One thing that’s important to AVOID is the things that come from the world being artificial and made specifically for challenges, things like there always being a way to succeed in the given task even if it seems not to, or the player always turning out to be important without a clear cause, or a multitude of other things, just look through TV tropes for more. In short, most games are stories. If you want the game to train you in thinking like reality you have to make the game more similar to reality (or make it very abstract).
So, some properties a reality like game might have:
Procedurally generated environments, with no special checks for solvability or indeed any causal arrows coming in from what the player might do in them.
The player is not placed in a special character. Either the player is the inly intelligence around, ir the player is given control of a random sample from a large population where everyone have interesting enough lives, or the player has to find and chose someone interesting from a randomly generated population. The middle solution is probably the most realistic.
Lots of things are Hard Work. No gaining advantages quickly as a side effect of accomplishing your other goals, or by killing random things. You have to earn your skills.
Brutal and unforgiving. A single mistake can make everything you have come crashing down, and there is no reloading from a saved game. Even usually harmless things can permanently cripple you and the only way to avoid this is being observant and trying to understand what makes things tick so you can be out of the blast radius when they finally tock. If there is combat it is short and even if you will can leave you mortally wounded. The game is NOT fair, and things having consequences disproportionate to the crime is the rule rather than the exception.
You don’t really know what the goal is until you win. The game constantly give you “intuition” hints when you LOCALLY approach it. The goal is different each time you play.
Some NPC characters will try to detect any behaviour that might be smarter than them, and get hostile to anything that seems to be getting an advantage over them. The player can either act dumb and ignore obvious opportunities, avoid interacting with NPCs, or try to grab power to fast for the NPCs to stop them.
Lots of these sound similar to the rougelike genre I think, those also tend to require less development effort than most other games.
This reminds me of a game where you explore a sandbox world, in which most players choose to harvest and rearrange the blocks that make up the terrain in order to build whatever they decide they should build.
At night, monsters come out and attack you, so you should build a protective structure or have weapons and constant vigilance.
Specifically,
It has a procedurally generated world.
The player is the only intelligence.
Things are pretty hard, and there’s no leveling up to make it easier. It takes a while to physically reshape the world into what you want.
Its super brutal. Like, an improperly controlled fire will burn down a forest, and probably kill you while you’re trying to put it out. And there’s lots of ways to kill yourself and generally ruin everything.
Its also a timesink that I wasted a week or two playing before quitting, so I’m ROT13ing its name. zvarpensg. In case you’re interested. It’s also behind a paywall and pretty buggy, so hopefully that will discourage long-term casual play.
EDIT: Its not particularly rational, but it does have a lot of the traits mentioned.
I know someone who plays this game constantly. It’s fun, but it doesn’t seem like a rationality builder. Said obsessed person doesn’t think it’s taught ver anything really useful.
Hiya, while I greatly appreciate your effort to help us improve the quality of games we build… I don’t want to turn any idea away just yet (no matter how terribly tropey).
We’re still in the early brainstorming phase of this—and it’s much better just to let the ideas pour out—regardless of how bad they are. Engaging the internal editor too early quashes that natural flow. :)
Also—the games you describe above sound really interesting… but probably too big for what we’ve got in mind to begin with… my little red+blue card game might be built over a weekend, rationalist clue (which would fit your requirements and be totally awesome) - would take months of work.
Lets start with the simple stuff—even if it’s tropey.
“Tropes Are Tools, not clichés. They are plot devices and progressions (similar to but more defined than literary devices) that have been around for a long time because they work, and there’s no inherent loss of complexity through the use of them (most of the time). ”
I never said all tropes are bad. And even saying SOME are bad was only in the context of training rationality. Most tropes are, however, divergences from reality that the human brain are prone to make, and thus looking for them might be useful in making a game more similar to reality. This is different from realism by the way, realism is about fact inside the work of fiction having the same answers as IRL, the reality-similarity we want for a rationalist game however are on the decision theoretical level, and in fact the first kind of realism might be directly bad as it allows players to “cheat” and not find the answers out themselves using the ingame tools.
Anyway, I am brainstorming, I am not constraining the configuration space of possible games, I’m just pointing toward a section of it where it think it might be a good idea to start looking.
One thing that’s important to AVOID is the things that come from the world being artificial and made specifically for challenges, things like there always being a way to succeed in the given task even if it seems not to, or the player always turning out to be important without a clear cause, or a multitude of other things, just look through TV tropes for more. In short, most games are stories. If you want the game to train you in thinking like reality you have to make the game more similar to reality (or make it very abstract).
