Esports and space: BASILISK’s quest for “Science Victory”

Sarah Al-Ahmed: The Planetary Society teams up with an esports team. This week, on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of The Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Today, we're exploring an unexpected but powerful crossover, gaming and space science.

BASILISK is an esports team with a mission that goes beyond the game. Alongside champions in StarCraft II, Chess, and even Magic: The Gathering, they're carrying the banner of Science Victory. Through a new partnership with The Planetary Society, that message is now reaching space fans as well as gamers.

Kyle Hill, who's an award-winning science educator and now Head of Science Education and Outreach at BASILISK, joins me to share how this team is reaching new audiences, building inclusive spaces for gamers and scientists, and making science something we can all cheer for.

Later in the show in What's Up, Bruce Betts, our chief scientist and I, talk about some of our favorite space-themed games, and our upcoming appearance in PBS SoCal's Won't you be my Gamer?

If you love Planetary Radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it.

I love video games. They bring together so many different facets of human art and cultures. Our new technologies have allowed us to take storytelling to a completely different immersive level. As a space fan, that means that I get to step foot on worlds that I've only ever seen in images from spacecraft or in my own imagination.

In games, I've walked the ice of Europa. I've built Dyson spheres to power entire civilizations. I've even power-washed the dust off of Mars Rover's solar panels. Games have given me this profound way to experience and learn more about space science. I may never be able to travel to space myself, fingers crossed, but through gaming, I've explored the stars and visited worlds that no one else will see, which is why I've been so excited for this episode.

This week, we're talking about a partnership that might surprise you. The Planetary Society for the first time ever has teamed up with an esports team. If you're not familiar, esports are professional video game competitions with teams, tournaments, and prize pools that honestly can rival traditional sports. Millions of people around the world tune in to watch, but the team we're talking about today isn't just any team. They're called BASILISK, and they're the first esports organization built around science. Their whole mission is to carry what they call the banner of Science Victory, showing that the same strategy and critical thinking that can win games can also inspire the next generation of scientists.

BASILISK was founded in 2020 by two longtime friends, Chris Bothur and Hans Kassier. They bonded over their love of tough brain bending games. Today, their roster includes some of the sharpest players in the world. I can't name them all here, but it's really impressive. They've got Starcraft II champions like Joona "Serral" Sotala. Chess grandmaster, Vincent Keymer. Magic: The Gathering analyst and content creator, Sam "Rhystic Studies" Gaglio. And fighting game legend, Justin Wong.

Just this summer, their Starcraft II player, Serral, won the World Championship at the esports World Cup in Saudi Arabia wearing a jersey that said, "Science Victory," on the sleeve. But also, if you look a little closer, that Jersey now includes The Planetary Society's logo. They've partnered with us and with Caltech's Institute of Quantum Information and Matter to take their mission even further.

Leading the charge in this kind of outreach is someone that you may already know, Kyle Hill. Kyle is an award-winning science communicator and the creator behind, Because Science and THE FACILITY, and the former host of MythBusters: The Search. He's written for Wired, Popular Science, and Scientific American. He's also worked with the US Department of Energy and even advised the White House on science communication. These days, he's Head of Science Education and Outreach at BASILISK, bringing space science directly into the gaming world. Hey, Kyle, thanks sir for coming on Planetary Radio.

Kyle Hill: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I got to say it's a weird thing to talk to someone who's been a constant presence on my YouTube for over a decade now.

Kyle Hill: Wow, I feel like I'm going to turn to stone, but yeah, no, it's always nice to talk to someone else in the space where we have a shared experience of what science communication in those spaces is like. So, yeah, thanks for having me on.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And really lovely to meet a fellow gamer. I mean, I think it's such a beautiful cross-section, and I've been saying this at The Planetary Society to my colleagues for years now, that I think if we can somehow combine that love of gaming and the effort and the nerdiness that goes into it with the power of science, we can reach whole new audiences. And now, here you are in our lives helping us to do this with this esports team.

Kyle Hill: Yes, I share your enthusiasm and your reasons for being so enthusiastic. Yeah, BASILISK is an esports organization and the only esports organization that actually wants to promote STEM and for people, especially young people to go into scientific careers because we have also identified this huge overlapping of the Venn diagram, so to speak.

Why I got involved in the first place is, you may or may not be able to see, I'm wearing a jersey right now and it says, "Science Victory," on the sleeve. Now, I was watching a Starcraft II tournament as you do, because I'm a big old nerd, and one of the winners had this jersey and it said, "Science Victory," on it. And then I reached out to BASILISK saying, "Well, what is that about?" And I quickly learned that their entire mission statement is to actually use the nerdiness, the analysis, the critical thinking skills that go into playing the hardest games at the top levels to promote scientific thinking, critical thinking, STEM careers.

