MMO players are doing science, academic proposes
We've seen plenty of arguments in support of MMOs, claiming they improve everything from hand-eye co-ordination to math to economics to social skills. Even if some of these seem overblown, we'd rather have MMOs shown in a positive light than the alternative. Now, though, an academic from the University of Wisconsin has pointed out something which in retrospect seems obvious: gamers who engaged with difficult challenges were utilizing the scientific method in order to beat them.
This didn't simply mean fighting ice beasties with fire powers, or the jolly gonzo science we've seen in the past. The gamers were coming up with specific hypotheses, testing them with empirical data, and modifying the hypotheses accordingly, using Excel spreadsheets to analyze their findings. This is, as she put it, 'the essence of science'.
Constance Steinkuehler, who has presented a research paper based on her discovery, also believes that MMOs could be used to teach science, since the very people who are turning away from science in the classroom are (allegedly) the same people who are adopting the scientific method without realizing it. Though the teaching potential of virtual worlds has been asserted, we're leery of attempts to make MMOs educational, and some attempts to do so in the past haven't exactly yielded stellar results. But she's spot-on in her assessment of how the drive to explore and analyze works in MMOs.
What she may not have realized is that the next logical step beyond discovering the rules by which the MMO world works is exploitation - using the rules in a way in which they weren't intended to work. That's a whole new debate. Seen in that light, those who exploit a game would be the real cutting-edge scientists, refusing to be hindered by mere consensus morality. But then, an MMO has discrete authorities and self-evident design, and the debate is still ongoing as to whether the real world has either.
