Technobabble / Video Games

Technobabble in video games.

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• Sega outright loved to brag about how the Sega Genesis was better than the Super Nintendo because of its "Blast Processing". Which was essentially a trendy way of saying their console's CPU ran at 7.67MHz to the SNES's 3.58MHz, had more audio channels, and had a bit higher resolution, as well as to distract from how the SNES had higher RAM, more colors on-screen, and could show more sprites.
• The presenter in High Voltage's tech demo for their Quantum3 Engine spoke out so much technobabble, it made the E3 2004 tech demo of Unreal Engine 3 look tame in comparison. Terms include "Camera space RGB gloss maps", "tangent space gloss map", "standard tangent space bump maps", and roughly 20 seconds of showing a feature list of about 100+ features.
• A lot of Google Stadia's marketing centered around how many teraflops the console ran at, it edge nodes being closer to players, and its high-powered supercomputer datacentres. While these are real things, the service running at far lower performance than competing home consoles makes one wonder exactly how well it used such power.

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• Advent Rising: The descriptions for all the weapons are full of techno babble. Quark mind-drives, entropic energy waves, and grav-shielded singularity cores, just to name a few terms.
• Borderlands has numerous examples of this, mostly in mission briefings. An example is a mission from Patricia Tannis:
  "Tannis needs more parts to ensure the protection grid holds on her device’s ecto-containment unit, safeguarding against total protonic reversal, which would be extraordinarily bad."
• Command & Conquer:
  • This is done once in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, when Dr. Moebius giddily explains what Tiberium is:
    Molecularly, Tiberium is a non-carbon-based element, that appears to have strong ferrous qualities, with non-resonating reversible energy! Which has a tendency to disrupt carbon-based molecular structures, with inconsequential and unequal positrons orbiting on the first, second and ninth quadrings!
  • For Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars, EA took things up a notch and commissioned scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to "provide a white paper describing the biophysics of Tiberium, its atomic structure, its method of transmutation, the form of the radiation that it emits, and the way to harness it for powering machinery and weapons — giving it the same treatment as would be suitable for a scientific journal article on a real substance." Actually, an interesting read.
• Mocked by the blueprints of your ship in Cosmic Osmo, which point out the Aero-ether Quanto-particulate Detecto Rings and a triple-loop Polar Yagi Recepto-Wod, among other features.
• Doom³: The in-game description for the flashlight delves into this, just to say that it's an Infinite Flashlight.
  "UAC Standard issue light source. This model utilizes a static transfer power supply, so battery replacement is unnecessary."
• In Dreamland Solitaire 3: Dark Prophecy a potion is made to combat Jill the witch.
  Wizard: To finish it I need some asphodelus root, a ground bezoar, acromantula saliva...
  Knight: And I didn't understand anything you just said.
• In Earth and Sky Austin, commenting on the fog ability of Emily's super-suit, states that fogging a bad guy might come in handy.
  Emily: Well sure, but couldn't he just walk out of the cloud?
  Austin: No, I don't think so. The notes say that the molecular bonding that causes the fog effect keys on a chemical signature from the affected subject, thereby neutralizing motility as a counter-tactic.
  Emily: Say again, in English?
  Austin: The fog would follow him around.
  Emily: Ah.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 2: The quest to repair Gecko's nuclear power plant requires the player to obtain a "Hydroelectric Magnetosphere Regulator". When asked what it is, Harold reveals that "technically, it's a thingie".
  • Fallout 3 has you take the Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test as sort of a way to set up what kind of character you'll be playing with. The first question reads: You are approached by a frenzied Vault scientist, who yells, "I'm going to put my quantum harmonizer in your photonic resonation chamber!" What's your response?
    • One of your responses can be: "But doctor, wouldn't that cause a parabolic destabilization of the fission singularity?"
    • Or you can just say "Yeah? Up yours too, buddy!"
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, Hope's given explanation for Lightning's having to return to the Ark every day at 6 A.M. is that it's to "regulate the time distortion". It's never really explained just what this means.
  • Similarly, in Final Fantasy Tactics, Orators have a skill called Mimic Daravon that puts enemies to sleep. Daravon is the person who explains the mechanics of the game in the optional tutorial.
• Ghostbusters: The Video Game is even worse with the technobabble than the movies that inspired it. "Charged nucleon jackets" and "fermion absorption rings" are but two examples.
• This is an actual Skill in Guild Wars, which you earn from the technologically advanced civilization of the Asura. It damages and dazes your opponent.
• Half-Life:
  • Parodied in the Half-Life expansion Opposing Force, when Shephard finds an armed nuclear bomb, with instructions for turning it on. (However, Shephard only needs to press a button to turn it off.)
    1. Indispose the gravitronic rev limiter to 11.
    2. Rotate red knob to the on position.
    3. Press button labeled B.
  • The technibabble in the Black Mesa remake is hilariously off the charts. For example:
    "We should harness the remaining photonic energy to ensure resonance control. Double-check the Brewster plates' angles and make sure the superluminescent diodes are protected from optical feedback."
  • Half-Life 2:
    • Dr. Judith Mossman has the tendency to speak in technobabble which your character is supposed to understand, and likely does. You however, are not, and likely don't.
    • Freeman's doctoral thesis is titled Observation of Einstein-Podolvsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures by Induction Through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array. Basically, shooting low-frequency electromagnetic waves through heavy element crystals to make things teleport.
    • "You can call it the 'Zero Point Energy Manipulator' if you really want to."
