21 JUN 2014 by ideonexus

 A good game teaches you how to play it

What you eventually discover as you continue to play is that Portal is a game about escaping from rooms that operate according to rules you are unaware of. You learn that each room is a puzzle, increasingly booby-trapped, and the game requires you to understand more and more complex physics in order to get out. If you don’t teach yourself the physics of each new room— that is, if you don’t learn the rules of the game—you’ll be stuck there forever, listening to the AI system repeat h...
Folksonomies: gamification
Folksonomies: gamification
  1  notes
 
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 Admit When You Don't Know

There are things that not even the best scientists of today can explain. But that doesn't mean we should block off all investigation by resorting to phoney 'explanations' invoking magic or the supernatural, which don't actually explain at all. Just imagine how a medieval man - even the most educated man of his era - would have reacted if he had seen a jet plane, a laptop computer, a mobile telephone or a satnav device. He would probably have called them supernatural, miraculous. But these dev...
  1  notes

It is more honest to admit ignorance, to admit that something is a puzzle, than to invoke the supernatural to explain it.

30 AUG 2011 by ideonexus

 Geology is Like Putting a Puzzle Together

The world is the geologist's great puzzle-box; he stands before it like the child to whom the separate pieces of his puzzle remain a mystery till he detects their relation and sees where they fit, and then his fragments grow at once into a connected picture beneath his hand.
  1  notes

...to find a complete picture form under the scientist's hands.