NESTA Predictions for 2012 include "educated gamers" in science, tech, maths

[Garrett Eastman]

Happy New Year and greetings to everyone,

My attention was drawn to a set of tech predictions from the UK's National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts(NESTA) for 2012, particularly this one on "educated gamers," video games increasingly playing a role in science technology and math education:
 http://www.nesta.org.uk/news_and_features/12for2012/assets/features/educated_gamers

Garrett Eastman
Director of Libraries
Becker College
61 Sever Street
Worcester, MA 01609
geas...@gmail.com

[Maria Droujkova]

Thank you for the link, Garrett! We just had a conversation about a related topic with our game design group, while working on our grant writing. In practice, "educated gamers" (advanced gamers) crave, and add, a lot of mathematics to their gaming experience. To illustrate the point, I searched a custom-modified user interface from "World of Warcraft" and picked one which demonstrates a pretty typical array of user-created addons - ALL of them providing quantitative info to the player. You can barely see the World (of warcraft) for all the numbers on the screen. 

That's how gamers move from metaphors to abstractions.

So do designers, by the way. Math in games has been getting more explicit over the last decade - that's what players want, apparently! 

"Show me your... stats!"

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
919-388-1721

Make math your own, to make your own math

 

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