So for me, as a science communicator, this is my entire day job, and also someone who plays games, and also plays games while science communicating, it was a perfect fit between me and BASILISK, and then reaching out to The Planetary Society, we had the same intuition that you did that we know in this day and age, we need to be reaching ... Especially older organizations like yours, need to be reaching younger and younger audiences over time. And so we offer that kind of audience and that intersection with a demographic that does trend towards younger, so it's a win-win for us, whether you're talking about the communication effort or the gaming.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Honestly, there was this moment I was talking to one of my coworkers. He came to me and he goes, "Hey, do you know anything about esports or Starcraft?" And I was like, "I have been training for this day." I used to actually go every year to BlizzCon, which is the convention held by Blizzard. That is the company that made Starcraft and Starcraft II. So I've been to many of the competitions though, the World Championship Series there to go watch it. So I'm really glad that you guys are kind of keeping the candle lit for these kinds of real-time strategy games, because as some people may know, it's not like Starcraft II is a new game. These kinds of challenging games stick around. They have the longevity, because they're so complex and they have that solid user base all these years later.

Kyle Hill: Yeah. And it's not just Starcraft, where we also recently acquired a chess grandmaster. We recently acquired the goat of almost every fighting game, Justin Wong. We are looking to expand our reach in the gaming space to not just reach the nerdiest of the nerdy games like RTS games like Starcraft, but all competitive games that you can play electronically, esports, electronic sports, because we feel that all of these games at the nerdiest level do use the same kinds of critical thinking planning that scientists do. And by combining the two, I think it's a force multiplier for both.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, can you talk a little bit about your career and how you bridge that gap between studying civil and environmental engineering to becoming literally a world-renowned science communicator?

Kyle Hill: I wouldn't go that. I mean, I guess I have been identified overseas before, so I guess there is some noun there, but my career path has been filled with a lot of luck. I will say that first and foremost. I started out in civil and environmental engineering. While was doing that, I discovered that I had some passion and excitement for educating and trying to explain complex topics to a general audience.

And during that time, I started writing my own little WordPress blog, if you remember when those were a thing. I then started through social media sharing those posts. Then I took up a little blogosphere residency at Scientific American and then in Discover Magazine. And in doing that, I got some job opportunities that eventually led me to trying out on-camera work. I had been then doing some on-camera segments for Al Jazeera America, which was back 10 years ago trying to expand into America. And in doing that, there was a lot of on-camera work in Los Angeles.

And so I eventually moved out to Los Angeles to try to get more of that work. Right after that, Al Jazeera America kind of crumbled in the United States, and I was left looking for a science communication job. I then very serendipitously met the founder of a website called Nerdist at a birthday party, and I elevator pitched him like, "Hey, I bet I can explain how the Walking Dead virus works." This was very big at the time, and he was hosting a talk show for it.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Talking Dead?

Kyle Hill: Talking Dead. Yes. Yes. I elevator pitched Mr. Hardwick, and two weeks later I was working at his company as the science editor. So I was writing articles, but then I was also sourcing articles from freelancers and editing those articles. And then about two months after that, they asked if I could start a YouTube show, and I did a show called Because Science where I was writing on your screen with markers. I did that every week for five years. And then I left and I started my own company, and that's what I've been doing now. But the core of it has always been education first.

I don't consider myself a YouTuber or a social media influencer or anything like that. They just happen to be the things that are the most accessible, and impactful, and economically incentivizing right now. But no matter what it is, it's always been education first for me. But now, further expansion into the esports world with BASILISK where I serve as the Head of Science Education and Outreach, and that's how we got hooked up in the first place.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's such a wild ride. And honestly, when people try to ask me about how you get into science communication, all I can say to them really is just, if that's your passion, chase whatever opportunity comes your way because it's really difficult-

Kyle Hill: Well, you started in astrophysics, right?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, that's true.

Kyle Hill: How did you get from ... So when I told my engineering professors that I was going to switch from, instead of doing a master's PhD program in engineering to switching to the communications, humanities department for a master's, they were very confused. What was your education to communication journey like?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. I mean, I always knew that I love storytelling. I had that kind of question in my brain like, "Am I going to go into science?" Because I want to do the research. Or am I doing it as some kind of preface to some kind of communications or sci-fi writing career?

Kyle Hill: Oh, interesting.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That was always something that was in my mind. And to this day, I'm still working on my secret writing projects, but I graduated in a difficult time. I was graduating right around that 2008 financial collapse in the United States. And at the time, I was doing research with someone named Alex Filippenko over at UC Berkeley, and he was just such a phenomenal science communicator. And he had just released a series of classes in astrophysics for people that he had published online, and it was so inspiring the way he could take these complex topics. There was just something about it that was so Carl Sagan-esque, right?

Kyle Hill: Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: So I found myself in this difficult position. I was doing research, but they weren't paying me to do research as this tradition, and I was trying to find a science job. And in the midst of all of that, a girl has got to eat. I did a bunch of side projects. I worked at a Trader Joe's, and I worked at a tofu factory. And at some point, I found myself in this position where I was trying to spin up my own YouTube channel, and I thought to myself, "Hey, let's take a chance and apply at Griffith Observatory."

Kyle Hill: Interesting.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And I thought maybe this would just be a side gig until I found something else. Maybe I'd go back to school, but then I started teaching particularly the school field trips, and it was those kids, man. It was the way that revealing the universe to these kids just blew their mind. But also, the way that someone who's 60 or 70 years old looking at Saturn through a telescope for the first time, that equal level of just the fact that you expanded what it meant to be alive in this universe for them, by revealing something that I was so passionate about, I was hooked forever.

