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Learning the Scientific Method From Games
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."
Har har har! I is made smarterer by playing the WoWs!
...to the summary was: What? I didn't catch a word of that.
Thankfully, TFA is a bit better:
While I have the highest respect for my esteemed colleagues in Madison, I find myself disagreeing with Steinkuehler's conclusions. These kids are not practicing science, they're practicing being human beings. And as human beings, we find new and inventive ways to meet a challenge whenever one is presented to us.
All one needs to do is look back through history. Aliens didn't build the pyramids; humans did. Humans who were given the seemingly impossible task rose to the challenge and made it happen. The Flavian Amphitheatre (aka the Coliseum) didn't just appear when someone pulled the plug on a drain and the water swirled around. Humans wanted a better place to host their blood sport. So they devised a new method. Trains didn't start moving themselves. Humans had a problem of not enough labor. So they devised a solution.
Which isn't to say that these many engineering feats were devoid of what we today think of as "science". However, it is important to remember that the scientific process (i.e. the thing that separates "science" from simply "effort") is a formalized process that vets the actual facts from the statistical noise. If you are not following the formalized methodology, you are not performing "science".
Which isn't to say that I don't think these kids deserve mad props. They used their brains and were rewarded for it. Which is something to be proud of in a comfortable modern society that makes it all too easy to turn one's brain to the "off" position. :-)
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Games undeniably require considerable evaluation and analysis to play at a high level. Strategies have to be formulated according to a model, and honed by tests against the gameworld, unknowns have to be tested, etc, etc. However, I'm not sure that what goes on in games is very much like science, except perhaps at the level of small scale mechanics(testing and similar).
With all the games I've ever played(not all of them certainly; but a fair few), I've never escaped the sense that I'm attacking a constructed puzzle, that was built by somebody with the explicit purpose of being a game. Games just reek of design. Some are better than others; but all of them are, to a noticable extent, a process of reverse engineering somebody's carefully designed puzzle.
Very few games even rise to the level of having a degree of unintended emergent behavior, rather than strictly scripted design, and what does emerge frequently derives from the humans in a multiplayer game, not the game itself. Most games are also orders of magnitude less complex than even fairly simple natural systems. Find an object in a game? It almost definitely has a purpose.
I agree that there is an overlap between the skills needed to dissect a game's workings, and the skills needed to study the world; but the epistemology of dissecting a game and the epistemology of studying the world seem significantly distinct.
Since games are probably more relevant than my amateur whinings about epistemology, does anybody have examples of games that seem particularly "natural", not in the sense of visually appealing or having accurate physics(though those are nice); but in the sense of feeling as though they hadn't been engineered in every detail?
It certainly isn't perfect; but I'd say Dwarf Fortress had some of that feel for me.
Yes they are: Computer science is a branch of discrete mathematics. It's just that software engineering isn't computer science.
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Actually, while I'm not on the WoW forums at all, I can tell you that in some games they _are_ doing proper science.
The scientific method isn't about publishing in the sanctified journals and getting grants. It merely says that you have to make falsifiable predictions, and go with the theory that, in this order, (A) better explains the available data, and (B) if they're equal in the former aspect, pick the simplest.
And a lot of reverse engineering a game does just that: it devises experiments, measures some data, and makes falsifiable predictions. And in all cases I've seen, the simplest theory _is_ the one picked.
One example was COH before the game devs decided to actually show you the numbers. People did devise experiments to basically measure a lot of data, and solved the equations to come to the endurance (mana) costs of powers. And made falsifiable predictions.
E.g., one such experiment was to figure out a mix of powers which drains your endurance to zero, measure over how much time. Given enough such equations (at least one per variable), you can calculate the costs of each. And you can make the predictions for another set of powers. Or in reverse, how long it takes to recharge X points of mana, if you have powers A, B and C turned on. And again, the experiments were done, and available to everyone, to try to falsify the theory based on those predictions.
The theory also passed Occam's Razor with flying colours, in that it assumed the minimum possible: that each power only has a given cost per second, without any other interdependencies. E.g., if power A costs 0.21 endurance/sec, it always does so, regardless of whether you have powers B and C also active, and regardless of who you are or what you're doing. And again, even that assumption was falsifiable and supported by experimental data.
Now someone may argue that reverse-engineering a game is hardly a _serious_ scientific domain, or that it doesn't exactly benefit humanity in the same way as the LHC's reverse-engineering hadrons does. Fairy 'nuff. But nevertheless the scientific method was applied. Quite literally.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Mathematics isn't a branch of science either. Mathematicians don't practice the "scientific method" as it is generally known, although they do exercise logical reasoning.