, says there's actually something to the concept of passing down learning through genes. Still, "DNA is such an easy cop-out these days," he told Ars. "It's an easy way to explain all that, and they just expect the player to say, 'Well he said DNA so now I have to buy the story.' It's like a magic gateway."

Games' explanation of futuristic technology often isn't any better. "If you just said, 'Oh, nanomachines did it,' and stop there, we'd like to say, 'Oh, nanomachines did it, because of this, this, and this, and did you know that last year's discovery showed that they've replicated 30 percent of the idea in the video game?' Something like that really resonates with the player and makes it really cool and makes them more immersed in it."

Thwacke put out feelers for its concept by publishing articles examining the scientific background of games like Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect in the specialist press. He was encouraged by the strong response. The team then started approaching game makers, offering to provide similar background to inform games as they were being made. InXile was the first one to take them up on the deal, and it's been a good match, according to founder Brian Fargo.

"Each one of the writers on Wasteland 2 has benefited from their work in either being inspired or finding some real world facts to help them put their ideas into a stronger basis," Fargo told Ars. "Colin McComb garnered quite a bit of information on poisons, explosives, and water issues to help shape his map for example. ... I gravitated towards the idea of working with them when I read about the kinds of creatures that would thrive in nuclear fallout or about dust storms and the use of ethical dilemmas in situations and how the brain looks at risk and reward."

"...everyone knows radiation makes things super-large"

To help shape Wasteland 2's radiation-soaked, er, wasteland, the team at Thwacke reviewed research on everything from Hiroshima to the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll to determine how survivors and the environment would be affected. For example, Alvarado points out that nuclear blasts often create trinitite, a shiny green glass formed when sand gets super-heated incredibly quickly. Thwacke passes that background on to InXile and lets them decide how or whether to use it in the game.

One of the best examples of how Wasteland 2 will be intertwining real world science and imaginative fantasy probably comes through in enemy design. Alvarado recalls that the InXile team needed some believable enemies for a waterlogged area that had been ruined by a natural disaster. "We wanted to explore what kind of animals would survive in water and out of water, what animals do we know that live in a tidal zone and that could survive, things like that," he said.

The scientists found the humble hermit crab was a likely candidate for post-nuclear survival, thanks to its ability to absorb radiation in its shell and then discard it during a molting cycle. That's the academically valid, scientific part. But since this is still a video game, they wanted to make sure it was a little "off the wall" as Alvarado put it.

"We used radiation as a very simple gaming mechanism to argue that it makes animals super large, because everyone knows radiation makes things super-large... we'll just take that one as a granted," he said, laughing. "So let's let these hermit crabs get [so big] they can't find housing in their conventional shell and they'll actually seek housing in a bus or a telephone booth or something like that."

"So the whole idea is that they'll hide in parts of the environment and they'd actually have this stealth ability, in the fact that they wouldn't actually be seen by the player," Alvarado continued. "It kind of works with a bit of biology, it works a bit with what Wasteland is after ... it fits into this world that Wasteland has with bizarre and fun off-the-wall type humor and everything."

Feeding the obsession

A lot of the information Thwacke provides for the game won't have such a direct impact on game design, but will end up as background that goes into a Mass Effect-style codex to help describe the backstory and lore of the world, Alvarado said. Many players will ignore this kind of superfluous information, but Alvarado expects many obsessive players will eat it up.

"I've seen tons and tons of arguments online, people arguing about how one alien in Mass Effect can defeat another alien in Mass Effect just based on evolutionary biology. Looking at the science in these fictional universes, people have arguments over them, which really thrills me, because it's people really thinking about this kind of science."

"There's this type of immersion that a lot of these developers are trying to achieve now. It goes past just designing a game, it goes into really developing a narrative," he continued. "It's one thing to play a game and get addicted to shooting things on-screen. It's another thing to really be drawn into a story to something you believe to be close to reality. We really want to build as much real life as we can in the game while still maintaining the vision of the game and creating that immersion and building upon that."

While Fargo says most players probably wouldn't mind if Wasteland 2 had no connection to modern science, he thinks having some grounding in reality can only be a good thing. "I find that being inspired by nature and science is always helpful when fleshing out a world," he said. "Nobody really cared how the forests of Avatar were inspired by Cameron's exploration of the ocean yet it gave it a wonderful look. Much of our work with Thwacke helped inspire some big ideas that we might not have come across otherwise. Sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction."

It's important that a focus on realism doesn't impinge on making a fun and imaginative games, though. Fargo says players definitely shouldn't worry on that score. "We would never let the realism trump the fun factor of the gameplay as our goal is to make a game a not a simulator or learning game," he said. "We are focused on the experience over the realism and the two can work hand in hand. The sensibilities of our Wasteland world are well documented in the vision document that we posted so the input of Thwacke does not affect the world feel in a negative way."

Alvarado agrees wholeheartedly. "I know some people are saying, 'Oh, I don't want Wasteland 2 to be scientifically accurate or realistic, because that would ruin such an off the wall game,' we're not doing that at all. ... We know that the game would be pretty boring if it had to be 100 percent realistic. We're trying to add some science facts on to their fiction just to give it a bit more grounding in reality. If you happen to identify with some of the actual science, you enjoy it that much more. If you don't, that's fine, you're still going to enjoy the game."

But for those that do care, Alvarado is excited his efforts might help expand players' curiosity. "We're doing our bit for science literacy," he said. "If we can make a really cool idea into a game that educates people, we know we're doing our job well. At the end of the day, people really are interested in learning, it's a behavior we all know we have."