Amazon's new role-playing game can help you build your AWS skills | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's new role-playing game can help you build your AWS skills

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70 pointswebmaven43 comments

Alright I was slightly cynical going in, but this doesn't seem too bad of a way to learn. Runs well in the browser, some clear presentation, and I can see its appeal towards a younger crowd or a crowd that's comfortable with gaming in general.

But mainly I like that their loading screen appears to use 'The Internet' box from IT crowd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

When people say that monopolies stifle innovation, this should surely be held up as the poster-child of that mantra.

Will this be a flash in the pan? Yes

Was this wasted money? Yes

Could, basically, any human have predicted this is a waste of money? Yes

Could the combined cognitive and monetary resources invested in this have been put to much better use elsewhere? Yes

Don't learn AWS this way, learn about general purpose components and networking and then, if you want, learn the AWS API, it is the ONLY part of AWS that matters.

Different people learn in different ways. And even failed experiments are important for progress.

I kind of wish this urban myth dies. There are more common things amongst humans about learning than differences. By a long shot.

Veritasium covered this in much greater detail but still approachable by the laymen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA

It almost always shutsdown the discussion of improving or criticizing learning methods. Because, there is this deus-ex-machina of learning "Everyone is different" and therefore we must not question, we must not contest, we must not improve.

Btw, this is also rampant in other dysfunctional fields such as nutrition and product-reviews.

> Veritasium covered this in much greater detail

Big fan of the channel, however he also has another about p hacking which I think applies to his evidence in this video. I agree that people learn the same, but desire and attention aren't discussed enough here. Sure if you force people to try each different way of learning, they won't actually have a "ideal way". However, I tend not to learn if I don't enjoy the way the material is being presented. You can't run a race if you never make it to the starting line.

Veritaseum lost a lot of credibility to me when he released his Waymo-sponsored self-driving video where he conveniently acts like certain things (like his own videos on statistics and critical thinking) don't exist and other claims should be taken at face-value (94% accidents are human error).

As for this "different people learn differently", I think it'd be better to say that different modes, models, analogies are better or worse at capturing the attention of different people long enough to learn something.

You're seriously going to base your conclusion on a Jay-Leno-style "man on the street" YouTube video over the deeply-researched, peer-reviewed academic literature based on the painstaking efforts of trained education researchers?

Did you see the references on Veritasium video description? If not, I'll list it out here:

References:

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119. — https://ve42.co/Pashler2008

Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015). The scientific status of learning styles theories. Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266-271. — https://ve42.co/Willingham

Massa, L. J., & Mayer, R. E. (2006). Testing the ATI hypothesis: Should multimedia instruction accommodate verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style?. Learning and Individual Differences, 16(4), 321-335. — https://ve42.co/Massa2006

Riener, C., & Willingham, D. (2010). The myth of learning styles. Change: The magazine of higher learning, 42(5), 32-35.— https://ve42.co/Riener2010

Husmann, P. R., & O'Loughlin, V. D. (2019). Another nail in the coffin for learning styles? Disparities among undergraduate anatomy students’ study strategies, class performance, and reported VARK learning styles. Anatomical sciences education, 12(1), 6-19. — https://ve42.co/Husmann2019

Snider, V. E., & Roehl, R. (2007). Teachers’ beliefs about pedagogy and related issues. Psychology in the Schools, 44, 873–886. doi:10.1002/pits.20272 — https://ve42.co/Snider2007

Fleming, N., & Baume, D. (2006). Learning Styles Again: VARKing up the right tree!. Educational developments, 7(4), 4. — https://ve42.co/Fleming2006

Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2015). Matching learning style to instructional method: Effects on comprehension. Journal of educational psychology, 107(1), 64. — https://ve42.co/Rogowskyetal

Coffield, Frank; Moseley, David; Hall, Elaine; Ecclestone, Kathryn (2004). — https://ve42.co/Coffield2004

Furey, W. (2020). THE STUBBORN MYTH OF LEARNING STYLES. Education Next, 20(3), 8-13. — https://ve42.co/Furey2020

Dunn, R., Beaudry, J. S., & Klavas, A. (2002). Survey of research on learning styles. California Journal of Science Education II (2). — https://ve42.co/Dunn2002

Thanks for posting these! Clearly there is research pointing in the opposite direction.

My only problem with the cliche of “Everyone does x differently” is that it fits intuition and people can relate to it - thus, it’s popularity. More often than not, it is not scientifically backed. It also robs away attention and understanding when things are truly different for one another.

Perhaps a more accurate statement would be "people prefer to learn things differently." Such data can easily be gathered by polling and is non-controvertible. Preference in learning methods is different from the relative effectiveness of them.

Some people like fast-food hamburgers; some like them from expensive restaurants; others like to cook them at home. But nutritionally, they're not all that different from one another.

But people do learn different. The proper way to learn is to get a bachelors in your interest, and meet professionals. Some people settle for books. Others - videos.

Yes, if we are starting at the assumption that the set of people of people who engage in various learning channels are equal. Which isn’t the case. The real world doesn’t always have equal sampling.

For example, someone who doesn’t read a book, learns zero from that book.

