What essential elements to you look for in a science fiction game? IOW, what "things" makes it science fiction, to the extent that if they were removed, the game would no longer appeal to you? I've got some categories, but feel free to add your own. What elements would be most important, and what elements least? 1) Visual Representation: Futuristic look and feel to objects and places. You love the beauty of space and stellar environments, or ultra-modernist geometry that makes up cars, buildings or character outfits. 2) Cool Wow Themes: Lightsabers, mutants, lasers. You've grown up with these themes, from books and movies, and you like seeing them in a game for their wow factor. You don't mind swinging a +1 sword to solve a problem, but dammit, it better be a "light sword!" 3) Unique Environments: Sci-fi offers environments that you couldn't or don't often encounter in any other genre. Open space, lunar environments, rotted urban hellholes, etc. 4) Genre Exclusion: You can't stand elves, fairies and all that other crap ([smile]stolen from a Fallout ad years ago). 5) Inherent Complexity: The future is just more complicated than the past. You like that the world may have more gray that black and white, as is common in fantasy. 6) A Well Imagined World: You expect the game world to be well thought out. You read the email / datacubes / etc. found in game, care about the character motivations, and want background on the factions or empires. The worst thing in the world you can hear is "Generic Megacorporation X took over the world and blah blah blah" 7) Impossible Possibilities: You like the thought of encountering what you simply wouldn't encounter in other games: Aliens, different worlds, or technology impossible or unavailable to another time. 8) Scientific Faithfulness: You like science, and you like to see it faithfully represented in a game. You're not afraid of physics, or chemistry or biology, but at the same time don't necessarily want to have to have a PhD to play the game. You just want it to be somewhat accurate. 9) Unqiue Gameplay: Just face it, you can't drive a mech or fly a battleship in a medieval game. What you use is more important than how you use it (that is, a wagon just won't due, even if it has the same gameplay as Halo's Warthog). 10) Future-philia: You like the sense of being there. Post-apocalyptic, utopia, Tron cyberworld, whatever, the world doesn't matter, you just want good gameplay in a futuristic environment. Any others?

If you compare to fantasy, I like science fiction better because it has a more analytic, less mystical way of looking at things, which agrees more with my own perspective.

For 3 you might also want to include unique cultural environments, and psychological environments inside character's heads.

I consider 6 to be the most important, but this virtue can also be found in fantasy and historical fiction, it's not exclusive to science fiction. Basically I like learning about unique, surprising (because they're new to me), well-designed worlds, especially the culture and biology of those worlds, and the psychology of individual characters having this biology and living in this culture. Science fiction fans are often said to be motivated by xenophilia, love of the new and different.

well sci-fi for me relates to an alternate reality that is akin or based on ours. sci fi can draw more parallels to our current world than fantasy, I think.

we have computers, sci-fi has computers. planes, cars, have sci fi equivalent.
stars, galaxies are known to us now. sci fi can draw the player's knowledge of these things to provide more immersion than fantasy games. give the player a computer terminal and the player can associate a thousand images, uses for the computer simply because the uses probably some experience with computers.

Personally sci fi appeals to me because of the what-if factor. jules verne's novels come to mind. They were considered science fiction yet we now have submarines and have put men on the moon and back. I like a world that may be the future of our world.

in response to your elements: 6 would be my best bet.
a well thought out world that has many parallels with the current world so player can supply some of the immersion but with enough new things to make the world interesting.

8 is also good provided general laws of nature are preserved or adequate reasons (technology) is provided

i always liked robert heinlein's "Science Fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws. The result can be extremely fantastic in content, but it is not fantasy; it is legitimate--and often very tightly reasoned--speculation about the possibilities of the real world."

most of what most people think is "science fiction" is really "futuristic fantasy"... not that i have a problem with that genre :)

What draws me to science fiction is the inventor in me that empathetically responds to new ideas and inventions. I also am drawn to it because of the physical boundaries of travel are so vast (across time and space itself) that it represents the kind of distance requirements my form of escape enjoys.

I enjoy science fiction because I was raised in the Air Force, where my dad worked on projects like the x-15, the rocket sled, Area 51, etc. I got exposed to it, flew in it, watched them streak across the sky, and well, was hooked for life the second Niel Armstrong spoke in the greatest remote broadcast of all time to date.

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