I’m finding the game … not fun. Here are some reasons.
The notation for “Bayes nodes” is confusing and figuring out what it’s saying requires more conscious thought than I really want to be putting into a game like this.
There’s this menu where I have to choose “go to lectures”, “study in the library”, or “hang out with friends” all the time—except that only one choice is actually ever available (so far, at least).
There’s too much now-press-space, somehow.
In the actual node-guessing game that’s the main activity, you usually get to inspect about one node per lecture on average. That’s not enough to make it very interesting. (Also: if the idea is to teach people about separation, so that they can figure out when knowing the state of one node means that learning X doesn’t tell you anything about Y, wouldn’t it be better if that situation were to arise more often?)
It doesn’t feel to me as if any sort of highbrow analysis of the networks provides a substantial advantage, which is a shame if the idea is to make people learn to do it. On the other hand …
So far I’ve played three or four games and been rejected by the academy about halfway through every time. So maybe there are strategic lessons I haven’t learned yet. Or maybe it’s just that success is too dependent on luck?
Thanks for the feedback, I agree with a lot of your criticisms.
Re: the difficulty: just played the game and thrice and failed on each attempt. Huh, I remember that when I was trying to get the difficulty right before releasing it, I managed to get pretty reliably to the last stages, if not beat it. Looks like I notched the difficulty too up, when it used to be too easy at first.
I’m finding the game … not fun. Here are some reasons.
The notation for “Bayes nodes” is confusing and figuring out what it’s saying requires more conscious thought than I really want to be putting into a game like this.
There’s this menu where I have to choose “go to lectures”, “study in the library”, or “hang out with friends” all the time—except that only one choice is actually ever available (so far, at least).
There’s too much now-press-space, somehow.
In the actual node-guessing game that’s the main activity, you usually get to inspect about one node per lecture on average. That’s not enough to make it very interesting. (Also: if the idea is to teach people about separation, so that they can figure out when knowing the state of one node means that learning X doesn’t tell you anything about Y, wouldn’t it be better if that situation were to arise more often?)
It doesn’t feel to me as if any sort of highbrow analysis of the networks provides a substantial advantage, which is a shame if the idea is to make people learn to do it. On the other hand …
So far I’ve played three or four games and been rejected by the academy about halfway through every time. So maybe there are strategic lessons I haven’t learned yet. Or maybe it’s just that success is too dependent on luck?
Thanks for the feedback, I agree with a lot of your criticisms.
Re: the difficulty: just played the game and thrice and failed on each attempt. Huh, I remember that when I was trying to get the difficulty right before releasing it, I managed to get pretty reliably to the last stages, if not beat it. Looks like I notched the difficulty too up, when it used to be too easy at first.