So, some properties a reality like game might have:
Procedurally generated environments, with no special checks for solvability or indeed any causal arrows coming in from what the player might do in them.
The player is not placed in a special character. Either the player is the inly intelligence around, ir the player is given control of a random sample from a large population where everyone have interesting enough lives, or the player has to find and chose someone interesting from a randomly generated population. The middle solution is probably the most realistic.
Lots of things are Hard Work. No gaining advantages quickly as a side effect of accomplishing your other goals, or by killing random things. You have to earn your skills.
Brutal and unforgiving. A single mistake can make everything you have come crashing down, and there is no reloading from a saved game. Even usually harmless things can permanently cripple you and the only way to avoid this is being observant and trying to understand what makes things tick so you can be out of the blast radius when they finally tock. If there is combat it is short and even if you will can leave you mortally wounded. The game is NOT fair, and things having consequences disproportionate to the crime is the rule rather than the exception.
You don’t really know what the goal is until you win. The game constantly give you “intuition” hints when you LOCALLY approach it. The goal is different each time you play.
Some NPC characters will try to detect any behaviour that might be smarter than them, and get hostile to anything that seems to be getting an advantage over them. The player can either act dumb and ignore obvious opportunities, avoid interacting with NPCs, or try to grab power to fast for the NPCs to stop them.
Lots of these sound similar to the rougelike genre I think, those also tend to require less development effort than most other games.
This reminds me of a game where you explore a sandbox world, in which most players choose to harvest and rearrange the blocks that make up the terrain in order to build whatever they decide they should build.
At night, monsters come out and attack you, so you should build a protective structure or have weapons and constant vigilance.
Specifically,
It has a procedurally generated world.
The player is the only intelligence.
Things are pretty hard, and there’s no leveling up to make it easier. It takes a while to physically reshape the world into what you want.
Its super brutal. Like, an improperly controlled fire will burn down a forest, and probably kill you while you’re trying to put it out. And there’s lots of ways to kill yourself and generally ruin everything.
Its also a timesink that I wasted a week or two playing before quitting, so I’m ROT13ing its name. zvarpensg. In case you’re interested. It’s also behind a paywall and pretty buggy, so hopefully that will discourage long-term casual play.
EDIT: Its not particularly rational, but it does have a lot of the traits mentioned.
I know someone who plays this game constantly. It’s fun, but it doesn’t seem like a rationality builder. Said obsessed person doesn’t think it’s taught ver anything really useful.
Agreed. It’s not particularly rational, but it just had the qualities described.
I think it may have some small benefit in practice-of-thinking, if you get into mechanism building:
Solving problems in digital logic and 3-dimensional spatial layout.
Planning for sufficient space available for a mechanism, especially if you want it hidden in walls between rooms and no bigger than necessary.
Debugging.
But the majority of the time spent is probably no better than any other grinding.
A simple version of this would be the GROW flash game series. Here is one
So… Dwarf Fortress?
Hey, have a look at my name… :p
Hiya, while I greatly appreciate your effort to help us improve the quality of games we build… I don’t want to turn any idea away just yet (no matter how terribly tropey).
We’re still in the early brainstorming phase of this—and it’s much better just to let the ideas pour out—regardless of how bad they are. Engaging the internal editor too early quashes that natural flow. :)
Also—the games you describe above sound really interesting… but probably too big for what we’ve got in mind to begin with… my little red+blue card game might be built over a weekend, rationalist clue (which would fit your requirements and be totally awesome) - would take months of work.
Lets start with the simple stuff—even if it’s tropey.
besides, somewhere once said:
“Tropes Are Tools, not clichés. They are plot devices and progressions (similar to but more defined than literary devices) that have been around for a long time because they work, and there’s no inherent loss of complexity through the use of them (most of the time). ”
I never said all tropes are bad. And even saying SOME are bad was only in the context of training rationality. Most tropes are, however, divergences from reality that the human brain are prone to make, and thus looking for them might be useful in making a game more similar to reality. This is different from realism by the way, realism is about fact inside the work of fiction having the same answers as IRL, the reality-similarity we want for a rationalist game however are on the decision theoretical level, and in fact the first kind of realism might be directly bad as it allows players to “cheat” and not find the answers out themselves using the ingame tools.
Anyway, I am brainstorming, I am not constraining the configuration space of possible games, I’m just pointing toward a section of it where it think it might be a good idea to start looking.