Gameology (pronounced game-ology) is the study of The Game, and more precisely, why people lose. There are countless causes of loss, ranging from the obvious to the abstract.
In order to research The Game and Game-related behaviour, a version has been created know as a Gameological Self-Assessment (GSA). This includes an addition to Rule 3, whereby players must not only announce their loss, but also write down the time and cause of loss.
A typical GSA may look something like the following (click here to for a GSA template):
Time |
Cause |
12:30 |
Met Bob |
17:15 |
Computer game told me "You Lose!" |
21:50 |
Forgot to make a phone call |
14th April 2006 |
|
00:20 |
Thought about the phone call again |
Slept from 01:30 to 10:00 |
|
10:15 |
Remembered I had to make phone call |
Dates should be recorded as well as approximate sleeping times.
Thinking about Gameology should be included in the definition of thinking about The Game in Rule 2, to prevent the following situation:
Time |
Cause |
10:15 |
Remembered I had to make phone call |
10:15 |
Gameological Self-Assessment |
10:15 |
Gameological Self-Assessment |
10:16 |
Gameological Self-Assessment |
10:16 |
etc... |
Not making this inclusion would provide another interesting experiment, and I would hypothesise that the brain would eventually habituate and cease to lose.
Starting a GSA will initially cause abnormal/erratic loss behaviour. I hypothesise that players will quickly habituate to this new version of The Game.
Read about habituation
It should be noted that it is possible to lose The Game with out remembering to make note of the loss.
In December 2008, Cory Antiel of Sarah Lawrence College investigated the GSAs of 12 participants over the course of four weeks. Click the following link to download the PDF file.
The conclusion of his experiment reads as follows:
Gameological Self-Assessments inherently create new Game loss-cues, which accounted for over half the total Game losses in this experiment. Directed forgetting studies do not pertain to the semantic aspects of The Game. No strong evidence of habituation was found within the GSA, though sensitization played an important role in loss frequency. Writing down loss-cues contributes to rehearsal of episodic memories of particular instances of loss and primes the participant for subsequent losses. The Zeigarnik effect is clearly at work here, as GSAs create an ongoing task to which the brain devotes a certain amount of energy until its completion. The very thing that allows us to analyze causes of Game loss greatly affects any data gathered that it may be impossible to examine everyday (non-GSA) Game loss patterns.
