The Witness is a fantastic puzzle game, but see my section on recommending games on LW: the very fact that The Witness is more engaging and addicting makes it a better experience but (according to me) a worse recommendation to a community of non-gamers who have other high-value uses of their time.
Re: completing Understand puzzles without understanding why: Yeah, I also did that at the start, and that also hampered my experience a bit. Personally I eventually returned to those levels and solved them in a way such that I understood and could write down each rule.
Anyway, for me the core experience of Understand is not so much solving any individual levels, but constantly practicing the loop of: make new hypothesis → experiment → falsify hypothesis → make new hypothesis.
For example, it’s one thing to learn about confirmation bias by reading about it on LW, and another to constantly run afoul of it during gameplay; the latter experience is a great illustration and motivation for the claim that one should try to falsify, rather than prove, one’s hypotheses.
The Witness is a fantastic puzzle game, but see my section on recommending games on LW: the very fact that The Witness is more engaging and addicting makes it a better experience but (according to me) a worse recommendation to a community of non-gamers who have other high-value uses of their time.
Re: completing Understand puzzles without understanding why: Yeah, I also did that at the start, and that also hampered my experience a bit. Personally I eventually returned to those levels and solved them in a way such that I understood and could write down each rule.
Anyway, for me the core experience of Understand is not so much solving any individual levels, but constantly practicing the loop of: make new hypothesis → experiment → falsify hypothesis → make new hypothesis.
For example, it’s one thing to learn about confirmation bias by reading about it on LW, and another to constantly run afoul of it during gameplay; the latter experience is a great illustration and motivation for the claim that one should try to falsify, rather than prove, one’s hypotheses.