Note also the Wiki page, with links to previous threads (I just discovered it, and I don’t think I had noticed the previous threads. This one seems better!)
One interesting game topic could be building an AI. Make it look like a nice and cutesy adventure game, with possibly some little puzzles, but once you flip the switch, if you didn’t get absolutely everything exactly right, the universe is tiled with paperclips/siny smiley faces/tiny copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky. That’s more about SIAI propaganda than rationality though.
One interesting thing would be to exploit the conventions of video games but make actual winning require to see through those conventions. For example, have a score, and certain actions give you points, with nice shiny feedbacks and satisfying “shling!” sounds, but some actions are vitally important but not rewarded by any feedback.
For example (to keep in the “build an AI” example), say you can hire scientists, and the scientists’ profile page lists plenty of impressive certifications (stats like “experiment design”, “analysis”, “public speaking”, etc.), and some filler text about what they did their thesis and boring stuff like that (think: stats get big Icons, and are at the top, filler text looks like boring background filler text). And once you hired the scientists, you get various bonuses (money, prestige points, experiments), but the only of those factors that’s of any importance at the end of the game is whether the scientist is “not stupid”, and the only way to tell that is from various tell-tale signs for “stupid” in the “boring” filler texts—For example things like (also) having a degree in theology, or having published a paper on homeopathy … stuff that would indeed be a bad sign for a scientist, but that nothing in the game ever tells you is bad.
So basically the idea would be that the rules of the game you’re really playing wouldn’t be the ones you would think at first glance, which is a pretty good metaphor for real life too.
It needs to be well-designed enough so that it’s not “guessing the programmer’s password”, but that should be possible.
Making a game around experiment design would be interesting too—have some kind of physics / chemistry / biology system that obeys some rules (mostly about transformations, not some “real” physics with motion and collisions etc.), have game mechanics that allow you to do something like experimentation, and have a general context (the feedbacks you get, what other characters say, what you can buy) that points towards a slightly wrong understanding of reality. This is bouncing off Silas’ ideas, things that people say are good for you may not really be so, etc.
Here again, you can exploit the conventions of video games to mislead the player. For example, red creatures like eating red things, blue creatures like eating blue things, etc. - but the rule doesn’t always hold.
Here again, you can exploit the conventions of video games to mislead the player.
I think this is a great idea. Gamers know lots of things about video games, and they know them very thoroughly. They’re used to games that follow these conventions, and they’re also (lately) used to games that deliberately avert or meta-comment on these conventions for effect (i.e. Achievement Unlocked), but there aren’t too many games I know of that set up convincingly normal conventions only to reveal that the player’s understanding is flawed.
Eternal Darkness did a few things in this area. For example, if your character’s sanity level was low, you the player might start having unexpected troubles with the interface, i.e. the game would refuse to save on the grounds that “It’s not safe to save here”, the game would pretend that it was just a demo of the full game, the game would try to convince you that you accidentally muted the television (though the screaming sound effects would still continue), and so on. It’s too bad that those effects, fun as they were, were (a) very strongly telegraphed beforehand, and (b) used only for momentary hallucinations, not to indicate that the original understanding the player had was actually the incorrect one.
The problem is that, simply put, such games generally fail on the “fun” meter.
There is a game called “The Void,” which begins with the player dying and going to a limbo like place (“The Void”). The game basically consists of you learning the rules of the Void and figuring out how to survive. At first it looks like a first person shooter, but if you play it as a first person shooter you will lose. Then it sort of looks like an RPG. If you play it as an RPG you will also lose. Then you realize it’s a horror game. Which is true. But knowing that doesn’t actually help you to win. What you eventually have to realize is that it’s a First Person Resource Management game. Like, you’re playing StarCraft from first person as a worker unit. Sort of.
The world has a very limited resource (Colour) and you must harvest, invest and utilitize Colour to solve all your problems. If you waste any, you will probably die, but you won’t realize that for hours after you made the initial mistake.
Every NPC in the game will tell you things about how the world works, and every one of those NPCs (including your initial tutorial) is lying to you about at least one thing.
