Sorry if this is getting annoying, but I recently thought of two new ideas that might make interesting video games, and I couldn’t resist posting them here:
The first idea I had is an adventure game where you have a reality-distorting device that you must use before you try to do anything that wouldn’t work in real life, but that you must not use before you do anything that would work in real life.
If you fail to use the device before doing something that wouldn’t work in real life, then the consequences will be realistic, and disastrous. For example, if you try to leap off a cliff wearing an aesthetically pleasing but aerodynamically unsound pair of wings you made out of bird feathers, then you will just fall and go splat instead of gliding safely to the ground.
If you use the device before doing something that would work in real life, then the consequences will be unrealistic, and disastrous. For example, if you try to use a small amount of gunpowder, placed very carefully in just the right spot to knock over a pillar, then instead of there being a small explosion that knocks over the pillar, there will be a huge explosion that shatters the pillar into tiny pieces, one of which hits you in the head with perfect aim, arcing or ricocheting as necessary to reach you behind your carefully chosen barrier.
The purpose of this game is of course to test the player’s grip on reality, and their ability to rationally think about the consequences of their actions, though the system is simple enough that the players could easily win just by trial and error.
The second idea I had is a game where you play as a stereotypical hollywood villain, but the objective is not to win, but to lose. In the game you are presented with a series of decisions where you can either make the rational choice, or the cliched villain choice. The rational choice will lead to you easily defeating the good guys, and the cliche choice will lead to the good guys succeeding—not in the traditional hollywood way, but in the way that would happen if the heros were familiar with all of the cliches.
The purpose of this game is of course to test the player’s ability to detect blatant stupidity, though unfortunately the game is set up so that they must always deliberately make the stupid choice. Also, the system is simple enough that players could win just by trial and error, or by memorizing the Evil Overlord list. One way to reduce this is to have choices whose consequences aren’t seen until much later in the game.
Another idea is to play as the hero, and have to avoid the cliches instead of follow them.
Another idea would be to alternate between playing the hero and the villain, winning only if the hero avoids all of the cliches and other stupid decisions, and the villain follows all of them. This could also teach the player a more realistic picture of what really happens when the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against the hero.
If anyone likes any of these ideas, or any of my previous ideas enough to write a script for the game, then I would volunteer to code this into a simple text adventure game, probably implemented in PHP. Feel free to make the script nonlinear, or do other interesting things with it. If someone likes the text version enough to do artwork for it, then maybe we could even turn it into a Flash game, and submit it to the various Flash game portals around the internet.
I am mentally cringing at the idea of being forced to guess the game developer’s password. The first time I am punished for something that should work but doesn’t I would have to discard the game. For a game of any significant depth or breadth I would be shocked if I couldn’t come up with a strategy that the developer hadn’t considered and is penalised inappropriately.
I suspect I would find a more conventional game a more useful (and enjoyable) challenge to my rational thinking. Not that a game designed to teach some chemistry (gunpowder, etc) and engineering (what happens with the gunpowder takes out that post?) is useless. I just think it is an inferior tool for training rationality specifically than, say ADOM is.
Perhaps I didn’t explain clearly: In the game, whenever you make any significant action, you must choose whether to do so with the reality-distorting device on or off. You make this decision based on whether you expect that the plan would work in real life or not. This means that if there is a “game developer’s password”, then it’s only one bit long for each decision, and can be guessed by trial and error. Perhaps this is a feature, rather than a bug. If you save your game before making the decision, then you don’t even lose any time. Perhaps the game could have an “easy mode” where the game just shows you the results of your choice, and then continues as if you had made the right choice, rather than forcing you to restart or reload from a saved game.
And I agree that the game shouldn’t require advanced knowledge of chemistry and engineering. The gunpowder/pillar thing was just the first example I thought of.
Anyway, this game was just a random idea I had, and your criticism is welcome.
I suppose that pretty much any game (not just video games) can be better for training rationality than more passive forms of entertainment, like watching TV. Pretty much any game is based on objective criteria that tell you when you made a bad decision. Though it’s not always easy to figure out what the bad decision was, or what you should have done instead, or even if there was anything you could have done better.
