Why is EVE so Darn Cool?

Because of posts like this? To me anyway.

There can be little doubt about what the coolest aspect of EVE is. Inflation, money supply and the velocity of money is where it‘s at, right? Well, that‘s what this blog is about.

The Perils of Gamification

When my kids were younger, we got them a few "math learning games". Over the years I've wondered why we don't do more of that. Today I have a simple answer to that question: They don't work. Stanley Erlwanger, a math education research published a paper studying how a student named Benny had progressed through a math learning program, gaining levels faster than anyone else, but had failed to learn any math whatsoever.

What the designers of the IPI program had intended was that gaming the game required mastering the mathematics. Unfortunately, there is no way to prevent people, particularly smart ones, from coming up with alternative systems.

In Benny’s case, this involved developing a complete set of rules for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions. Though his rules were symbolic manipulation procedures that made no sense mathematically, they enabled him to move through the sheets faster than everyone else in his cohort group, scoring 80% or better at each stage.

Whenever his rules yielded wrong answers, he simply adapted them to fit the new information he had acquired.

There's something familiar about this description. A high school teacher once told me about a student (in high school) who didn't know how to read, and his attempts to teach the student. This student had learned a bunch of tricks to navigate the world of letters and words, none of which actually constituted reading. But getting the student to walk away from those tricks and grind through phonetics and all the crazy rules that most of us learned in first grade was very difficult.

This is recounted by Math Guy Keith Devlin in a series called "How to Design Video Games That Support Good Math Learning".

The issue, it would seem, isn't limited to video games though. Here's a video showing a similar problem to Benny:




Devlin mentions that the same issues show up in gamification. It's hard to prove that getting good at a game demonstrates skill in anything at all other than playing that game.

Gamification, to my mind, has other problems as well, the chief of which is that it relies on extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic.

Orcs LOVE Fried Goblin, Daddy

I haven't been posting much, because I've been playing Skyrim so much. I've had epic battles with dragons. I've taken an arrow in the knee and remained an adventurer. I've wondered if "arrow in the knee" was a reference to a certain filthy German phrase, fick dich doch ins Knie. (No, I'm not going to translate it for you.) I've destroyed the Dark Brotherhood. I've joined the Imperial Legion and crushed the rebellious Stormcloaks and negotiated a truce between the Legion and the Stormcloaks so that I could save the freaking world! And all of this with but the merest toss of my fabulous red hair.

Also, I have listened to Phritz' tales of running his young half-orc through adventures. I am personally acquainted with this particular aspiring barbarian, which makes it extra entertaining. Phritz has a long history of this, being the one to initiate my own two offspring into the mysteries of tabletop RPG.

So I am greatly amused to read ChattyDM describing how he invented an RPG to play with his 10 year old orc.

And as you [the orc -Toldain] pass below the murder holes, you hear a gargled scream of pain as a very crisp, very fried and very dead goblin falls to the floor behind you. Seems to me someone tripped on the burning oil cauldron

(Laughter) Bersork takes pieces of the fried goblin.

Ewwww, you do? Why?

Orcs LOVE fried goblins daddy!

When Nico told me this little crunchy morsel (pun intended) about Castle Death’s setting, I wanted to jot it down so I could refer to it in a later game (with or without Bersork). So I reached out, picked an index card, wrote “Truths” on it and wrote: “Fried goblins is the finest of Orcish delicacies”.

I have nothing else to add.

I take it back. There's always something to be said. Well, in this case it's a picture from Skyrim. It's the College of Winterhold during a snowstorm. I fought a dragon in this spot. I was too busy not dying to take a screenshot then, though.

But it totally COULD be Castle Death!