At least visual novels (well, the two or three of them that I’ve played) are pretty good about giving your decisions reasonable consequences based on what you know or should be able to infer. If I’m remembering my childhood well, Choose Your Own Adventure books have a nasty habit of dropping you into unwinnable states based on trite moral dilemmas, when they aren’t dropping you into unwinnable states for no good reason at all. Not that life’s fair in that regard either, but CYOA doesn’t even give you the option of taking the steps that could ameliorate it.
So I’ve got to doubt the usefulness of this as a general decision procedure. Seems to me that it’d lead to overweighting conventional social mores and social risks in general, and underweighting the sort of fact-finding and risk minimization that actually works. Which, while not as immediately suboptimal as ignoring the “Beware of Yeti” sign or playing patty-cake with the toaster in the bathtub, is probably a lot more salient for a halfway sane decision-maker.
This is one of the things I originally found disconcerting about the board game Arabian Nights. It’s like anti-consequentialism: You would have options of things to do, and the option that seemed the most logical (“I’ll give change to the beggar” or “I’ll ignore the beggar”) never gave as good of results as the craziest options (“I’ll worship the beggar” or “I’ll steal from the beggar”, etc). I ended up getting the best results by choosing the weirdest option available.
That strategy doesn’t ALWAYS work out poorly in weird life. If you go through life looking for opportunities to make your life weirder, it WILL be interesting, if nothing else. Of course, you might also get shot.
At least visual novels (well, the two or three of them that I’ve played) are pretty good about giving your decisions reasonable consequences based on what you know or should be able to infer. If I’m remembering my childhood well, Choose Your Own Adventure books have a nasty habit of dropping you into unwinnable states based on trite moral dilemmas, when they aren’t dropping you into unwinnable states for no good reason at all. Not that life’s fair in that regard either, but CYOA doesn’t even give you the option of taking the steps that could ameliorate it.
So I’ve got to doubt the usefulness of this as a general decision procedure. Seems to me that it’d lead to overweighting conventional social mores and social risks in general, and underweighting the sort of fact-finding and risk minimization that actually works. Which, while not as immediately suboptimal as ignoring the “Beware of Yeti” sign or playing patty-cake with the toaster in the bathtub, is probably a lot more salient for a halfway sane decision-maker.
This is one of the things I originally found disconcerting about the board game Arabian Nights. It’s like anti-consequentialism: You would have options of things to do, and the option that seemed the most logical (“I’ll give change to the beggar” or “I’ll ignore the beggar”) never gave as good of results as the craziest options (“I’ll worship the beggar” or “I’ll steal from the beggar”, etc). I ended up getting the best results by choosing the weirdest option available.
That strategy doesn’t ALWAYS work out poorly in weird life. If you go through life looking for opportunities to make your life weirder, it WILL be interesting, if nothing else. Of course, you might also get shot.