I'm going to use this open thread to once again suggest the idea of a Less Wrong video game.

( Here's a link to the post I made last month about it )

After some more thought, I realized that making a game with fancy graphics and complex gameplay would probably not be a good idea for a first project to try.

A better idea would be a simple text-based game you play in your browser, probably running on either PHP or Python.

This might not have as much fun appeal as a traditional video game, since it would probably look like a university exam, but it could still be an effective way for us to measure our rationality.

So far I thought of the following ideas:

1) Multiple Choice questions, with only one right answer. Not just a quiz of trivia you memorized from Less Wrong, but applications of the techniques taught here. Also, the standard tests that reveal if you've learned how to not fall for the standard biases.

2) Questions that require you to do some math, and enter your answer, which can be scored on how close it is to the correct answer.

3) A "spot the logical fallacy" game, or a "spot the bias" game. The player is presented with a few paragraphs of text. It could be a news article, a section of a short story, a conversation between two people, or maybe something else. The purpose is to spot the first sentence that contains a logical fallacy, or a bias. Once you select which sentence contains the error, you have to say what type of error it is. Maybe typing in the name of the fallacy, or maybe selecting it from a list of the fallacies that have pages about them on the LW Wiki.

We could also implement questions that start with an introduction that you can read before the timer starts ticking, then you proceed to the timed part, where you are scored based on how quickly you answer. Maybe some questions could have a time limit of a few seconds, to force an immediate response.

This LW game could be integrated with the rest of the LW website, where your score is linked to your username. Though this feature is entirely optional. The wiki already has a separate user account not linked directly to your main LW user account, so the game could do the same. The game would keep track of which questions you got right, and how long it took you to answer. This would give speedreaders an advantage, but maybe this isn't a problem, because speedreading is a generally useful skill to learn.

The game should keep track of which questions you've already answered, so it doesn't ask you the same question again. Or maybe for the questions where you need to do math, it could ask you again with randomized numbers. Maybe there could be a calculator built into the question webpage, with functions for calculating probabilities, etc.

There should also be a way to compare your scores with other players, or see how you rank.

To generate questions for the game, we could use a comments thread in the main LW site, or we could use the LW wiki, or we could set up a special submission form in the game itself.

another random idea: If you give an answer that you think is right, but the game says is wrong, there should be a way to enter your explanation for why your answer is right. Someone would then check these messages, and if your explanation is valid, the game could award you double points.

(Another random idea I had was to make a text adventure game, where you participate in conversations, and sometimes need to interrupt a conversation to point out a logical fallacy, to prevent the conversation from going off-track and preventing you from getting the information you needed from the conversation. But that would be more of a challenge to implement, and generate content for.)