4 ms·

The Didactic Novel

62 points by telotortium 5y ago

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
Regarding the Shogun stuff in the beginning - think of all the Elvish you learned from Tolkien!
- bradrn 5y ago
  Practically none. Tolkien went out of his way to avoid using constructed languages in his books, even going so far as to translate character names (‘Frodo’ is really Maura). When he does provide sentences, there is no effort to make them comprehensible to us; even today, there is no complete reference grammar of even his best attested languages. There is certainly no systematic attempt to teach another language, as seen in Shōgun
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    Ok think of all the Fremen lore you learned from Dune.
jhbadger 5y ago
There's an amusing comic novel by Andrew Drummond called "A Handbook of Volapuk" (itself a reference to a 19th century textbook of that name). It's about the 19th century Volapuk movement. Volapuk was an early attempt at an artificial language, like Esperanto, but earlier. The novel includes scenes of Volapuk lessons and they are actually accurate, although of dubious practical use.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  An earlier one is Latin. In reading Familia Romana Per Se Illustrata, you see it's like a made-up language.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    There's a set of books on this, called the "direct method" or "nature method" A page with a link to several of these: https://blog.nina.coffee/2018/08/27/all_nature_method_books.html https://blog.nina.coffee/2018/08/27/all_nature_method_books.... (the site that it refers to is where I initially found the same list of books, but it seems to be defunct) https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazione/metodo-diretto-applicato-alle-lingue-moderne https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazio... (defunct, it seems)
    - inetsee 5y ago
      There is also a set of 3 books by I. A. Richards titled "English Through Pictures.I think it's a useful idea, but the pictures in these books are fairly primitive stick figure drawings.
bmitc 5y ago
Dragon's Egg is basically a tutorial on neutron stars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
themadturk 5y ago
This gives a name to so much of what I love about many Neal Stephenson novels (and about Shogun as well) -- didactic.
dbtc 5y ago
see also 'Bildungsroman' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsroman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsroman
tony-allan 5y ago
Time to get reading again... Shōgun Cryptonomicon Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality ... The Didactic Novel
motohagiography 5y ago
What an edifying article. I love this idea of a fully didactic novel from a genre fiction perspective. Romance novels are strictly formulaic, and borrowing the structure of those to freight with didactism could make this didactic novel thing a huge genre for absorbing facts. One could use the romance novel frame and plug in foundations as plot points.
aaron695 5y ago
hcs 5y ago
Are there computer/video games that work on this level, didactic and narrative, as well as having substantial gameplay? I expect there are some with a lot of e.g. military history, but I haven’t played those myself. Of course most games will teach you how to play the game itself, but can they do more while still succeeding as games? Hack ‘n’ Slash is my best example, it gets across some basic ideas about data structures, gameplay scripting, and cheat methods. But I don’t know how much of that can be picked up purely from the game, since it’s all through stuff the player has to figure out how to do (even with some prompting). You don’t get to learn from watching a character figure it out. Not that one or the other is better, I’m just curious about other examples.
- AmpsterMan 5y ago
  Kerbal Space Program comes to mind. https://xkcd.com/1356/ https://xkcd.com/1356/
- Banana699 5y ago
  The Zachtronics game "Exapunks" is amazing. Its plot is a standard cyberpunk story with body modifications and underground networks of outlaws working against corrupt corporations. Its gameplay is that you write (an extremely simple) assembly bytecode for virtual machines called the "Exa"s, those virtual machines then infiltrate computer systems across the network and perform your program there. The whole thing is visualised as tiny little robotic virus-like creatures, representing the malicious scripts you write, hopping around in an arena representing the network they haunt. Aside from the amazing and nostalgic story and the obviously educational value of teaching a player the bare basics of assembly programming, there are more subtle educational content being sneaked into the experience. Off the top of my head: 1) The Exa is extremely primitive, it has a single general purpose 4-digit-wide register that can hold decimal numbers from -9999 to 9999 (and occasionally strings), and another one mostly like it but test-and-jump instructions additionally treat it as an implicit second operand, that's it. No stack, no procedures, no nothing. Just 2 registers, and a very simple set of 2 dozen or so instructions. Oh and there's also a limit on the code size, it varies on each level but it's about 100-150 instructions. 2) But the Exa is Turing-complete, because it has a special instruction MAKE that creates a file, files are infinite length comma-seperated list of values, you can only write to it by writing to a special register on the Exa. Juggling values between files and registers is thrilling mental gymnastics. 3) Exas can fork, this is the primary mechanism that gets around code size limitations. Forking works just like OS processes, a new copy of the Exa with the same code is created and the child jumps to a label while the parent falls through the code. I learned and internalised all of this before I knew what 'Process' in the OS sense even means, that's how beautiful this game is. There are even a mechanism for communication between Exas (i.e. IPC), complete with rules about what happens if an Exa writes to the network register and nobody reads it or vice versa. 4) Sometimes you manipulate external devices (neurones, ATM machines, satellite dishes, Etc...) by writing to special registers, just like you manipulate files by writing to a special register, this is yet another sneaky educational bit: the Everything-is-a-file of Linux and Unix OSes, the interface for hardware mimics the interface for files and networks. Also checkout other Zachtronics games like kohctpyktop, TIS-100, and shenzenIO. Every one of them has something awesome to teach you, but it's Exapunks that burned itself deep inside my brain and heart.
XFrequentist 5y ago
A choose-your-own-adventure format would be an interesting layer, since you could embed recall/understanding checks at each decision point.

