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A most profound video game: a good cognitive aid for research
Baba Is You is a philosophical video game that facilitates the kind of thinking needed for frontier topics in the sciences of life and mind.
The dichotomy between object and message is seen for example in classic cannibalism studies by McConnell (download the archive of hard-to-find papers here), in which trained planaria were eaten by naive hosts and conferred behavioral information. The game breaks that binary framing, which is good, because the notion of a active data (like our self-sorting arrays), and indeed agential memories, are powerful areas for development in the emerging field of Diverse Intelligence. The notion of a continuum between passive information patterns (thoughts) and active cognitive agents (thinkers) is hard for many to grasp, and playing a game like this may provide an intuitive understanding of the framework – in a way that reading scientific papers may not.
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