Recursive thinking
What is recursive thinking? This is a teaching method based on solving one of the greatest problems of the curren education. Think of physics or maths, for example. Students are taught a lot of formulas and nature laws they don't understand, under the promise that someday they will. Because of this, many students lose their interest: they either don't understand or don't care.
So, recursive thinking consist in, instead of begin by the reasoning, the "formula", the boring part, begin by showing "students" (players in our case) a practical case and example. There are two important points about this:
· We show players an experience, not a resaoning. We're not trying to make players understand something, but live (experience) something. So, in this part, emotion and excitement are more important than... intelligence or elegance.
· We're going to confuse players, that's precisely our intentions. At this moment, our intention isn't to give them something they know how to handle and play, rather the opposite. We want to intrigue them so they want to learn more.
If we analyse it, we see that this method is completally opposite to our current education system. Students are given examples once they already have the theory and the formula, to apply it. But they should be given the examples also before getting the knowledge, so they felt intrigued, and challenged, and tried to think by themselves how to fix the problem, how to solve the puzzle.
In physics, for example, students are given a lot of theory they don't understand, and later they will need to practically apply that knowledge to examples and exercises they don't fully understand either, to finally "imagine" or "extrapolate" how it works.
Recursive thinking means doing that the opposite way: first show students (players) an easy common everyday case, something that even our grandmas would understand. Make them feel intrigued, interested, challenged, As if it were a game (the process of learning, I mean). Then, and only then, show them how to solve the problem, but not the formula directly. Show them, little by little, we can control and manage the situation, and change it, and forsee it, and then they will feel even more interested, they will want that kind of "power". And finally, teach them how to do it.
Let's apply that to a game. A fighting game, for example. Instead of using the first fight as a tutorial and showing the use of each button, and then all the combos, to finally let the player actually play the game, make it the opposite way. Begin the game by showing the player a battle between two IAs, showing amazing combos and techniques, that will make the player feel interested for the game, because it looks cool!
Then let the player play, but with more basic controls. Like letting him move freely, and make a combo just by clicking one key, something like that. Something soft. After that you let the player start playing the game, without "tutorials", just make them fight with some dumb-easy IA, very easy to defeat, so the player can test it, try it. Little by little the player will adapt to the game, will learn how it works and get more fun.
That's totally opposite to make the player play a tutorial at the beginning, and then letting them play a game he still doesn't understand.
So, to finish up, recursive thinking is about giving players experiences before knowledge, fun before "tutorials" and learn through testing and playing.