Kyle Hill: Yeah. And there's something personally gratifying about it too. I don't know if it's Feynman or whoever, but when you're able to explain something you feel, you really truly do feel like you understand that thing. My North Star for this has always been that at every level, I have had fantastic teachers. Really, really good teachers, and most kids don't get that.

And so if I can, in any way, be a good teacher for those who don't have one, then I feel almost morally obligated that I should try to do that. It's not considered name-dropping because he's your CEO. But the other thing that keeps me going is that I hosted kind of the Q&A portion of Mr. Nye's documentary that was about his life. I got up there on stage with him afterwards and the audience was asking questions after the screening, and someone asked a question about legacy, like, "Okay, well, this is about your life, what comes next?" And he turned aside. He looked at me and he pointed and he said, "Well, people like Kyle." And then he looked at me and said, "So I'm passing you the torch man. Don't screw this up." And so I've spent the rest of my life since that moment trying not to screw it up, more or less.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I relate so hard. No, but really though, I mean one science communicator can change the way a whole new generation sees themselves, and I believe very strongly that it's an important thing to try to be the adult that a younger you could have needed in their life.

I feel that all the time that I wished I had more people who made me feel like I was worthy of my dreams. So if I can make even one young person feel like they're not too dumb and this isn't out of reach, that they belong in these spaces, then it's absolutely worth it.

And I think your career has done it in a really interesting way, because within a lot of the realms that you've worked, you're not just talking about straight science, you're leveraging pop culture and media as a way of getting people into the subject. And I think that it was, at least at the time it began, really underserved niche.

Kyle Hill: Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And I'm wondering what you would say to the question of, what do you think today are the places where we can do more overlap, to do more outreach, not just within gaming, but within broader media?

Kyle Hill: You're having me reflecting now, because I think the first time I stumbled on using science to very nerdily analyze pop culture wasn't something that was done all that much back in 2011. It didn't become an entire business model for people like Game Theory or something like that, Vsauce or whoever. I did get into that niche pretty early, and that is an interesting reflection that it wasn't always a thing. But for me, finding the intersection between science and things that people who like science already like is just the sugar that makes the medicine go down. It is a communication strategy in information theory.

It's like people have schema for ideas and topics. They already have this mental scaffolding upon which they put ideas and they put them into the right categories, et cetera, et cetera. It is much easier to continue building on a scaffolding than it is to start a new building.

So if I can take something that people already enjoy, whether that we're doing at BASILISK, whether that's gaming, whether that's superheroes, comic books, video games, movies, TV shows, things that people already nerd out about and add some critical thinking, some scientific thinking to that, some real educational value to that, that is much, much easier to get people excited about and then to eventually understand than it is to start from scratch.

The example I always use is one of our other partners that we're now working with at BASILISK is the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter over at Caltech. And my friend there, Dr. Spyridon Michalakis, is not only the smartest guy I know, mathematical, theoretical, quantum physicist, I don't know, it's a word salad whenever he says. Not only is he a quantum physicist, but he is also the guy who advises on Ant-Man and Spider-Man in Hollywood.

And it is much easier to get people interested in quantum mechanics if you start with something like Ant-Man or The Avengers than it is to start with Schrodinger's cat. I mean it just is, or tunneling, or teleportation, or superposition, any of these things that are very interesting, but they're very hard to understand unless you have an entry point. And so I think a lot of what I've ... I mean, yeah, my whole career, I've been trying to find what are those entry points that will amend themselves to learning something interesting.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And now, you've expanded out into the space where you're trying to help an organization that already kind of shared this idea combining esports with science advocacy. But this, again, is one of those things that I really haven't seen people doing before and it's really fascinating to me. But before we get deeper into it, it occurs to me that a large number of people in our audience might be unfamiliar with the concept of esports in general. And it doesn't shock anyone that a nerd like me would already be into it, but how would you describe esports more broadly, and what are the competitions actually like?

Kyle Hill: Yeah. So esports is a pretty simple concept. It is taking video games, games that are played electronically, esports, that amend themselves to being played competitively and shaping that into a kind of competition structure like you're already familiar with. If you like basketball and you watch March Madness and football and you like the playoffs, esports has all that. They have teams, they have narratives, they have storylines, they have the best players. Can it come back and win the championship this season? You have games with single players, you have games with whole teams of players, but the point is to play that game at the highest possible level and compete against each other usually for titles and money.

So it's exactly similar to sports in general, but the games that we're playing in esports aren't usually made with competition in the forefront. Games need to make money, and so usually, the games are games that everyone likes to play, whether it's Fortnite, or Valorant, or Call of Duty, or chess. We have online ... We have digital. You can play against each other in local area networks, two computers next to each other, but chess tournaments have electronic aspects now, because the players are so fast that you literally, the time it would physically take to go and hit the stop clock, like it's wasting too much time. So even these traditionally physical sports can be moved into an esports context.

