Serious Games - World of Borecraft?

Slate has up a piece right now talking, in a somewhat frustrated tone, about the mixed message that serious or education games can pass on. The article recognizes that serious games have a great deal of power, and can be useful ... but do they have to be boring? "The basic issue here is that it's easier to make a fun game educational than it is to inject fun into an educational game. In his 2005 book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues that games like The Sims and Grand Theft Auto make us smarter by training the mind in adaptive behavior and problem-solving. Most overtly educational software, though, ignores the complexities that make games riveting and enriching. The serious-gaming types think they can create educational software from whole cloth. In reality, they have a lot to learn from Grand Theft Auto." Coincidentally, Gamasutra is running an article entitled Who Says Videogames Have to be Fun?, which looks at the same issue from a slightly different point of view.

Comments

Heh. Oh please...

[Moraelin]

Here's a fun concept for you: Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: massaging the data into looking like whatever you want it to look like. That's what Koster is doing. Just because Raph can argue a hypothesis without (A) any more proof than his own delusions of grandeur (it must be true because He said so), and (B) based on some very vague correlations and assumptions (just because it involves some learning, doesn't mean that's what triggers the "fun" signal), doesn't make it true.

Here's another fun concept for you: Correlation does not imply causation. Just because (A) you're having fun, and (B) you're learning something, doesn't mean that A causes B. B is something so intrinsic to the brain, that it's there just by virtue of being there all the time. It's like saying that the sun causes the fun signal, because hey, every time you're having fun, the sun still exists.

And in this case it's not just the taking a wild assumption, it's outright ignoring reality and the readily available counter-examples. There's a heap of counter examples where B (learning) is present, yet A (the fun) is missing. Think a boring lecture at college. Think being forced to learn a subject you don't like. FFS, think the players'/users' complaints about the learning curve. So postulating that "B => A" is just stupid. If there is at least one case (and there are plenty) where B is true, yet A is false, that implication just doesn't hold.

Here's a third fun concept for you: theory != hypothesis. What Koster does is just handwaving a _hypothesis_. It's not a theory, it's not some grand revelation, it's just an unproven hypothesis. Supported by nothing more than handwaving and ignoring everything that was already known.

As for point 4, no, au contraire. It means that there is _no_ dedicated "learning is fun" circuit up there. Those signals measure how much your situation has actually improved, not how much you learned from it. Heck, there isn't even any actual learning until you've slept a night or two on it: that's when any data is actually committed to long-term storage. Seriously, read a real biology book, if you want real info, not Koster's ego-masturbation.

Oh, wait, is that you, Koster? Well, then carry on. That's exactly the kind of thing I expected from you.