Lineage and WoW - a textbook of scientific thinking for children

A few years ago, Constancia Steinkculer , a scientist at the University of Wisconsin, played “The Rule.” For 12 hours a day. There she was pumped to the level of the “presidential princess” and led up to 150 people in quests. Most of the guild fighters were teenage boys.

To find the weak points of the monster Constance and the guys used scientific methods. We collected all the statistics on the damage to the enemy by different types of weapons and spells, kept it in the Excel table. Then they made up a mathematical model and calculated how to act more profitably. They spent hours discussing these mathematical models, put forward various hypotheses, tested them and corrected them in preparation for the next quest.

In this way, the children studied science. Wired magazine writes that nowadays multiplayer online games have become the most effective way to instill scientific thinking in children. Constantia herself recently published a scientific paper ( PDF ) on this topic.

In his work, Constance analyzes in detail what scientific methods are used by gamers to analyze an online game as a complex dynamic system, in order to identify hidden patterns. As is customary in the scientific community, gamers use the experience gained by others, give the facts obtained experimentally, and also publish the results of their research (on game forums). They discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different models of pumping or victory over a particular monster, test and refute non-viable models. All this is typical scientific methods.
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Tellingly, all this stormy scientific activity takes place against the background of a decline in the quality of secondary education in ordinary schools. In this situation, there is only one way out. It is necessary to study the “Ruler” in schools, because it seems to bring more benefits to children than ineffective lessons in physics and chemistry, the essence of which is only memory training, and not the refinement of scientific thinking.

What is science? This is a technique for discovering new laws that govern this world. Developing the most effective line of behavior in an online game like Lineage or World of Warcraft is literally the same thing, only there the “laws of the world” are programmed by the game developers. Even if they themselves are not aware of this, but gamers really turn into researchers using the scientific method. One of the children in his guild, Constance once asked: "Do you understand what we did in Excel, is this the essence of science?", And the guy genuinely astonished: "Come on, we were just looking for a cheat."