Metagame

Metagaming refers to the relationship between the game and outside elements, including everything from player attitudes and play styles to social reputations and social contexts in which the game is played. Post-game locker room conversations about the match are metagame interactions. Memorizing words in the Scrabble dictionary is a metagame activity, the honing of in-game skills. The typical playing strategies of a particular Go master are metagame information, useful if you are playing agai...

 Dice Rolls are Suspect

It is true that every aspect of the role of dice may be suspect: the dice themselves, the form and texture of the surface, the person throwing them. If we push the analysis to its extreme, we may even wonder what chance has to do with it at all. Neither the course of the dice nor their rebounds rely on chance; they are governed by the strict determinism of rational mechanics. Billiards is based on the same principles, and it has never been considered a game of chance. So in the final analysis...

 Euclid's Elements as a Game

"If video games had been around in 350 BC, Euclid would have made a video game," Devlin told me. The thirteen books of Euclid's Elements would have been the supplemental material, a PDF file that you could read if you wanted to. "People think I'm joking—I absolutely mean that. Euclid would not have written a textbook, he would have designed a video game." Peek at any of his proofs, Devlin said, and you'll quickly find that the great Greek mathematician, often called the father of geometry, is...

 Teachers Must Put Themselves in the Student's Place

According to Devlin, teachers have a responsibility to learn about kids' interests. "It's not the students' responsibility to put themselves in our place. As teachers, it's our responsibility to put ourselves in the students' place. And if they are in a digital world, where they will invest many hours solving difficult, challenging problems in a video game, it would be criminal if we didn't start where they are and take advantage of the things they want to do. That's the world they live in, t...

 A Sick Burn

Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulat...

 Arcade Games in Game-Based Education

Arcade games such as Pac-Man, Asteroids, Tempest, Gauntlet, and the like are not useless to the gamifying teacher. Rather, their use is limited . . . and their usefulness makes them more akin to board games than contemporary video games. What is Pac-Man but a game of pattern management? Gauntlet is as much about resource management as anything else. These are notions that were discussed in the previous level. So, don’t exclude the value of the old-school video game . . . but don’t equate it w...

 Flow Promotes Learning

Experiences that are well aligned with flow are those that we have no trouble committing to for a long time. We concentrate on them for hours at a time because we’re getting rewarded for that concentration. Even more important, perhaps, is that when we’re playing games, we want to enter that deep state of concentration. Well-crafted experiences offer a deep and effortless involvement that separates the experience of play from the experience of ordinary life. These experiences are enjoyable be...

 Gamification: Ability-Based Challenge

In a study of what makes video games so captivating, the key element was found to be variable ability-based challenge for players. Th e most popular games took players through increasingly challenging levels as they became more and more skillful. As skill improved, the next challenge motivated new mastery to just the right extent such that the player could reach the next goal with practice and persistence. Th e most motivating video games are ones in which players make the correct move about ...

 Repressive Desublimation

It refers to the kind of soft authoritarianism preferred by wealthy, consumer culture societies that want to repress political dissent. In such societies, pop culture encourages people to desublimate or express their desires, whether those are for sex, drugs or violent video games. At the same time, they’re discouraged from questioning corporate and government authorities. As a result, people feel as if they live in a free society even though they may be under constant surveillance and forced...

 China to Rate Online Behaviour in Social Credit System

Chinese internet firms are definitely interested, as Ant Financial, a subsidiary of ecommercegiant Alibaba, recently showed. To its popular app Alipay it added a new service which rated a person's credit worthiness on a scale of 350 to 950 points. This score is not only determined by one's lending behavior, but also by hobbies and friends. If friends have a poor lending reputation, this reflects badly on the person, just as prolonged playing of video games. Buying diapers indicates responsibi...