    • Dr. Kleiner is practically a walking encyclopedia of technobabble when he's busy at work or making public announcements.
• Lampshaded in Kindergarten when Monty repurposes one of the principal's bombs into being remote activated in Buggs's mission.
  Monty: Okay then. Just a solder here. Rewire that timer to pass through that capacitor. Set the receiver to the correct frequency. More technobabble to make me seem smart...and it's done!
• In Kingdom Hearts II, Sora and his friends have a hard time understanding what Tron is saying when they first meet him, because of this trope. As time goes on, Tron becomes easier to understand as a result of gaining emotions due to his friendship with them. Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] implies that this could be the result of the program getting a heart.
• Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite: Thanos at first inverts this using very simple language to explain how to track the infinity stones to Iron Man. Iron Man mocks him slightly for this by stating the explanation in technical language. Thanos proceeds to up the ante with this:
  Thanos: I need only for the Time Stone to be in range, while the dynactic interphase field chronocatacalyzes.
  Iron Man: Uh... sure. You do that.
• Mass Effect 2:
  • A lot of the Engineer Duo's talks are this. Lampshaded when Engineer Daniels yells at Donnelly for "boring the Commander with tech".
  • Even more so would be Mordin Solus, who combines this with being a Motor Mouth and a Terse Talker.
• Portal:
  • Portal:
    • The 1500 Megawatt Aperture Science Heavy Duty Supercolliding Super Button is, quite simply, a big red button that opens doors.
    • The Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill. It dissolves all unauthorized material, including, on semi-rare occasions, dental fillings, crowns, tooth enamel, and teeth.
    • The Man-Sized Ad Hoc Quantum Tunnels Through Physical Space With Possible Applications as Shower Curtains (portals).
    • The Aperture Science Unstationary Scaffold is a really just moving platform.
    • The incinerators that appear in the game are only referred to as Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerators.
    • GLaDOS lampshades this by referring to her morality core only as an "Aperture Science Thing-We-Don't-Know-What-It-Does".
  • Portal 2: The Aerial Faith Plate (a catapult platform), the Excursion Funnel (a blue funnel that pulls you in the direction it's facing), and the Thermal Discouragement Beam (a laser). Faith, Excursion, and Discouragement are licensed trademarks of Aperture science.
• Appears all over the place in the Ratchet & Clank series, frequently with Big Al. For example, when the eponymous duo encounter him in Marcadia's defense facility during the third game:
  Ratchet: How can you use the city's defense network to play a video game?!
  Al: Simple. I bypass the security server with a 626 hex matrix adapter and reprogram the graphics sub-processor.
  Ratchet: No, no, I mean- urgh! Clank, you speak, uh... "nerd".
  Clank: It appears you have a feedback loop in the induction coils of your DB-3 signal processor.
  Al: Impossible! I ran a recursive checksum on the signal matrix.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Blast Processing. ^note In fact, it has been suggested that "Blast Processing" has an actual meaning: it refers to the Genesis's rather powerful I/O processor, which could offload some work for the CPU. Alternatively, it may simply refer to the system's design approach: it was built around a very powerful CPU, whereas the SNES had a slower CPU controlling more advanced video and sound subsystems. This is the reason why some early SNES games had slowdown issues (devs hadn't quite figured out this novel design), and why polygon-based games ran much better on the Genesis.
  • Tails has been known to rattle off Technobabble ever since he was finally given a speaking role that revealed he was the team's resident science geek extraordinaire.
  • Sonic Adventure 2 gets points off, though, for referring to a Bernal sphere (the ARK) as a "Bernoulli sphere".
• This is one of the cruxes of the Co-Op Multiplayer Mobile Phone Game Spaceteam. Each player has a procedurally generated control panel for the fictional Cool Spaceship and a series of instructions, but the instructions cannot always be carried out on their panel; the intended result is for players to yell absurd jargon at each other: "Inflate Nanoflange!" "Set Triweaver to 2!" "Rotate Posidome!" For additional amusement, the tasks and panels sometimes involve mundane tasks like "Rearrange Deckchairs", "Suspend Disbelief" and "Darn Socks".
• Tales Series:
  • Tales of Symphonia has some to explain why something you did nearly destroys the world, which makes so little sense that even if what the player did was avoided, the events would probably still happen.
  • Tales of the Abyss likes explaining the exact mechanics behind its magic system, and its explanations can turn into this. When you're discussing the game and it becomes necessary to explain that it wasn't obvious that a character's fonon frequency was 3.14159 because having the ability to channel a fonon through one's fon slots does not necessarily mean that one is isofonic to said fonon's aggregate sentience... yeah.

• Unreal Tournament mixes technobabble with a generous measure of Gun Porn in most weapon and item descriptions, so even if bits of it go over your head, you can still be confident of the power it's packing.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 actually has an amusing version near the end where the explanation actually makes perfect sense (a character states that they can activate an orbital station's retro-rockets to prevent it from crashing into the planet below), but the other characters treat it as this trope because the general tech level of the setting is nowhere near far enough along for them to be able to understand. Also, the explanation is still meaningless because the character in question made it up to get the rest of the cast out of the way while they perform a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Xenogears and Xenosaga are madly, passionately in love with their technobabble. A lot of it's real, about evenly divided between advanced physics, neuroscience, and five or six kinds of Gnosticism (including Jungian psychology, which gets a lot of its terminology from Hermetic alchemy). Admittedly not all of the physics would actually work like that—you can't use quantum entanglement, i.e. the EPR paradox, for a Subspace Ansible, for example, and you probably couldn't use the Collective Unconscious as a hyperdrive, either.

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