Concept Maps

Mappings

For our game, we’re trying to model the development of scientific knowledge through embodying universities. Within it, we hope to capture several key dynamics that happen at universities:

• Top scientific talent is recruited by the university and given resources to both observe and model the world.
• Many scientists have different specializations — some may be better at making precise empirical observations, and some may be better at synthesizing it to produce a theory. One example that comes to mind is Tycho Brahe tabulating fifteen years of data which was later synthesized by Johannes Kepler.
• The corpus of scientific knowledge is built through a long process of continuously working to refine the existing paradigm. Current ideas are based on what best fits the available evidence, but paradigms can shift over time as newer discoveries are made.

Keeping that in mind, we designed our game’s mechanics to have a mostly one-to-one correspondence with the key dynamics from the real process. We modeled recruitment as a way to strengthen your university’s team of scientists, which is abstracted to improving the number of tokens that you have in your spinner. We abstracted conducting research with your team of scientists to spinning your spinner; we felt that this was the most appropriate place to insert variance, since it’s not a far cry to say that scientists can have both slumps and periods of rapid breakthroughs in their careers. We abstracted publishing manuscripts/papers to playing cards because it’s an action that puts private information into the public corpus of knowledge. Then, to model paradigms as a product of the times, we made sure that the gameplay persisted through more than one era, so the paradigm can shift. Finally, we chose renown as our condition of victory because that’s how universities attract future generations of scientists.