And it's not just these more flashy first-person shooter or FPS games either. Like I said, it's chess, Magic: The Gathering, it's Age of Empires, it's StarCraft II, it's fighting games. We just brought on into our organization who someone who's widely considered the goat of fighting games. I think he's a nine-time world champion across multiple fighting games, Justin Wong, and we identify that playing specifically electronic sports, these games at the highest level, have many qualities that are similarly required by critical thinkers and scientists. You're analyzing down ...

I mean, some of these fighting game dudes analyze down to the frame, which is to say down to the millisecond of inputs that they're doing. They're trying to exploit the game's code at a level. It gets extremely nerdy. And we at BASILISK want to use that extreme nerdiness to promote science, because millions and millions of people watch esports and even many more play video games in general. And so to try to target that audience feels like it makes a lot of sense.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. I was just joking the other day that I love a game when I've started spreadsheeting. Not at the point where I'm analyzing each and every frame, but this team is taking it to the next level where you're trying to apply actual data science to what is the best answer here. And can you use this math to not only figure out best strategies, but maybe even pick best players for certain things?

Kyle Hill: Yeah. And so I would just like to emphasize, it's not just that we try to find players who are very cerebral and things like that to bring in our team and kind of moneyballing esports and using the data to get into it. And this is why I jumped on board BASILISK is because it is explicitly taking the mindset that competitive gamers have and the overlap with the general public and trying to promote science with it.

So it's not just that we're using science in the things that we're doing, the games that we play. We want to get the people who watch these games and play these games also excited about science if they're not already. And that's kind of where my job comes in. I do not play games competitively, at least not at the level of our roster. It would be a massacre if I tried to play any of them in any of these games.

Vincent Keymer, who we just brought on, is the highest rated German grandmaster ever. He just entered the top 10 in the world in chess. We just had the biggest esports championship in the world this year, the Esports World Cup, and our top StarCraft II player just won the entire championship. So we have very, very high level players, but we want to use that exposure and the fact that nerdy people are already interested in these games to get more people into the sciences, into STEM, and to get excited to use the same kind of excitement and critical thinking skills in other spaces, namely scientific ones.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But what does that look like functionally? How are you actually using this to outreach to people?

Kyle Hill: Yeah, so I will say we are in the building phase. We are in the rapid expansion phase, and so my first two things that I did at BASILISK was work on these partnerships with you at The Planetary Society. So our first two partnerships were with you and then Caltech, as I mentioned with the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. And in doing this, we are going to further work with our partners and cross-pollinate, promote and build upon the things that you and our other partners are already doing.

For example, over at Caltech, they're also working on a quantum chess video game, so they want to use chess to teach quantum mechanics. So it is chess, but with the rules of quantum mechanics, superposition, tunneling, teleportation, that kind of thing. If you want to check it out, there's a video with Stephen Hawking and Paul Rudd talking about it, playing it over at Caltech. What we want to do as an esports organization is come in, build that out, promote that kind of play, and thinking to people and get more eyeballs on the actual science too.

There's other things that I want to do. So sponsoring and funding an entire BattleBot team, or being on the ground with a FIRST Robotics team. I would love to go and sponsor a FIRST Robotics team or another national competition team, a science competition, robotics competition here in the United States. Hand out jerseys to all the kids, get them feeling like they're part of an organization.

Part of this is that one of the grand unifying things about sports is that you feel like you're part of a team and you feel like there's something that you can get enthusiastic about, talk about and cheer for. We want to make science one of those things because we believe fundamentally we need that. Aside from esports, we think that science should be something you root for too. And I know that's very big at The Planetary Society, especially right now in 2025. And so we want to bring people into another fold that they may have not known was there, support existing efforts, and really be the nerdiest team in gaming and use that for educational impact.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I actually went to the office to go watch the championship that was held in Saudi Arabia recently, and I had the best time being there with some of my coworkers who knew that we had done this collaboration and this partnership with you guys, but weren't familiar with how StarCraft worked. And here I am, finding myself at work talking about StarCraft, explaining actions per minute, talking about the different teams, Zerg versus Protoss. It was so much fun to be able to do that. So in a fundamental way, you're now not just cross-pollinating people from the gaming world into science, you have now effectively also brought some people from science into gaming, which was cool.

Kyle Hill: Yeah, no, and you find yourself even ... When you start explaining the inner mechanics of a game like StarCraft or this does this and this counters that. I mean, you can feel it is the same kind of stuff you go through if you're explaining the life and death of a star or something like that. You're like, "At a certain point, after it fuses all these elements, then it gets to iron. Now, at that point, if you see iron, you're in trouble because in the next hour or so, there's going to be these rebound shocks from the ground." You can feel the similarities between being nerdy about the processes in a game and other fields of science. And I should say, I'm very proud of the fact that we brought on TPS in time for this giant championship. So we had The Planetary Society on our jerseys for dozens of hours on a channel that was, during the championship, I think getting 80,000 live viewers concurrently just the championship that our player, Serral, won in the jersey featuring your lovely logo has 200,000 views right now on a four-hour-long video, which if you're not familiar with how YouTube works, that's pretty good.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there is, for many of your listeners, you probably understand the shape of the science space and how many people might be in it and what they're doing. The gaming space is so much bigger that we need as educators and communicators to be tapping into the gaming space, and that's why I'm at BASILISK.

