{"id":1902,"date":"2014-03-12T21:58:47","date_gmt":"2014-03-12T20:58:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=1902"},"modified":"2014-03-13T09:30:40","modified_gmt":"2014-03-13T08:30:40","slug":"iq-tests-as-game-genre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2014\/03\/12\/iq-tests-as-game-genre\/","title":{"rendered":"Patch Wednesday #3: IQ Tests as Game Genre"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>This is my third\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/category\/games\/patch-wednesday\">Patch Wednesday<\/a>\u00a0post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or simply not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas, and invite comments.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>The header does sound a bit like Ash Wednesday, so we can reaffirm our faith in the idea of examining video games, but I also call it Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies. It falls mostly on the day after Microsoft\u2019s monthly\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Patch_Tuesday\">Patch Tuesday<\/a>. Time to patch things up and start again.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I think it by now is well understood that players approach a new game on the basis of their previous game (and other) experiences &#8211; hence the success of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/casualrevolution\/\">casual games<\/a> that can be approached by a new audience. And we understand that players during a game will expand their skill set gradually (what I call\u00a0<em>repertoire\u00a0<\/em>in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.half-real.net\/\">Half-real<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>OK, but can we extend this outside regular game-play?<\/p>\n<p>I thought of this when last year, Richard Bartle posted this brain teaser from the &#8220;Daily Brain Games&#8221; calendar:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1904\" alt=\"ooo2\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/ooo2.jpg\" width=\"387\" height=\"185\" \/><\/p>\n<p>What is the right answer? Bartle proposed the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i>Fish<\/i>\u00a0Only one with fins. Only one without lungs.<\/li>\n<li><i>Rat<\/i>\u00a0Only one with fur. Only one that has babies. Only one that carries the Black Death. Only one that Pied Piper can charm.<\/li>\n<li><i>Snake<\/i>\u00a0Only one that sheds its skin. Only one able to eat something bigger than its head. Only one Indiana Jones is scared of.<\/li>\n<li><i>Frog<\/i>\u00a0Only one without a tail. Only one to undergo metamorphosis. Only one that can jump.<\/li>\n<li><i>Hen<\/i>\u00a0Only one with feathers. Only one with a beak. Only one that can&#8217;t live in water. Only one that&#8217;s only female.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The calendar wants us to answer\u00a0<em>rat<\/em>, because it is a mammal.\u00a0I have posed this riddle to several people who can instantly identify the correct answer, while I struggled to choose between all the possible explanations I could come up with.\u00a0I couldn&#8217;t figure out why at first, but I suspect that we can identify a number of genre conventions that govern how you are meant to approach such puzzles. For anything related to the natural world, I think there is a hierarchy where you are supposed to answer according to the <b>first<\/b>\u00a0distinction applicable:<\/p>\n<p>1) Natural \/ man-made<br \/>\n2) Fly \/ walk two legs \/ walk four legs \/ swim<br \/>\n3) Mammals \/ non-mammals<br \/>\n4) Nocturnal \/ diurnal<br \/>\n5) Cold-blooded \/ warm-blooded<br \/>\n&#8230;\u00a023) Shed skin &#8230;\u00a026) Extinction status &#8230;\u00a048) Funny observations about the spelling\u00a0&#8230;\u00a0and so on.<\/p>\n<p>So the trick is to approach a question like this not as logic, but as &#8220;what are the usual answers in this genre&#8221;.<\/p>\n<h2>IQ Tests and Probability<\/h2>\n<p>I find that the word and visual puzzles in IQ test often have a similar quality: it is easy to conjure up dozens of possible answers and explanations (like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.syvum.com\/cgi\/online\/serve.cgi\/iq\/ar_oddo2.html?question_hide\">this one<\/a>), but the test creators seem to believe that there really is one true answer. And again, it comes down to a set of genre conventions that have built over the years.<\/p>\n<p>Another example concerns the kind of puzzles posed to show that humans have a poor grasp of probability or logic. I discussed the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/tuesday-changes-everything-a-mathematical-puzzle\">Tuesday boy problem<\/a>\u00a0some time ago, but let us take the simpler <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Boy_or_Girl_paradox\">Boy or girl paradox<\/a>.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Mr. Smith has two children. At least one of them is a boy. What is the probability that both children are boys?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you are into probability puzzles, you assume that there is something particular to look out for in the phrasing of the question, and yes: you understand that the question concerns the likelihood that someone who has two children and more than zero boys, will have two boys. The correct answer is 1\/3. (Because there are three boy\/girl combinations with more than zero boys: boy\/girl, girl\/boy, boy\/boy, and only one of these is boy\/boy, so the answer is 1\/3.)<\/p>\n<p>If you are <em>not<\/em> into probability puzzles, you imagine a situation where you meet someone with one of their children, a boy, and you are asked about the likelihood that the other child is also a boy, so 1\/2. This certainly isn&#8217;t the answer you are meant to give.<\/p>\n<p>It is undoubtedly true that we often apply too-simple heuristics to problems like this, but it is also clear that Boy or Girl Paradox may be more of a test of whether we are into probability puzzles than of whether we intuitively understand probability.<\/p>\n<p>Compare this to the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Monty_Hall_problem\">Monty Hall problem<\/a>, which does not seem to be based on genre knowledge, but actual questions of probability.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t mean to suggest that everything is a game, only that IQ tests and some probability puzzles are too much like stale and ossified game genres to actually measure that they are meant to measure.<\/p>\n<p>As for game studies, I think this shows how the tools that we have developed for game design and game play &#8211; these tools can become useful outside regular games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is my third\u00a0Patch Wednesday\u00a0post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or simply not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas, and invite comments.\u00a0 The header does sound a bit like Ash Wednesday, so we can reaffirm our faith in the idea of examining video &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2014\/03\/12\/iq-tests-as-game-genre\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Patch Wednesday #3: IQ Tests as Game Genre&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-patch-wednesday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}