The Didactic Novel

62 points by telotortium 5y ago

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

Regarding the Shogun stuff in the beginning - think of all the Elvish you learned from Tolkien!

bradrn 5y ago
Practically none. Tolkien went out of his way to avoid using constructed languages in his books, even going so far as to translate character names (‘Frodo’ is really Maura). When he does provide sentences, there is no effort to make them comprehensible to us; even today, there is no complete reference grammar of even his best attested languages. There is certainly no systematic attempt to teach another language, as seen in Shōgun
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  Ok think of all the Fremen lore you learned from Dune.

jhbadger 5y ago

There's an amusing comic novel by Andrew Drummond called "A Handbook of Volapuk" (itself a reference to a 19th century textbook of that name). It's about the 19th century Volapuk movement. Volapuk was an early attempt at an artificial language, like Esperanto, but earlier. The novel includes scenes of Volapuk lessons and they are actually accurate, although of dubious practical use.

daniel-cussen 5y ago
An earlier one is Latin. In reading Familia Romana Per Se Illustrata, you see it's like a made-up language.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  There's a set of books on this, called the "direct method" or "nature method" A page with a link to several of these: https://blog.nina.coffee/2018/08/27/all_nature_method_books.html https://blog.nina.coffee/2018/08/27/all_nature_method_books.... (the site that it refers to is where I initially found the same list of books, but it seems to be defunct) https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazione/metodo-diretto-applicato-alle-lingue-moderne https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazio... (defunct, it seems)
  - inetsee 5y ago
    There is also a set of 3 books by I. A. Richards titled "English Through Pictures.I think it's a useful idea, but the pictures in these books are fairly primitive stick figure drawings.

bmitc 5y ago

Dragon's Egg is basically a tutorial on neutron stars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg

themadturk 5y ago

This gives a name to so much of what I love about many Neal Stephenson novels (and about Shogun as well) -- didactic.

dbtc 5y ago

see also 'Bildungsroman' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsroman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsroman

tony-allan 5y ago

Time to get reading again... Shōgun Cryptonomicon Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality ... The Didactic Novel

motohagiography 5y ago

What an edifying article. I love this idea of a fully didactic novel from a genre fiction perspective. Romance novels are strictly formulaic, and borrowing the structure of those to freight with didactism could make this didactic novel thing a huge genre for absorbing facts. One could use the romance novel frame and plug in foundations as plot points.

aaron695 5y ago

hcs 5y ago

Are there computer/video games that work on this level, didactic and narrative, as well as having substantial gameplay? I expect there are some with a lot of e.g. military history, but I haven’t played those myself. Of course most games will teach you how to play the game itself, but can they do more while still succeeding as games? Hack ‘n’ Slash is my best example, it gets across some basic ideas about data structures, gameplay scripting, and cheat methods. But I don’t know how much of that can be picked up purely from the game, since it’s all through stuff the player has to figure out how to do (even with some prompting). You don’t get to learn from watching a character figure it out. Not that one or the other is better, I’m just curious about other examples.

AmpsterMan 5y ago
Kerbal Space Program comes to mind. https://xkcd.com/1356/ https://xkcd.com/1356/
Banana699 5y ago
The Zachtronics game "Exapunks" is amazing. Its plot is a standard cyberpunk story with body modifications and underground networks of outlaws working against corrupt corporations. Its gameplay is that you write (an extremely simple) assembly bytecode for virtual machines called the "Exa"s, those virtual machines then infiltrate computer systems across the network and perform your program there. The whole thing is visualised as tiny little robotic virus-like creatures, representing the malicious scripts you write, hopping around in an arena representing the network they haunt. Aside from the amazing and nostalgic story and the obviously educational value of teaching a player the bare basics of assembly programming, there are more subtle educational content being sneaked into the experience. Off the top of my head: 1) The Exa is extremely primitive, it has a single general purpose 4-digit-wide register that can hold decimal numbers from -9999 to 9999 (and occasionally strings), and another one mostly like it but test-and-jump instructions additionally treat it as an implicit second operand, that's it. No stack, no procedures, no nothing. Just 2 registers, and a very simple set of 2 dozen or so instructions. Oh and there's also a limit on the code size, it varies on each level but it's about 100-150 instructions. 2) But the Exa is Turing-complete, because it has a special instruction MAKE that creates a file, files are infinite length comma-seperated list of values, you can only write to it by writing to a special register on the Exa. Juggling values between files and registers is thrilling mental gymnastics. 3) Exas can fork, this is the primary mechanism that gets around code size limitations. Forking works just like OS processes, a new copy of the Exa with the same code is created and the child jumps to a label while the parent falls through the code. I learned and internalised all of this before I knew what 'Process' in the OS sense even means, that's how beautiful this game is. There are even a mechanism for communication between Exas (i.e. IPC), complete with rules about what happens if an Exa writes to the network register and nobody reads it or vice versa. 4) Sometimes you manipulate external devices (neurones, ATM machines, satellite dishes, Etc...) by writing to special registers, just like you manipulate files by writing to a special register, this is yet another sneaky educational bit: the Everything-is-a-file of Linux and Unix OSes, the interface for hardware mimics the interface for files and networks. Also checkout other Zachtronics games like kohctpyktop, TIS-100, and shenzenIO. Every one of them has something awesome to teach you, but it's Exapunks that burned itself deep inside my brain and heart.

XFrequentist 5y ago

A choose-your-own-adventure format would be an interesting layer, since you could embed recall/understanding checks at each decision point.