[LINK] How a Computer Game is Reinventing the Science of Expertise
post by InquilineKea · 2011-12-05T05:06:22.186Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 6 comments
For decades, a different game, chess, has held the exalted position of “the drosophila of cognitive science”—the model organism that scientists could poke and prod to learn what makes experts better than the rest of us. StarCraft 2, however, might be emerging as the rhesus macaque: its added complexity may confound researchers initially, but the answers could ultimately be more telling.
“I can’t think of a cognitive process that’s not involved in StarCraft,” says Mark Blair, a cognitive scientist at Simon Fraser University. “It’s working memory. It’s decision making. It involves very precise motor skills. Everything is important and everything needs to work together.”
Blair, the Simon Fraser University scientist running the SkillCraft project, asked gamers at all ability levels to submit their replay files. He and his colleagues collected more than 4500 files, of which at least 3500 turned out to usable. “What we’ve got is a satellite view of expertise that no one was able to get before,” he says. “We have hundreds of players at the basic levels, then hundreds more at level slightly better, and so on, in 8 different categories of players.” By comparing the techniques and attributes of low-level players with other gamers up the chain of ability, they can start to discern how skills develop—and perhaps, over the long run, identify the most efficient training regimen.
Both Blair and Lewis see parallels between the game and emergency management systems. In a high-stress crisis situation, the people in charge of coordinating a response may find themselves facing competing demands. Alarms might be alerting them to a fire burning in one part of town, a riot breaking out a few streets over, and the contamination of drinking water elsewhere. The mental task of keeping cool and distributing attention among equally urgent activities might closely resemble the core challenge of Starcraft 2. “For emergencies, you don’t get to train eight hours a day. You get two emergencies in your life but you better be good because lives are at stake,” Blair says. “Training in something like Starcraft could be really useful.”
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comment by Desrtopa · 2011-12-06T04:19:57.396Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
"I can’t think of a cognitive process that’s not involved in StarCraft"
"Is this a high status pursuit for me to engage in in the first place?"
Maybe that's a bit meanspirited of me, and in South Korea the answer is quite possibly "yes," but it didn't take me long to think of it.
comment by [deleted] · 2011-12-05T13:52:06.275Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I find this interesting. In chess I feel like there are two main skills: memorisation and analysis. There are plenty of points in chess where the best moves are well studied, and that an experienced enough player can just do- so for instance queen king vs king theres a very clear way to mate from any start. But there are other times where the result is less well known and the player must use their analytical skills, based on being able to predict a few moves ahead and also knowledge of good practice- trying to avoid moving pawns too much in the early game, trying to avoid redundancy, trying to get pieces in the same place.
In starcraft theres some added issues. As well as hard knowledge (best units to build in a certain situation, build orders) and analysis theres also physical constraints- actions per minute, map awareness which aren't really present in chess.
Replies from: billswift↑ comment by billswift · 2011-12-06T01:08:26.541Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
In video games and real life, there is more complexity, as in more dimensions that solutions and actions have to address, but I would argue that the underlying skills, search and evaluation or judgment are used for all. See Jonathan Baron's book Thinking and Deciding for a detailed view of how those two, search and inference (in his terms), underlie all thinking tasks - problem solving, decision making, planning, learning, and creativity.
comment by argumzio · 2011-12-06T01:31:21.428Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think the main issue here is that expertise must be conceptualized with respect to a particular activity or set of activities in order for it to maintain its essential meaning. The nature of expertise is also restricted to a specific range of tools the brain embodies (as in "embodied cognition"); in other words, it is not the hand the knows what to type, but rather the keyboard that knows what to type. To be clear, my cognitive capacity is effectively extended and reshaped by the interaction with the keyboard, so in effect the nature of the expertise will be limited specifically to the final cause (in the philosophical sense) of the activity itself. I like to think of it as the mind further approximating the function of the game, or activity, over time serving as a kind of analogy to the ever-accumulating expertise therein.