Sorry if this is getting annoying, but I recently thought of two new ideas that might make interesting video games, and I couldn’t resist posting them here:
The first idea I had is an adventure game where you have a reality-distorting device that you must use before you try to do anything that wouldn’t work in real life, but that you must not use before you do anything that would work in real life.
If you fail to use the device before doing something that wouldn’t work in real life, then the consequences will be realistic, and disastrous. For example, if you try to leap off a cliff wearing an aesthetically pleasing but aerodynamically unsound pair of wings you made out of bird feathers, then you will just fall and go splat instead of gliding safely to the ground.
If you use the device before doing something that would work in real life, then the consequences will be unrealistic, and disastrous. For example, if you try to use a small amount of gunpowder, placed very carefully in just the right spot to knock over a pillar, then instead of there being a small explosion that knocks over the pillar, there will be a huge explosion that shatters the pillar into tiny pieces, one of which hits you in the head with perfect aim, arcing or ricocheting as necessary to reach you behind your carefully chosen barrier.
The purpose of this game is of course to test the player’s grip on reality, and their ability to rationally think about the consequences of their actions, though the system is simple enough that the players could easily win just by trial and error.
The second idea I had is a game where you play as a stereotypical hollywood villain, but the objective is not to win, but to lose. In the game you are presented with a series of decisions where you can either make the rational choice, or the cliched villain choice. The rational choice will lead to you easily defeating the good guys, and the cliche choice will lead to the good guys succeeding—not in the traditional hollywood way, but in the way that would happen if the heros were familiar with all of the cliches.
The list of choices would of course be based on the Evil Overlord List
(and in case anyone here doesn’t already know, Warning: TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life )
The purpose of this game is of course to test the player’s ability to detect blatant stupidity, though unfortunately the game is set up so that they must always deliberately make the stupid choice. Also, the system is simple enough that players could win just by trial and error, or by memorizing the Evil Overlord list. One way to reduce this is to have choices whose consequences aren’t seen until much later in the game.
Another idea is to play as the hero, and have to avoid the cliches instead of follow them.
Another idea would be to alternate between playing the hero and the villain, winning only if the hero avoids all of the cliches and other stupid decisions, and the villain follows all of them. This could also teach the player a more realistic picture of what really happens when the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against the hero.
If anyone likes any of these ideas, or any of my previous ideas enough to write a script for the game, then I would volunteer to code this into a simple text adventure game, probably implemented in PHP. Feel free to make the script nonlinear, or do other interesting things with it. If someone likes the text version enough to do artwork for it, then maybe we could even turn it into a Flash game, and submit it to the various Flash game portals around the internet.
I am mentally cringing at the idea of being forced to guess the game developer’s password. The first time I am punished for something that should work but doesn’t I would have to discard the game. For a game of any significant depth or breadth I would be shocked if I couldn’t come up with a strategy that the developer hadn’t considered and is penalised inappropriately.
I suspect I would find a more conventional game a more useful (and enjoyable) challenge to my rational thinking. Not that a game designed to teach some chemistry (gunpowder, etc) and engineering (what happens with the gunpowder takes out that post?) is useless. I just think it is an inferior tool for training rationality specifically than, say ADOM is.
Perhaps I didn’t explain clearly: In the game, whenever you make any significant action, you must choose whether to do so with the reality-distorting device on or off. You make this decision based on whether you expect that the plan would work in real life or not. This means that if there is a “game developer’s password”, then it’s only one bit long for each decision, and can be guessed by trial and error. Perhaps this is a feature, rather than a bug. If you save your game before making the decision, then you don’t even lose any time. Perhaps the game could have an “easy mode” where the game just shows you the results of your choice, and then continues as if you had made the right choice, rather than forcing you to restart or reload from a saved game.
And I agree that the game shouldn’t require advanced knowledge of chemistry and engineering. The gunpowder/pillar thing was just the first example I thought of.
Anyway, this game was just a random idea I had, and your criticism is welcome.
And is this the ADOM you’re referring to? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Domains_of_Mystery
I suppose that pretty much any game (not just video games) can be better for training rationality than more passive forms of entertainment, like watching TV. Pretty much any game is based on objective criteria that tell you when you made a bad decision. Though it’s not always easy to figure out what the bad decision was, or what you should have done instead, or even if there was anything you could have done better.