There are countless videos on Youtube of people trying these things out – stacking barrels in Farcry or balancing helicopters on top of other helicopters in Battlefield: Vietnam.  Constance Steinkuehler, an academic in the field of Educational Communications & Technology, asserts that kids in Lineage and World of Warcraft have been unwittingly conducting experiments according to the scientific method in order to understand the world around them!  This behaviour seems to be quite common.  If you look through any forum dedicated to a game you’ll find extensive write-ups of all the units, power-ups and a weigh-in on whether something is worth having or doing.  Http://strategy.diii.net, a site for Diablo II, h0as links to strategy guides which outline the principles of experiment design. A site dedicated to World of Warcraft,  thottbot.com, calculates the probability of a monster dropping an item to three significant figures!

In one respect, this is a wonderful development.  People are using rigorous, principled methods of investigation in order to understand the worlds they find themselves in.  On the other hand, those environments are not only artificial – video games are necessarily artificial – but worlds with such a feeble resemblance to reality that no relevant knowledge can be gleaned through experimentation.  This is tragic.

This is not an attack on all games, though.  This frustration is aimed at worlds that purport to some degree of realism – racing games where an autopilot takes control when you spin out (Ridge Racer), or momentum values that are tweaked with no justification to make a spacecraft more maneuverable as a game progresses. I don’t think all games have to have Newton-perfect calculations of mass and velocity, but I think there ought to be games that at least try.

Towards that end, here’s another update of what I’ve been working on.  It’s really hard to resist holding off on an update because I’m so close to a breakthrough, but I’ve found that after one breakthrough is made, it always seems ‘close enough’ to the next to hold off again. Consequently, there’s a lot in now that wasn’t in the last build. The list of what’s new is probably less interesting than the thing itself, so here it is:

• Colour sliders: Now, rather than relying on the colour of a mirror being made on the fly, you can select the colour of all the elements, setting a laser to beam only red light, or a mirror to reflect only yellow light etc.
• Rotation: Works now.  You click to select a pivot to rotate the selection about, and drag around to place ‘em.
• Tooltips: Finally, there is a little feedback about what things are and what to do with them!
• Cirlces: Only work with lasers at the moment, but they are solid, circular mirrors that could be considered to have a “mass”.  One day.
• Polygons: These do work with beams and lasers, but do some silly things with beams (when you point the beam on to an angle less than 180º) . These could also be considered to have mass one day.

What’s next?  Remote loading and saving (I’m going to need some help with PHP for that), and then Box2D!  I’ve been messing around with some ideas for games that could actually use this engine, and I’ve come up with one idea, which I’ve sketched out on my Flickr page, but that’s as far as it goes right now.  When I have more, I will show it!

I think what Koster is talking about is this:  After concentrating on the electric guitar for four years, a person may have developed the equivalent of two years of xylophone training, one year of drums and so on.

This model is suggested in most physical fitness plans (so I am told,) although after a certain amount of specialization, it’s often suggested that a person’s more general fitness actually decreases, given the finite resources that the human body has.

We need to be cautious about suggesting that training for one thing will result in losing skill in another, since it gives us an excuse not to perfect one particular skill set. The way in which a human being can incorporate a variety of different skills is what makes us great, and in particular, the incorporation of a diverse (and seemingly conflicting) set of mental skills is probably the coolest part.

I also think that the breadth of knowledge that people get from learning a single thing is very different. Someone learning the guitar for 10 years may only have the equivalent of 5 years’ skill by the end of it, but may end up equally skilled on trumpet, vibraphone, violin and the drums.  Conversely, someone may end up with 15 years’ worth of skill on the guitar, but be completely useless on everything else.

With musical instruments, it’s easy to see that an accoustic guitar would be closely related to an electric, where a banjo or a ukelele would be slightly less related.  If we look at sports and take baseball as the central sport, then it would make sense that softball and cricket would be closely related, and that soccer and football may come into the mix too, but to a lesser extent. Somewhere in the distance, someone’s snooker skill may improve too.

What about quadratic equations? Very few people will ever use quadratic equations for any reason other than to pass the test on quadratic equations, but we learn them anyway.  If we think about this breadth of knowledge, though, we can see that we aren’t just learning about quadratics as we stare at the graph paper and crunch the numbers.  We might learn a little about algebra, graphing, calculus, and possibly things outside the realm of mathematics altogether.

Basically, everything that we do has unintended consequences.  Destroying an enemy base tends to damage civilian infrastructure, and we call that Collateral Damage.  It’s terrible, but it’s taken largely for granted.  What isn’t taken for granted, though, is that learning about one thing tends to make us think about other things.  I like to call it Incidental Learning, and I like to talk about it a lot.