Making citizens do science embedded in video games.

[brianvds]

Also, amateur science need not be at post grad level at all. It can be as simple and joyous as counting the different kinds of pollen on a piece of exposed sticky tape under a cheap microscope.

Or even just watching birds or trying to identify plants in a field of weeds. I'm an enthusiastic amateur scientist. I well remember the day when I used my bathtub to test the notion that water spirals out of it in different directions depending on the hemisphere you are in. Debunked that theory in ten minutes. :-)

I actually remain perplexed at how easily people believe things that they can very easily test without any expensive equipment...

[BoogieMonster]

... of dubious entertainment value simply because the real thing is so easily accessible.

Maybe you have some sort of FTL drive I wasn't aware of yet.

[st0nes]

Sopwith was fun back in the day, until we got a faster computer and the timing algorithm clearly hadn't taken faster computers into account. The result was a hilariously fast and unplayable game, as were many others.

Yeah, I remember writing a small TSR program in assembly that just used up clock cycles to slow the machine down.  The drawback was that the only way to speed it up again was to reboot...

[Rigil Kent]

... of dubious entertainment value simply because the real thing is so easily accessible.

Maybe you have some sort of FTL drive I wasn't aware of yet.

Fair enough, science fiction is not readily accessible.

R.

[cr1t]

Sopwith was fun back in the day, until we got a faster computer and the timing algorithm clearly hadn't taken faster computers into account. The result was a hilariously fast and unplayable game, as were many others.

Yeah, I remember writing a small TSR program in assembly that just used up clock cycles to slow the machine down.  The drawback was that the only way to speed it up again was to reboot...

I remember that problem, and a clever solution to the problem I just got better games to play.