now playing: video games for SCIENCE!

My favorite exhibit at the St. Louis Science Center is a little wing on the second floor called "Cyberville," aka a life-sized interior set from ReBoot. Okay, maybe not an exact replica, but between the primary-color-painted atmosphere and all the interactive things to do with sensors and alarms and mini-computers and introduction to binary concepts, I couldn't help but think of the whole thing as a cartoon in computer science. When I found the exhibit on a visit today, I discovered that a bunch of people in name tags with pieces of paper endorsed by the University of Wisconsin were doing a little study about the use of video games in science museum exhibits.

In short, I got to play video games... *cue GLADOS impression*... FOR SCIENCE!

The questionnaires were focused mostly on my experience as a museum goer, rather than as a gamer. So now the day is over and I'd like to talk a little more about those games I found from the perspective of how they rank on the transcended-games spectrum.

Virulent is actually a title exclusive to the iPad (although it is free), so apologies to those of you who are in my same economic class and can only play on nice big Star-Trek-age screens when they're offered for free use at science museums. As a recent graduate of AP Biology, I can very much appreciate the visual detail ascribed to microscopic entities and processes, complete with a sympathetic narrative written in a Borg-collective voice ("We are united. We are Virions.") so you don't feel bad about evading antibodies and corrupting the immune system of what is probably a helpless 9-year-old.

But who cares? You're doing it for science!

The last two games come from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

Poikilia was by far my favorite game in the study. Combining color theories of light and pigment into a series of clearly-defined puzzle objectives and a cutscene narrative illustrated in silent comic panels, Poikilia is the reason this post earns the "zen" tag. If I hadn't been pressed for time, I could've spent the entire study dabbling around this game. I didn't always understand what I was doing, but the trial-and-error gameplay meant that I didn't get easily frustrated like I did with Virulent's lack of clearly observable objectives and Waker's reflex-based style of play (see below). Not only are the mechanics relaxing, but the storyline keeps you interested in the overall "educational" value without seeming educational whatsoever (again, see below).

Seeing a screenshot from Waker on a poster is actually what alerted me to the study in Cyberville. And for good measure, I played it again. I've pretty much said everything I'm going to say about Waker in this earlier review--I really didn't learn much about physics, but maybe that's just because I wasn't getting hit over the head with a frying pan steaming full of the EDUCATIONAL SO IT WILL IMPROVE YOUR GRADES mantra that most "educational" games fall easy prey to as the designers try to keep the games from being too much "fun." My opinion of the game as a whole, however, is only improved by my discovery that it is a lot nicer to play on a responsive machine.

Bonus feature: Nanoquest

This game wasn't actually part of the study, but it was set up on one of the Cyberville computer stations, so I played it for about ten minutes. I expected to laugh at the blocky animations, the decidedly creepy character faces that hadn't quite made it over the uncanny valley, or the simplistic run-and-collect mechanics. And I did laugh! It's amusing, quirky, time-killing, and everything else you could want in an a casual game AND all things said and done, I ended up actually learning something about carbon buckyballs while fully immersing myself in the cheesy goodness of old-school CGI graphics. You can play online with Shockwave or download for the desktop, but if you're looking for some old-school thrills, any way you play this game is the way to really get that ReBoot nostalgia. Ahh.