How Videogames Blind Us with Science

“A few years ago, Con­stance Steinkuehler — a game aca­d­e­mic at the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin — was spend­ing 12 hours a day play­ing Lin­eage, the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a ‘siege princess,’ run­ning 150-person raids on hell­ishly dif­fi­cult bosses. Most of her guild mem­bers were teenage boys.

But they were pretty good at fig­ur­ing out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were build­ing Excel spread­sheets into which they’d dump all the infor­ma­tion they’d gath­ered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what dam­age, and when. Then they’d develop a math­e­mat­i­cal model to explain how the boss worked — and to pre­dict how to beat it.

Often, the first model wouldn’t work very well, so the group would argue about how to strengthen it. Some would offer up new data they’d col­lected, and sug­gest tweaks to the model. ‘They’d be sit­ting around argu­ing about what model was the best, which was most pre­dic­tive,’ Steinkuehler recalls.

That’s when it hit her: The kids were prac­tic­ing science.

They were using the sci­en­tific method. They’d think of a hypoth­e­sis — This boss is really sus­cep­ti­ble to fire spells — and then col­lect evi­dence to see if the hypoth­e­sis was cor­rect. If it wasn’t, they’d improve it until it accounted for the observed data.

This led Steinkuehler to a fas­ci­nat­ing and provoca­tive con­clu­sion: Videogames are becom­ing the new hotbed of sci­en­tific think­ing for kids today.…

This is what Steinkuehler reports in a research paper — ‘Sci­en­tific Habits of Mind in Vir­tual Worlds’ (.pdf) — that she will pub­lish in this spring’s Jour­nal of Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion and Tech­nol­ogy. She and her co-author, Sean Dun­can, down­loaded the con­tent of 1,984 posts in 85 threads in a dis­cus­sion board for play­ers of World of War­craft.” [Games with­out Fron­tiers]

Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff. We had Con­stance speak at the first (non-ALA) Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Libraries Sym­po­sium back in 2005 (sadly, MLS has taken down all of the mate­ri­als that were online about that event, so I can’t point you to any­thing about it). You can read my notes from her ses­sion here, though..