Inferno_Rice
Oct 10, 2004, 01:35 PM
Apparently, the Cognitive Science department at the University of California, San Diego is doing research concerning decision making and environments. StarcraftGamers found out about this through an ad one of their users found, which you can see here. The ad is pretty recent as you can see, as it asks for "expert and intermediate level Starcraft players" to use for their research and experiments. The website on the ad leads to this site which links to the actual project site which explains what it's all about. The Starcraft experiment is called "Passing the Bubble" and here is an excerpt from the long description:
Approach
To create a realistic but tractable experimental paradigm to study transfer of situational understanding we designed an experiment in which one decision maker ?passes the bubble of awareness? to another decision maker in the context of a virtual world style computer game: Starcraft. This is a complex strategy game with high quality graphics that requires substantial planning, expertise, and understanding of strategy. The world in which players live is generated by an extremely powerful graphics engine that retains perspective, and 3-dimensionality, not unlike the type of data feeds a UAV might produce.
There's a video you can download from that page showing one of the experiments as they're doing it, and it's pretty funny and cool to watch as two Starcraft fans are actually sitting there playing the game, and actually being part of a real university level research process at the same time.
What is really interesting, to me at least, is that I actually go to UCSD...in fact I am sitting here in my apartment on campus as I'm writing this. It's pretty funny to me that this is going on in a building I walk past everyday and I think I'll be writing to those professors just to say hi. Also it's cool that another Starcraft fan at my school decided to take a photo of that ad and submit it into the Starcraft community so let me know if you're reading this. Unlike that one post we made a long time ago where there was allegedly a class where people played Starcraft all day, this is a real university level research project being done involving Starcraft, which goes to show just how great this game is!
from sclegacy.com
Approach
To create a realistic but tractable experimental paradigm to study transfer of situational understanding we designed an experiment in which one decision maker ?passes the bubble of awareness? to another decision maker in the context of a virtual world style computer game: Starcraft. This is a complex strategy game with high quality graphics that requires substantial planning, expertise, and understanding of strategy. The world in which players live is generated by an extremely powerful graphics engine that retains perspective, and 3-dimensionality, not unlike the type of data feeds a UAV might produce.
There's a video you can download from that page showing one of the experiments as they're doing it, and it's pretty funny and cool to watch as two Starcraft fans are actually sitting there playing the game, and actually being part of a real university level research process at the same time.
What is really interesting, to me at least, is that I actually go to UCSD...in fact I am sitting here in my apartment on campus as I'm writing this. It's pretty funny to me that this is going on in a building I walk past everyday and I think I'll be writing to those professors just to say hi. Also it's cool that another Starcraft fan at my school decided to take a photo of that ad and submit it into the Starcraft community so let me know if you're reading this. Unlike that one post we made a long time ago where there was allegedly a class where people played Starcraft all day, this is a real university level research project being done involving Starcraft, which goes to show just how great this game is!
from sclegacy.com