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Learning the Scientific Method From Games

Posted by Soulskill on from the theorycrafting-101 dept.

Wired is running a story about a research paper out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison which discusses how some games get players to do scientific research without them explicitly realizing it. The paper itself is also available. Quoting: "... we examine the scientific habits of mind and dispositions that characterize online discussion forums of the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Eighty-six percent of the forum discussions were posts engaged in 'social knowledge construction' rather than social banter. Over half of the posts evidenced systems based on reason, one in ten evidenced model-based reasoning, and 65% displayed an evaluative epistemology in which knowledge is treated as an open-ended process of evaluation and argument."

4 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. The New Scientific Method by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The old days Scientific Method of objecttively searching for truth is more or less obsolete.

    These days most scientists have to work hard to keep their funding: publishing, making sure that they don't say things that offend their benefactors, etc.

    If you don't believe me, go listen to the CMU podcast about Bill Gates. They suck up to him so badly it is embarrassing just to listen to it. So much for what was once a leading Computer Science department.

    As much as we might dislike it, that is the New Scientific Method.

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
    1. Re:The New Scientific Method by drakethegreat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "The whole thing springs from the fact that science is the pursuit of knowledge, and in some systems (like chemistry) you're building models to understand the unknown, while in others (like logic) you're working with the consequences of knowingly assumed premises." Believe it or not in theoretical Computer Science you build models as well. You seem to be suggesting that in all cases you have a theory and are looking to verify results but in certain cases you can build a model simply to analyze what is still unknown. For instance getting trace data on a network in some weird way may actually yield results that nobody had expected. Yes its a world of grays we live in and ultimately we put order and associations with what stuff is but it can always fall apart.

    2. Re:The New Scientific Method by gad_zuki! · · Score: 3, Interesting

      >The old days Scientific Method of objecttively searching for truth is more or less obsolete.

      What old days? When scientists were beholden to Lords and Kings? People who could not only cut off funding with the wave of their hands but people would could have you tried and executed for discovering the "wrong" things?

      Or do you mean before that in the ancient world, where great thinkers who spoke out were put to death? Trial of Socrates ring any bells?

      You are experiencing whats called idealization of the fictional past. Things are most likely better now (post-enlightenment post-democracy post-civil rights) than ever. I mean, the kids of non-nobles going to university and teaching and publishing disagreeable things?? Scandalous!!

  2. Not news by archen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In any game like this you'll always find a minority that will do all the theory crafting in order to maximize some aspect of the game. For World of Warcraft people usually refer to the elitist-jerks forums that specializes in this. However I'd say far less than 1% really ever does any concrete critical thinking about game aspects in order to improve play.

    I myself have actually gone and done the math on some things, and I actually got into a sort of "discussion" with another person over it. The conclusions I came up with were easily testable and easily verifiable, yet they refused to believe unless they saw "proof" of it somewhere on the web. (For people who don't play WoW, or a rogue this is going to be a crappy example).

    I play an assasination rogue, the staple of which is a move called "mutilate" - an attack with both daggers that awards combo points. However if there is a crit, it will award 3. I couldn't find any information how this actually worked so I started thinking about it myself. I found that each dagger had a chance to do a critical strike independently, and that if only one of them would crit I would get the extra combo point. So what are the chances of me getting the extra point? I just read up on simple probability and found it was a non mutually exclusive probability event and plugged in my critical chance (given on the character stat page). I can say however that out of the 15k people on my server, I'm probably the ONLY one who has bothered to figure this out. And also that not only will people not believe you and do the (scientific) tests themselves, but will blindly follow some random page on the web - even if it's wrong.

    But that's the world we live in.