Ben Sawyer's Serious Game Summit got underway yesterday at GDC. Raph Koster started things off with his "Theory of Fun" talk, from his book and based on his talk at the Austin Game Conference in 2003. I had a chance to speak about Serious Games in Second Life, Wilde Cunningham, Brigadoon Island and Virtual Hallucinations, which was quite fun (and seems to have been well received.) Also got see a great demo by Andrew Phelps and Dave Parks of RIT, who's MUPPETS project is an amazing approach to computer science education. It is also exciting because it echos many of the benefits of collaboration and real-time development that we see in Second Life.
A couple of things from Raph's talk jumped out at me. Several times he focused on the difference between "thinking" and "knowing." He also repeated asserted the common statement that we get "worse" at learning as we age and that older people (he used his father as an example) wouldn't be able to comprehend the open nature of Second Life.
Read on for why I disagree with those thoughts.
"Thinking" versus "knowing" first. This is an interesting distinction and one that runs contrary to his basic opinion that humans are basically pattern matching machines and that "fun" is the act of identifying the pattern. Leaving aside the discussion of whether or not that is a good description of "fun," I happen to find the evidence that brains (especially mammalian brains, with human brains at the top of the heap) are pattern matching machines quite compelling (references below), so I basically agree with Raph. So, I'm surprised to see him missing the point pattern matching applies both to "thinking" and to "knowing", it is simply a matter of scale. He used the example of learning your multiplication tables as an example of "thinking" and Gauss' solution to summing the numbers from 1 to 100 (the sum of 1 to N is N(N+1)/2) as "knowing." I submit that those are both examples of identifying patterns in numbers, the latter certainly a more complicated or higher order pattern, but still just a pattern.
Patterns also show up in the "we get dumb as we age" question. As we grow and learn, we identify more and more of the simple patterns and produce higher level patterns. As a result, more of our learning involves these higher level, and presumably, more complicated patterns. This is a strength, not a weakness, and one has only to look at the success of Second Life's residents to see that higher level thinking is an asset. We've also seem direct correlation of age to conversion rate.
As for Raph's dad and Second Life, I hope that he gives it a try. I suspect that he might enjoy it.
(See Hawkins' fascinating "On Intelligence" for a micro view or Aronson's "The Social Animal" and Cialdini's "Influence" for macro views. Or, Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", "Freedom Evolves" or "The Intentional Stance" for macro + evolutionary views.)
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