> I kind of wish this urban myth dies

The popular sensory-based learning styles thing that people are sort of innately programmed to be “visual”, “auditory”, etc. learners is a myth, that people learn better via different totalities of educational methods (material, organization, content, context, timing, structure, etc.) based on a wide variety of personal factors (physical conditions, interests, relation of intellectual to emotional development, etc.) is not.

Yes because the billions of VC money wasted every year where only 1 out of 10 companies will be successful is better?

You are misunderstanding what it means to have a LTV of > $100,000. I don't know if you watched the video but you could make that game in Unity/Unreal/etc super easy. They just outsource the dev to some shop for a few million and if you get ~1000 real customers you have made your money back.

Everyone that wants to learn by "general purpose components and networking and then learn AWS API's" has already done that. How do you expand past that?

Is a game the best way to do that? Who knows, but you have to do something. As a sib comment said not everyone learns the way youre saying (I definitely don't)

Source: back of the napkin calcs https://askwonder.com/research/customer-acquisition-cost-cac...

This game isn't outsourced to any shop. It was created and developed by Amazonians who have been there year. I personally know the people who worked on the game. They all have worked at Amazon for years and are extremely excited about expanding Cloud Quest in a bunch of very exciting ways.

Can you make a game in Unity? Yeah. But this wasn't outsourced.

Did they export to WebAssembly?

This is the kind of “VIM is the only IDE you need” gatekeeping garbage mentality that pushes creative young people out of tech.

What an absurd premise.

Tech has very little diversity because of gatekeeping

Somebody got up in the wrong side of the bed today. Having learned aws the hard way I recommend doing something easier.

A reference architecture diagram and cloud formation or terraform for a base infrastructure would have done me wonders.

AWS training is actually really good. I did the solutions architect training and learned more than I expected.

I was curious what it looked like.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lcmVvIeiFGc

I love this idea, I think there is a lot of potential for learning this way.

AWS is the last company I want making a video game. These people are not great at usability or thinking about the overall experience, and no one needs this video game to have 99.9999 uptime, which is what they're better at.

I can't even imagine the horrific UI, overlapping nonsensical quests or mechanics, etc. that's in this thing.

They already made an MMO about Colonization. I think it has middle of the road reviews.

You mean the crashing mess, New World? Haven't checked on it in a month but it seems to be standing on its final legs. Suffered from duping glitches, weird gameplay mechanic choices, server population imbalances,and ofcourse bots.

This sword is excellent at killing rats.

But wait. This new sword was forged at the lord's yearly reinvention festival, and can kill black rats better. If you use it on a brown rat though, it'll stab you in eye instead. It's magic.

Heh, I wonder if that's why they bought LumberYard (which I only recently learned is now actually Open Source, Apache 2.0 & MIT: https://github.com/o3de/o3de#readme )

It's disappointing that the core gameplay is apparently 2D diagram puzzles [1]. I was hoping for a 3D representation of AWS with the player's actions manipulating resources like in KubeCraftAdmin [2]. For example, build a building that represents an S3 bucket.

That said, it's brilliant advertising. It could be a foot in the door for AWS in more high school computer science curriculums.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcmVvIeiFGc

[2] https://eric-jadi.medium.com/minecraft-as-a-k8s-admin-tool-c...

That's a very approachable method even, especially younger developers. Imagine their faces when one night a creeper blows up whole infrastructure.

If you play it, you'll see that the 2d diagrams are just intro guides to each "mission". The actual gameplay has you launching a pre-provisioned AWS Console in a separate tab and completing set objectives.

There are challenges where you log in to an actual AWS console and create real resources. One of the first things I was tasked to do when I tested the game was to look at some network diagrams, watch a couple of videos, and then create a Static S3 website in the AWS console.

Network diagrams are 2D. But you're also launched into the AWS console to do real work.

Every time I see something like

> training to 29m people by 2025

I have to be skeptic at the quality of the training. I think there are going to be 28.8m half baked educations from this. Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing since not everyone needs to be a great cloud engineer, but I feel like there will be a lot of situations where 6 people are struggling through a problem that one decently trained person could knock out without issue.

Not necessarily a criticism here, but more of a general anecdote on education now that I think about it. The amount of classmates I had in university that couldn't get something simple done, despite having a solid four year CS education is unfortunate.

Those 28.8m can't be any worse then most of the Windows Admins I've worked with...

Having some internal knowledge of this, and its roadmap, I'm super excited to see where Cloud Quest is going. I think it's honestly going to be a game changer when it comes to gamifying learning in the cloud.

During testing, I found myself enjoying tasks I could do in my sleep because of the slick presentation and the ability to build and customize my own city.

This is brilliant. This is the kind of creative marketing and education we need to help close the tech skills gap. Kudos AWS team!

Does anyone know if this is cloud-streamed, WASM, or do you download a native binary to play it?

If you need to code a game to teach your users how to properly use your products...

Who said they needed to?

Can't be worse than New World

And yet... the API and Console remain egregiously flawed. Horrible.

But I guess those are for locked-in customers, so no marketing dollars for those.

The cynicism on this forum is overwhelming.

It's from years and years of abuse by software vendors who make promises they can't keep, and take your money anyways. We're burnt out on this shit.

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