Roland: theoreticians of game design (Well—some guys, Raph Coster, Dan Cook …) often reduce “fun” in games to learning—and those aren’t just games that would appeal to this audience. The space of mathematical problems to solve seems like a close enough approximation of the space of complex systems in which one can learn, and, by a happy coincidence, there’s plenty of theoretical work on the complexity of mathematical problems and how large that space might be.
Roland: theoreticians of game design (Well—some guys, Raph Coster, Dan Cook …) often reduce “fun” in games to learning—and those aren’t just games that would appeal to this audience. The space of mathematical problems to solve seems like a close enough approximation of the space of complex systems in which one can learn, and, by a happy coincidence, there’s plenty of theoretical work on the complexity of mathematical problems and how large that space might be.