Last night I was reading AL Daily and came across an enlightened debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke surrounding the scientific evidence behind the furor caused by Harvard President Lawrence Summers controverisal remarks about why there are fewer women in the sciences performing reserach at elite schools.
From this debate, this quote from Pinker jumped out at me.
In psychometric studies, three-dimensional spatial visualization is correlated with mathematical problem-solving. And mental manipulation of objects in three dimensions figures prominently in the memoirs and introspections of most creative physicists and chemists, including Faraday, Maxwell, Tesla, Kéekulé, and Lawrence, all of whom claim to have hit upon their discoveries by dynamic visual imagery and only later set them down in equations. A typical introspection is the following: "The cyclical entities which seem to serve as elements in my thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined. This combinatory play [emphasis mine] seems to be the essential feature in productive thought before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs." The quote comes from this fairly well-known physicist.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html#p31
This, of course, led me to examine what Tycho had to say over at Penny Arcade. Well, not really, but I'll bet you that you NEVER saw that coming.
In the blogging of the day Tycho mentioned how one of his friends worked to uncover the patterns that would allow him to 'crack' the PSP uber-fun puzzle game {PG-13 strong language}, or should that be addictive, Lumines.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2005-05-16
Robert is with us to make sure we don't sell Penny Arcade again, that is his main purpose, but he is also Gabe's Splinter Cell partner. It's gotten to some weird level with those two, they have a pair of neon green elastic bracelets to signify their unconventional union and everything.
Japanese RPGs are his genre of choice, they appeal to the math major in him, and it is no doubt the numerical symmetries and relationships that appeal to him in puzzle games as well: he has refined a Greater Theory of Lumines (seriously, he drew diagrams) that allowed him to "flip" the game and earn the final bonus song, like so:
I play games to enter a trance state and experience other lives, he plays them to defeat the designer of the game by proxy. [Empahasis mine] That's a significant distinction.
These two are somehow related. I know that Yee and Squire talk of Min-Maxers being one type of play style they have observed in MMORPGs and Civilization repsectively. This play style involves probing the system to discover the limits of the model, extending in to breaking through loopholes that the model didn't account for. Some would call it cheating, but I'm fairly certain that Consalvo would defend the act as falling within the boundaries of play.
Within all this I am also intrigued by the 'Flynn effect" that has been widely reported. Is spatial ability an indicator that one is likely to succeed in the sciences, or is it a prerequisite that one must possess in order to succeed in the sciences.
If it is a prerequisite, then what we see with a genreation of students accustomed to interacting with 3D virtual worlds and play spaces. Anything? We live in a 3D world and that doesn't seem to produce the desired effect on its own. Why were the early 'renaissance men' we revere accomplished in art and science? What, if anything, does this have to do with play and playfulness of mind?
How can I thread these together?
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