Here’s an idea I’ve had for a while: Make it seem, at first, like a regular RPG, but here’s the kicker—the mystical, magic potions don’t actually do anything that’s indistinguishable from chance.
(For example, you might have some herb combination that “restores HP”, but whenever you use it, you strangely lose HP that more than cancels what it gave you. If you think this would be too obvious, rot13: In the game Earthbound, bar vgrz lbh trg vf gur Pnfrl Wbarf ong, naq vgf fgngf fnl gung vg’f ernyyl cbjreshy, ohg vg pna gnxr lbh n ybat gvzr gb ernyvmr gung vg uvgf fb eneryl gb or hfryrff.)
Set it in an environment like 17th-century England where you have access to the chemicals and astronomical observations they did (but give them fake names to avoid tipping off users, e.g., metallia instead of mercury/quicksilver), and are in the presence of a lot of thinkers working off of astrological and alchemical theories. Some would suggest stupid experiments (“extract aurum from urine—they’re both yellow!”) while others would have better ideas.
To advance, you have to figure out the laws governing these things (which would be isomorphic to real science) and put this knowledge to practical use. The insights that had to be made back then are far removed from the clean scientific laws we have now, so it would be tough.
It would take a lot of work to e.g. make it fun to discover how to use stars to navigate, but I’m sure it could be done.
For example, you might have some herb combination that “restores HP”, but whenever you use it, you strangely lose HP that more than cancels what it gave you.
What if instead of being useless (by having an additional cancelling effect), magical potions etc. had no effect at all? If HP isn’t explicitly stated, you can make the player feel like he’s regaining health (e.g. by some visual cues), but in reality he’d die just as often.
I think in many types of game there’s an implicit convention that they’re only going to be fun if you follow the obvious strategies on auto-pilot and don’t optimize too much or try to behave in ways that would make sense in the real world, and breaking this convention without explicitly labeling the game as competitive or a rationality test will mostly just be annoying.
The idea of having a game resemble real-world science is a good one and not one that as far as I know has ever been done anywhere near as well as seems possible.
Good point. I guess the game’s labeling system shouldn’t deceive you like that, but it would need to have characters that promote non-functioning technology, after some warning that e.g. not everyone is reliable, that these people aren’t the tutorial.
Best I think would be if the warning came implicitly as part of the game, and a little ways into it.
For example: The player sees one NPC Alex warn another NPC Joe that failing to drink the Potion of Feather Fall will mean he’s at risk of falling off a ledge and dying. Joe accepts the advice and drinks it. Soon after, Joe accidentally falls off a ledge and dies. Alex attempts to rationalize this result away, and (as subtly as possible) shrugs off any attempts by the player to follow conversational paths that would encourage testing the potion.
Player hopefully then goes “Huh. I guess maybe I can’t trust what NPCs say about potions” without feeling like the game has shoved the answer at them, or that the NPCs are unrealistically bad at figuring stuff out.
Exactly—that’s the kind of thing I had in mind: the player has to navigate through rationalizations and be able to throw out unreliable claims against bold attempts to protect it from being proven wrong.
So is this game idea something feasible and which meets your criteria?
I think so, actually. When I start implementation, I’ll probably use an Interactive Fiction engine as another person on this thread suggested, because (a) it makes implementation a lot easier and (b) I’ve enjoyed a lot of IF but I haven’t ever made one of my own. That would imply removing a fair amount of the RPG-ness in your original suggestion, but the basic ideas would still stand. I’m also considering changing the setting to make it an alien world which just happens to be very much like 17th century England except filled with humorous Rubber Forehead Aliens; maybe the game could be called Standing On The Eyestalks Of Giants.
On the particular criteria:
Interesting: I think the setting and the (hopefully generated) buzz would build enough initial interest to carry the player through the first frustrating parts where things don’t seem to work as they are used to. Once they get the idea that they’re playing as something like an alien Newton, that ought to push up the interest curve again a fair amount.
Not (too) allegorical: Everybody loves making fun of alchemists. Now that I think of it, though, maybe I want to make sure the game is still allegorical enough to modern-day issues so that it doesn’t encourage hindsight bias.
Dramatic/Surprising: IF has some advantages here in that there’s an expectation already in place that effects will be described with sentences instead of raw HP numbers and the like. It should be possible to hit the balance where being rational and figuring things out gets the player significant benefits (Dramatic) , but the broken theories being used by the alien alchemists and astrologists are convincing enough to fool the player at first into thinking certain issues are non-puzzles (Surprising).
Not rigged: Assuming the interface for modelling the game world’s physics and doing experiments is sophisticated enough, this should prevent the feeling that the player can win by just finding the button marked “I Am Rational” and hitting it. However, I think this is the trickiest part programming-wise.
I’m going to look into IF programming a bit to figure out how implementable some of this stuff is. I won’t and can’t make promises regarding timescale or even completability, however: I have several other projects going right now which have to take priority.
