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 dire...
We need some ideas for serious games. Games that will help us be better. Games that reward us for improving ourselves (even if just by the satisfaction of seeing our scores improve). Games that will help us in our quest of Tsoyoku Naritai
We've got an upcoming hackday in London - where we'll have a (small) bunch of people able to code up any good ideas into something usable... but we need **you** to help us come up with a whole bunch of good ideas.
To start with, they should be simple ideas - not as complex as Rationalist Clue (which is an awesome idea... but we all have dayjobs too). I've got in mind something like the kinds of games you see at luminosity
The ideas should address individual biases - a way of training us to: a) recognise when we've accidentally engaged a bias b) reward us when we find a way to get the "right answer" in an unbiased manner.
We can do the programming (more help would of course be welcome), we can even come up with some ideas of our own...
but we are few, and you are many... and the more ideas we get, the better we can choose between them... so let's roll.