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PC gamers have been accustomed to the presence of physics in games since first launching a toilet at a Combine soldier’s head with Half-Life 2’s gravity gun. Yet while there are countless games that play with simulations of Newton’s laws of motion, few games engage with physics as a subject or theme.
This is what separates Exographer from your typical physics-based puzzle platformer. Instead of being about swinging on ropes and pushing boxes around, Exographer bases its world and systems on the history and study of physics itself. Not just physics in general, either. Exographer is specifically about particle physics, the strangest, most enigmatic area of study in the field.
Placing you in the role of an alien explorer, Exographer tasks players with investigating the downfall of an ancient yet technologically advanced civilisation. On the surface, it resembles any other puzzle-platformer, with luscious pixel art, standard movement and jumping controls, and an array of unlockable gadgets like boots that let you stick to the ceiling. As you play, however, you’ll discover that Exographer grows more complex the deeper you delve. Your abilities, for example, are unlocked by discovering subatomic particles, protons, electrons, photons, and gluons, while the line-based puzzles you solve to discover these particles are based on Feynman diagrams, conceived by physicist Richard Feynman to depict how subatomic particles behave and interact.
It’s an unusual concept, one with an equally fascinating origin. Exographer is the creation of SciFunGames, a French studio founded by physicist Raphaël Granier de Cassagnac. Specialising in nuclear and particle physics, Granier de Cassagnac is a director of research at France’s École Polytechnique, and a member of the CMS experiment at CERN. He’s also a writer of several science fiction novels and an avid player and scenario writer for tabletop RPGs.
Exographer emerged from a dialogue Granier de Cassagnac had with the European Research Council, from which he had a grant at the time. “At the end of it, they come back to you and say ‘we can give you a bit more money if you put your research on the market,'” he says. There was no practical application for Granier de Cassagnac’s research, such as a new material or medication. But he wondered if there might be a way to put the science itself on the market. “So I started thinking about outreach, and then it was absolutely clear to me that the one media that I wanted to use to do outreach was videogames.”
Granier de Cassagnac was intrigued by the potential of using videogames to encourage interest in science. “It’s underused, I think, because the audience is super large [and] because game mechanics can be made close to science mechanics,” he says. To be clear, he didn’t want to make what are known as ‘edugames’ or ‘serious games’, which are designed specifically for teaching purposes. Instead, his interest lay in making an entertaining game sufficiently immersed in the history and study of particle physics that it might pique the curiosity of players.
In the end, the ERC wasn’t sold on Granier de Cassagnac’s pitch. But by this point he was entranced by the notion of making a game, and after securing funding elsewhere, founded SciFunGames and hired a small team of designers. Initially, he intended to make mobile games, toying with numerous ideas including one he describes as “The Candy Crush of particle physics”. But as the team grew, and Granier de Cassagnac learned more about the resources needed to break into the mobile market, the sentiment within SciFunGames shifted toward making a game for PC and consoles.
Much of Exographer’s design was influenced by scientific concepts in some way, but the game’s physics heritage is most evident in its puzzle mechanics. As you explore Exographer’s abandoned civilisation, you document your findings using a camera. Taking screenshots in the right places will reveal information about how to solve puzzles and provide insight into the society and its own path of scientific discovery. “Particle physicists take pictures,” says Granier de Cassagnac. “Long ago, it was real pictures with a real camera. Now it’s more like an electronical thing, but at the end it’s images you take.”
Reflecting the use of photography and electronic imaging in particle physics, some photos you take in Exographer reveal evidence of new subatomic particles. Identifying those particles requires players to solve the Feynman diagram puzzles. In these, players match the trajectory of specific particles by inserting jigsaw-like pieces into an incomplete Feynman diagram. Yet the basic lines presented to you don’t tell the whole story. To discover their true nature, players must use various analytical tools to highlight different particle types.
Granier de Cassagnac says the idea for using Feynman diagrams as puzzles came from Exographer’s game designer Tony Cottrell, and that how players use the Feynman diagrams in-game tracks closely with how they’re used in actual research. “Each analysis that you make in the game is real,” he says. “It’s scientifically accurate.” Some of these are incredibly specific. The game’s final puzzle, for example, is inspired by the discovery of the Higgs boson. “You have four analyses to make. They are the four decay modes of the [Higgs Boson].”
While its systems are where Exographer primarily draws from particle physics, the science does exhibit influence on other areas of the game. The subterranean laboratories you explore are inspired by real labs located around the world, while the alien scientists whose trail you follow all refer to real particle physicists. Even the art direction takes its cues from particle science. Granier de Cassagnac wanted everything in Exographer to be rendered in pixel art because “the pixel is the elementary particle of the screen”. Everything, that is, except the particles you discover. “The idea [was that] beyond the pixel, you might find something else,” he says.
Exographer released in September last year, and while it made a modest splash on PC, its reception on Steam is universally positive. The experience has also emboldened Granier de Cassagnac, as he has now moved fully into the sphere of game development, with SciFunGames already prototyping its next creation, which will move beyond the quantum realm. “The next game that we’re working on, we will talk about much broader science.”
Although the scientific backdrop to Exographer’s art and systems is fascinating, it is worth remembering this is not a game about instructing players on the minutiae of particle physics. Rather, it wants to provoke a sense of wonder about the world that lies beyond the visible. Its most powerful moments occur not when the camera pushes forward, but when it pulls back. In one example, 1n1 reaches the summit of a mountain, revealing a dramatic panorama lidded with thunderclouds. As 1n1 casts their eyes to the sky, lightning forks across the screen. In that moment, your camera shutter clicks, and the charged particles in the atmosphere reveal themselves.
It’s lightning-strike moments like this which Granier de Cassagnac wants to channel through Exographer’s players. “I’m a bit obsessed by the idea that I want people who don’t care about science at all, who even maybe hate it, to play my game,” he says. “And then if I am good, then maybe I will raise a little bit of interest in this for those people.”
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Kurt Indovina
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