I don't know if you know this, but the gaming industry is bigger than every other media industry combined. That's all books, movies, TVs, all of that combined is less than gaming. Almost everyone plays a game of some sort, whether that's on your phone or that's on your computer or your PS5 or what have you. So this is a huge audience that, again, I'm very proud that we were able to put Science Victory, Planetary Society in front of, well, on the biggest stage in the world at that moment. It was really cool.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It was really cool, and thanks for helping us get the word out. I mean, we've got a massive multi-million person audience around the world, but it's not like the hundreds of millions of people that are watching esports. I'm sure there's a lot of people who are going to be coming over and learning more about science and becoming members of The Planetary Society because of this, and it's absolutely mind-blowing to finally see these hopes and dreams I've been having in the background of my science career becoming real through things like this. It's wild.

Kyle Hill: Yeah. No, I mean, I had the same thought. And if you're a sciencey person, if you're a nerdy person, engineering type, what have you, any kind of stem or steam adjacent field, our thinking is that if you also like games and you're looking at players or teams or any esport, there's only going to be one that you see and be like, "Well, I'm going to root for that guy, or that gal, or that person because they have Science Victory right on their jerseys. Hell, yeah. They support institutions. They support The Planetary Society. They're going to support kids around the country." I want to make it a very obvious choice and then use that choice to go above and beyond.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, you're my team now. We'll be right back with the rest of my interview with Kyle Hill after the short break.

Jack Kiraly: This October, NASA needs you. Hi, I'm Jack Kiraly, Director of Government Relations at The Planetary Society. In response to unprecedented proposed budget cuts to NASA's science programs, The Planetary Society and a coalition of our allies and partners are organizing a special day of action to save NASA Science.

Join us in person on October 5th and 6th in Washington D.C. You'll receive training on effective advocacy from our team of space policy experts. Then head to The Hill to meet directly with your representatives in Congress to advocate for protecting NASA's science budget and ongoing missions. If you can't come to Washington D.C., you can still pledge to take action online. We'll give you the resources you need to be part of the movement to save NASA Science.

This event is open to any US resident, no experience required. Space science benefits all of humanity. Let's stand together to protect it. Registration is open now at planetary.org/day-of-action. We'll see you in Washington.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It does occur to me as a woman who started out gaming in a time when it might've been a little taboo for people like me to enter that space. I got bullied a lot as a kid for liking these things, and that is also science.

Kyle Hill: Oh, are you saying the reception of women on Twitch is totally fine?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Totally fine, not at all in any way toxic, but I am wondering about that because something I've always been super passionate about is making the space community feel more welcoming and accepting for people. And I wish I could do the same thing for gaming, but if I had a dollar for every time someone told me to go make a sandwich, I would be a multi-billionaire at this point. So what does the team do to try to make that fan base, that space feel more welcoming and inclusive and through that maybe change perceptions about whether or not the science community is also a comfortable place for them to be?

Kyle Hill: Yeah, so there's only so much that we on the other side of the Venn diagram can do for the perception of women in the sciences. That's a very tough problem, of course, on our side, and for me at least personally before I can even try to address that situation. What I personally push back against in the esports, the gaming space is kind of the broification of video games. The kind of people that leave those comments for you are low, low intellect individuals, and I want to de-broify the space of ...

Your listeners, when I say esports, you're probably still thinking of a guy screaming, playing Call of Duty being like, "Let's go. Yeah, get wrecked." You're probably thinking of that. I want to change that at BASILISK. I want to have a space for the people that aren't like that, who are very analytical, introverted, nerdy, scientists, anyone adjacent to these fields. I want to be the smartest team in gaming. I don't want it to have anything to do with your testosterone levels. I want it to be a place where you know that you can feel smart, be smart, play smart, and that is what's valued. It doesn't matter who you are, where you come from. If you play games, if you're nerdy about it, if you want to play games competitively while you do so, come on in. That's what we want to do.

So before we can get at the perception of people in science as a whole, which is a whole another ... I personally think it's more of a pipeline problem where we need to get way higher up in the educational levels before women and minorities plummet out of the higher education master's degree, PhD degree. It's like, "Oh, these groups seem to have the exact same level of interest until this exact point right around where people stop being gross to each other and then they fall out." That is a difficult problem. But at BASILISK, as long as I'm here, I want to have it be an inclusive place that values your intellect and your nerdiness above all else. Your brain, not what surrounds your brain. You know what I mean?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And it tracks scientifically too. I think one of my favorite articles I've read in the last few years was a study on gamers and toxicity versus how good they were at the game. Essentially, if you're good at playing, you're less toxic, so maybe be kind, get good.

Kyle Hill: Yeah, get good, dude. Yeah, no, and dear listeners, don't get me wrong. The reason why I was kind of stumbling through half of that question there is because it is a very difficult question.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh, it's huge.