Taking the example of chess versus a modern-day computer-enhanced strategy game, the modes of embodiment are vastly different, and so the kinds of expertise to be expected should naturally diverge. However, I would not be so pollyannaish as to assert that playing StarCraft 2 (or Chess) would be "really useful", unless you're playing for money to help you in some specific goal outside of the game itself. That is going a bit too far, in my opinion. We already know that the nature of expertise is such that it only operates at the level of the activity one is engaged in, and will not generalize (or transfer) far from that domain of activity. For instance, the expertise in knowing the layout of a keyboard and being able to type commands without a second thought (being constantly honed by a game that demands it) will transfer to the tasks (of other games) that require the same input on a keyboard (and will differentially benefit from those quick reflexes), but the specific tactics and techniques learned in-game will generally not find much use beyond that game, and I do believe that is what we're getting at with a game like SC2 insofar as "expertise" is a concern here. Similarly with chess: one might very well have excellent reflexes, honed in certain other tasks, and know many strategies and techniques for other things, but they won't apply to the space of chess, and so vice versa for chess to other activities. (And we already know that typical memorization techniques used in chess really don't help with memorizing anything else.)
Having said all that, I wonder whether or not there might be a prime example of the game of general expertise par excellence out there, one that touches on many domains simultaneously... Perhaps the Glass Bead Game? Ah, never mind. But, in all seriousness, the way of the game is probably the only way we'll ever find out if such a thing exists and will permit the mind to approximate the function of life all the more perfectly.
By the way, I don't know how it is the researchers in the article don't think there hasn't been such a "satellite view" of expertise before, particularly on the note of chess. Hasn't anyone told them of the Chess Tactics Server? ( http://chess.emrald.net/ ) Chumps to champs aplenty there.
Replies from: James_Blair↑ comment by James_Blair · 2011-12-06T21:18:15.959Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I wonder whether or not there might be a prime example of the game of general expertise par excellence out there, one that touches on many domains simultaneously...
Probably not. While in video game design there are general competencies you can rely on, there are both mutually exclusive challenges: fast paced FPS games like Quake 3 cannot be played like slower paced FPS games like Call of Duty, players who attempt to transfer their skills without understanding this don't succeed; and balance problems, where the addition of game elements overshadow others like in Alien Swarm where there are five effective weapons even though there are fifteen other options and some of them are dismissed unfairly because they are introduced to players who haven't seen a need for the skills they ask. Both of these factors, however, mean that challenges and tradeoffs go hand in hand in your game's design.
That all said, people do try. Spore is the readiest example of this to me: the mishmash of different games doesn't really work, the way they tried to address the challenge balancing issues means that four fifths of the game design is effectively useless, but it's an instructive game nonetheless.
Replies from: argumzio↑ comment by argumzio · 2011-12-08T07:34:34.161Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Excuse me for waxing over-philosophical in my last message, since I said "might be" rather than "currently is". To be clear, I'm referring to the practical possibility (if not the straightforward logical possibility) of such a game existing.
I suppose, in any case, that one form such a game has the greatest chance of succeeding in meeting that (rather vague) designation would involve its exhibiting the most generality within its gameplay, such that the kinds of cognitive requirements put upon users would not necessarily involve specific skills or skill acquisition per se, but rather a kind of mystifying push-without-training-wheels that permits the mind to shape itself however it sees fit to accomplish the task - which then creates problems for users by forcing them to constantly modify their adopted strategy or preferred tactics.
One such game that comes to mind as a (tentative) example is Dual N-Back (or related variants) that does not directly demand any specific strategy or conceptual framework for it to be taken on by a user. One has no specific input on how to tackle it, but when the user gets the hang of it, the game naturally changes the rule(s) or framework, forcing the user to adapt once more. Such a game most certainly involves expertise (a lot of time spent playing it and getting better).
But, yeah, with most, if not all, generally recognized games, it is pretty clear that with the kinds of skills demanded of a user it may be quite difficult to maneuver certain other skills and make such a game feasible.