Thanks, I’m glad I was able to give you the kind of idea you were looking for, and that someone is going to try to implement this idea.
I’m also considering changing the setting to make it an alien world which just happens to be very much like 17th century England
Good—that’s what I was trying to get at. For example, you would want a completely different night sky; you don’t want the gamer to be able to spot the Big Dipper (or Southern Cross for our Aussie friends) and then be able to use existing ephemeris (ephemeral?) data. The planet should have a different tilt, or perhaps be the moon of another planet, so the player can’t just say, “LOL, I know the heliocentric model, my planet is orbiting the sun, problem solved!”
Different magnetic field too, so they can’t just say, “lol, make a compass, it points north”.
I’m skeptical, though, about how well text-based IF can accomplish this—the text-only interface is really constraining, and would have to tell the user all of the salient elements explicitly. I would be glad to help on the project in any way I can, though I’m still learning complex programming myself.
Also, something to motivate the storyline would be like: You need to come up with better cannonballs for the navy (i.e. have to identify what increases a metal’s yield energy). Or come up with a way of detecting counterfeit coins.
To advance, you have to figure out the laws governing these things (which would be isomorphic to real science) and put this knowledge to practical use. The insights that had to be made back then are far removed from the clean scientific laws we have now, so it would be tough.
Or you could just go look up the correct answers on gamefaqs.com.
So the game should generate different sets of fake names for each time it is run, and have some variance in the forms of clues and which NPC’s give them.
Yes, a little, but I never really got into it. As I recall, Nethack didn’t do what I suggest so much as not tell you what certain things are until you magically indentify them.
Well, there are other ways in NetHack to identify things besides the “identify” spell (which itself must be identified anyways). You can:
Try it out on yourself. This is often definitive, but also often dangerous. Say if you drink a potion, it might be a healing spell… or it might be poison… or it might be fruit juice. 1⁄3 chance of existential failure for a given experiment is crappy odds; knowledge isn’t that valuable.
Get an enemy to try it. Intelligent enemies will often know the identies of scrolls and potions you aren’t yet familiar with. Leaving a scroll or potion on the ground and seeing what the next dwarf that passes by does with it can be informative.
Try it out on an enemy. Potions can be shattered over an enemy’s head instead of being drunk; this is safer than drinking it yourself, though you may not notice the effects as readily, and it’s annoyingly easy to miss and just waste the potion on the wall behind the monster.
Various other methods that can at least narrow down the identification: have your pet walk on it to see if it’s cursed, offer to sell it to to a shopkeep to get an idea of how valuable it is, dip things in unknown potions to see if some obvious effect (i.e. corrosion) occurs, scratch at the ground with unknown wands to see if sparks/flames are created and if so what kind, kick things to see if they are heavy or light, and so on and so on...
The reason NetHack isn’t already the Ideal Experimental Method Game is because once you learn what the right experiments are, you can just use them repeatedly each game; the qualitative differences between magical items are always the same, and it’s just a matter of rematching label to effect for each new session.
On the other hand, for newbie players, where the experimental process might be exciting and novel… well, usually they’re too busy experiencing Yet Another Silly Death to play scientist thoroughly. Heck, a lot of the early deaths will be directly due to un-clever experimentation, which discourages a scientific mindset.
Curiosity killed the cat… indirectly, with a shiny unlabeled Amulet of Strangulation.
And anyways, hardly anybody figures out the solutions to NetHack on their own. The game is just too punishing for that, and the cheatsfiles are too easily available online. (Any NetHack ascendants here who didn’t ever look stuff up online?)
This reminds me of something I did in a D&D game once. My character found three unidentified cauldronsful of potions, so she caught three rats and dribbled a little of each on a different rat. One rat died, one turned to stone, and one had no obvious effects. (She kept the last rat and named it Lucky.)
I didn’t get ahold of vials that would shatter on impact before the game fizzled out (a notorious play-by-post problem). I did at one time get to use Lucky as a weapon, though. Sadly, my character was not proficient with rats.
The reason NetHack isn’t already the Ideal Experimental Method Game is because once you learn what the right experiments are, you can just use them repeatedly each game; the qualitative differences between magical items are always the same, and it’s just a matter of rematching label to effect for each new session.
Yes. That’s why
So the game should generate different sets of fake names for each time it is run, and have some variance in the forms of clues and which NPC’s give them.
isn’t quite the perfect solution: you can still look up a “cookbook” set of experiments to distinguish between Potion That Works and Potion That Will Get You Killed.
To be fair, in real life, it’s perfectly okay that once you determine the right set of experiments to run to analyze a particular phenomena, you can usually use similar experiments to figure out similar phenomena. I’m less worried about infinite replay value and more worried about the game being fun the first time through.
