UPDATE
Shortly after we published this piece this morning we received this tweet from Jon McKellan, the creator of Observation:
We got you. pic.twitter.com/8hraMPe8ts
— Screen Burn (@_ScreenBurn) September 18, 2019
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.
Firstly, this is BRILLIANT. Secondly, Jon was kind enough to tell me a little bit about the use of POSS in Observation: (Be warned, the last paragraph contains a spoiler.)
“When we were designing the Astrophysics missions for the game, we had to explore the various ways star charts were presented. The player is viewing all of this as SAM, an AI that is having a bit of an existential crisis, and so the natural direction was to go digital – a fully digital map, created as a scientific 3D model or something. But much like in Stories Untold, there is something about analog being presented as being ‘more honest’. That the best, most accurate or truest form of something is not the digital form, but rather something made out of chemicals and light. Like it’s somehow tamper-proof.