I’m interested in video game design and game design in general, and also in raising the rationality waterline. I’d like to combine these two interests: to create a rationality-focused game that is entertaining or interesting enough to become popular outside our clique, but that can also effectively teach a genuinely useful skill to players.
I imagine that it would consist of one or more problems which the player would have to be rational in some particular way to solve. The problem has to be:
Interesting: The prospect of having to tackle the problem should excite the player. Very abstract or dry problems would not work; very low-interaction problems wouldn’t work either, even if cleverly presented (i.e. you could do Newcomb’s problem as a game with plenty of lovely art and window dressing… but the game itself would still only be a single binary choice, which would quickly bore the player).
Dramatic in outcome: The difference between success and failure should be great. A problem in which being rational gets you 10 points but acting typically gets you 8 points would not work; the advantage of applying rationality needs to be very noticeable.
Not rigged (or not obviously so): The player shouldn’t have the feeling that the game is designed to directly reward rationality (even though it is, in a sense). The player should think that they are solving a general problem with rationality as their asset.
Not allegorical: I don’t want to raise any likely mind-killing associations in the player’s mind, like politics or religion. The problem they are solving should be allegorical to real world problems, but to a general class of problems, not to any specific problems that will raise hackles and defeat the educational purpose of the game.
Surprising: The rationality technique being taught should not be immediately obvious to an untrained player. A typical first session should involve the player first trying an irrational method, seeing how it fails, and then eventually working their way up to a rational method that works.
A lot of the rationality-related games that people bring up fail some of these criterion. Zendo, for example, is not “dramatic in outcome” enough for my taste. Avoiding confirmation bias and understanding something about experimental design makes one a better Zendo player… but in my experience not as much as just developing a quick eye for pattern recognition and being able to read the master’s actions.
Anyone here have any suggestions for possible game designs?
RPGs (and roguelikes) can involve a lot of optimization/powergaming; the problem is that powergaming could be called rational already. You could
explicitly make optimization a part of game’s storyline (as opposed to it being unnecessary (usually games want you to satisfice, not maximize) and in conflict with the story)
create some situations where the obvious rules-of-thumb (gather strongest items, etc.) don’t apply—make the player shut up and multiply
create situations in which the real goal is not obvious (e. g. it seems like you should power up as always, but the best choice is to focus on something else)
Sorry if this isn’t very fleshed-out, just a possible direction.
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.
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).
I’m not sure if transformice counts as a rationalist game, but appears to be a bunch of multiplayer coordination problems, and the results seem to support ciphergoth’s conjecture on intelligence levels.
Transformice is awesome :D A game hasn’t made me laugh that much for a long time.
And it’s about interesting, human things, like crowd behaviour and trusting the “leader” and being thrust in a position of responsibility without really knowing what to do … oh, and everybody dying in funny ways.
One way to achieve this is to make it a level-based puzzle game. Solve the puzzle suboptimally, and you don’t get to move on. Of course, that means that you may need special-purpose programming at each level. On the other hand, you can release levels 1-5 as freeware, levels 6-20 as Product 1.0, and levels 21-30 as Product 2.0.
Not allegorical:
The puzzles I am thinking of are in the field of game theory, so the strategies will include things like not cooperating (because you don’t need to in this case), making and following through on threats, and similar “immoral” actions. Some people might object on ethical or political grounds. I don’t really know how to answer except to point out that at least it is not a first-person shooter.
Surprising
Game theory includes many surprising lessons—particularly things like the handicap principle, voluntary surrender of power, rational threats, and mechanism design. Coalition games are particularly counter-intuitive, but, with experience, intuitively understandable.
But you can even teach some rationality lessons before getting into games proper. Learn to recognize individuals, for example. Not all cat-creatures you encounter are the same character. You can do several problems involving probabilities and inference before the second player ever shows up.
Text adventures seem suitable for this sort of thing, and are relatively easy to write. They’re probably not as good for mass appeal, but might be OK for mass nerd appeal. For these purposes, though, I’m worried that rationality may be too much of a suitcase term, consisting of very different groups of subskills that go well with very different kinds of game.
Another thing that’s relatively easy to create is a Neverwinter Nights module, but you’re pretty much stuck with the D&D mechanics if you go that route.
