Can Video Games Be Used for Science?

[frocob]

The Escapist regularly runs content discussing the growth of gaming as a medium. Typical debates are over whether games can be insightful enough to qualify as art or how gaming communities compare to traditional social groups such as athletic teams, hobby clubs, and other groups that form around a central interest. Less often discussed is the potential that games have to further scientific and academic pursuits.

This is a topic that deserves more attention because video games offer new ways to study human behavior. The most common studies involving video games focus only on the effect that playing the game has on the player; things such as reflexes, tolerance for violence, or attention span. Very few studies have been conducted that use video games as a medium to study broader social issues. One such study was conducted by North Western University in 2009; it studied how the skin color of avatars in the game Second-Life influenced other players attitudes towards that avatar (Here's a link to a more detailed description: http://www.pixelsandpolicy.com/pixels_and_policy/2009/10/race-case.html).

Currently, there is an experiment underway at St. Mary?s College of Maryland that uses Minecraft to study communities and social interactions. The study hasn?t concluded yet but images from one of the experimental iterations have been published to Imgur; they can be seen here: https://imgur.com/gallery/wKWA4

The Imgur post also includes a link to an application form for people interested in participating the next iteration of the experiment; copied here: http://goo.gl/forms/knPFQ0IXrv

What do you think? Do video games have untapped scientific potential?

 

[SoreWristed]

I heard on the grapevine that a lot of NASA scientists play, and are impressed by, Kerbal Space Program and that they are very interested in Star citizen.

I think games have a great potential for study, not only as an object of study, but as a medium aswell.

Videogames turn players into almost perfect labrats, ranging from simple tasks such as finding and remembering which button releases the food, to navigating mazes and solving complex puzzles. Just think of the simplest labrat experiment. There are two buttons, one gives a shock and the other one releases some food. The rat will try the shock button a couple of times, but once it figures out that food only comes from the left one, it will not try the shock button again. That translates almost perfectly to some of the older games you've probably played. In king's Quest, an early text based adventure game, you can go in any four directions on the starting screen. Going south almost instantly kills you so you're less inclined to test that out again without a change in the situation.

Going on to more complex tasks, when was the last time you found out a friend had beaten a certain boss in Dark Souls differently than you did? He may have gone with a poleaxe and went all out damage, while you equipped a shield and carefully nicked away at the boss' health step by step. In Sherlock Holmes : Crime and Punishment, the game keeps track of who you pointed out as the culprit and how you came to that conclusion and shows you the percentage of players that solved the case the same way. This is already collecting data on how people solve problems and react in certain situations.

Going on to some of the most complex problems. Simulators are often used to figure out how planecrashes came about and often pilots are tasked to run a simulation of conditions during the crash in a simulator to see if the pilot was at fault or should have reacted differently. This leads to changes in flight regulations or protocols and allows for safe testing of new equipment, before it even reaches the field. And who hasn't played a simulator of any kind at some point in their life?

If the engine is complex enough, almost anything can be tested by building it in a simulator. And game engines are in their most basic function a simulation of the real world. Not all of them are built with the idea of an accurate portrayal of the laws of physics, but every once in a while one will pop up. Just imagine if Leonardo Da Vinci had acces to a tool like Besiege!

On a more social note, I found it very interesting to hear about the issue with Rust locking players into a randomly chosen race and appearance. Whatever you think about the developers choice in the matter, I found it fascinating to hear that players who show racist tendencies will often get hunted down and killed. That bit of information right there would have taken someone a year of research to figure out. Not to mention the cost of developing tools for this specific bit of research and the arduous task of finding and monitoring test subjects.

The whole game of portal was a player running through lab tests! Researchers should be flocking to games like that!

 

[J Tyran]

Didn't NASA claim to get some useful data from that Moonbase Alpha game a number of years back? It was a free game they gave away and for the most part people played Mario Kart moonbase, made a dong shaped base and trolled each other, NASA said they got some useful info on optimized layouts and journey times between sections and other things like that.

That was a good five years back, cannot remember much other than they claimed it was a great success.

 

[Zontar]

The CDCP and several universities already used WoW's infamous Corrupted Blood incident [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident] due to how it was used by players to spread the disease to other players, and economists already look at the data for a lot of video game economies (in fact, both EvE Online and TF2 have people dedicated to watching the statistics of the game economy, as in actual economists and not just some programmer or community manager, though they likely keep in close contact with them).

 

[ArcaneGamer]

The Escapist regularly runs content discussing the growth of gaming as a medium. Typical debates are over whether games can be insightful enough to qualify as art or how gaming communities compare to traditional social groups such as athletic teams, hobby clubs, and other groups that form around a central interest. Less often discussed is the potential that games have to further scientific and academic pursuits.

This is a topic that deserves more attention because video games offer new ways to study human behavior. The most common studies involving video games focus only on the effect that playing the game has on the player; things such as reflexes, tolerance for violence, or attention span. Very few studies have been conducted that use video games as a medium to study broader social issues. One such study was conducted by North Western University in 2009; it studied how the skin color of avatars in the game Second-Life influenced other players attitudes towards that avatar (Here's a link to a more detailed description: http://www.pixelsandpolicy.com/pixels_and_policy/2009/10/race-case.html).

Currently, there is an experiment underway at St. Mary?s College of Maryland that uses Minecraft to study communities and social interactions. The study hasn?t concluded yet but images from one of the experimental iterations have been published to Imgur; they can be seen here: https://imgur.com/gallery/wKWA4

The Imgur post also includes a link to an application form for people interested in participating the next iteration of the experiment; copied here: http://goo.gl/forms/knPFQ0IXrv

What do you think? Do video games have untapped scientific potential?

Heck yeah, I do. I mean, look at some of Game Theory and the codex for the Mass Effect games. For science itself? I'm all for discussions like that. Next you'll tell me someone is building a real life Beam Katana.