Players should learn that banking on an unlikely solution is never a good bet, but highly probable solutions are still only probable rather than certain.
Banking on an unlikely solution is a good bet if and only if you get odds more favorable than the solution is unlikely.
It’s a question both of payoff and of likeliness.
You could even run that as a game mechanic—you have limited investigative time, and certain leads have more promising-looking rewards or more likely to end up with something that helps you out, and then after investigating the lead you update your beliefs and try something else.
A good skill for this is seeing what leads you can cheaply eliminate. It would also put into focus the costs of having too many low-value leads.
I think it might be counterproductive to time players, because it’s likely that time pressure would encourage players to use system 1 reasoning, and develop quick but sloppy heuristics for proceeding in the game.
Possibly the game could introduce some Time Attack elements late on, once the players have mastered everything else, but speaking as someone who very rarely enjoys time constraints in games, I’d prefer if it were optional.
I though that by “quickly”, “with few pieces of evidence” was actually meant—the less, the better. Still, you can always get more evidence than necessary.
Yeah, “quickly” got overloaded by both “how long the player takes to make decisions” and “how many units of in-game time have elapsed”. Perhaps “fewer turns used” is a better way to phrase it.
Banking on an unlikely solution is a good bet if and only if you get odds more favorable than the solution is unlikely.
It’s a question both of payoff and of likeliness.
You could even run that as a game mechanic—you have limited investigative time, and certain leads have more promising-looking rewards or more likely to end up with something that helps you out, and then after investigating the lead you update your beliefs and try something else.
A good skill for this is seeing what leads you can cheaply eliminate. It would also put into focus the costs of having too many low-value leads.
I’m concerned that separating reward from effectiveness in getting the right answers would make the game too complicated, and dilute the message.
Err, I was trying to go for a “you are rewarded for getting the right answer quickly” sort of deal.
I think it might be counterproductive to time players, because it’s likely that time pressure would encourage players to use system 1 reasoning, and develop quick but sloppy heuristics for proceeding in the game.
Possibly the game could introduce some Time Attack elements late on, once the players have mastered everything else, but speaking as someone who very rarely enjoys time constraints in games, I’d prefer if it were optional.
I though that by “quickly”, “with few pieces of evidence” was actually meant—the less, the better. Still, you can always get more evidence than necessary.
Yeah, “quickly” got overloaded by both “how long the player takes to make decisions” and “how many units of in-game time have elapsed”. Perhaps “fewer turns used” is a better way to phrase it.