The game is filled with awesome flavor, and a lot of awesome mechanics. (Specifically mechanics I had imagined independently and wanted to make my own game regarding). It looked to me like one of the coolest sounding games ever. And it was amazingly NOT FUN AT ALL for the first four hours of play. I stuck with it anyway, if for no other reason than to figure out how a game with such awesome ideas could turn out so badly. Eventually I learned how to play, and while it never became fun it did become beautiful and poignant and it’s now one of my favorite games ever. But most people do not stick with something they don’t like for four hours.
Toying with player’s expectations sounds cool to the people who understand how the toying works, but is rarely fun for the player themselves. I don’t think that’s an insurmountable obstacle, but if you’re going to attempt to do this, you need to really fathom how hard it is to work around. Most games telegraph everything for a reason.
It’s a good game, just with a very narrow target audience. (This site is probably a good place to find players who will get something out of it, since you have higher than average percentages of people willing to take a lot of time to think about and explore a cerebral game).
Some specific lessons I’d draw from that game and apply here:
Don’t penalize failure too hard. The Void’s single biggest issue (for me) is that even when you know what you’re doing you’ll need to experiment and every failure ends with death (often hours after the failure). I reached a point where every time I made even a minor failure I immediately loaded a saved game. If the purpose is to experiment, build the experimentation into the game so you can try again without much penalty (or make the penalty something that is merely psychological instead of an actual hampering of your ability to play the game.)
Don’t expect players to figure things out without help. There’s a difference between a game that teaches people to be rational and a game that simply causes non-rational people to quit in frustration. Whenever there’s a rational technique you want people to use, spell it out. Clearly. Over and over (because they’ll miss it the first time).
The Void actually spells out everything as best they can, but the game still drives players away because the mechanics are simply unlike any other game out there. Most games rely on an extensive vocabulary of skills that players have built up over years, and thus each instruction only needs to be repeated once to remind you of what you’re supposed to be doing. The Void repeats instructions maybe once or twice, and it simply isn’t enough to clarify what’s actually going on. (The thing where NPCs lie to you isn’t even relevant till the second half of the game. By the time you get to that part you’ve either accepted how weird the game is or you’ve quit already).
My sense is that the best approach would be to start with a relatively normal (mechanics-wise) game, and then have NPCs that each encourage specific applications of rationality, but each of which has a rather narrow mindset and so may give bad advice for specific situations. But your “main” friend continuously reminds you to notice when you are confused, and consider which of your assumptions may be wrong. (Your main friend will eventually turn out to be wrong/lying/unhelpful about something, but only the once and only towards the end when you’ve built up the skills necessary to figure it out).
Huh, sounds very interesting! So my awesome game concept would give rise to a lame game, eh?
This was my experience with the Void exactly. Basically all the mechanics and flavors were things I had come up with one my own that I wanted to make games out of, and I’m really glad I played the Void first because I might have wasted a huge chunk of time making a really bad game if I didn’t get to learn from their mistakes.
It was made by a Russian developer which is better known for its previous effort, Pathologic, a somewhat more classical first-person adventure game (albeit very weird and beautiful, with artistic echoes from Brecht to Dostoevskij), but with a similar problem of being murderously hard and deceptive—starving to death is quite common. Nevertheless, in Russia Pathologic had acceptable sales and excellent critical reviews, which is why Ice-Pick Lodge could go on with a second project.
“once you flip the switch, if you didn’t get absolutely everything exactly right, the universe is tiled with paperclips/tiny smiley faces/tiny copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky.”
Riffing off my weird biology / chemistry thing: a game based on the breeding of weird creatures, by humans freshly arrived on the planet (add some dimensional travel if you want to justify weird chemistry—I’m thinking of Tryslmaistan.
The catch is (spoiler warning!), the humans got the wrong rules for creature breeding, and some plantcrystalthingy they think is the creatures’ food is actually part of their reproduction cycle, where some essential “genetic” information passes.
And most of the things that look like in-game help and tutorials are actually wrong, and based on a model that’s more complicated than the real one (it’s just a model that’s closer to earth biology).
Note also the Wiki page, with links to previous threads (I just discovered it, and I don’t think I had noticed the previous threads. This one seems better!)
