The ultimate science game is 20 Questions?

So as a game designer who is intensely interested in the scientific process and has studied the psychology of scientific reasoning, I'm interested in making a game to teach science. I don't mean teach facts about a particular field, I mean a game that embodies, represents, and can be used to teach about the process of science. The cycle of observation, interpreting that observation, testing that interpretation with another observation, and so on that we use to understand how the world we live in works. I think that would be super awesome and provide a sorely needed service.

Yes, geeking out about the scientific method and
trying to make it a board game may be even stronger
nerd credentials than previously presented, I suppose

This post isn't about the side project game I'm working on, though. Well, except for context: I was thinking about how to do this, and being the big dreamer I am, my initial impulse was to not just represent the cyclical ongoing process of empirical observation and theory revision, but to have systems in the game to show the interplay of surrounding factors as well. For example,  needing some theories in other domains first (like plate tectonics and hereditary traits for the theory of evolution), how new theories have to address all the evidence for current theories, how past theories accumulated anomalous data until a new theory was more attractive, and so on. So after the initial rush of sketching out these systems, I realized this would be a rather complex game.

Not that I don't enjoy complex games.

That's of course fine for a general boardgame, but if I wanted to communicate these concepts to kids as young as possible (which I do) this is not an optimal approach. What I really needed was more a progression of games/activities. So ideally, something only verbal with no pieces at all to get players thinking in a scientific way, then a core game that was just the scientific process, and then expansions for those other systems that could later be bolted on; so once players were familiar with the core game, depth and some complexity could be added, to provide a richer experience and model of the process. (So as a side note, I'm fiddling with just the core game now.)

But when I tried to think of that initial activity, I realized it already exists; The game I want to start with, thats a verbal game with no pieces required, that has players iterate through this cycle, and that involves some critical thinking to refine an idea and progress. Its called 20 Questions.

Yes, the game that proved that one friend is always thinking about Batman.

Think about the goal of 20 questions and how it works for everyone guessing;
You are trying to determine information about an unknown thing. To do this, you get to conduct a number of tests that tell you limited information about the thing (ie yes or no), and then use the information for all the previous tests to devise the next test. You go on figuring out what questions to ask and using the responses to ask more questions until you know the information you want, and that is just such a nice idealized version of the general scientific process in playable form. It makes me giddy, just thinking about it.

But it gets even better. Think about when you play 20 questions and how it progresses. It always starts with the same, practically formalized questions: "Person, place, or thing", "real or fictional", "larger or smaller than a breadbox", "living or dead". Then some other broad but less used questions, and eventually you are asking questions you have probably never asked in a previous game.

Ok, so a real living person who is sort of famous
from the internet, for youtube videos...
Have they ever done a video in peanutbutter face?

Which is just so appropriate. First you have the big general tests that are used on everything, because they are so general, and these are time-tested...tests that have persisted because they are effective. Then the main categories within those distinctions. The breadbox one strikes me as particularly funny, because its a common question/test based on a reference thats outdated but is still used in this one field as a standard convention. That may be funnier to people in some fields than others (or anyone using the Imperial system over metric).

But as you progress into tests that will be useful for addressing this specific, novel problem, there stop being stock tests. You have to think about similar things you've dealt with before, or generate entirely new questions based on what you think the possibilities are. And that even involves evaluating what the remaining possibilities are and what test would distinguish between them.

Ok, so yes to the peanut butter, but not a vlogbrother.
You faked me out. Hmm...was it for comedic effect or cosmetic?

I mean when I thought about it, I just couldn't come up with a better lightweight activity to express science as a game. Its just so good. A game where the point is literally to discover some piece of information about the world (it may only be what someone else is thinking of and of limited utility, but as a psychologist its still totally worth knowing). And the way you do this is a cycle of test, refine your idea of what the possibilities are, then test again. And sometimes you get a response that makes you completely rethink what those possibilities are.

Cosmetic? geez I am not up to date on my peanut butter facial youtubers...

And you can play cooperatively with others, where you are all trying to think of good questions and collaborating. And its such a general game, it demonstrates how this kind of thinking can be applied across many, many areas. Its just so good.