Cookbook experiments will suffice if you are handed potions that may have a good effect or that may kill you. But if you have to figure out how to mix the potion yourself, this is much more difficult. Learning the cookbook experiments could be the equivalent of learning chemistry.
Here’s an idea I’ve had for a while: Make it seem, at first, like a regular RPG, but here’s the kicker—the mystical, magic potions don’t actually do anything that’s indistinguishable from chance.
(For example, you might have some herb combination that “restores HP”, but whenever you use it, you strangely lose HP that more than cancels what it gave you. If you think this would be too obvious, rot13: In the game Earthbound, bar vgrz lbh trg vf gur Pnfrl Wbarf ong, naq vgf fgngf fnl gung vg’f ernyyl cbjreshy, ohg vg pna gnxr lbh n ybat gvzr gb ernyvmr gung vg uvgf fb eneryl gb or hfryrff.)
Set it in an environment like 17th-century England where you have access to the chemicals and astronomical observations they did (but give them fake names to avoid tipping off users, e.g., metallia instead of mercury/quicksilver), and are in the presence of a lot of thinkers working off of astrological and alchemical theories. Some would suggest stupid experiments (“extract aurum from urine—they’re both yellow!”) while others would have better ideas.
To advance, you have to figure out the laws governing these things (which would be isomorphic to real science) and put this knowledge to practical use. The insights that had to be made back then are far removed from the clean scientific laws we have now, so it would be tough.
It would take a lot of work to e.g. make it fun to discover how to use stars to navigate, but I’m sure it could be done.
What if instead of being useless (by having an additional cancelling effect), magical potions etc. had no effect at all? If HP isn’t explicitly stated, you can make the player feel like he’s regaining health (e.g. by some visual cues), but in reality he’d die just as often.
I think in many types of game there’s an implicit convention that they’re only going to be fun if you follow the obvious strategies on auto-pilot and don’t optimize too much or try to behave in ways that would make sense in the real world, and breaking this convention without explicitly labeling the game as competitive or a rationality test will mostly just be annoying.
The idea of having a game resemble real-world science is a good one and not one that as far as I know has ever been done anywhere near as well as seems possible.
Good point. I guess the game’s labeling system shouldn’t deceive you like that, but it would need to have characters that promote non-functioning technology, after some warning that e.g. not everyone is reliable, that these people aren’t the tutorial.
Best I think would be if the warning came implicitly as part of the game, and a little ways into it.
For example: The player sees one NPC Alex warn another NPC Joe that failing to drink the Potion of Feather Fall will mean he’s at risk of falling off a ledge and dying. Joe accepts the advice and drinks it. Soon after, Joe accidentally falls off a ledge and dies. Alex attempts to rationalize this result away, and (as subtly as possible) shrugs off any attempts by the player to follow conversational paths that would encourage testing the potion.
Player hopefully then goes “Huh. I guess maybe I can’t trust what NPCs say about potions” without feeling like the game has shoved the answer at them, or that the NPCs are unrealistically bad at figuring stuff out.
Exactly—that’s the kind of thing I had in mind: the player has to navigate through rationalizations and be able to throw out unreliable claims against bold attempts to protect it from being proven wrong.
So is this game idea something feasible and which meets your criteria?
I think so, actually. When I start implementation, I’ll probably use an Interactive Fiction engine as another person on this thread suggested, because (a) it makes implementation a lot easier and (b) I’ve enjoyed a lot of IF but I haven’t ever made one of my own. That would imply removing a fair amount of the RPG-ness in your original suggestion, but the basic ideas would still stand. I’m also considering changing the setting to make it an alien world which just happens to be very much like 17th century England except filled with humorous Rubber Forehead Aliens; maybe the game could be called Standing On The Eyestalks Of Giants.
On the particular criteria:
Interesting: I think the setting and the (hopefully generated) buzz would build enough initial interest to carry the player through the first frustrating parts where things don’t seem to work as they are used to. Once they get the idea that they’re playing as something like an alien Newton, that ought to push up the interest curve again a fair amount.
Not (too) allegorical: Everybody loves making fun of alchemists. Now that I think of it, though, maybe I want to make sure the game is still allegorical enough to modern-day issues so that it doesn’t encourage hindsight bias.
Dramatic/Surprising: IF has some advantages here in that there’s an expectation already in place that effects will be described with sentences instead of raw HP numbers and the like. It should be possible to hit the balance where being rational and figuring things out gets the player significant benefits (Dramatic) , but the broken theories being used by the alien alchemists and astrologists are convincing enough to fool the player at first into thinking certain issues are non-puzzles (Surprising).
Not rigged: Assuming the interface for modelling the game world’s physics and doing experiments is sophisticated enough, this should prevent the feeling that the player can win by just finding the button marked “I Am Rational” and hitting it. However, I think this is the trickiest part programming-wise.
