One idea I’d like to suggest would be a game where the effectiveness of the items a player has changes randomly hour by hour. Maybe a MMO with players competing against each other, so that they can communicate information about which items are effective. Introduce new items with weird effects every so often so that players have to keep an eye on their long term strategy as well.
I think a major problem with that is that most players would simply rely upon the word on the street to tell them what was currently effective, rather than performing experiments themselves. Furthermore, changes in only “effectiveness” would probably be too easy to discover using a “cookbook” of experiments (see the NetHack discussion in this thread).
I’m thinking that the parameters should change just quickly enough to stop consensus forming (maybe it could be driven by negative feedback, so that once enough people are playing one strategy it becomes ineffective). Make using a cookbook expensive. Winning should be difficult, and only just the right combination will succeed.
I think this makes sense, but can you go into more detail about this:
Make using a cookbook expensive.
I didn’t mean a cookbook as an in-game item (I’m not sure if that’s what you were implying...), I meant the term to mean a set of well-known experiments which can simply be re-ran every time new results are required. If the game can be reduced to that state, then a lot of its value as a rationality teaching tool (and also as an interesting game, to me at least) is lost. How can we force the player to have to come up with new ideas for experiments, and see some of those ideas fail in subtle ways that require insight to understand?
My tendency is to want to solve this problem by just making a short game, so that there’s no need to figure out how to create a whole new, interesting experimental space for each session. This would be problematic in an MMO, where replayablity is expected (though there have been some interesting exceptions, like Uru).
Ah, I meant: “Make each item valuable enough that using several just to work out how effective each one is would be a fatal mistake” Instead you would have to keep track of how effective each one was, or watch the other players for hints.
Hmmm—changing things frequently means you’ll have some negative knock-on effects. You’ll be penalising anybody that doesn’t game as often—eg people with a life. You stand a chance of alienating a large percentage of the audience, which is not a good idea.
One idea I’d like to suggest would be a game where the effectiveness of the items a player has changes randomly hour by hour. Maybe a MMO with players competing against each other, so that they can communicate information about which items are effective. Introduce new items with weird effects every so often so that players have to keep an eye on their long term strategy as well.
I think a major problem with that is that most players would simply rely upon the word on the street to tell them what was currently effective, rather than performing experiments themselves. Furthermore, changes in only “effectiveness” would probably be too easy to discover using a “cookbook” of experiments (see the NetHack discussion in this thread).
I’m thinking that the parameters should change just quickly enough to stop consensus forming (maybe it could be driven by negative feedback, so that once enough people are playing one strategy it becomes ineffective). Make using a cookbook expensive. Winning should be difficult, and only just the right combination will succeed.
I think this makes sense, but can you go into more detail about this:
I didn’t mean a cookbook as an in-game item (I’m not sure if that’s what you were implying...), I meant the term to mean a set of well-known experiments which can simply be re-ran every time new results are required. If the game can be reduced to that state, then a lot of its value as a rationality teaching tool (and also as an interesting game, to me at least) is lost. How can we force the player to have to come up with new ideas for experiments, and see some of those ideas fail in subtle ways that require insight to understand?
My tendency is to want to solve this problem by just making a short game, so that there’s no need to figure out how to create a whole new, interesting experimental space for each session. This would be problematic in an MMO, where replayablity is expected (though there have been some interesting exceptions, like Uru).
Ah, I meant: “Make each item valuable enough that using several just to work out how effective each one is would be a fatal mistake” Instead you would have to keep track of how effective each one was, or watch the other players for hints.
Hmmm—changing things frequently means you’ll have some negative knock-on effects. You’ll be penalising anybody that doesn’t game as often—eg people with a life. You stand a chance of alienating a large percentage of the audience, which is not a good idea.