And as boggled as I am by how well this ubiquitous game presents scientific reasoning, I am at least as boggled by how much less interesting and effective the standard ways of teaching "the scientific method" are. Even more so when I searched for other games on it.

"Look on my gamified quizzes, ye designers, and despair!"

Like a lot of others in science and science communication, I think the science is awesome, in the full, outdated, drop-your-jaw-and-stare meaning of that word. From the impressive feats to the everyday improvements, its just great. And all that progress comes from this empirical, critical process.

I think its a great disservice to reduce that process to something students memorize, regurgitate, and then think of as "something scientists do in a lab", something separated from their own life.

This is something people do all the time, but don't think about as 'scientific' since its not in a lab or a classroom. I think (perhaps naively) that if you get people, especially when they're young, to see science as how we learn about the world, as something they are already doing outside the classroom, and at its core as that process of making sense of the world based on what we've observed of it, then they'll respond better to it. It can become a thing like running or talking or reading,  that everyone does, but some do professionally, rather than something scary you don't understand.

And I think more people like that would be a good thing.
Even if they still argued just as much but about what findings meant and methods. 

And Hank could have even more people calling for an encore.

What do you think?
Is 20 questions not as awesome as I think? Can you read even more into it?
Is there some other game that embodies scientific thinking even better or more portably?
Or do you just have a story of how science is awesome?
Let me know.

Quick thought: scientific reasoning and reading

I was thinking about science this morning, and came up with something I wish I had during the previous work for my Masters:

"Scientist aren't the only ones who do scientific reasoning any more than book critics are the only ones who read. Sure the critic may read more challenging material and have a richer discussion of what is going on in it, but reading is something your average person does all day everyday from signs to get around to emails and entertainment. It's something you're doing right now without thinking it extraordinary or uncomfortable. So it is with scientific reasoning too; when defined as 'drawing conclusions based on previous observations and experience' then most problem solving or even wondering if something is true would fall under this label; its why you could say (if pretentious) that you were 'theorizing that X is Y' or 'hypothesizing this author is wrong'.

So when we talking about how people use scientific reasoning, its not about just scientists, but about how people solve problems and make sense of the world they live in everyday."

That would have been a stronger, cleaner introduction to the topic than what I went with at the time, which relied more on examples than a good analogy. I really like the reading analogy to strongly say that this is a common practice, though there are specialized practitioners.

My focus may be more on 'critical thinking' and 'problem solving' now, but its all related. And I still think if we can understand how people do these types of things and how to either teach or help them to do them better, the benefits will more than pay for the effort.

Just a quick thought.

I < 3 Valve

So last week I talked about the transition from identifying as a passive consumer, to a critical consumer or even creator of content, and specifically about communities supporting this shift; about how communities often improve themselves and those making this transition. Picking up from there, lets talk about what it looks like when company, a more formal, business oriented group directs its resources to encouraging that.

"Gentlemen, how do we help our customers? Yes, Johnson?"
"I don't understand sir."

If you want to see what it looks like for a company to value that transition (or something very close to it) you want to look at Valve. You know, the company behind Steam, the platform that does ~51% of the digital distribution of PC games (according to 2011 numbers)? Every time I watch a talk  by Gabe Newell, it makes me feel better about the company, its views,  and the directions its going.

Now, I said "something very close to it" earlier because Gabe is generally talking about content creation from more of an economic perspective, as a opposed to the sort cultural and intrapersonal perspectives the vlogbrothers and Jim Gee were coming from. While they talk about how it benefits someone to feel included and productive, and develop their ideas and abilities or how society benefits from more perspectives and new ideas, Gabe tends to talk about connecting creators to markets, or providing monetary incentives to become a creator to people who previously had none (for this type of work).

Its a different way of looking at the at the situation, but it makes perfect sense when you're talking from a business standpoint. It also shows why Valve is encouraging this type of capability growth; by setting itself up so it profits from market activity, its incentivized to help as many creators as possible reach as large a possible audience as possible. As opposed to the way most people think of a simplified model of a business where its incentivized to get as many people to give it as much money for its product.



