Video Games Require the Scientific Method

Video games aren’t as easy as they seem to the uninitiated. One cannot simply sit down and immediately begin shooting those aliens. One must first learn how to play the game. Gee (2003) suggests that skilled players learn to play using a four-step probing process (p. 90):

1. The player must probe the virtual world by looking around the current environment, clicking on something, or engaging in a certain action.

2. On the basis of the probing results, the player must form a hypothesis about how an item or action might affect game play

3. The player reprobes the world with that hypothesis in mind, seeing what effect he or she gets.

4. The player treats this effect as feedback from the world and accepts or rethinks his or her original hypothesis.

This probing cycle should look very familiar, as it is essentially the steps of the scientific method. This is important to note because, as any good science teacher tells students, the scientific method is not a magic tool just for scientists in the laboratory. It’s a way of problem solving that we can use in nearly any unfamiliar situation

Successful problem solvers use this sort of process to move beyond knowledge and comprehension and to apply, synthesize, and evaluate. The probing cycle forces players to not only analyze an object, but also synthesize the properties of the object with their prior knowledge about similar objects in the game world and evaluate the object’s usefulness in achieving the game’s objective. For players not adept at probing, the video game can become immediately frustrating and exceptionally difficult.