One interesting game topic could be building an AI. Make it look like a nice and cutesy adventure game, with possibly some little puzzles, but once you flip the switch, if you didn’t get absolutely everything exactly right, the universe is tiled with paperclips/siny smiley faces/tiny copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky. That’s more about SIAI propaganda than rationality though.
One interesting thing would be to exploit the conventions of video games but make actual winning require to see through those conventions. For example, have a score, and certain actions give you points, with nice shiny feedbacks and satisfying “shling!” sounds, but some actions are vitally important but not rewarded by any feedback.
For example (to keep in the “build an AI” example), say you can hire scientists, and the scientists’ profile page lists plenty of impressive certifications (stats like “experiment design”, “analysis”, “public speaking”, etc.), and some filler text about what they did their thesis and boring stuff like that (think: stats get big Icons, and are at the top, filler text looks like boring background filler text). And once you hired the scientists, you get various bonuses (money, prestige points, experiments), but the only of those factors that’s of any importance at the end of the game is whether the scientist is “not stupid”, and the only way to tell that is from various tell-tale signs for “stupid” in the “boring” filler texts—For example things like (also) having a degree in theology, or having published a paper on homeopathy … stuff that would indeed be a bad sign for a scientist, but that nothing in the game ever tells you is bad.
So basically the idea would be that the rules of the game you’re really playing wouldn’t be the ones you would think at first glance, which is a pretty good metaphor for real life too.
It needs to be well-designed enough so that it’s not “guessing the programmer’s password”, but that should be possible.
Making a game around experiment design would be interesting too—have some kind of physics / chemistry / biology system that obeys some rules (mostly about transformations, not some “real” physics with motion and collisions etc.), have game mechanics that allow you to do something like experimentation, and have a general context (the feedbacks you get, what other characters say, what you can buy) that points towards a slightly wrong understanding of reality. This is bouncing off Silas’ ideas, things that people say are good for you may not really be so, etc.
Here again, you can exploit the conventions of video games to mislead the player. For example, red creatures like eating red things, blue creatures like eating blue things, etc. - but the rule doesn’t always hold.
I think this is a great idea. Gamers know lots of things about video games, and they know them very thoroughly. They’re used to games that follow these conventions, and they’re also (lately) used to games that deliberately avert or meta-comment on these conventions for effect (i.e. Achievement Unlocked), but there aren’t too many games I know of that set up convincingly normal conventions only to reveal that the player’s understanding is flawed.
Eternal Darkness did a few things in this area. For example, if your character’s sanity level was low, you the player might start having unexpected troubles with the interface, i.e. the game would refuse to save on the grounds that “It’s not safe to save here”, the game would pretend that it was just a demo of the full game, the game would try to convince you that you accidentally muted the television (though the screaming sound effects would still continue), and so on. It’s too bad that those effects, fun as they were, were (a) very strongly telegraphed beforehand, and (b) used only for momentary hallucinations, not to indicate that the original understanding the player had was actually the incorrect one.
The problem is that, simply put, such games generally fail on the “fun” meter.
There is a game called “The Void,” which begins with the player dying and going to a limbo like place (“The Void”). The game basically consists of you learning the rules of the Void and figuring out how to survive. At first it looks like a first person shooter, but if you play it as a first person shooter you will lose. Then it sort of looks like an RPG. If you play it as an RPG you will also lose. Then you realize it’s a horror game. Which is true. But knowing that doesn’t actually help you to win. What you eventually have to realize is that it’s a First Person Resource Management game. Like, you’re playing StarCraft from first person as a worker unit. Sort of.
The world has a very limited resource (Colour) and you must harvest, invest and utilitize Colour to solve all your problems. If you waste any, you will probably die, but you won’t realize that for hours after you made the initial mistake.
Every NPC in the game will tell you things about how the world works, and every one of those NPCs (including your initial tutorial) is lying to you about at least one thing.
