Videogames Blind Us With Science

Clive Thompson has a good piece in Wired about computer games considered as science: kids jointly exploring and analyzing the underlying properties of a game and its components as an example of the scientific method. They go through a process very much like the discourse in scientific journals, experimentally verifying theories about the game's behavior.

I'm a little concerned that this approach to learning analysis, figuring out the behavior of a preprogrammed system, implicitly depends on a Creator of the system. Isn't that a poor assumption to have as an unconscious foundation for scientific research?

Thompson makes much of the fact that the kids deny that their process has anything to do with science, then goes on to decry the state of science education as the presentation of boring facts. Well, there's nothing new about that, just like history is presented as boring dates and literature is presented as boring poems. (Fortunately, I enjoyed Homer in spite of anything a grad student teaching freshman English could do to desiccate him.)

This isn't news. The best teachers are, and have always been, those who have a real love for their subject and are able to share their excitement with their students. The eternal problem is how to find such teachers and compensate them appropriately.

Games Without Frontiers: How Videogames Blind Us With Science