I just finished playing a side-scrolling game called Closure (http://www.closuregame.com) that has some qualities of Myst, et al. I think that you’ve got a good idea here, but a problem could arise from the ‘death penalty’ that most games impose. Typically, you just restart the ‘mission.’ Games that operate like that don’t provide quite enough incentive to pull out your whole intellect. If the player knew ahead of time that a single failure meant permanent loss, they would be more apt to give the game effort enough to have their rationality tested accurately.
If the player knew ahead of time that a single failure meant permanent loss
That would be the RogueLike genre, of which NetHack is a pretty good example of “painful trial and error to learn how the world works”. Most successful players just go online and read the spoilers, and I’d argue that this is the more rational approach—it’s irrational to go out and pay the price of failure when someone else has already done that for you, and you can learn from them.
Besides, most people don’t find that sort of trial and error game play fun, which I think is a fairly important consideration if you’re trying to teach people.
I just finished playing a side-scrolling game called Closure (http://www.closuregame.com) that has some qualities of Myst, et al. I think that you’ve got a good idea here, but a problem could arise from the ‘death penalty’ that most games impose. Typically, you just restart the ‘mission.’ Games that operate like that don’t provide quite enough incentive to pull out your whole intellect. If the player knew ahead of time that a single failure meant permanent loss, they would be more apt to give the game effort enough to have their rationality tested accurately.
That would be the RogueLike genre, of which NetHack is a pretty good example of “painful trial and error to learn how the world works”. Most successful players just go online and read the spoilers, and I’d argue that this is the more rational approach—it’s irrational to go out and pay the price of failure when someone else has already done that for you, and you can learn from them.
Besides, most people don’t find that sort of trial and error game play fun, which I think is a fairly important consideration if you’re trying to teach people.