Hey there, and welcome to Play Noggin.
I'm Julian, your brain's Player Two.
Today we're looking at a game that utterly traumatized me, either because I spent half
the game having flashbacks to high school while I cowered in fear inside a locker, or
because I spent the other half being devoured by a set of double jaws.
That's right, today we're talking about Alien: Isolation.
This 2014 sci-fi horror game relied on the atmosphere, soundtrack, and pacing to scare
the Sevastapol out of players, so it was mostly in the vein of Ridley Scott's original Alien
than James Cameron's macho-space-marine murdering Aliens, mostly.
Oh the game also relies on the terrifying death machine that is the Xenomorph to scare
you.
That too.
The xenomorph is pretty scary in large part because of that unknown factor.
The unknown is something we're inherently wary of.
At its root is social identity theory, which encourages us to put ourselves in the "in"
group, while forcing everything we don't understand into the "out" group.
We assign positive traits to our "in" group and negative traits to those creepy
"out" group weirdos.
We essentially think our team is better than your team.
Nothing could be more unknown to us than aliens, which is why film directors and game creators
have relied so heavily on alien stories over the years.
Of course there are other scarier unknowns that are more at the forefront of your mind
when you're playing than how alien this alien is.
Things like: is it right behind me?
Can it see me?
How do I kill it?
With fire?
Is this enough fire?
Oh no it was not enough fire.
All those pressing concerns stem from the same bigger unknown though.
You've never seen a creature like this before, so you don't know what to do about it, and
that's scary.
Even the name of the alien implies the unknown; Xenomorph comes from the greek words for "strange"
and "shape."
Eventually, through a lot of trial and error and death and reloads, we become familiar
with how the xenomorph hunts and the creature isn't so scary anymore.
Then we can really take a moment to appreciate the alien's physiology.
Don't get me wrong, I still jump when I absent mindedly walk into a drool puddle,
but now I think of it as an educational experience.
Also terrifying.
But really cool!
I have a lot of emotions about this thing.
So just how strange is the xenomorph's shape?
If you think about it, aliens in movies looking like us is more a practicality than anything.
These aliens are usually played by actors.
Even Ridley Scott's Alien was a guy in a suit, which explains why it has arms and legs
like we do.
So, if we throw away the assumption that aliens have to at least superficially resemble us,
what would an alien look like?
This is more theoretical than fact-based, of course, but all we need to do is look at
the world around us to draw some pretty solid conclusions.
Our world is filled with weird creatures.
On earth, we have around 30 different "body plans," or phyla, that our lifeforms are
based on.
Each is well-suited to its particular environment.
The environment, of course, plays a huge role in determining how an animal evolves.
Even animals that evolved separately, but in similar environments, often develop very
similar traits.
Think the long, slender bodies of dolphins and tuna, for example.
So even though extra-terrestrials got their start somewhere completely different, it's
not unreasonable to expect them to have some familiar basic traits.
Things like hands.
I don't think I have to tell you what an advantage it is to have hands, but if you
want a good demonstration, try typing your comments with boxing gloves on.
Hands don't have to have five digits like ours though, that's just a holdover from
our early tetrapod ancestors.
A hand-me-down, if you will.
Some of their contemporaries had up to eight digits.
Generally scientists agree that the minimum number of digits an alien would need to grab
and manipulate objects is three.
Eyes are key, too.
The Xenomorphs have no easily discernible eyes, and though there's a lot of internet
speculation about how they see -- with echolocation! with its creepy mouth tongue! -- they clearly
don't have what many scientists believe to be a prerequisite for intelligent life:
Binocular vision, i.e. two eyes, located not far from the brain so as to minimize visual
processing "lag."
A large number of animals on our own planet follow this two-eye minimum rule, so it's
a safe bet that interstellar alien lifeforms follow the same cues.
Along those lines, two eyes isn't really a coincidence.
Symmetry is a pretty important part of intelligent life.
The sort of symmetry that we have is called two-fold symmetry, which makes us part of
the group known as Bilateria.
The way a symmetrical body is structured tends to place important sensory organs in the anterior
region of the body, which is an evolutionary trend called cephalization.
That keeps all our most vital senses in close proximity to our big brains.
If an advanced alien species out there somehow exists in a different form -- say, something
with radial symmetry like a jellyfish -- we have a hard time imagining what the creature
could be.
So pairs of arms, pairs of legs, these things seem to occur repeatedly on our planet because
they give an organism an advantage.
But what about pairs of jaws?
Actually that's happened here too.
Dragonfly larva have a hinge plate over their mouth, and their mouth can shoot out just
like the xenomorph's, which helps them catch prey.
One thing you'll notice right before those jaws clamp down on your head and ruin your
whole day is the xenomorph's hard exoskeleton.
Seems like a sweet evolutionary advantage but for practical reasons, it's not a good
idea.
The chances of an insect-like creature on another planet developing intelligence of
the level of a xenomorph is pretty slim.
Having your skeleton on the outside is actually really inconvenient.
It makes growth challenging, and you have to periodically let it shed and regenerate.
That's why generally, insects are tiny, because an animal with an exoskeleton on an
earth-like planet needs to stay relatively small.
Otherwise when it molted it would be all floppy floppy.
Since insects stay small, they're less likely to develop intelligence because physical size
is at least partially related to a brain's capacity for complexity.
That's right, we have big brains because our bones are on the inside, deal with it,
bugs.
Can we say with absolute authority what aliens look like?
No, definitely not.
But we have a rough idea of what to expect, at least.
And that means some things about the xenomorph aren't that strange after all.
Does it make it less scary?
Sweet Ellen Ripley, no.
Thanks for watching.
As usual, leave us a Like and subscribe if you're into what we do.
Any ideas for topics to cover, drop them in the comments.
And don't forget to keep on playing.

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