This is a really brilliant idea. Somehow I feel that using the Bayesian network system on simple trivial things at first (like the student encounter and the monster fight) is great for getting the player into the spirit of using evidence to update on particular beliefs, but I can imagine that as you go further with the game, the system would be applied to more and more ‘big picture’ mysteries of the story itself, such as where the main character’s brother is.
Whenever I play conversation based adventure games or mystery-solving games such as Phoenix Wright, I can see how the player is intended to guess certain things from clues, and ask the right questions to gain more crucial information, but having the Bayesian Network be explicitly represented in the game means the game is a lot simpler in some ways (you don’t have to do all the updating in your head) but also introduces a different kind of challenge (the player can be shot down if ve tries to guess the answer to the mystery right away with too little data, and it becomes a lot more to do with which pieces of evidence that could be looked at could provide the most information). A growing vision in my mind of what a game like this would look like is making me quite excited to play it!
But I think I’m getting a little carried away. The game as an educational tool would probably quite different from a game which tries to make mystery-solving a challenge. Getting the balance right, to make it fun, might still be pretty challenging, I think.
As a side note, it’d be pretty awesome to use this system to show particular logical fallacies that people (either other characters, or the main character before applying proper probability theory) in the game could make.
This is a really brilliant idea. Somehow I feel that using the Bayesian network system on simple trivial things at first (like the student encounter and the monster fight) is great for getting the player into the spirit of using evidence to update on particular beliefs, but I can imagine that as you go further with the game, the system would be applied to more and more ‘big picture’ mysteries of the story itself, such as where the main character’s brother is.
Whenever I play conversation based adventure games or mystery-solving games such as Phoenix Wright, I can see how the player is intended to guess certain things from clues, and ask the right questions to gain more crucial information, but having the Bayesian Network be explicitly represented in the game means the game is a lot simpler in some ways (you don’t have to do all the updating in your head) but also introduces a different kind of challenge (the player can be shot down if ve tries to guess the answer to the mystery right away with too little data, and it becomes a lot more to do with which pieces of evidence that could be looked at could provide the most information). A growing vision in my mind of what a game like this would look like is making me quite excited to play it!
But I think I’m getting a little carried away. The game as an educational tool would probably quite different from a game which tries to make mystery-solving a challenge. Getting the balance right, to make it fun, might still be pretty challenging, I think.
As a side note, it’d be pretty awesome to use this system to show particular logical fallacies that people (either other characters, or the main character before applying proper probability theory) in the game could make.