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..

David Thomas, Justin Hollander

David:
Urban planning as a curriculum
city systems, regional systems
wanted to teach young architects to learn to build using games
tend to think of urban planning as a design problem - if this then that
but cities don’t work that way
conflict happens in games, similar to how conflict happens in cities

looking for ways to empower the powerless, to provide access to people who have none
social justice component
ethically and morally try as hard as you can to look to the people who don’t have power and make decisions that affect them first (that’s how they train urban planners)

“oh, you teach SimCity” but it’s the worst game ever for teaching urban planning
games are about the themes for how conflicts are resolved in the real world
“let’s use some games”

Justin:
Forest Hills Neighborhood in Boston
they built a version of FH in Second Life where they can interact and experiment

David:
urban planning is the public’s interest in private property
what’s missing in SimCity? there’s no private property - nobody complains when you tear something down
it’s a weird model for how cities are designed
“the best you get out of SimCity is Stalinism” - David Thomas
teach them that’s not how cities work, but what games can you use next?
“dice wars” - what if the shapes are neighborhoods? shifting boundaries that are contested and constantly moving
there’s something competitive about cities

TransAmerica - most negotiation in cities is like this, in the open, even though there are secret motives that you won’t know about until it’s too late; might benefit you or hurt you
play the game for a little while and then talk about it

Carcassonne - it’s like chess; everything is out and everyone can see what is happening; constant negotiation to build the map, and the map for every game is different; this is how cities work - they’re all trying to maximize the map for themselves

nobody designed the neighborhood we’re in, designed how high the buildings are, etc.
environmental maps of the conflict that occurred to create

Fluxx - get the students playing tactically because the rules are always changing; a moving target where the goals and rules keep changing and you have influence over the rules, like when groups come together in cities to wield power to rewrite rules
even rules themselves and their systems are very fluid

Justin:
people in the area couldn’t actually get in to access Second Life (challenge)

David:
do games trivialize the subject matter?
it’s hard to get a community to care about issues until you can show them the effects

needs games he can teach in 5 minutes and that can be played in a short time
is now thinking about designing a planning card game to help fill this gap, currently shoehorning content

next year, plans to implement the “value of play” workshop into the class
tries to bring planning to life for students