Kyle Hill: And I don't have an answer for when you say, "Well, how do you make everyone fit into the scientific fields and stuff like that?" I wish I knew, I really do, but within my power to detoxify the gaming space, that's what we want to do here at BASILISK. And if you are turned off by the broification of video games and things like that, then I want to offer a geeky inclusive alternative.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. Another one of my mantras in life is if someone tells me that I can't do something because of my identity or who I am, I'm going to do that thing, which-

Kyle Hill: I'm going to beat you.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: ... kind of explains my entire arc in life and why I am where I am, but I don't want it to be as difficult for everyone else. So it makes me really glad to know that there's going to be this community because I've seen the love and the acceptance and the understanding that comes out of the scientific community.

So I'm hoping that just in general, just by the very premise of the fact that you guys are trying to elevate science within the gaming community, that just naturally, it will be having less of a tendency toward toxicity, but that's just a guess. I don't have data yet.

Kyle Hill: Yeah, no. I mean, I don't have data either, but in my career and my experience, when I have community spaces, like take my own stuff, if I have a Discord server, my own Discord server that is only about my channel and things that I talk about, I find that the people who show up wanting that kind of community that values the same kind of things we're valuing at BASILISK, those are ... Yeah, you get a few weirdos every now and then, but by the most part, you get the kindest, funniest, nerdiest people that show up.

I mean, I wake up, I open Discord, and I have the project manager at a nuclear power plant being like, "Hey, Kyle, what do you think of this?" Like, "Geez, I don't know, man. You probably know better than me." People come up to me like, "Hey, my son is going to work on a nuclear submarine. Can he send you a message?" "Yeah. Yes. Yes." So we want to have more of those spaces, generally. I want to have more of those spaces generally, but for BASILISK specifically, the people like yourself who may have had bad interactions or less than optimal reactions playing video games competitively and online, we want to have a space where, again, it's your brain that matters and how you play, it doesn't matter who you are.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But finding games that are at that level of cerebral engagement, at least for me, is getting a little more challenging over time. And this is a weird thing to say, because gaming as a medium is so much more popular now. There's so much more games than there ever been before, but I am noting this kind of turning away, at least among high-end AAA game companies. They prefer to make games that they know are going to make money or can be commodified through these microtransactions and things like that. Even games like StarCraft are kind of falling by the wayside or RTS as a genre.

Kyle Hill: That's a big problem. Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Right. Do you feel like that's in any way limiting the games that the team is currently playing, or is it just that you're kind of starting out and ... I mean, you've been around since 2020, but do you wish there was more to pick from within those spaces?

Kyle Hill: Oh, for sure, and I agree with you. It's hard where everything does seem to be just a AAA shooter with loot boxes and skins that you can buy, but I have to have faith that as long as the game is really good and the competitive scene is really good, it can still thrive in a competitive space aside from it just being made by one studio or another.

So it is actually a big problem that StarCraft II, it was recently knocked out of a couple of large regular tournaments in Europe because the funding wasn't there. Blizzard no longer supports it, and supports the tournaments, and so that is difficult, and it's sad that, that part is going away. That's why the Esports World Cup was such a big deal in Saudi Arabia because there was. It was a $70 million prize pool or something like that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That was wild, and you guys crushed it.

Kyle Hill: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was our prize pool? Was it 700,000 for StarCraft II? I forget. I think it was something crazy like that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It was.

Kyle Hill: So that is really cool. And I see your point. Are there games like StarCraft, like chess, like Age of Empires that are more amenable to our mission of being really analytical, and nerdy, and thought through? I wish there were more, but again, like I said, I have to have some kind of faith that people still want to play those games. People still want to make those games, and when they get really good, when they're made really well, they will just naturally evolve into a competitive scene that can be taken up by some of these larger tournament cycles and things like that.

So I wish I could tell you that more really nerdy games that had a competitive element were coming out, but I don't know. The shape of the gaming industry is really weird right now. Mass layoffs and tournament shakeups and team shuffling people around and things like that. So it's a difficult space to be in for sure right now, but we're always expanding. We did start with Starcraft and chess, but now we're going out into another what people may not see as an untapped audience.

The fighting game community is huge, is absolutely huge. It feels more underground for whatever reason, but it is an enormous amount of people who play Tekken and Street Fighter and Super Smash Brothers and all these games. That is another community that we're getting into, and hopefully we'll have some representation in all sorts of games. And even if it is in some of these less than totally transparent AAA releases, if you are on Team BASILISK, you know that we're going to be nerdy, we're going to be smart, we're going to be promoting science while we're doing so.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I do wonder how the inclusion of esports in the Olympics is going to change this scene, because that's a new and emerging thing. If there is this market for it, and clearly there's a market for competitive games, but-

Kyle Hill: It's going to turbocharge everything. It's going to turbocharge it. A similar thing happened, aside from gaming and science and stuff like that, I used to do rock climbing semi-competitively. And what happened two Olympics ago was that climbing, competitive climbing was first introduced as an Olympic sport. What happened was a knock-on effect of, if you know that you can get into the Olympics and win a gold medal for your country and accolades for yourself and your team and those kinds of things, then everything downstream of the Olympics becomes crazy important.