"Ok, that part I understood"
"Johnson, stop being such a strawman and try to keep up."

So this sort of demonstrates how a system can be set up to where a company is monetarily encouraged to support these community effects that can be so positive, directly benefitting from them rather than it just being a nice bonus that marginally helps your specific game, product, or service.

The really interesting part of considering Valve though is considering how it got to this place and what its continued trajectory looks like, based on that past. Steam may have started as a way for Valve to distribute and verify its own games, but it grew into a convenient way to affordably buy games, lowering the barriers both in terms of availability and cost. Its one of the things Gabe talked about: connecting producers with markets they didn't have access to and making games easily widely available, regardless of what was physically available in your region.

And then there was the step of not just lowering barriers for consumers, but for creators;
making indie games more visible and available. Offering software to make games on Steam. Adding the workshop, so people can make and share pieces of games, and develop their skills.

Without even using training montages.

To the rage of Half-Life fans everywhere, now they seem more concerned with providing interesting tools and spaces for other people to make stuff than making stuff themselves. But the way they moved there from producing, and clearly have people who are still very focused on how to incentivize and influence behavior and who are interested in "creating markets" and enabling creators is what really makes them interesting to watch.

I said Gabe Newell makes me feel good about the company when he talks, but everytime they rollout something new picking apart its design and purpose is what really drives it home . If you don't think they want more creators, look at the workshop, and if you don't think they're still just as sharp on how to manipulate users, look at the trading cards and badges system. There's allot of amusing snark and/or ranting about companies doing one thing and saying another, but this post is about Valve because what they're doing and saying lines up, and what they're doing is very interesting compared to what most everyone else is doing.

Oh, another action/adventure/shooter game as a white male protagonist 
now with microtransactions? Cool, cool.
 Yeah we'll just be over here lowering barriers to entry
and enabling innovative new ideas at lower risk.

Of course if I'm going to talk about them now, I probably should address the Steam universe and Steam box. But its just continuing this trend, albeit very ambitiously. Putting steam in the living room opens up a larger audience to participate in playing games, and even contributing to them from there. But that's not the really ambitious part. Competing with consoles is kind of ambitious, creating an open platform, to enable the hardware competition and peripheral variety PCs have, is pretty ambitious, but again, not what I see as their biggest challenge.

If Valve is in the living room, with this track record, unless they screw it up first, they have to be eventually aiming to reduce barriers for other media: movies, tv, music, whatever. Eventually it'll be competing with (or working with) Youtube and Netflix and iTunes and whatever other media they can.

Yea, he shall be the lord of media distribution,
and this shall be his crown.

Now that much content under one banner is terrifying, for any group to have that much power over communications. But we have massive media empires right now, and I will be very interested to see, if Valve can get to that level, what it'll look like to have one with this creator focused, barrier breaking model driving it.



Ok, I may have gone off the rails at the end, but what do you think of Valve? Am I giving them too  much credit or vastly misreading they're direction? Can you think of are other companies that support a transition to a critical consumer or creator?
Let me know what you think in comments.

photo credit: ign

Creating creators and critics

Originally, this was going to be the Part 2 of the community post; last week's post was originally longer, but I couldn't figure out how to articulate everything by my self-imposed deadline so I split it up. A significant chunk of the followup was going to be talking about Jim Gee's thoughts on 'affinity groups'.

...but then I saw this this video (as part of my continuing effort to watch every vlogbrothers video in the archive) and now this post is going to be about Gee's more recent thoughts and how they're related.


Uh...yay?

 Ok, in order to get there, lets start off talking about "consumers" and specifically about consuming media, be that TV, movies, music, video games, comics books, book books, newspapers, what-have-you. Except for video games, people generally think of "consuming media" as a passive experience; you're reading or watching something others have made. You're really not participating or interacting with it, but just kind of absorbing it.

or at least advertisers hope you are.

This kind of view is really clear  in the language; vegging out in front of the boobtube, or the idiot box, zoning out. All this imagery of being super passive.

