cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/9197489
I was only looking for some validation posts because I was annoyed at a couple of the more unrealistic reactions you have going in NMS. Like being able to get salt from combining dihydrogen and oxygen (instead of receiving the obvious water, which doesn’t even exist in the game as usable item/component). Then I stumbled upon this research paper, read it completely (unfortunately the discussion section is longer than it needs to be due to them repeating most of their results in it) and now (by looking it up before writing this post) learned that you can form salts with hydroxide ions.
So while the process is much simplified and not always intuitive in the reactions in game (and the Salt icon says NaCl despite no sodium or chlorine having been used in the “refiner”, just H2 and O, even though Na and Cl exist in game), that particular combination for the refiner now makes at least some sense to me.
A couple nice highlights from the paper:
To the question “What did you feel about the presence of chemistry in No Man’s Sky?” in which players had 5-levels to choose, from 1- Frustrated to 5-Excited, 46% selected the level 4, 23,8% the maximum-level and the lowest two levels combined for less than 6% of the answers.
To the question “Did No Man’s Sky make you feel motivated to know more about scientific topics?”, 57,9% answered “Yes”. And to the question “Did No Man’s Sky help you understand some concepts about chemistry?”, 35,7% answered positively.
In the end, we asked “When you think about chemistry or listen to words like ‘chemistry’ or ‘chemicals’, is usually a good or a bad thought?”, and 87,3% of the respondents answered “Good”.
Fun study, but n=126 seems very low to be representative in any way.
Mhmm, although I can easily imagine it being representative of gamers who are interested enough in science to take part in surveys.
Speculation: It could be roughly okay to extrapolate the results to the greater NMS community, because their sample size and variety seems to mostly correlate to the age and geographic location of the gaming communities in USA, Brazil and Europe (the bulk of their respondents). Without knowing the actual numbers, I can imagine most of the NMS players sit in those three regions and with about a 2:1:1 ratio.
In the end, we asked “When you think about chemistry or listen to words like ‘chemistry’ or ‘chemicals’, is usually a good or a bad thought?”, and 87,3% of the respondents answered “Good”.
NGL I feel like this could be taken a number of ways. IDK if that was the intent of the paper or just a side effect of poor wording. Personally I think “bad thoughts” because I’m in a chemistry class but I also like the idea of chemistry so I don’t know what I’d put.
I’m sad there was no “zero” option for “exasperated by the abject stupidity”. I don’t expect most people to know much chemistry, but you don’t even need to pass middle school to understand that H2 + O does not equal NaCl.
I mean, we’re talking about a simulated world, in which the reality itself is constantly glitching out. I think weird chemistry is on par with the rest of the NMS’ weirdness
Oh yes, I did read that sentiment elsewhere, too, and that’s pretty much the only way I can get behind the weird/nonsensical chemistry. It’s just a bit unfortunate that the reveal of the simulated (and melting reality) is explained only a couple dozen hours into the story. So I feel for the (admittedly small) subset of players who wrongly learn that this is how chemistry works before being able to make the mental leap that it’s possibly intentionally this weird and unrealistic.
