This was (more or less) the discussion topic at the last Toronto meetup. Here's what we discussed (NOTE: these are minutes of a LW meetup so don't expect it to be 100% on-topic). Also see the wiki page with previous discussion threads

No definitive game idea yet, but lots of interesting suggestions came up.

Harry Potter & the Methods of Rationality: The Game.

• Suggestion was not to play Harry, as he already knows everything (or a lot, anyway). Instead you have to deal with Harry.

Realtime stategy game where you recruit units rather than building them

• either bully or befriend units or just make your team the most fun (Draco/Hermione/Harry strategies)
• can also just pay units but that obviously means you need to acquire more resources
• units are aligned to different factions, and you can signal loyalty to one faction to gain their support at the expense of the other

Epistemic rationality: the game

• discover how the game mechanics work as you go along
• Is it possible to procedurally generate the laws of physics? (e.g. number of dimensions, gravitational constant etc. randomly generated)
• I was worried that most combinations of physical laws would be unplayable for one reason or the other, and unlike real life we don't have the anthropic principle to help us out
• game of science, e.g. building atoms into molecules with different laws of physics

Extreme cooperation

• Both players controlling same character
• (Alien hand syndrome)
• The Elephant and its Rider: The Game. One player assigned the role of rationalising the other's behaviour.
• The opposite of this is a single player controlling two characters but with the same controls (e.g. you can't move one character right without making the other character fall off a cliff). Not really LWish but might be fun.

Bayes Theorem game

• Murder mystery/court case
• Base on real life court cases?
• Game where you have to program your own rewards
• The way gameplay is set up, you are motivated to achieve far goals but not near ones
• Gameplay is too frustrating unless you can calibrate visual rewards so that you get rewarded for doing vaguely the right thing
• This was my idea but I don't know whether the concept even makes sense

Game teaches you real world stuff incidentally.

NPC's prone to different biases

• First use your Bayesianness to work out who has which bias
• Then work out how to use characters' biases to defeat them or persuade them to join your side
• Can we simulate biased player also?
• Close off elements of the dialogue tree depending on what your biases are supposed to be.
• (My idea for a reprogramming your own brain game. More precisely, reprogramming interface between input devices and what your character does. Not really LW)

Time Portal

• Like Portal except jumping through the portal displaces you in time (one way is forwards, the other backwards)
• Again not really LWish.

Fix moral system

• Existing games tend to be kick puppy vs. feed puppy
• Sometimes you should get good results from bad actions
• Trolley problem: the game

Game that starts off like the Sims and ends up like Civilization

• Weaponising apparently innocent game mechanics, e.g. stealing all the fire alarms from someone's house and then cooking something

Existing games which we like and/or which came up in the discussion:

• Braid
• Portal
• Limbo
• Fez
• Phoenix Wright
• Psychonauts
• A flash game called Chronotron
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
• Some game which was like Ikaruga but cooperative?
• Mass Effect