Enkhbold Nyamsuren - What happens when scientists play games?

Games are extremely under-appreciated as a tool for scientific research. First, games provide an entertainment and motivational value to traditionally boring laboratory experiments. Second, games are incredibly convenient tools for studying interaction, cooperation and competition of cognitive processes involved in complex problem solving tasks. Third, findings from the game-based research can be further used in development of applied games facilitating learning and training for real-life tasks.

This talk consists of two parts. The first and main part will discuss games as a paradigm for studying complex real-world tasks. An example will be given based on a board game of SET that requires many of the cognitive processes frequently used in real world. I will discuss how the study of player's behavior in SET widens our understanding of the human visual system, interaction between top-down planning and bottom-up visual processes, error making mechanisms and general human strategies in complex problem solving tasks.

The second part will briefly mention potential directions of using findings from the first part of the presentation for building applied games. I will also touch upon the future of applied gaming in Europe within the context of the Rage-project, a Horizon 2020 project involving 20 organizations from 10 countries and aimed at promoting applied gaming development and research.