Abstract

Video games have long been an established medium of popular culture. Like other elements of popular culture, they play a major role in the everyday lives of many people - especially children and young adults - and even form part of their own identity and sense of belonging to certain groups. This automatically leads to the fact that the recipients take up the contents of games, possibly adopt concepts that are presented in them, and thereby gain knowledge about the world as a whole. The fact that video games have a high potential to be used for learning processes due to these aspects has been the starting point of pedagogical studies in recent years. What is neglected, however, is the question of how to deal with scientific content in video games that is misleading or even misrepresented. Especially in the field of modern physics - such as quantum physics and chaos theory - it can be seen that phenomena such as the many worlds theory or the butterfly effect are used in pop culture in great numbers, but these are addressed in a misleading way almost as often. This can also be seen in various video games, where these phenomena are not only mentioned or explained, but even used in game mechanics. An example of this is the video game Life is Strange, released in 2015, and its use of the butterfly effect as a theme. Two questions are interesting here, firstly: How can the emergence of this misleading content be explained? For this purpose, this phenomenon will be made scientifically tangible by classifying it by means of Ludwik Fleck's concept of false popularization. For this purpose, the phenomenon of the butterfly effect will first be outlined in its scientific and pop cultural dimension, in order to examine its thematization and reception in Life is Strange. After clarifying the question of how the butterfly effect is built into the game and which misunderstandings arise, the second question is addressed: How to deal with these findings? The proposal of this essay is to take a didactic perspective.