NASA's MMO, "Astronaut: Mars, Moon and Beyond"

It might seem a little strange that NASA, the same agency that put a man on the moon, would have anything to do with the development of its own MMO. However, that's exactly what's happening with "Astronaut: Mars, Moon and Beyond," a space-themed MMO in early development. Daniel Laughlin, Project manager for NASA's Learning Technologies program, is creating the world's first MMO geared toward the education of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (or STEM); and according to a recent interview with Edge, he wants it to be just as fun as any other MMO.

To do it right, Laughlin and his team partnered with Virtual Heroes, developers of America's Army, the US Army-funded first-person shooter. NASA's motivation in creating the MMO is similar to what the Army had in mind when creating its video game, but instead of driving kids to their local recruitment offices, NASA is looking for the next generation of scientists, astrophysicists, engineers and astronauts. Today's younger generation doesn't have the same excitement and interest in the space program as, for example, children who grew up in the late 60s (or even the 80s, when every kid in class dreamed of going to Space Camp).

"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," Laughlin told Edge. A short excerpt from the story explains the idea in more detail:

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.

The game developers at Virtual Heroes are working on designing the MMO around "scenarios [including] constructing and using robotics, mass accelerators, spacecrafts and surface vehicles," according to the story. But Laughlin said the reason they decided to partner with an established game developer is because they wanted to make sure the game was actually fun, instead of "[choking] the life out of the gameplay for the sake of having the right number of rivets on a spacecraft."

A demo called MoonBase will be released early next year via Steam, which will serve as a beta-like "module" of the bigger MMO, meant to test the waters and generate player interest. For more details, check out the entire story here.

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