I may be crazy, but I think I see a similarity between playing video games and my students behavior in math class. This weekend, I again tried to play Soul Calibur IV and again was overwhelmed both by its complexity and by its unintuitive control scheme. SC4 is a fighting game where control combinations execute various character movements and attacks. But there are *many* characters, each with dozens of different *unique* control combinations. Ive read that good players dont memorize *all* the combos, but you need a pretty big subset. Decades ago, I used to play Samurai Shodown II, which had a much smaller selection of characters and unique control combos. Most of *its* combos had some spatial correspondence to the associated character action. For example, down-forward + attack executed a low attack, while quarter-circle-back + attack would move the character back and then launch a reach attack. Unfortunately, Soul Calibur IV has far too many control combos to manage any spatial correspondence, so most of the control combos are unintuitive, and therefore difficult for me to remember. So Soul Calibur IV rewards the memorization of arbitrary actions to solve problems -- often without much conscious thought (you have to be *quick*) and usually without any strategic planning. You might think ahead maybe a handful of seconds (to set up sequences of character actions), but no further. Finally getting around to the math class, I frequently see students ignoring mathematical principles in favor of memorizing solution techniques, and trying to reflexively deploy those techniques without any strategic planning. When I see this type of problem, I always solve it with this sequence of steps. That approach often gets foiled when we change the order of terms, or switch which parts of the problem are constants. Not much math can be solved by blind algorithm. Do videogames such as Soul Calibur IV teach or encourage reflexive, memorized responses? Or does it simply tap into a preference that already exists in the population? I guess the first question would be, Are people *really* addressing game play and math problems with similar mental processes...?
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 14:10:20 +0000
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