In my everyday life I have been finding overlap between fellow skeptics and folks who game. That is to say, the people I know in real life and online who I would consider ‘critical thinkers’ and scientists have a notable affinity for playing complex and unique board games, dice games, or card games. It is not a closed-set of people by any means, but it makes me wonder: What do games teach us about thought? Are games good models for teaching integrity to kids (one of skep/dad’s claimed core pillars of critical thinking) or is it mere correlation? Or what else could we deduce from this seeming connection — if it even exists?

These questions are far too big to answer in one post, so I’ve decided to break it out into a number of smaller posts (call them chapters or sub-sections, if you will) that will eventually form the basis for (I hope) a small paper on the topic. The concept is explained on my WhitePapers page.

First, what is gaming, exactly?

At what depth of involvement in a community does one need to be entrenched to consider themselves an expert? There was a time not so long ago when three other grown men and I, gathered around a fully expanded game of Settlers of Catan, were distractedly discussing the economic viability (to the point of some degree of formal business planning) of opening a board game store in our city. If seriously considering and planning to become a local vendor does not put one in sight of such expertise, it certainly bends one’s mind to a new level of consideration for what constitutes the same. We have not taken the plan any further (though it is not off the table) but it has left me pondering the culture of gaming to a much more substantial degree than I had ever before considered.

Gaming, if I suppose I needed to loosely define it, is any form of (I’d like to think mature, but not always) rule-based, non-sport play. When I think of gaming — as I’m sure do many others — I think of cracking open a cardboard box and extracting a board, dice, cards, tokens, bits, pieces, and often a crisp sheet of rules. But I don’t want to limit my definition to that. A handful of dice, a deck of cards, or a pencil and paper can be the basis for the simplest game. I sheepishly admit that I possess a small (and expensive) collection of hand-painted die-cast miniature figurines, replete with statistics cards, status tokens, color-coordinated dice, and multi-volume rulebooks, that in themselves define the upper-echelons (and the opposite end of the spectrum) of complexity in gaming.

While I would wager that the average person on the street is not only aware of games, but has played them, I think the Culture of the Gamer is limited to a much narrower band of society.

To examine this, my previous post is a fairly basic survey on gaming and the demographics of gaming. Please take a moment to fill it in. I’m going to make use of the results in a later post, so right now this is one of the best (and easiest) ways you can help me out!

What does gaming have to do with thinking?

Now we begin to get to the heart of this topic. I am inclined to ask some meaningful questions about the relationship between thought (and specifically critical thought) and the act of playing games — and ask I will.

• Who are gamers? What defines a gamer?
• What the key (mental, social, etc) attributes of gamers?
• What skills do gamers acquire because they game?
• What personal attributes makes someone a gamer?
• Do people define gaming, or does gaming define people?
• Why do people game? And how did they start?
• Why don’t people game? And are they avoiding it deliberately?
• Has any research been done on gamers?

I’m sure I (and others) will think of many more avenues of thought on this topic, but this is where I am starting and I hope it leads me to:

Are gamers necessarily critical thinkers?

My gut feeling (*cough*) is yes, and my prediction is the same. That said…

If I do find that there is a relationship, it will be the next step to dissect the argument into a question of correlation versus causation. I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer that — and I’m not even sure there is a way to be sure of that relationship anyhow. In other words, I think gamers are critical thinkers by necessity (and by broad generalization, though as I alluded to earlier I don’t think the opposite, that critical thinkers are necessarily gamers). I will need to research and discuss if gaming hones that skill, or is merely an outlet for it. I am certain that there are elements of evidence and extrapolation that can help my readers and I narrow our conclusions into something useful that contributes to the final question, and the question pertaining directly to the subject of this blog:

How is gaming related to raising critical thinking kids?

My final focused topic will be of particular interest to readers of this blog, and while I can never hope to answer it with a blog discussion and (*cough, cough*) informal meta-analysis, I hope I can shine some light on a few questions:

• Are we as parents contributing positively to our child’s rational development through gaming?
• Is there, in fact, a link between rule-based play and developing integrity in kids?
• Are some games better than others for critical thinking?
• With who should kids be gaming? And how often?
• Are there other skills that come from gaming? Do those skills build or inhibit critical thought?

In the end, I hope I can provide some evidence-based conclusions about the value of gaming and raising critically thinking kids, be that positive, negative, or decidedly neutral. Time and further research will tell — and after all, this is just the “proposal” for my further analysis.

Again, please take a moment to fill in my survey. I’d like to get at least one hundred responses before I do any sort of analysis on the data. And, if you are stumbling here from somewhere else, please check out the status of this whole project from the WhitePapers page which will be the central source for all parts of this skep/dad blog sub-project.

Skeptical Tidbits

New Partners #1: Not a “partner” per se, but one of the new contributors for the skepchick blog is a fellow Canadian — and Albertan! Very cool!