Then you have tournaments that are team selection, regional qualifiers, country qualifiers, money being infused, teams scooping people up. Everything downstream of that becomes hyper important because it's the dang Olympics. And so with esports inclusion, even if we don't have brand new games and things like that, and maybe not the distribution of the kinds of games that we're already in right now, like we don't have any FPS games on our roster right now. Even so, all the existing games that we are into are going to get turbocharged by that. Everything is going to be more important, more eyeballs are going to be on it, more money is going to be in it, and it's only going to get bigger from here.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Right. BASILISK at the Olympics.

Kyle Hill: Oh, can you imagine. Sheesh. And I'm not even sure. We haven't talked about this internally yet, but if everyone is on a team from their country, I imagine-

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's a great point.

Kyle Hill: ... how do you also go on ... We have individual competitors, and it would be easy enough to be like, "Well, you're going to be on Team Italy or whatever." But then do you also rep the team that you're on? And what if you have a five-person Call of Duty squad, are you on a team, or are you on five individual countries that maybe ... I don't know how. I don't know.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, that changes the entire dynamic. And part of what I love about the gaming scene is that it's so international.

Kyle Hill: My co-founders, Chris and Hans, that's their problem. They're the logistics guys. I am just going to make sure that if and when we do show up at the Olympics, we're going to be repping scientific organizations like yourself, and we are going to be representing the ideals that we want to see and the ideas that we want to push.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, for people who are listening, who are really resonating with this message and are maybe gamers themselves, how can they get more involved in the fan base for your team or learn more?

Kyle Hill: Yeah. So right now, you can go to BASILISK.gg and that will bring you to our website. We also have social media platforms on every social media platform, and that can also get you, if you want a little bit more community, into our public Discord where you can chat with the actual players on our team. I'm in there and you can follow along with tournaments that we're in, or just channels that are just about science. If you want to talk about sciencey stuff, mathematics, computer engineering, all that sorts of stuff, you can find us on every platform and that website BASILISK.gg. And of course, if you want to see anything that I do adjacent to that, you can just search my name on YouTube and I will probably pop up.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Probably. I'll leave links to all of these things on the webpage for this episode of Planetary Radio. Well, seriously, thanks for helping get BASILISK's message out there for all the things that you're doing to try to make science more accessible to people, and just for generally being a really cool person who seems to combine all of my nerdy passions together in one science communicator, I appreciate you.

Kyle Hill: Well, thank you so much for saying so. That is incredibly kind. It's hard. It's always hard taking praise, but I very much appreciate. Sarah, thank you for having me on. Thank you for seeing some value in what we do and what we're trying to do. I promise you good things will come out of this, and especially with our partnership between BASILISK and The Planetary Society. I'm excited to see what happens next.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Thanks so much. For years, you've heard Dr. Bruce Betts, our Chief Scientist and I banter about space, but what you may not know is that the moment that we stop recording, we're almost always talking about video games. Well, that and our pets.

We have a fun appearance coming up next week on PBS SoCal's Won't You Be My Gamer? Which is a show where the hosts are joined by guests to play games and talk about their expertise. In our case, it's space. We'll talk more about that next in What's Up. Hey, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: Hello, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Okay, so my evil scheming for all of these years has finally come to fruition. We finally have a moment to talk about space gaming on Planetary Radio.

Bruce Betts: That's quite the long build up. Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh, I know, right? I'm a super passionate gamer, so are you. We don't always play the same games, but I love that they're trying to fuse this love of space and advocacy for science with esports. I've never seen anyone do this before and it's just such a cool concept.

Bruce Betts: What a neat collaboration that come out of wherever it came out of. Space games.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Space games. Do you have any favorite space games?

Bruce Betts: Let me take you back to before people thought there were computer games. I think I first saw it when my brother was in high school and they had an old HP computer in 1975, and there was a game, so to speak, where you would pick the velocity changes as the Apollo spacecraft went down to the surface and figured out if you crashed or ran out of fuel. So that wasn't my favorite, but it wasn't my first.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Was it like a text-based game, or like an ASCII art thing?

Bruce Betts: Oh God, yes. Oh, no, no. It was text. Text space. Speaking of text-based games, skip 10 years ahead or more, when I was in grad school, I was doing work initially, my thesis was supposed to tie to observations with Phobos, Mars' moon, but then spacecraft failures, and so that changed. But at the time I was working on Phobos, I with a friend went into, here's another throwback for some of you, Egghead Software, and there was a game called Leather Goddesses of Phobos. I was like, "Oh, I must own that." Text-based game, Leather Goddesses of Phobos. It was quite hilarious. Puzzle solving. It was like a Zork. Anyway, I did move it into the future, so more recently, No Man's Sky, I've spent quite a lot of time with that and I know you're big-

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I love that game.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, you're a big fan of that and a big fan. Much people play a lot more Destiny than I have, and so ...

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's true. I played so much Destiny too. But what other game can I go around the solar system and just, I don't know, kind of explore on the maps? I love the art design in that game.