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.
I’m interested in video game design and game design in general, and also in raising the rationality waterline. I’d like to combine these two interests: to create a rationality-focused game that is entertaining or interesting enough to become popular outside our clique, but that can also effectively teach a genuinely useful skill to players.
I imagine that it would consist of one or more problems which the player would have to be rational in some particular way to solve. The problem has to be:
Interesting: The prospect of having to tackle the problem should excite the player. Very abstract or dry problems would not work; very low-interaction problems wouldn’t work either, even if cleverly presented (i.e. you could do Newcomb’s problem as a game with plenty of lovely art and window dressing… but the game itself would still only be a single binary choice, which would quickly bore the player).
Dramatic in outcome: The difference between success and failure should be great. A problem in which being rational gets you 10 points but acting typically gets you 8 points would not work; the advantage of applying rationality needs to be very noticeable.
Not rigged (or not obviously so): The player shouldn’t have the feeling that the game is designed to directly reward rationality (even though it is, in a sense). The player should think that they are solving a general problem with rationality as their asset.
Not allegorical: I don’t want to raise any likely mind-killing associations in the player’s mind, like politics or religion. The problem they are solving should be allegorical to real world problems, but to a general class of problems, not to any specific problems that will raise hackles and defeat the educational purpose of the game.
Surprising: The rationality technique being taught should not be immediately obvious to an untrained player. A typical first session should involve the player first trying an irrational method, seeing how it fails, and then eventually working their way up to a rational method that works.
A lot of the rationality-related games that people bring up fail some of these criterion. Zendo, for example, is not “dramatic in outcome” enough for my taste. Avoiding confirmation bias and understanding something about experimental design makes one a better Zendo player… but in my experience not as much as just developing a quick eye for pattern recognition and being able to read the master’s actions.
Anyone here have any suggestions for possible game designs?
RPGs (and roguelikes) can involve a lot of optimization/powergaming; the problem is that powergaming could be called rational already. You could
explicitly make optimization a part of game’s storyline (as opposed to it being unnecessary (usually games want you to satisfice, not maximize) and in conflict with the story)
create some situations where the obvious rules-of-thumb (gather strongest items, etc.) don’t apply—make the player shut up and multiply
create situations in which the real goal is not obvious (e. g. it seems like you should power up as always, but the best choice is to focus on something else)
Sorry if this isn’t very fleshed-out, just a possible direction.
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.
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).
I’m not sure if transformice counts as a rationalist game, but appears to be a bunch of multiplayer coordination problems, and the results seem to support ciphergoth’s conjecture on intelligence levels.
Transformice is awesome :D A game hasn’t made me laugh that much for a long time.
And it’s about interesting, human things, like crowd behaviour and trusting the “leader” and being thrust in a position of responsibility without really knowing what to do … oh, and everybody dying in funny ways.
One way to achieve this is to make it a level-based puzzle game. Solve the puzzle suboptimally, and you don’t get to move on. Of course, that means that you may need special-purpose programming at each level. On the other hand, you can release levels 1-5 as freeware, levels 6-20 as Product 1.0, and levels 21-30 as Product 2.0.
The puzzles I am thinking of are in the field of game theory, so the strategies will include things like not cooperating (because you don’t need to in this case), making and following through on threats, and similar “immoral” actions. Some people might object on ethical or political grounds. I don’t really know how to answer except to point out that at least it is not a first-person shooter.
Game theory includes many surprising lessons—particularly things like the handicap principle, voluntary surrender of power, rational threats, and mechanism design. Coalition games are particularly counter-intuitive, but, with experience, intuitively understandable.
But you can even teach some rationality lessons before getting into games proper. Learn to recognize individuals, for example. Not all cat-creatures you encounter are the same character. You can do several problems involving probabilities and inference before the second player ever shows up.
Text adventures seem suitable for this sort of thing, and are relatively easy to write. They’re probably not as good for mass appeal, but might be OK for mass nerd appeal. For these purposes, though, I’m worried that rationality may be too much of a suitcase term, consisting of very different groups of subskills that go well with very different kinds of game.
Another thing that’s relatively easy to create is a Neverwinter Nights module, but you’re pretty much stuck with the D&D mechanics if you go that route.
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.