This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 25 Apr 2008, by Todd Suomela.
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25 Apr 08
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Malone divides curiosity into two variants: sensory curiosity, which is about maintaining interest in the senses (and matches up with Biederman and Vessel), and cognitive curiosity, which is more about the semantic content of information. For example, one picks up a National Geographic because the photo on the cover is intriguing – this is sensory curiosity. One picks up a newspaper because of a surprising headline – this is cognitive curiosity.
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On the subject of cognitive curiosity, Malone makes an interesting (although intuited and therefore essentially unsupported) claim:
...people are motivated to bring to all their cognitive structures three of the characteristics of well-formed scientific theories: completeness, consistency and parsimony. According to this theory, the way to engage learners’ curiosity is to present just enough information to make their existing knowledge seem incomplete, inconsistent, or unparsimonious.
This idea strikes me as worthy of further investigation, and even suggests something concerning the nature of science itself. Since until recent centuries “science” meant “domain of knowledge”, perhaps the element that has allowed what we now term “science” (i.e. empirical research) to gain so much ground is that its mechanisms produce statements that are cognitively pleasing. The alternative interpretation – that we aim for cognitively balanced statements because of the influence of science – seems somehow less plausible, but there is room for inquiry in either case.
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The idea that an uncertain outcome can fuel a player’s interest is one of the most fascinating elements of the Malone papers, and suggests a link between chance and curiosity in videogames. Malone notes:
Randomness and humor, if used carefully, can also help make an environment optimally complex.
And also:
...if randomness is used in a way that makes tools unreliable it will almost certainly be frustrating rather than enjoyable.
Malone’s observations that uncertain outcomes are inherently part of the draw of videogames warrant further investigation. It seems to me that there are games where the outcome is not really uncertain – in most RPGs, you know you’re going to level up, you just don’t know how, for instance – but even in these cases there is always a level of uncertainty at work. Consider how a player who has mastered a particular game produces a new uncertainty by adding a higher level goal (in speed runs, for instance) – thus restoring uncertainty to the situation.
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