This post gave me an idea about how you might approach magic in fiction while keeping it ground in reality: something like magic users are people who learn to pick out relevant variables from the noise to consistently nudge reality in ways that otherwise seem not possible.
I’ve wanted for a while to see a game along these lines. It would have some sort of 1-v-1 fighting, but dominated by “random” behavior from environmental features and/or unaligned combatants. The centerpiece of the game would be experimenting with the “random” components to figure out how they work, in order to later leverage them in a fight.
There are a lot of video games where some of the rules are never taught to you, although I think the overwhelming majority of examples are due to laziness and/or attempts to disguise the game’s shortcomings, rather than attempts to gamify scientific inquiry.
I’ve typically just found it annoying when the rules of a game aren’t communicated. For instance, how in Civilization 6 the construction costs of certain things change over time according to undocumented rules, or how in As Far as the Eye there’s a hidden “harmony” variable that worsens random events if you do things like fully exhaust a resource deposit (but the game never tells you this).
I think this is partly “I was looking for a strategy game, not a research project”
and partly “they didn’t do a very good job of designing a fun research project, probably because they weren’t even thinking of it in those terms and so they never actually tried”
and partly “science is inherently effortful and luck-driven, which makes it harder to gamify than things that are less so”
I think you could definitely make a “do your own experiments” game that’s better than the examples that have annoyed me in the past, although I’m uncertain whether it’s possible to do them well enough to be competitive with other styles of game. I’m dubious that a 1-v-1 fighting game would be a good fit for this.
This also reminds me of an article I read a long time ago (and can’t find now) about deliberately-secret rules in video games. It talked about one game where enemies turn into different colored gems depending on their horizontal position on the screen when you defeat them, and this is important for getting the right gems, but the game never explains it and the player needs to notice it. Also something about a secret ending in Bubble Bobble that’s only available if one of the players has never died, I think?
I noticed that all the examples seemed to be old arcade games, which is perhaps a sign such mechanics weren’t popular.
This post gave me an idea about how you might approach magic in fiction while keeping it ground in reality: something like magic users are people who learn to pick out relevant variables from the noise to consistently nudge reality in ways that otherwise seem not possible.
Basically placebomancy from Unsong.
I’ve wanted for a while to see a game along these lines. It would have some sort of 1-v-1 fighting, but dominated by “random” behavior from environmental features and/or unaligned combatants. The centerpiece of the game would be experimenting with the “random” components to figure out how they work, in order to later leverage them in a fight.
There are a lot of video games where some of the rules are never taught to you, although I think the overwhelming majority of examples are due to laziness and/or attempts to disguise the game’s shortcomings, rather than attempts to gamify scientific inquiry.
I’ve typically just found it annoying when the rules of a game aren’t communicated. For instance, how in Civilization 6 the construction costs of certain things change over time according to undocumented rules, or how in As Far as the Eye there’s a hidden “harmony” variable that worsens random events if you do things like fully exhaust a resource deposit (but the game never tells you this).
I think this is partly “I was looking for a strategy game, not a research project”
and partly “they didn’t do a very good job of designing a fun research project, probably because they weren’t even thinking of it in those terms and so they never actually tried”
and partly “science is inherently effortful and luck-driven, which makes it harder to gamify than things that are less so”
I think you could definitely make a “do your own experiments” game that’s better than the examples that have annoyed me in the past, although I’m uncertain whether it’s possible to do them well enough to be competitive with other styles of game. I’m dubious that a 1-v-1 fighting game would be a good fit for this.
This also reminds me of an article I read a long time ago (and can’t find now) about deliberately-secret rules in video games. It talked about one game where enemies turn into different colored gems depending on their horizontal position on the screen when you defeat them, and this is important for getting the right gems, but the game never explains it and the player needs to notice it. Also something about a secret ending in Bubble Bobble that’s only available if one of the players has never died, I think?
I noticed that all the examples seemed to be old arcade games, which is perhaps a sign such mechanics weren’t popular.