Bruce Betts: Hey, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, we explored Mars and Venus in our mind. I'm just wandering into all sorts of weird corners.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh man, you just reminded me of that Star Wars game, Knights of the Old Republic, totally classic. I've played not every space game, but a whole lot of them. No Man's Sky, I really loved. I played Eve Online for a long time back in the day, no longer. I went on to other things. Kerbal Space Program was a really great one. I played Space Engineers, gosh, Empyrean. And recently, I got into Dyson Sphere Program, if anybody likes automation games and wants to just absolutely ruin a weekend by trying to build up resources. It was a great one.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, we should have started with you.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. Does Halo count? I think Halo counts.

Bruce Betts: Oh, I forgot I was going to mention Halo. I mean, I guess. Yeah, played all the Halos or I think all the ... Anyways, several of them.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. I want Starfield more recently, that Bethesda game. I always love a good RPG. Not my favorite of the Bethesda games, but the fact that you can actually go to Mars and go visit the Curiosity Rover or go to the old, broken down Kennedy Space Center. Perseverance's head is in your group hangout room. There's so many great space games, and I'm glad you and I are going to have a fun opportunity coming up next week on Wednesday on September 3rd. We're going to be on PBS SoCal's, Won't You Be My Gamer show.

Bruce Betts: Won't You Be My Gamer? Yeah, I am looking forward to it, but I don't really know what we're going to be doing other than someone is playing video games. I hope it's us while trying to answer general space questions. It should be a fun romp for all involved.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I know. I wonder what game they're going to choose. This is going to be interesting.

Bruce Betts: Probably Doom. People think space, they think Doom.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, I'm going to have a fun time with that, and thanks for coming out into the wild and doing cool gaming events with me. I really appreciate having a coworker that gets my love of gaming. We don't talk about it on the show very often, but I feel like this is one of the things that we bond over most.

Bruce Betts: Oh, yeah, definitely. And I would guess our audience, there are some of you out there really annoyed with this conversation, but I think a lot of space fans are gamers as well, so hopefully you're interested as well, and you can flood Sarah's email with your thoughts on space gaming.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Please do.

Bruce Betts: You know what's a great game?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: What?

Bruce Betts: This is obvious for some people, but I realize some may not know that the ... Of course, we have The Great Red Spot on Jupiter that's been around since we've started observing it 300, 400 years ago. Great Dark Spot on Neptune that Voyager saw was by five years later when Hubble was up and looking at it, it was gone, and those dark spots keep coming and going on Neptune.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Wonder what's up with that. And you didn't do this on purpose, but I'm actually wearing a necklace with Neptune and the dark spot right here.

Bruce Betts: No way.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: No way.

Bruce Betts: How do you know I didn't do it on purpose?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: You just anticipated. Yeah.

Bruce Betts: No way.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's because next week, we're talking about Uranus and I didn't have a Uranus themed necklace, so I went with Neptune. Need more Uranus jewelry.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, Uranus. It gets a lot of grief.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Anticipating a lot of weird jokes out of that one. But, yeah, what is up with the dark spots?

Bruce Betts: It's tough to tell. I mean, common thoughts are it's more of like a window through the methane-rich cloud deck still tied to an anti-cyclonic storm like Jupiter. Some theory that because they move around in latitude, whereas Jupiter's is pretty much locked in one place due to the high-speed winds going east and west above and below it.

I guess the Neptune ones wander around some, but good news is we'll be able to see them better now with James Webb Space Telescope and already people were doing a lot of creative stuff to see them and, of course, playing in the infrared. It's always fun for me because I see in the infrared. It's unusual.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Like a bee? Oh, no, that's ultraviolet.

Bruce Betts: Like some snakes, I think. People have called me that. There you go. It's pretty straightforward, but I find it interesting that you have the ... More amazing that you have a storm that lasts for hundreds of years, but still amazing that they last for a few years, but then they go away and they're a different type thing, but similar. I don't know. It's crazy. Crazy, science, space, it's just cool out there.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Just cool.

Bruce Betts: Hey, everybody, go out there, look up the next guy and think about whether you would be tilted on your side if you were with Sarah playing games in space, or would there be any meaning being tilted on your side only if you were orbiting? Anyway, thank you and good night.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh my gosh, there are so many space games that we forgot to mention. So before I go, shout out to the Helldivers, the Space Marines, and the people that are still thinking about their time in Mass Effect. I hope you all have a wonderful time exploring worlds and getting good.

We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week to talk about Uranus or some fun mysteries from the Voyager era, and it's got a new moon. If you love the show, you can get Planetary Radio T-shirts at planetary.org/shop, along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise.

Help others discover the passion, beauty, and joy of space science and exploration by leaving a review or a rating on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your feedback not only brightens our day, but helps other curious minds find their place in space through Planetary Radio.

You can also send us your space thoughts, questions, and poetry at our email, [email protected]. Or if you're a Planetary Society member, leave a comment in the Planetary Radio space in our member community app. We definitely have some threads in there talking about space gaming if you'd like to join.

Planetary Radio is produced by The Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by our members. You can join us at planetary.org/join. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers. Casey Dreier is the host of our monthly space policy edition, and Mat Kaplan hosts our monthly book club edition. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Pieter Schlosser. My name is Sarah Al-Ahmed, the host and producer of Planetary Radio, and until next week. Ad astra.