The game is filled with awesome flavor, and a lot of awesome mechanics. (Specifically mechanics I had imagined independently and wanted to make my own game regarding). It looked to me like one of the coolest sounding games ever. And it was amazingly NOT FUN AT ALL for the first four hours of play. I stuck with it anyway, if for no other reason than to figure out how a game with such awesome ideas could turn out so badly. Eventually I learned how to play, and while it never became fun it did become beautiful and poignant and it’s now one of my favorite games ever. But most people do not stick with something they don’t like for four hours.
Toying with player’s expectations sounds cool to the people who understand how the toying works, but is rarely fun for the player themselves. I don’t think that’s an insurmountable obstacle, but if you’re going to attempt to do this, you need to really fathom how hard it is to work around. Most games telegraph everything for a reason.
Huh, sounds very interesting! So my awesome game concept would give rise to a lame game, eh?
*updates*
I hadn’t heard of that game, I might try it out. I’m actually surprised a game like that was made and commercially published.
It’s a good game, just with a very narrow target audience. (This site is probably a good place to find players who will get something out of it, since you have higher than average percentages of people willing to take a lot of time to think about and explore a cerebral game).
Some specific lessons I’d draw from that game and apply here:
Don’t penalize failure too hard. The Void’s single biggest issue (for me) is that even when you know what you’re doing you’ll need to experiment and every failure ends with death (often hours after the failure). I reached a point where every time I made even a minor failure I immediately loaded a saved game. If the purpose is to experiment, build the experimentation into the game so you can try again without much penalty (or make the penalty something that is merely psychological instead of an actual hampering of your ability to play the game.)
Don’t expect players to figure things out without help. There’s a difference between a game that teaches people to be rational and a game that simply causes non-rational people to quit in frustration. Whenever there’s a rational technique you want people to use, spell it out. Clearly. Over and over (because they’ll miss it the first time).
The Void actually spells out everything as best they can, but the game still drives players away because the mechanics are simply unlike any other game out there. Most games rely on an extensive vocabulary of skills that players have built up over years, and thus each instruction only needs to be repeated once to remind you of what you’re supposed to be doing. The Void repeats instructions maybe once or twice, and it simply isn’t enough to clarify what’s actually going on. (The thing where NPCs lie to you isn’t even relevant till the second half of the game. By the time you get to that part you’ve either accepted how weird the game is or you’ve quit already).
My sense is that the best approach would be to start with a relatively normal (mechanics-wise) game, and then have NPCs that each encourage specific applications of rationality, but each of which has a rather narrow mindset and so may give bad advice for specific situations. But your “main” friend continuously reminds you to notice when you are confused, and consider which of your assumptions may be wrong. (Your main friend will eventually turn out to be wrong/lying/unhelpful about something, but only the once and only towards the end when you’ve built up the skills necessary to figure it out).
This was my experience with the Void exactly. Basically all the mechanics and flavors were things I had come up with one my own that I wanted to make games out of, and I’m really glad I played the Void first because I might have wasted a huge chunk of time making a really bad game if I didn’t get to learn from their mistakes.
It was made by a Russian developer which is better known for its previous effort, Pathologic, a somewhat more classical first-person adventure game (albeit very weird and beautiful, with artistic echoes from Brecht to Dostoevskij), but with a similar problem of being murderously hard and deceptive—starving to death is quite common. Nevertheless, in Russia Pathologic had acceptable sales and excellent critical reviews, which is why Ice-Pick Lodge could go on with a second project.
“once you flip the switch, if you didn’t get absolutely everything exactly right, the universe is tiled with paperclips/tiny smiley faces/tiny copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky.”
See also: The Friendly AI Critical Failure Table
And I think all of the other suggestions you made in this comment would make an awesome game! :D
Ooh, I had forgot about that table—Gurps Friendly AI is also of interest.
Riffing off my weird biology / chemistry thing: a game based on the breeding of weird creatures, by humans freshly arrived on the planet (add some dimensional travel if you want to justify weird chemistry—I’m thinking of Tryslmaistan.
The catch is (spoiler warning!), the humans got the wrong rules for creature breeding, and some plantcrystalthingy they think is the creatures’ food is actually part of their reproduction cycle, where some essential “genetic” information passes.
And most of the things that look like in-game help and tutorials are actually wrong, and based on a model that’s more complicated than the real one (it’s just a model that’s closer to earth biology).