Jeevan Kumar

Movies, Games, Music, Books... these are all different mediums of expressing experiences.

Now, a movie may contain music, storytelling inspired by books, and 3D models taken from games ... but does that make movies something “greater” than music or games? Not at all.

Some experiences are better told in one medium than the other. For example:

Crime and Punishment (Note: I have only started reading it.) In this novel, Dostoevsky writes every flicker of thought the character faces - the justifications, the madness, the spiritual breakdown - in a way the camera can't directly show.

The thoughts of the character may be pages and pages long. If we were to make it into a movie, we would probably have to reduce those pages of thoughts into something simpler to make it more entertaining.This would mean losing a lot of information. Thus, this story is better told through a novel.

Kerbal Space Program is a game where you build rockets and make them fly. It doesn’t directly teach you the physics of rocket science, but your goal is to make rockets reach space , and you can only do that if you truly understand it, since the game’s physics are modeled after reality.

So what happens is, people turn to textbooks and YouTube videos, study orbital mechanics, and then come back to the game just to land their rockets on the Moon.

This game has had a huge impact ... many gamers have ended up choosing to major in physics because of it.

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If we give word problems like “Find the force and angle needed to throw this bird so that it reaches position (x, y)”, the student may not find it very engaging. And if the student gives a wrong answer, they’re simply met with a blunt “WRONG ANSWER” as a response.

This is negative reinforcement.

But turn that same word problem into an Angry Birds-like game, where they have to hit a specific target and can control the force and angle ... and suddenly it becomes fun.

Even if they fail, they still get to see funny things happen , like walls breaking or objects tumbling around. And when they finally get the answer right and win the level, it feels like a celebration.

Isn’t that fun?