I’m going to look into IF programming a bit to figure out how implementable some of this stuff is. I won’t and can’t make promises regarding timescale or even completability, however: I have several other projects going right now which have to take priority.
Thanks, I’m glad I was able to give you the kind of idea you were looking for, and that someone is going to try to implement this idea.
Good—that’s what I was trying to get at. For example, you would want a completely different night sky; you don’t want the gamer to be able to spot the Big Dipper (or Southern Cross for our Aussie friends) and then be able to use existing ephemeris (ephemeral?) data. The planet should have a different tilt, or perhaps be the moon of another planet, so the player can’t just say, “LOL, I know the heliocentric model, my planet is orbiting the sun, problem solved!”
Different magnetic field too, so they can’t just say, “lol, make a compass, it points north”.
I’m skeptical, though, about how well text-based IF can accomplish this—the text-only interface is really constraining, and would have to tell the user all of the salient elements explicitly. I would be glad to help on the project in any way I can, though I’m still learning complex programming myself.
Also, something to motivate the storyline would be like: You need to come up with better cannonballs for the navy (i.e. have to identify what increases a metal’s yield energy). Or come up with a way of detecting counterfeit coins.
Let me know if you would like help with the writing, either in terms of brainstorming, mapping the flow, or even just copyediting.
Or you could just go look up the correct answers on gamefaqs.com.
So the game should generate different sets of fake names for each time it is run, and have some variance in the forms of clues and which NPC’s give them.
Ever played Nethack? ;)
Yes, a little, but I never really got into it. As I recall, Nethack didn’t do what I suggest so much as not tell you what certain things are until you magically indentify them.
Well, there are other ways in NetHack to identify things besides the “identify” spell (which itself must be identified anyways). You can:
Try it out on yourself. This is often definitive, but also often dangerous. Say if you drink a potion, it might be a healing spell… or it might be poison… or it might be fruit juice. 1⁄3 chance of existential failure for a given experiment is crappy odds; knowledge isn’t that valuable.
Get an enemy to try it. Intelligent enemies will often know the identies of scrolls and potions you aren’t yet familiar with. Leaving a scroll or potion on the ground and seeing what the next dwarf that passes by does with it can be informative.
Try it out on an enemy. Potions can be shattered over an enemy’s head instead of being drunk; this is safer than drinking it yourself, though you may not notice the effects as readily, and it’s annoyingly easy to miss and just waste the potion on the wall behind the monster.
Various other methods that can at least narrow down the identification: have your pet walk on it to see if it’s cursed, offer to sell it to to a shopkeep to get an idea of how valuable it is, dip things in unknown potions to see if some obvious effect (i.e. corrosion) occurs, scratch at the ground with unknown wands to see if sparks/flames are created and if so what kind, kick things to see if they are heavy or light, and so on and so on...
The reason NetHack isn’t already the Ideal Experimental Method Game is because once you learn what the right experiments are, you can just use them repeatedly each game; the qualitative differences between magical items are always the same, and it’s just a matter of rematching label to effect for each new session.
On the other hand, for newbie players, where the experimental process might be exciting and novel… well, usually they’re too busy experiencing Yet Another Silly Death to play scientist thoroughly. Heck, a lot of the early deaths will be directly due to un-clever experimentation, which discourages a scientific mindset.
Curiosity killed the cat… indirectly, with a shiny unlabeled Amulet of Strangulation.
And anyways, hardly anybody figures out the solutions to NetHack on their own. The game is just too punishing for that, and the cheatsfiles are too easily available online. (Any NetHack ascendants here who didn’t ever look stuff up online?)
This reminds me of something I did in a D&D game once. My character found three unidentified cauldronsful of potions, so she caught three rats and dribbled a little of each on a different rat. One rat died, one turned to stone, and one had no obvious effects. (She kept the last rat and named it Lucky.)
Did you try using the two lethal potions as weapons?
I didn’t get ahold of vials that would shatter on impact before the game fizzled out (a notorious play-by-post problem). I did at one time get to use Lucky as a weapon, though. Sadly, my character was not proficient with rats.
It’s a rat-flail!
Nah, I used him as a thrown weapon. (He was fine and I retrieved him later.)
Nethack as ML training environment: https://nethackchallenge.com/
Yes. That’s why
isn’t quite the perfect solution: you can still look up a “cookbook” set of experiments to distinguish between Potion That Works and Potion That Will Get You Killed.
To be fair, in real life, it’s perfectly okay that once you determine the right set of experiments to run to analyze a particular phenomena, you can usually use similar experiments to figure out similar phenomena. I’m less worried about infinite replay value and more worried about the game being fun the first time through.
Cookbook experiments will suffice if you are handed potions that may have a good effect or that may kill you. But if you have to figure out how to mix the potion yourself, this is much more difficult. Learning the cookbook experiments could be the equivalent of learning chemistry.