For an indication of the tenaicty of this community take a look at this book length post on editing tech trees in Civ 4. Civilization has a sizeable Moder community, which spends a tremendous amount of time building, tearing apart, and remaking the way science and technology work in the game. Rob’s assignment is in fact so fun that there are all sorts of gamers that do exactly this sort of thing for fun. As Rob’s students uncovered, the structure of the tech tree itself makes assumptions about how progress, science, and technology work.
In most cases the most compelling arguments in games are actually embedded inside game mechanics. But it’s not just the content of the games that make arguments. Games, like other media (books, articles, films, etc.) express arguments in their content. There is a lot of excitement about games and education but so much of that fervor misses a crucial point at the heart of Rob’s assignment.
Student’s then proposed their own ideas for how to model the history of science in a video game. Rob’s students picked apart the way the game allows players to develop science and tech. A few weeks back Rob Macdougall posted a great essay about using the game Civilization’s approach to the history of science and technology as a point of entry into conversations about models for representing the history of science and technology more broadly.