However, this is not the only way of 'consuming media'; you can also consume it reflectively, considering the deeper levels of meaning or context in the media. What does this symbol mean? What is the creator trying to say and how? How does this relate to other similar pieces of media?



What does this dick joke say about the environment?

Gee calls this 'being a critical consumer', and the vlogbrothers call it thinking complexly, and its a parallel theme that's very important to both of them. For the vlogbrothers, its how you start to make sense of the world, and they extend this into science, too. To them this idea is about finding some way of more deeply understanding the world, be it through literary analysis or scientific quantifying and statistics, and using it.  To find some way to help yourself better understand the world you are in, meaningfully discuss it with others, increase that understanding, and act based on it.

And that's where we come back to Gee.
If you're not familiar with James Paul Gee,
he's a professor who was trained as a linguist, then became focused the potential of video games as a medium, then started really looking at how video games teach and engage, and how people interact with them and each other around them, then wrote a book about it...

That I'm a fan of.

...and has been an influential thinker in the academic space around games since. (If that phrasing seemed odd, I'm using "academic space around games" to go general and avoid the whole serious games/educational/games for impact/games for good etc. naming issue.)

Now, that's the revised edition, because he wrote it years ago. More recently, Gee's been talking more about critical consumption and a "modding attitude". So critical consumption is similar to what we were just discussing, but from there things go slightly differently. See for Gee its not just about being able to discuss creations meaningfully, but about discussing things in the manner of a creator and from there creating things yourself as part of  larger discussions.

For example, in literature, this could look like someone reading Fahrenheit 451, discussing in classes or online the themes of how man relates to technology, and how they're expressed in the book and whether they agree or not, and eventually writing something themselves, to express their feelings and thoughts on that same topic. Or other topics that became more important to them during that journey.



Like how awesome and terrifying robot hounds can be.

Gee refers to this shift to identifying as a creator as a "modding attitude" because he was focused on games, and there you can plot a nice pregression of person who plays games, to "gamer", to modder, and perhaps from there to game creator.

Though, to be clear, modding is creating something new, the same way a short video , or essay, or parody of a song is creating something new and contributing something to larger cultural discussions of issues. You don't have to be making  full movies or games, or books to be contributing.



A single image can be enough.

And this is where I think the vlogbrothers and Gee's feelings converge; its important to be able to reflectively consume media, because if you can't do that you won't really be able to engage with the issues within or behind those media or meaningfully contribute to larger discussions. And having more people meaningfully contributing makes those discussions richer, bringing new perspectives or ideas that others hadn't thought of. And when someone engages with those discussions its also usually good for them, helping them feel capable, feel like they belong to something, and helping them be better able to deal with their lives in some way.

This was one of the things I was groping for a way to express in the community post, and cut; one of the things good communities do is support this transition. They welcoming novices,  help them develop skills of critical analysis, provide aspirational and instructive examples of higher level discourse, and create safe areas to try out new ideas and ways of expressing them. These communities enrich themselves, and enrich the people involved in them.

If in the last post I had asked "How do you make games that spawn good communities?" rather than focusing on 'positive impact', this would have been part of the definition of "good".



Not taking yourself too seriously all the time would likely have been another part.

Gee highlights facilitating this transition as something the education system needs to be doing and is currently bad at. The vlogbrothers highlight this as a reason they like youtube: because the weak barrier between creators and consumers allows for more interaction and (and this part may be more implicit) a very easy transition from one to the other.

So what do you think about the importance of shifting your identity from the audience of a message to a participant in a discourse?  Is it important? Why?
How about its importance in terms of the media we're bombarded with everyday, and being able process and contextualize it all rather than being buffeted about?

Leave your thoughts in the comments,
or if you have a story of making this kind of transition in some area, whether its how you went from watching films to making them or how it felt doing a young authors contest or science fair, leave that too. It seems that these can be some of the most interesting experiences to share or to hear about.

photo credits: yaelol.wordpress.com, hhhuuuhhh125 on deviantart, , sophiedaveyphoto.wordpress.com, semi-rad.com