MIT Creates The One Video Game You'll Be Thrilled To See Your Kid Get Hooked On
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
And even beyond the Super Solvers series, there were dozens of others like these, from the game I used to learn to type, to Carmen Sandiego. And beyond the outright edutainment games, most of the rest of my childhood was spent playing Simcity 2000, Age of Empires, and other similar games of the era. I even learned to "use the Internet" by playing Yahooligans' Cybersurfari. (Holy crap, does anyone remember THAT?! Practically lost to history at this point!)
I strongly suspect a good portion of my "intelligence" was actually acquired by exercising my brain in these ways when I very young, rather than due to school or genetics.
I also suspect that there's a whole generation of kids -- born around the same time during the heyday of edutainment (~1988-92) -- who had a similar experience.
Games like Descent led to extremely developed spatial reasoning skills. Games like Nethack led to a level of meticulousness and a never-give-up, use-every-trick-in-the-book mentality. Games like Starcraft helped develop a sense of complex system dynamics. I was consistently observing the environment, solving puzzles, making tradeoffs and efficiency decisions (do I skip this area? Is it worth crossing that lava to get that powerup?), learning diligence and persistence, and doing controlled experiments to teach me about the games.
I also played a fair number of "edutainment" titles, including one my dad coded himself in the early 1980s, and many of those on your list. They were quite good and certainly helped me exercise my brain, but not to the degree that games like Descent, Starcraft, and Nethack did.
What's the winning strategy in Civilization? Science! As much of it as you can! Everything else in society exists only in order to create the resources which scientists consume (or to defend your borders to enable your scientists to work unmolested by Aztecs and Zulus). Yep, everyone else in society is doing a thankless, pointless job, quickly forgotten as soon as they die, but the contributions of scientists live on forever, slowly advancing society down the tech tree. Is there any better feeling than making a new discovery? Hells no! Each discovery lets you make new and better stuff, as well as putting you forever closer and closer to blasting off to Alpha Centauri. Cities and fields and wonders of the world can burn and almost inevitably do, but nothing can ever take away your scientific knowledge.
Suffice it to say that too much Civilization in my formative years may have crystallized these sorts of values in my impressionable mind. I still see the world as divided into "scientists" and "support staff".
If raising a chess champion is a good thing, I can't imagine that raising a starcraft champion is a bad thing.
I'm all for filling in your spare time by playing games, but if it's all you're doing in life then that seems pretty sad.
Especially true if chess playing ability really is an indicator of general intelligence. All those grandmasters could be doing amazing things for the human race, but nope, their brains are filled with queens and rooks.
I'm not so sure chess masters would necessarily be good at other things like say physics as they would have to have a passion in that to even become remotely viable for race saving. Grandmasters likely have been playing and practicing and have been absolutely absorbed in chess for many years in order to achieve their status, but I don't know if it would be as easy for someone who thinks chess to become absorbed in something like medicine or aeronautics or other such things.
Edit: if you have a subscription to the new yorker this was a pretty good article on what a single grandmaster is like http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/21/110321fa_fact_... [PAYWALL]
Just imagine if mathematics had been his passion and chess the side hobby!
There are a lot of ways to use your intellect that don't benefit the world: crossword puzzles, inventing new programming languages, World of Warcraft, and sudoku all come to mind. Chess is one of the few that can get you laid. That doesn't change the fact that you're not helping anyone.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/vanished-smithsonian-0415... is straight from the horses mouth, and
https://vanished.mit.edu/user/register is the game itself.
Shame it requires you to login with a Google or Facebook account though. Is there any reason they can't allow email-free logins if you only want to do exercises?
A: The internet.
Also, as college students found the Internet faster to research than finding and reading physical books, much information entombed in books was not being considered by the younger generation.
A couple of counter-examples might be Civilization and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, where the educational aspects are so well integrated into the game that one might not consider it an educational game unless it were advertised as such.
Most games are educational in a way: they teach you something about their in-game universe, and the player has to recognize and learn patterns to win the game. The trick is to make a game where the patterns teach the players what you want them to learn without breaking the immersive experience that makes players want to continue playing a video game.
MIT's Vanished looks like it is doing well if it has produced 4,000 forum posts from 5,000 users (actually, the count is up to 37,500; you don't need an account to see the forum, although the comments are still hidden). The description makes it sound like the Portal 2 marketing campaign, with puzzles to solve in different media, rather than a video game.
You could basically take homework problems, dress them up with fancy interactive, informative graphics, and stick them in a "tycoon" game where you're manufacturing and selling chemicals. With some side work analyzing environmental pollutants, cleaning up accidents, reverse-engineering your competitors' products with spectroscopy, that sort of thing. I'd play that.
See what you think about this. I know the developer.