= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
lukeprog comments on Rationality Games & Apps Brainstorming - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (58)
One problem for rationality games in general is that an incorrect judgment isn't punished much because you just "start the level over" or something. One solution would be to penalize poor decisions more heavily, e.g. by making people start further back in the game than would be expected when, say, missing a jump in a platformer.
Is that really a problem? It's my understanding that getting rapid feedback, and an opportunity to retry the failed attempt while your previous failure is still fresh in your memory, is much more useful for skill acquisition than having each failure be maximally frustrating.
Hmm... perhaps you could just tighten the time/# of moves limit? To give fast, appropriate updating an advantage over a brute-force approach?
The problem would need to change a bit each time you tried it, so that you had to learn within the round.
Zoombinis actually had some great examples of this, where you had to learn what test was being applied, and how to pass the test, by induction. The exact criteria were randomly determined, so you had to solve the problem anew each time. And you were penalized for taking too long to learn, so being good at the game involved coming up with an efficient learning algorithm, rather than just an adequate one.
Oh man, I played Zoombinis when I was a kid, I loved that game and haven't thought about it in forever.
Zoombinis pro tip: The game allows you to create up to two zoombinis of each hair/eye/nose/transport configuration. You can make things way easier by making your party consist of 8 twinned zoombini pairs as opposed to the usual 16 distinct zoombinis. (For puzzles that depend on zoombini features, which is pretty much all of them, the solution for a given zoombini and it's twin will be the same.)
I love how the game's wikipedia page has a fairly detailed explanation of every puzzle...
So did I!
And, as far as I can remember, not only were the puzzles well designed, but there was a reasonably good overarching story with a definite goal, which meant the puzzles had purpose and there was a little sense of adventure too.
(I should really find the disk and play it again... hehe.)
Another common solution is to randomly generate problems so that you can never learn "by rote" how to pass the level.
They can still "grind" by trying random things until they happen to succeed by chance, but the wider context of the game can discourage that (for example by just showing how many tries it took you)