Arguments and Video Games

James Fallows, in this month's Atlantic Monthly, mentioned a new company out of Australia that interests me. The company, AusThink, has a product called Reason!Able that is designed to assist in graphically managing arguments. It is based on the company principal's background in philosophy and cognitive science, and has been under development at University of Melbourne for several years.

The technology is remarkably simple, providing a graphical tree view of premises, objections to those premises and supporting reasoning for the premises. While it really does little more than you could achieve with paper and pencil, it has been empirically tested in a university setting. The results show that students who take a critical thinking class using the technology achieve an improvement of 0.8 standard deviations on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test after only one semester. This compares favorably to an improvement of 0.5 SD for students over three years of college without the course!

So they get smarter faster.

I was thinking about this in light of my engagements in the local paper's online forum. The level of coherence in argumentation is astoundingly bad for the most part. The modus operandi is to directly insult those politically opposed to you and use straw man arguments to justify your claims. Another common tactic is generalization of the author's feelings to those of others, even when there is clear variation in opinions on the topic at hand. Among these kinds of authors, I believe the levels of education are not very high and the amount of coherent argument that they have had to engage in with anyone except their educational peers is relatively low.

Yet, I also think many of them have improved over the last several years and have started writing more coherently as they have watched their discussions get publicly skewered. It takes time, though, and I like to think that getting a critical thinking program down to the level of high schools would help improve the overall dialog.

Brainstorming: Could a video game do this kind of thing? How about a video game wherein you argue with people about complex issues like what the mission and goals are of the invading alien species? I will slightly sheepishly admit that I let my son play Halo/Halo2 and that he spent quite a long time trying to understand the motives, goals and underlying theology of the Covenant and Flood, so I think there is a kernel in sophisticated new games. But perhaps the needed unmet component involves puzzles that require verbal analytic capacity (discovery of a written document) to reach a conclusion about next steps?